Author Archives: Dana Pico

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It’s a good thing that the government doesn’t have all of your health records! The left wishes that was different

It’s no surprise at all that the left and the statists would want the government to have your health records!

    Fractured record keeping leaves Philly hospitals unsure which patients are vaccinated

    A patchwork of vaccination record keeping has left hospitals with no easy way to be precise about which of their patients have received inoculations against COVID-19.

    by Jason Laughlin | Tuesday, August 31, 2021

    More than nine months into the effort to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, the patchwork nature of vaccination records is keeping Philadelphia hospitals from getting clarity on whether patients have had the shot.

    “This is what everybody’s craving for,” said John Zurlo, division director of infectious disease at Thomas Jefferson University. “You’d hope we can get really accurate information about that and right now we really don’t get accurate information.”

    Temple University Hospital and Einstein Medical Center also reported having trouble obtaining accurate records this year, though coordination with the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania departments of health have improved the situation, hospital personnel said.

    Since vaccines were rolled out to the public earlier this year, doctors at Einstein have reported patients who are “100% sure” they were vaccinated not showing up in PhilaVax, the city database. Another record showed a patient to have gotten first doses in January and then again in April. . . . .

    Incorrect data entry may play a role in some of the record inaccuracy, said James Garrow, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. But the biggest causes of confusion are twofold: complications accessing the city’s vaccination records and the lack of a national COVID-19 vaccination database.

    “This has never been a problem in the past because there has never been such an immediate need for access to immunization records like we do for COVID vaccines,” Garrow said.

There’s more at the original, but the major point is one of which I am very glad: there is (supposedly) no national COVID-19 vaccination database.

Further down:

    Exchanging information with PhilaVax requires health-care providers to meet a federally outlined data-sharing standard. Most health-care systems meet that standard, Garrow said, but at least one large city hospital system, Jefferson, does not — though it is in the process of updating its system, hospital personnel said.

The federal government passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) in 2009, yet the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia still doesn’t meet “federally outlined data-sharing standard(s)”? What’s wrong with that picture?

    Fractured medical record keeping has been the subject of a decades-old policy debate. The 1996 Heath Information Portability and Accountability Act called for a national patient ID to create a central source for people’s medical records, but privacy concerns have kept a national registry from being created. Britain and Israel are among the countries that have such systems, said Tinglong Dai, professor of operations management and business analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which has made it easier to confirm vaccinations. The lack of a registry in the United States, he said, has become acutely problematic as people being asked for proof of vaccination have nothing but a card as documentation.

    A national registry would also ensure consistent quality, he said, rather than the patchwork of record keeping used across the country now.

    “This is definitely self-sabotaging,” Dai said. “I think there must be a significant portion of the population, including myself, who would really like to have that system so I wouldn’t have to carry around this card.”

Oh, woe is him, he has to carry around the card that he wants everybody else forced to carry! Well, I have such a card, because I was vaccinated months ago, I refuse to carry it around like some form of vaccine passport. If I go someplace, and they insist that I show them my vaccination card, whoever does so will receive a one-fingered salute; if they don’t want to let me in without showing my vaccination card, I don’t want to enter anyway, and most certainly don’t want to give them any of my money.

COVID-19 has become a hugely politicized disease, with the left trying to force the unwilling to comply, and the right sometimes trying to shame those who have chosen to be vaccinated. It might be more convenient to physicians if they had access to patients’ vaccination records, but they can always ask a patient if he has gotten the jab. It seems far more important to me that the government, at any level, not have this highly politicized information.

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Mugshot and photo hypocrisy from the Lexington Herald-Leader

We noted on Sunday that the Lexington Herald-Leader declined to post the mugshot of Brent Dyer Kelty, a man previously convicted of “several prior felonies in Fayette County since 2010,” in their story about him being indicted for the murder of an infant. In that, the newspaper followed the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, despite the fact that Mr Kelty, even if acquitted of murder, is still a multiply convicted felon.

The McClatchy policy is due to the possibility that an accused person might not ever be convicted, and thus having his mugshot published could harm him later in life. Of course, someone’s name is far more easily searchable, and just printing the suspect’s name can have far wider implications. For instance, prospective employers who do their due diligence on an applicant, will be searching for his name, not his photo.

But it seems that the Herald-Leader has no compunctions about printing the photo of someone accused of, and convicted of, a simple misdemeanor:

    Woman who attended University of Kentucky pleads guilty in U.S. Capitol riot case

    By Beth Musgrave | August 30, 2021 | 1:21 PM EDT

    Gracyn Dawn Courtright, a University of Kentucky student, faces charges linked to the Capitol riot on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2020. This photo was included in a criminal complaint filed against Courtright and allegedly shows her holding the “members only” sign. PHOTO VIA FBI.

    A woman from West Virginia who attended the University of Kentucky pleaded guilty Monday to charges related to entering the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.

    In federal court in Washington D.C., Gracyn Dawn Courtright pleaded guilty to a charge of entering and remaining in a restricted area, according to federal court records. She had faced more charges.

    Courtright will be sentenced Nov. 16. She could face up to six months in prison in addition to other fines and restitution.

There’s more at the original.

It might be complained that Miss Courtright is a convicted criminal now, but the Herald-Leader published the same photo on June 28th, before she was convicted of anything.

Miss Courtright is hardly the only one of the Capitol kerfufflers whose photo has been published by the Herald-Leader, even before they were convicted of anything. The newspaper had at least two articles on Lori Vinson, one of which was before she was even charged with any crimes, which featured her photos.

Both Miss Courtright and Mrs Vinson are facing maximum sentences of six months in jail; Mr Kelty is a multiply convicted felon looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison, but the Herald-Leader protected the photo of Mr Kelty. On March 3rd, the newspaper published a story which identified 12 Kentuckians by name, with photos of 10 of them — some difficult to identify — who were charged with crimes related to the demonstration, but at the time not convicted of anything.

The Herald-Leader also declined to publish the mugshots of two men sentenced to a year for their part in assaults during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city. Their crimes were more serious than any of the ones of which the Capitol kerfufflers were convicted.

Of course, the very liberal Herald-Leader probably sees the Capitol kerfuffle as a hideous and heinous crime, because that’s what the left do, when it was, in reality, little more than an out-of-control, disorganized frat party. The only shot fired was from a Capitol policeman, and even though a few firearms were recovered from a couple of the protesters’ vehicles, none were taken from protesters in the Capitol Building.

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Ignoring a very, very large elephant in the room

Do reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer read their own news paper?

Inquirer reporter Harold Brubaker, who specializes in the business side of health care and nonprofit sector, reported on the Keystone State’s attempts to revise nursing home regulations, but somehow he managed to miss the elephant in the room:

‘Insulting and dumb.’ That’s how a nursing home manager labeled criticism of Pa.’s new staffing proposal

Advocates say more staffing is desperately needed. But nursing home executives say Medicaid rates won’t support it.

by Harold Brubaker | August 28, 2021

Anne Clauss hates to imagine what her mother would have endured at a nursing home in Langhorne if she or another relative hadn’t visited daily during her stay from 2017 to 2018.

One evening Clauss found her mother at the end of a hallway facing away from her room, where she had been stuck for a few hours, another resident told her. Other times, staff — whom she called underpaid and overworked — forgot to bring her mother her meals.

Her mother died at a hospital in 2018. But that experience prompted the Levittown resident to comment in favor of a Pennsylvania Department of Health proposal to increase the homes’ minimum level of direct care to 4.1 hours daily per patient, up from the current 2.7 hours.

“I hope regulations can be updated to help our elderly live out their lives well cared for and treated respectfully,” Clauss wrote to the Independent Regulatory Review Commission, which will review the comments and eventually hold a public hearing. It’s not clear how quickly the commission will act.

Let’s tell the truth here: nursing homes are dreadful places, facilities in which to warehouse the elderly who can no longer care for themselves, but who can, and do, live on with nursing care and physical assistance. It’s a truth all of us know, but no one is willing to say out loud, because so many people fear that they will one day have to warehouse their aging parents in such a facility.[1]My family has been fortunate in that regard; such a decision was never one we faced. And I cannot imagine that any of us do not dread the thought of having to be in a nursing home themselves. I’m very thankful that I’m very healthy, but who can know what the future holds.

There’s a lot more at the original, and Mr Brubaker did a thorough job in his story, save for one thing. He noted that nursing homes have real difficulties in attracting staff, and that Medicaid payments for patients work out to roughly $8.00 an hour, which is significantly less than certified nursing assistants are paid. To provide more hours of patient care, more nursing staff would have to be hired, but there’s simply not enough money paid to nursing homes to do so. For the details, read Mr Brubaker’s original.

The effort is coming to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic in which over 13,000 people have died in Pennsylvania’s nursing homes.

This is where Mr Brubaker’s story fails. He mentions the COVID-19 panic just this once, and that’s it. But, as we previously noted, and as Mr Brubaker’s own newspaper has reported, Philadelphia’s Acting Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, has mandated that all health care workers in the City of Brotherly Love must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by October 15th. Dr Bettigole has noted that more than a dozen long-term care facilities in Philadelphia have less than 50% of their staff vaccinated.

If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else. Health care is not for you.

This is something that Mr Brubaker should have mentioned: not only are patients in nursing homes getting fewer hours of care than they should, Dr Bettigole and the city of Philadelphia want to fire the CNAs and RNs who refuse to get vaccinated.

Oh, they won’t put it that way — though the Commissioner came close — but that’s the result of the policy. The city obviously wants to force the reluctant to get vaccinated, and some will probably concede, but if over half the staff have resisted vaccination, in an industry which has been continually pushing for it, it has to be expected that at least some, quite probably a significant percentage of them, will continue to refuse to comply.

From an article referenced by the much nicer Dana on Patterico’s Pontifications:

As of last night, there were 102 people waiting for an ICU bed in the greater Houston area.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told Begnaud that she was prepared to open a field hospital, but as of Friday morning, hospitals in the Houston area were telling her they had extra beds — but not enough nurses. Seven hundred nurses arrived last week, but it’s still not enough to meet the demand.

Of course, that article, too, failed to address the elephant in the room:

Houston hospital workers fired, resign over COVID-19 vaccine

By Jamie Stengle | June 22, 2021

DALLAS (AP) — More than 150 employees at a Houston hospital system who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine have been fired or resigned after a judge dismissed an employee lawsuit over the vaccine requirement.

A spokesperson for Houston Methodist hospital system said 153 employees either resigned in the two-week suspension period or were terminated on Tuesday.

The case over how far health care institutions can go to protect patients and others against the coronavirus has been closely watched. It’s believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. But it won’t be the end of the debate.

It’s not a case of some health care workers may quit, or may be fired, for refusing vaccination, but that some have already quit, some have already been fired.

I get it: the editorial position of the Inquirer is strongly in support of vaccination, and perhaps noting that the city’s vaccine mandate will actually cost the city’s nursing homes employees isn’t something a biased newspaper like the Inquirer wants to report.[2]I take publisher Elizabeth Hughes opinion piece as an admission that the Inquirer has, and will continue to have, a bias toward the left. But for an article like Mr Brubaker’s to fail to note the potential loss of nursing home employees, just as he is noting that the Commonwealth might require more, is simply poor journalism. It wasn’t just a missed point, but ignoring a very, very large elephant in the room.

References

References
↑1 My family has been fortunate in that regard; such a decision was never one we faced.
↑2 I take publisher Elizabeth Hughes opinion piece as an admission that the Inquirer has, and will continue to have, a bias toward the left.
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Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader hides a mugshot, this time of a convicted felon.

As we have previously noted, the Lexington Herald-Leader adheres to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy. The policy states as one of its reasons is the possibility that a criminal suspect might be acquitted or have the charges dropped, in which case publishing his mugshot would have a detrimental effect on him.

But what if the accused is already a convicted felon, one with “several prior felonies”? Why should he be shielded?

    New Lexington murder indictment was from an infant’s death in 2018. Bond set at $500k

    By Jeremy Chisenhall | August 27, 2021 | 4:41 PM

    Brent Dyer Kelty. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center. Click to enlarge.

    The Lexington man indicted by a grand jury this week is accused of killing an infant three years ago, according to court records.

    Brent Dyer Kelty, 30, has been charged with murder in the death of 4-month-old Landon Mayes, who suffered head trauma. Mayes died on Sept. 8, 2018. Kelty was indicted on Wednesday, according to court records.

    Lexington police investigated the death, but the attorney general’s office presented the case to a grand jury, resulting in Kelty’s indictment. A spokesperson for Attorney General Daniel Cameron said representatives couldn’t comment on why the indictment came three years after Mayes’ death.

    “We cannot share details regarding the investigation,” Elizabeth Kuhn said.

    Kelty was already in jail on unrelated charges, according to jail records. In addition to murder, he was also indicted on a count of being a persistent felony offender. Kelty had been convicted of several prior felonies in Fayette County since 2010, according to court records.

There’s more at the original, but I would think that a man, a previously convicted felon, who has now been indicted for killing an infant, would qualify as accused of committing what should be considered a “high profile crime”.

The First Street Journal does not hold to the policy of shielding such defendants, and their mugshots are matters of public record. If this guy is guilty of killing an infant, there ought to be exactly one sentence: lock him up and throw away the key.

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Some Central Bucks Karens want to force other people to wear masks, but don’t have the courage to identify themselves

We have previously noted the decision by the Central Bucks School Board not to make facemasks mandatory for the upcoming school year. Naturally, when some people oppose a decision by an elected body, they sue!

    Central Bucks parents sue after school board votes against mask mandate

    It asks the judge to order the district to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for mitigating the virus in schools.

    by Maddie Hanna | August 28, 2021

    A group of parents of children with special needs sued the Central Bucks School District late Friday, alleging the district’s plan to start the school year Monday without masks or other COVID-19 mitigation measures violates their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    The lawsuit — backed by a fund-raiser started by parents that had amassed more than $35,000 as of Saturday afternoon — follows a 5-4 vote by the school board Wednesday night rejecting a mask mandate and other measures ahead of the new school year.

    It asks U.S. District Court in Philadelphia to order the school district to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for mitigating the virus in schools.

    “Together we have made a phenomenal statement that we need to follow CDC and [American Academy of Pediatrics] guidelines to keep the children, teachers and staff in our schools safe as well as prevent the spread of COVID in our community,” Susan Lipson, a family medicine physician who helped organize the GoFundMe, wrote on its page.

Actually, I’m surprised: Maddie Hanna, the article writer, actually wrote the way a journalist is supposed to write, with the most important information, the lede, first! But further down came the infuriating part:

    Parents suing the district — whom the lawsuit identifies only by their initials because “universal masking is a very contentious issue in the district” — say the plan puts their children “at risk of death and debilitating illness from COVID-19.”

So, we have parents suing the school, attempting to force other people to go along with their wishes, and to override the decision of the elected school board, and they don’t have the guts to identify themselves? I’m going to tell you what to do, but you don’t need to know who I am?

Yeah, that’s pretty infuriating.

The decision by the school board does not prohibit anyone from wearing a face mask. These parents can wear one or three or twelve masks if they want! They may take any virus mitigation efforts they wish, as far as their children and they are concerned.

But that isn’t good enough; they want to force other people to take extreme steps to protect their children and themselves. But they don’t have the courage to admit who they are.

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Tying things together

Why is it that an old, retired man out in the boondocks of eastern Kentucky can see these things, but the credentialed media just can’t put the stories together?

These things are all related, though the local media don’t seem to want to tell people that. Thanks to a tweet from Heather Long, I found this story:

    Ford CEO: Up to 20% of factory workers are out on some days

    By Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business | Wednesday, August 25, 2021 | Updated: 9:50 AM ET

    Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (CNN)Face masks are required again in major US auto factories and, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley, that has some workers deciding not to show up for work. In some factories, absentee rates can exceed 20%, he said in an interview with CNN Business.

    “When a fifth of your workforce isn’t coming in, in a manufacturing operation where everyone has their job and you don’t know who’s going to be missing every day, man, it’s really challenging,” Farley said.

    General Motors GM: (%), Ford F: (%) and Stellantis STLA: (%), the company that makes Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler vehicles, agreed with the United Auto Workers union in early August to begin requiring masks in their factories again. That mandate has contributed to the absentee problem, Farley said.

    “The economics of staying out of work are getting more attractive during the summer,” he said. “It’s people that are apprehensive. It’s people who say, ‘I don’t want to wear a mask this week.’ It’s a variety of things.”

    Spokespeople for GM, Stellantis and Toyota, which was not party to the UAW agreement but also now requires masks in its US facilities, would not share information about absentee rates in their factories.

There’s more at the original, but it boils down to one thing: even at United Auto Workers’ wages, Americans don’t like to be controlled. And CEO Jim Farley said the quiet part — at least, kept quiet by the media — out loud: people don’t want to be muzzled.

This is why Kentucky voters gave Republican state legislative candidates such a huge advantage, as they campaigned against Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) COVID restrictions, and this is why Pennsylvania voters passed a constitutional amendment limiting Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) executive authority, and this is why school boards across Pennsylvania — Governor Wolf asked local school boards to issue mask mandates, but 415 out of 474 school districts declined — and Kentucky — two-thirds of districts voted against them — decided to keep masks optional.

But the credentialed media won’t put 2 + 2 together and get 4, because they don’t want to get 4. Philadelphia instituted a city-wide indoor mask mandate two weeks ago, but now The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that enforcement is very spotty, if it exists at all.

    Since Philadelphia’s new mask mandate took effect two weeks ago, at least 102 complaints have been filed through the city’s 311 line about businesses not complying.

    But city officials can’t say how many violations have been found, warnings have been issued or even the number of complaints it investigated. They say they don’t keep count, and that any inspection reports regarding mask compliance end up funneled into its cumbersome, often tough-to-navigate restaurant inspection database, ostensibly alongside complaints about cockroaches, filthy restrooms and freon leaks in walk-in freezers.

    Business owners at times have chafed at the pandemic restrictions over the last 19 months, but enforcement of the mask mandate is mostly the same as last year. Merchants and companies are largely responsible for enforcing it within their premises, with relatively little oversight or tracking. (Last summer, city officials said they had completed a few thousand inspections and ordered seven restaurants to temporarily close for not complying, but later stopped tracking those numbers.)

    Jabari Jones, president of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, said it’s unfair for businesses to be held accountable for customers failing to wear masks, and he’s heard from many business owners who say they have “kind of shrugged off” the latest rules.

    “There’s just a growing indifference toward some of these mandates,” he said, “because it’s like, ‘Dude, how am I supposed to catch up with all this stuff if you keep changing the rules without any notice or advance conversation with the business community?’”

There’s more at the original, but the point is simple: a lot of people are resisting mask mandates, and even a very blue city like Philadelphia — Joe Biden won 81.44% of the vote there — is seeing the public resist. It is democracy in action, people voting with their bare faces against the orders Our Betters.

The Lexington Herald-Leader will never do the investigative work which would tell us that those food service and bus driver positions are going unfilled because potential applicants do not want to wear face masks, or be subject to mandatory vaccination orders, but that’s certainly part of the problem. The credentialed media, which continually tells us how vital they are to democracy, are not willing to dig deeply into the facts on an issue on which they have already come down firmly on one side.

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Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd!

Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd. Photo: Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts.

I wrote Impeach Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd! back on March 3, after he issued his illegal and unconstitutional injunctions against laws passed by the General Assembly, and it appears I was right. It took way, way, way too long for the state Supreme Court to rule that the injunctions should not have been issued, and order the injunctions dissolved:

    We find that this matter presents a justiciable case or controversy but that the Franklin Circuit Court abused its discretion in issuing the temporary injunction.[1]Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward. Accordingly, we remand this case to the trial court with instructions to dissolve the injunction.[2]Cameron v Beshear, page 2.

Now, five days later, we find that Judge Shepherd is not going to follow the instructions to dissolve the injunctions!

    KY judge delays following Supreme Court COVID order as Beshear & lawmakers negotiate

    By Jack Brammer | August 26, 2021 11:57 AM

    Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and legislative leaders are working together on a new set of COVID-19 emergency orders, which they hope to present to a Franklin Circuit Court judge before he dissolves an injunction against new laws that will torpedo Beshear’s existing emergency orders and regulations.

    At a status conference hearing Thursday morning, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd said he will follow the Kentucky Supreme Court’s instructions in a ruling last Saturday for him to dissolve the injunction but he will wait until the court hears more about the work between the Democratic governor and the Republican legislative leaders.

    The high court unanimously said the injunction was wrong and that the new laws limiting Beshear’s emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis should not have been blocked. A provision in one of the new laws would limit Beshear’s executive orders to 30 days unless renewed by the legislature.

Just where in the Court’s ruling does it give Judge Shepherd the discretion as to when to dissolve the injunctions?

    Beshear has said he would like to implement a statewide mask mandate, but lawmakers have shown little interest in that suggestion.

Of course they haven’t: getting rid of the mask mandate was what the voters elected the legislators to do!

    David Fleenor, counsel for Senate President Robert Stivers, told Shepherd he did not know exactly when the negotiations between the governor and lawmakers would be completed but said he expects it to be in days, not weeks, quickly adding, “I hope I’m not being overly optimistic.”

The Court specified that the General Assembly makes policy for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, not the Governor,[3]Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.” yet somehow Judge Shepherd believes he has the authority to hold off on following the Supreme Court’s instructions to dissolve the injunction until he hears more about what, if any, negotiations are ongoing between the Governor and legislative leaders.

That was not part of the Court’s ruling.

Judge Shepherd has told the parties to report back to him on Tuesday, September 7th, 12 days from now, and 17 days since the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Judge Shepherd, who had already suspended the laws which the state Supreme Court noted were passed legally, for 171 days, now thinks he can add another 17 days on top of that. That would be one day short of 27 weeks, more than half a year.

The state House of Representatives needs to impeach this judge when the regular session begins next January, and the state Senate needs to remove him from office and attaint him from ever holding another office in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The state Court of Appeals needs to overrule him and dissolve the injunctions, if the Supreme Court doesn’t beat them to it; I would expect Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R-KY) to immediately appeal Judge Shepherd’s refusal to dissolve the injunctions, and move that he be removed from the case.

References

References
↑1 Cameron v Beshear, Section B, pages 13 forward.
↑2 Cameron v Beshear, page 2.
↑3 Cameron v Beshear, page 20: “As we have noted time and again, so many times that we need not provide citation, the General Assembly establishes the public policy of the Commonwealth.”
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It ain’t just them unedumacated rednecks from eastern Kentucky who oppose #MaskMandates

There are a lot of people in the Bluegrass State who claim that it was only them unedumacated rednecks who are opposed to mask mandates in the public schools. Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) first recommended that local school boards impose masking requirements, but after they declined, with two-thirds voting against them, the Governor decided to make it an order, an order subsequently rescinded when the state Supreme Court sided against him.

But then I saw this in The Philadelphia Inquirer: Continue reading →

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I point at the moon; they stare at my finger When the left don't like the information, they attack the gathering of the facts

We noted, a month ago, the story of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars. But, as is so often the case with the left, the liberals got all upset about the wrong thing, and The New York Times spent 1,599 works to completely miss the point!

Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr

A conservative Catholic media organization, The Pillar, has published several reports claiming the use of dating apps at several churches and the Vatican.

by Liam Stack | August 20, 2021

The reports hit the Roman Catholic Church in rapid succession: Analyses of cellphone data obtained by a conservative Catholic blog seemed to show priests at multiple levels of the Catholic hierarchy in both the United States and the Vatican using the gay hookup app Grindr.

The first report, published late last month, led to the resignation of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference. The second, posted online days later, made claims about the use of Grindr by unnamed people in unspecified rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark. The third, published days after that, claimed that in 2018 at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limits to tourists.

The reports by the blog, The Pillar, have unnerved the leadership of the American Catholic Church and have introduced a potentially powerful new weapon into the culture war between supporters of Pope Francis and his conservative critics: cellphone data, which many users assume to be unavailable to the general public.

“When there is reporting out there that claims to expose activity like this in parishes around the country and also on Vatican grounds, that is a five-alarm fire for church officials, there is no doubt about it,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group.

Note that Faith in Public Life is very much a homosexual rights activist group.

The reports have put church officials in an awkward position: Priests take a vow of celibacy that is in no way flexible, and the downloading or use of dating apps by clergy members is inconsistent with that vow. But officials are also deeply uncomfortable with the use of cellphone data to publicly police priests’ behavior. Vatican officials said they met with representatives from the blog in June but would not publicly respond to its reports.

“If someone who has made promise of celibacy or a vow of chastity has a dating app on his or her phone, that is asking for trouble,” said Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark at a Zoom panel organized by Georgetown University. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Of course, His Eminence the Cardinal is far, far, far more concerned with the fact that some priests have been ‘outed’ as active homosexuals than he is about them being active homosexuals!

“I would also say that I think there are very questionable ethics around the collection of this data of people who allegedly may have broken their promises,” he said.

In American jurisprudence, information about a criminal suspect has to be gathered legally, and Americans tend to look at evidence gathered about people concerning things other than criminal law in the same manner.  But the investigation exposed by The Pillar, however it was gathered, has exposed, yet again, the problem of priests not keeping their vows. The Cardinal somehow doesn’t see that as that big a deal. “(T)hat is asking for trouble”? “(P)eople who allegedly may have broken their promises”? I’m sorry, but that is mealy-mouthing the issue.

The only app explicitly named in the reports has been Grindr, which is used almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men, although The Pillar has made vague references to other apps it says are used by heterosexuals. Only one of the reports directly links an app to a specific person, Monsignor Burrill.

The reports have been criticized by Catholic liberals for tying the general use of Grindr to studies that show minors sometimes use the app as well. That conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia is part of a longstanding effort by Catholic conservatives to blame the church sex abuse crisis on the presence of gay men in the priesthood.

Of course, there it is. I wrote, three years ago, about the problems in the Catholic priesthood, including the fact that a significantly large percentage of priests are homosexual,

the actual number unknown, but most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading

The Church does not want to admit that homosexuality is related to the sexual abuse of minors by priests, but the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. Several different Google searches have failed to turn up any notation concerning the number of victims in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report divided by sex, something of obvious interest, because such would reinforce the rather obvious fact that most victims of an all-male clergy have been boys. The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

The editors of The Pillar, J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon, said their work was motivated by a desire to expose a secretive culture of wrongdoing within the church.

“Immoral and illicit sexual behavior on the part of clerics who are bound to celibacy, but also on the part of other church leaders, could lead to a broad sense of tolerance for any number or kinds of sexual sins,” Mr. Flynn said on the podcast.

They said Newark was the only American diocese they wrote about because it was once led by the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 and charged last month with sexually assaulting a child in Massachusetts in 1974.

But their decision to investigate the use of a gay dating app in suburban New Jersey, instead of a city with a large gay population, has raised suspicion that their real goal may have been to undermine Cardinal Tobin, an ally of Pope Francis.

So, now The Pillar is being accused of targeting Cardinal Tobin and his archdiocese, as that somehow exculpates the entire behavioral issue.

A great deal of the Times article concerns how The Pillar obtained their information, and it includes a lot of speculation that is hardly consistent with good journalism.

Father Bob Bonnot, the executive director of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, said the use of cellphone data to track the movement of Monsignor Burrill had deepened a sense of vulnerability many priests feel.

“It can be terribly threatening,” he said. “It can make all priests uncomfortable and worried.”

It makes them worried about what, that such cell phone tracking might expose their own homosexual hook ups?

I don’t know why so many homosexuals are attracted to the priesthood. My guess is that they know that homosexual relationships are immoral and sinful, and they hope that, by the grace of God and the promise to be celibate, they can live life celibately.

But this really is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, and while it might be politically incorrect, it is also intellectually dishonest to deny that this is a homosexuality problem as well. We have a priesthood of sexually immature men — what else could they be, having been denied mature sexual relationships by the nature of their careers? — who are far more heavily than the population homosexual in orientation. The statistics we do have indicate that they were preying on boys just entering puberty, not prepubescent children, and that is an indication that sexual orientation as opposed to pedophilia is the primary motivation.

We need a priesthood who understand and participate in normal, adult sexual relationships, and, given that the Church does not, and cannot, recognize homosexual marriages as legitimate, that can mean only one thing: a priesthood in normal, heterosexual marriages.

That will not eliminate all sexual abuse; Jerry Sandusky, were he available for comment — and cared to tell the truth — could tell us all about men in stable, heterosexual marriages who still had a preference for underaged boys. Nor will it prevent the inevitable, some priests being divorced by their wives, and some children or married priests turning out badly.

But it has to be better than what we have now, a priesthood with an out-of-proportion homosexual cohort, and all being denied the most natural of human impulses, that of mating.

This is what we must have, this is what the Catholic Church needs in order to survive to serve the faithful into the future. Denying it, because it is politically incorrect, is denying the truth.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.