Scratch a liberal, find a fascist

It seems that President Biden believes he has the authority to order people to get the COVID-19 vaccines:

    Biden expresses frustration over the unvaccinated, says ‘a distinct minority’ is keeping the U.S. from overcoming the coronavirus

    By Annie Linskey, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Seung Min Kim and Lisa Rein | Thursday, September 9, 2021 | 5:52 PM EDT

    President Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

    Biden also said he was requiring all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

    And the president announced he would sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

    The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

    In remarks from the White House, Biden took a more antagonistic tone toward the unvaccinated than he has in the past, as he turned from cajoling toward compulsion and blamed those who refuse to get shots for hurting those around them.

Yeah, that’s going to persuade people who haven’t wanted to get vaccinated to do so!

There’s more at the original, but the Washington Post article never stated under what legal authority the President claims he can order private businesses to do this. The New York Times said that:

    The requirements will be imposed by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is drafting an emergency temporary standard to carry out the mandate, according to the White House.

An obvious question: if getting vaccinated is so important, why did Mr Biden only order it for companies with 100 or more employees?

There’s at least one more day of the special session of the Kentucky General Assembly; I would suspect that the legislators would quickly put together a bill banning all state employees from in any way assisting OSHA in enforcing this order of the President’s/

Will Andy Beshear regret calling a special session?

As we have previously noted, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) really, really doesn’t like the state legislature, but he didn’t have much choice but to call a special session of the General Assembly. Getting the General Assembly involved is something the Governor very much did not want to do. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

In the Bluegrass State, the legislature’s regular sessions are restricted by the state constitution, to sixty days, the last of which cannot go beyond April 15th in even numbered years, and thirty days, not to run beyond March 30th, in odd numbered years. The Governor, however, can call the legislature into special session, and he has the power to set its agenda during a special session. The General Assembly cannot call itself back into session outside of the constitutional restrictions.

But, with the COVID-19 state of emergency that the Governor declared in March of 2020 set to expire on Friday, September 10th, thanks to the state Supreme Court’s decision on the laws reining in the Governor’s emergency authority, Mr Beshear needed the special session to extend that. The General Assembly voted for an extension of that until January 15th, at which time the legislature will be in its regular session.

However, the Republican-controlled legislature hasn’t been doing much that the Governor wanted. We had previously noted that the Governor had asked school districts to put mask mandates in place, but most districts made them optional. The Governor then got pissed off, and made it an order.

    Bill ditching KY school mask mandate approved by House committee on the second try

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated September 8, 2021 | 7:15 PM EDT

    It took two attempts, but the House Education Committee on Wednesday passed a bill that would eliminate the state’s mask mandate in K-12 schools and specifies when districts could close to in-person learning.

    The House Education Committee first met at noon Wednesday, when House Bill 1 failed because it only got 11 of the 12 yes votes it needed to win approval in the committee of 22. There were seven no votes and three pass votes.

    Later, a second meeting of the House Education Committee was called for 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. At that meeting, the committee quickly reconsidered and approved the bill. It now moves to the full House of Representatives, and similar legislation remains alive in the Senate. The second vote was 16 yes votes, 2 no votes and no passes. . . . .

    At the second meeting, several lawmakers said they were changing their vote so that the legislation could be heard in the full House. Others said they were afraid if the bill died, schools would miss out on the help the legislation could provide. One provision makes it easier for retired teachers to return to the classroom to ease staff shortages.

There’s more at the original.

The Governor had already said that he would reimpose his despised statewide mask mandate if he could, and when the state Supreme Court ruled that his authority had been limited, he ran an end-around, to get the state Board of Education to issue one, a mandate lasting for the entire school year. I had been noting for awhile that the Governor was looking for an excuse to reimpose the mask mandate, and he admitted it, stating that the high number of COVID-19 cases and hospital staffing shortages would have spurred him to enact a statewide mask mandate for indoor settings.

However, under the proposed bill, local school boards and districts would still have the authority to issue mask mandates for their jurisdictions.

The truth is simple: it was the hated statewide indoor mask mandate which was the primary impetus for voters in the Commonwealth to give Republican legislative candidates such huge majorities in the 2020 elections.

The bill also includes language to allow schools more flexibility on ‘non traditional instruction’, NTI, days. In the regular session last winter, the legislature, fighting the closure of schools and long term use of remote instruction, mandated that no schools could take more than ten NTI days without having to make them up in in-person days. As several districts, at least 38 of them so far, have had to close down due to COVID, those days, normally used for snow days during the winter, would quickly get used up. The legislature is still looking at limits, but with more flexibility for schools who confine NTI to those students or classes which must be quarantined, rather than entire school systems. We do not yet know what the final form will be.

Final Jeopardy

Mayim Bialik: “Today’s Final Jeopardy category is ‘Foreign Affairs,’ and the answer is, ‘Yes.’ You have thirty seconds to write down your response, and be sure to put it in the form of a question.”

Jeopardy jingle music plays.

Mayim Bialik: “And now we come to our defending champion, Elwood. What did he have?”

Screen reveals, “Is Joe Biden stupid or senile?”

Mayim Bialik: “That’s correct!”

In noting the Biden Administration’s plans to reopen the American consulate in Jerusalem, where we already have our embassy to Israel, William Teach wrote:

This has the chance of causing big problems, and simply shows that Democrats hate Israel and Jews, and love the terrorists who attack Israel civilians.

Actually, what it shows is that liberalism is just plain stupid. There is a natural tendency to favor the plucky underdog, but that tendency is something which has to be tempered with a realistic assessment of just who the underdog is. Who could have imagined that the homosexual, transgender supporting American left would want to see an ‘LGBTQIA+’ supporting Israeli government defeated by an Islamic, if not completely Islamist, movement which disparages, beats, injures, and sometimes just outright kills homosexuals and ‘transgenders,’ but that’s what we have today. Who could have imagined that an American Democratic Party, the second most loyal voting demographic of which are Jews, would favor a group the stated intention of which is to conquer the Jews and push them into the sea?

We’ve just seen the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and our State Department has expressed dismay that there are no women in the Taliban 2.0 government, when the original banned women from leaving the house without a responsible male escort, and barred girls from being educated.

American liberalism has a collective pair of thick, foggy, rose colored glasses, glasses through which the left see the world not as it is, but the way that they believe it should be. The Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, al Fatah, these groups all tell us what they want to do, but today’s left just blithely ignore it, seeming to think that if we are just nice to them, they’ll behave like good, Western liberals.

Joe Biden is both senile and stupid. The rest of the left? Perhaps not senile, but certainly stupid.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

We recently noted the statistics provided by the Fayette County, Kentucky, Health Department regarding COVID-19 cases in the Bluegrass State’s second most populous county. The Health Department tell us that, in one of the few charts accompanying the graphs, that in August there were a total of 5337 cases, 3746 of which were among the non-vaccinated and 1708 are ‘breakthrough’ cases among the vaccinated, 31.3%.

The population of Fayette County is 323,200, and the total fully vaccinated population is 189,750. Those numbers are important, and I’ll come back to them later. From The New York Times:

    One in 5,000

    The real chances of a breakthrough infection.

    by David Leonhardt | September 7, 2021

    The C.D.C. reported a terrifying fact in July: Vaccinated people with the Delta variant of the Covid virus carried roughly the same viral load in their noses and throats as unvaccinated people.

    The news seemed to suggest that even the vaccinated were highly vulnerable to getting infected and passing the virus to others. Sure enough, stories about vaccinated people getting Covid — so-called breakthrough infections — were all around this summer: at a party in Provincetown, Mass.; among the Chicago Cubs; on Capitol Hill. Delta seemed as if it might be changing everything.

    In recent weeks, however, more data has become available, and it suggests that the true picture is less alarming. Yes, Delta has increased the chances of getting Covid for almost everyone. But if you’re vaccinated, a Covid infection is still uncommon, and those high viral loads are not as worrisome as they initially sounded.

    How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.

There’s more at the original, but note the specified risk: one in 5,000 per day. It’s that ‘per day’ factor that needs to be noted.

August has 31 days, and there were, according to the Fayette County Health Department, 1,708 cases of COVID-19 classified as ‘breakthrough’ cases, occurring among the fully vaccinated. Doing the math, 1705 cases divided by 189,750 vaccinated people yields an incidence of 0.900% of the vaccinated population contracting COVID-19 over a 31 day period. Divide that by 31, and the rate becomes 0.0290% per day. One out of 5,000 works out to 0.02%, so the Fayette County rate isn’t terribly out of line.

But let’s do the unvaccinated population as well. 3,746 COVID-19 cases out of 133,450 unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people yields a rate of 2.807% over the 31 days of August. Divided by 31 again, that comes out to a 0.0905% per day, 3.121 times that for the fully vaccinated, and not even a thousand to one chance that an unvaccinated person will contract the virus on any given day.

Yes, it makes sense to get the vaccine, because it cuts the chances that if you do contract the virus, you’ll actually get sick. But that raises an obvious question: if the vaccine helps keep those who contract the virus from getting sick, or as sick, as those who have not been vaccinated, are the asymptomatic but vaccinated population being tested at significantly lower rates?

If you’ve ever had a COVID-19 test, you already know: it’s not much fun having a nurse stick a swab all the way up your nose and into your sinuses. So, if you are completely asymptomatic, and you have a choice, why would you ever volunteer for that test?

There are two problems here:

  1. We do not know the real percentage of the fully vaccinated to contract the virus; and
  2. The numbers we do have are being politicized to death.

When The New York Times runs a headline, “One in 5,000: The real chances of a breakthrough infection,” and you have to read down to the end of the fourth paragraph to find out that number is per day, you are seeing propaganda, you are seeing politicized numbers.

Yes, I believe that getting vaccinated is the smarter thing to do, but am very much opposed to vaccine mandates or vaccine passports. But trying to make cases for vaccination by using politicized numbers only makes your case weaker when someone, someone like me, spots what has been done to politicize the numbers.

Andy Beshear hates the state legislature, but he had no choice but to call them in

Most of my articles on Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) are primarily sourced from the Lexington Herald-Leader, but he wrangled an invitation from NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, and came to the attention of The New York Times:

    Kentucky governor says the state’s Covid surge is ‘dire.’

    by Melina Delkic | September 5, 2021

    Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

    Kentucky’s Democratic governor on Sunday described the state’s surge of Covid cases as “dire,” and pointed out that Republican state lawmakers had limited his options to control the record wave of infections there.

    “If I had the ability to do it right now, we would have a masking order when you are in public and indoors,” said Gov. Andy Beshear, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” news program. “We know that’s a proven way to slow the spread of the virus and ultimately help our health care capacity.”

Right: if the Governor had the authority to issue a statewide mask mandate, he would have done so, and that is precisely why the voters of the Commonwealth gave Republican state legislative candidates such a huge margin in last November’s elections, because Mr Beshear had issued a statewide mask mandate last year.

Getting the General Assembly involved is something the Governor very much did not want to do. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

And, as it happens, Kentucky’s legislators are not wearing masks today, as the special session opens:

    Kentucky special session on COVID-19 starts with many lawmakers not wearing masks

    By Jack Brammer | Updated: September 7, 2021 | 5:12 PM EDT

    With most members not wearing masks, a special session of the Kentucky General Assembly started Tuesday morning to deal with the state’s surging COVID-19 pandemic.

    Lawmakers acted quickly on Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s call to extend the COVID-19 state of emergency that has been in place in Kentucky since March 2020 and more time for a state of emergency to deal with August flooding in Nicholas County. House Joint Resolution 1, which extends the states of emergency and many of the governor’s emergency orders, was expected to clear the legislature before the end of the day.

    House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, gaveled his chamber into session at 10:13 a.m. and 94 of the 100 members responded to the roll call and heard the proclamation of the special session. Thirty-four members of the 38-member Senate convened at 12:16 p.m. with most members going without a mask. The two physicians in the Senate — Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, and Karen Berg, D-Louisville — wore masks.

    Lawmakers returned to the state Capitol in Frankfort at the call of Beshear, who has presented them with an agenda to fight the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 7,900 lives in Kentucky.

    The Democratic governor made the session call Saturday, two weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court said his emergency orders dealing with the pandemic needed approval by the Republican-led legislature.

As far as I have heard, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd has not yet lifted his injunctions against the legislation that the state Supreme Court ordered him to do, and the parties to the lawsuit were supposed to appear before the judge today, but I have been unable to find any reports concerning that. Nevertheless, Governor Beshear at least appears to be acting as though those injunctions have been lifted.

The legislature quickly approved the Governor’s request to extend the state of emergency until January 15th, the state House of Representatives voting 92-3 in favor, and the state Senate 32-4, sending it to Mr Beshear for his signature.

By extending the state of emergency until January 15th, when the General Assembly will be in its regular session, the Governor would have the power to issue a statewide mask mandate, lasting for thirty days, but the General Assembly might just deny him that one:

    Bill ditching mask mandates for KY schools and daycare centers gains momentum

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated: September 7, 2021 | 4:32 PM EDT

    Hours after the Kentucky General Assembly began a special session Tuesday to deal with COVID-19 policies, the Senate Education Committee approved a bill that rejects the Beshear Administration’s emergency regulations requiring universal masking of people age two or older in K-12 schools and daycare centers.

    Senate Bill 1 declares the regulations requiring masks in schools and daycare centers null and void.

    The bill, approved by the committee with a 8-5 vote, now goes to the full Senate. Lawmakers who voted no voiced concerns about lifting the mask mandates at a time when transmission of COVID-19 and resulting hospitalizations are at an all-time high in Kentucky.

    Education Committee Chairman Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, said individual school boards will be free to decide their own policies about masking in schools.

    Wise said the bill would become law as soon as Gov. Andy Beshear signs it or the legislature overrides his veto, given that it is considered emergency legislation.

We had previously noted that the Governor had asked school districts to put mask mandates in place, but most districts made them optional. The Governor then got pissed off, and made it an order.

There’s more at the original, much of it devoted to the legislature’s plans to ease the restrictions on ‘non-traditional instruction,’ meaning those days in which school is conducted remotely. The legislature wants to keep schools from closing down for everybody because some students or staffers test positive for COVID-19.

Those were the two things which rankled the legislators, and Kentuckians in general, the most: the mask mandate and the schools being closed, and those are the two things the General Assembly appears to be most eager to prevent from happening again. Of course, it’s going to take a few days to see how this will play out, and what the legislature passes. But at least a wannabe dictator of a Governor has been reined in by the democratically elected General Assembly and the Kentucky Supreme Court.

The murder rate in Philadelphia has dropped Has The Philadelphia Inquirer actually noticed?

I have frequently referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. I will admit to also using it to refer to reporters who just don’t look at all of the facts.

‘Silence, and then screams’: Panic and numbness amid Labor Day weekend shootings in Philadelphia

The unofficial end of summer didn’t slow a record year of gun violence. Between Friday and Sunday, at least 13 people were shot in Philadelphia, two fatally.

by Anna Orso | September 6, 2021

Forty minutes feels like an eternity when lives are on the line.

That’s how long it took Brandon Collins to get home from work Friday evening after his sister called frantically: Someone had sprayed bullets right outside their home on the 1500 block of South Cleveland Street in Point Breeze. And Collins was terrified for his 58-year-old mother’s safety.

She was physically unharmed, but Collins was left shaken. “Things happen in a split second,” he said.

Police said two men had been shot and were hospitalized in the incident — a 33-year-old hit in the arm and hip, and a 24-year-old struck in the foot. An SUV that belonged to an uninvolved resident was riddled with bullet holes. No one was arrested, and police haven’t determined a motive.

That was how Labor Day weekend began in Philadelphia as the city’s unrelenting gun violence crisis continued. Even as the Made in America festival packed Center City and some residents bolted for the Shore, others across the city were left fearful for their family’s safety, or their own.

You have to get down to the ninth paragraph, past two large photographs and two ads, before you come to this part:

    More than 1,500 people have been struck by bullets in Philadelphia this year, and the city has recorded 358 homicides, most by guns. Police officials said during a news conference last week that 179 people were shot over four weeks in August, a 23% decrease compared to the previous four weeks.

    But that decrease was from a historically high level of gun violence in July. And the 186 shooting victims in all of August was more than in any month between 2015 and May 2020, when shootings spiked dramatically.

Journalists know that the further down in a story you get, the fewer readers who began it are still reading.

The Philadelphia Police Department reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Labor Day, September 6th, there had been 363 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year. With 249 days of the year having elapsed, that gives Philly an average of 1.4578 murders a day, which would yield 532 murders for the entire year, if that average was maintained.

As we reported on July 9th, the city then had a rate of 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. Thus, even with the really, really bad part of the year in teh statistics, the ‘projected’ homicide total for 2021 has dropped by thirty souls.

But there’s more. Over the last 1½ months, the murder rate has really dropped. There had been 314 homicides as of July 22nd, the 203rd day of the year. Since that time, 46 days ago, there have been ‘just’ 49 murders, a rate of 1.0652 per day. With 116 days left in 2021, if that rate were maintained, there would be ‘just’ 124 more killings, for a total of 487 for the year, 12 fewer than last year, and 13 fewer than 1990’s all time record of 500. If that number was the final one, it would be 75 fewer homicides than the math had projected just two months ago.

Which raises the obvious question: why has the homicide rate decreased? After all, mid-July through Labor Day is part of the long, hot summer, when killings seem to be at their peak. Did a really bad gang or two just get completely wiped out? Did a few gangs come up with a truce? Whatever happened, this ought to be a question real journalists would attempt to investigate.

Censorship on Twitter 'Regular' user Red Walrus gets flagged, 'Blue Check' Rachel Maddow does not

Nice and early in the morning, I noticed this tweet from Glenn Greenwald. The image itself is actually a screen capture, and you can click on the image to enlarge it. Here is the link to Rachel Maddow’s original tweet, which as of 8:50 AM EDT on Monday, September 6th, is still up. Miss Maddow was on Twitter two days later tweeting this, and on the 5th, tweeting this, as well as retweeting this, so it’s not as though she was just taking a Labor Day weekend off the medium.

Then, a little bit further down, I encountered a retweet of this. Again, this is a screen capture, which you may enlarge by clicking in it. Note the Twitter warning that “This Tweet may be misleading. Get the latest on preventative measures and COVID-19.”

Then, attempting to see how far Twitter’s censorship goes, I clicked on the retweet button, and got this, a message from Twitter warning me, “This Tweet may be misleading. Get the latest on preventative measures and COVID-19. Help keep Twitter a place for reliable info. Find out more before sharing this Tweet.”

Well, I clicked on the blue “Find out more” button, and got an article which claims that experts all agree that masking helps prevent the spread of COVID-19. But I have to ask: if Twitter is so very concerned about tweets they consider misleading, why haven’t they flagged Miss Maddow’s tweet, the one promoting a thoroughly debunked story, and which had been retweet 7.3K times?

The truth is simple: Twitter is concerned about “misleading” information only when it misleads in one political direction. We have previously noted how Twitter has banned “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals“, thus attempting to shut off all debate as to whether those who claim to be transgender have actually been able to change their sex. The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy, a male who claims to be a female and now calls himself ‘Parker’ Malloy, to claim that Twitter’s policy censoring freedom of speech actually promotes freedom of speech. To refer to Bruce Jenner or Bradley Manning on Twitter, one must use their fake names of ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner or ‘Chelsea’ Manning, which is a surrender to their claims that they have actually changed sex.

The only thing George Orwell got wrong was the year.

Twitter and Facebook and the credentialed media understand this well: control of language and control of information means control over the debate, and forces the debate into the directions they want to see it go.

Don’t surrender, don’t give in, don’t allow the credentialed media to push you into saying something false, something you know to be false, just to push through the barriers!

Theodore McCarrick illustrates the problem, but he is not the only problem

I have said it before: the Catholic priesthood must be changed, and restricted to married, heterosexual men.

Mandatory celibacy for priests was not established until the Second Lateran Council in 1139, and reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in 1563. That means that, for 1,100 years, the majority of Church history, priests could be, and were mostly expected to be, married men.

With humans being naturally inclined to mate, the Church is expecting the priest to live an unnatural lifestyle. Human beings need to mate, they need to be married, and the celibacy discipline denies to Catholic priests that most basic normalcy in human life. Even St Paul, who stated that he was celibate, noted that marriage was the natural condition of life,[1]I Corinthians 7:1-11. And St Paul also set down the conditions that a man must meet to be a deacon, priest or bishop:

The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church?[2]1 Timothy 3:1-5

St Peter, regarded as the first Pope, at least had been married at one point: Matthew 8:14-15 refers to his mother-in-law, though there is no reference to St Peter’s wife in the Bible.[3]1 Corinthians 9:5 has also been interpreted as confirming that not only was St Peter married, but that his wife accompanied him as he traveled with Jesus. Cephas, in the cited passage, refers to … Continue reading

The conditions for priests and deacon are similar. But clearly, St Paul expected those in Holy Orders to mostly be married.

Ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick pleads not guilty to child sex assault; some in crowd outside yell, ‘Shame on you!’

By Kurt Shillinger  and Michelle Boorstein | September 3, 2021 | 9:55 a.m. EDT

DEDHAM, Mass. — Disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, 91, in street clothes, stooped and using a walker, was arraigned Friday in a suburban Boston courtroom on three counts of criminal child sex abuse.

It was the first time the former Catholic archbishop of Washington had appeared in public since 2018, when his fall began amid a wave of sex abuse allegations. Some in the crowd outside, including survivors of other assaults, screamed at the former global power-broker: “Shame on you! Prince of the church!”

Inside, McCarrick was charged with sexually assaulting a teen in the 1970s, the first time a U.S. cardinal has faced a criminal charge of abuse. He pleaded not guilty during the hearing that lasted less than 10 minutes. Judge Michael J. Pomarole ordered McCarrick to give up his passport and to stay away from people under the age of 18, as well as the victim.

There’s much more at the original, but the story of the former Cardinal is well-known: after scads of evidence, Pope Francis took away his title as Cardinal, and eventually he was laicized. Let’s be honest about it: Mr McCarrick was a predatory homosexual, using his power and position to abuse not just teenagers, but seminarians and subordinate priests.

We need to tell the truth here: while it is wholly politically incorrect to say, the sexual abuse of minors in the Church has been a problem of homosexuality: 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.[4]The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002, page 12.

A celibate priesthood is a sexually immature priesthood. Sorry to tell the truth here, but if you have never, or only rarely, had sexual relations, you have simply not had time to mature in those relations.

There is no way that the Catholic Church could find a way to accommodate the sexual desires of its homosexual priests, when the Church holds that homosexuals cannot be married, that sexual activity outside of marriage is sinful,[5]Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2353 that homosexual activity is “gravely depraved”,[6]Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357 and that homosexuality itself is “objectively disordered.”[7]Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2358 This can mean only one thing: that Catholic priests must be heterosexual, and that they must be married.

This is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, but 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 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.

Back to The Washington Post:

While shocking, due to the popularity and power of the sprightly, charismatic McCarrick, his case came two decades after the Catholic sex abuse scandal exploded in Boston and spread everywhere from high-level sports to the Boy Scouts. Forty-six U.S. bishops have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct with minors, according to BishopAccountability. Many thousands of complaints have been filed and multiple dioceses have filed for bankruptcy to cover costs of attorneys and settlements.

But McCarrick is one of only two U.S. bishops who have been criminally charged. The charges against former Springfield bishop Thomas Dupre were dropped the same day, in 2004, with prosecutors citing the statute of limitations.

Forty-six bishops, forty-six bishops! They might not all be guilty, and must be proven innocent until proven otherwise, at least legally.

Pope Francis has recognized the problem:

Pope Francis warned Italian bishops this week to vet carefully applicants to the priesthood and reject anyone they suspected might be homosexual, local media reported on Thursday.

‘Keep an eye on the admissions to seminaries, keep your eyes open,’ the pope was quoted as saying by newspaper La Stampa’s Vatican Insider service. ‘If in doubt, better not let them enter.’

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the remarks, which Vatican Insider and Il Messaggero said were made at a closed-door gathering on Monday.”

Had the Pope’s admonition been put in place by Pope Pius XII, who was the Bishop of Rome when Mr McCarrick entered the seminary, perhaps he would never have become a priest, perhaps all of the disastrous behavior he exhibited while under Holy Orders would have been avoided. Had we a married priesthood, perhaps we would not have the shortage of priests we have now, and perhaps, just perhaps, we would not have had the scandals which have rocked the Church.

Mr McCarrick is an infirm, old man, who might not spend a minute in jail, who might not even survive until the end of his trial. Quite frankly, I don’t really care what happens to him at this point; his punishment is the disgrace he has suffered, and that will probably have to be enough.

But Mr McCarrick is the symbol of what has gone wrong in the Catholic Church, and tells us, if we are willing to look honestly at the problem, what the solution is: while not all homosexuals are predators going after minors, while some truly can remain celibate, their continued presence in the Church has been a persistent problem, and one which will not go away by simply ignoring it. Those who have done nothing wrong should not be somehow kicked out of the priesthood, but we must open the seminaries to married men, as we already have with permanent deacons, and restrict them to mature, married men.

References

References
1 I Corinthians 7:1-11.
2 1 Timothy 3:1-5
3 1 Corinthians 9:5 has also been interpreted as confirming that not only was St Peter married, but that his wife accompanied him as he traveled with Jesus. Cephas, in the cited passage, refers to Peter.
4 The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002, page 12.
5 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2353
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357
7 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2358

The unintended (?) consequences of being #woke

The left have been slamming police departments across this country ever since the death of George Floyd while he was resisting arrest in Minneapolis. Had Mr Floyd just gotten in that police car when he was arrested, he’d be alive today, or at least he would be if he didn’t overdose on the fentanyl he was using at some point. The left and the #woke and antifa all led Mostly Peaceful Protests™ against the police and doing radical things like obeying the law.

In the City of Brotherly Love, the rioters burned and looted:

Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.

The very first line by Inquirer architecture writer Inga Saffron asked whether the destruction of buildings in the riots in the city after the killing of George Floyd mattered. She claimed that the anger of the protesters was justified, but also noted that yes, those buildings did matter, too.

“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.

The “Buildings Matter, Too” headline got Stan Wischnowski, then Executive Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer fired to resign, with published Elizabeth Hughes writing that she’s transforming that once-great newspaper into “an anti racist news organization,” and telling readers that the Inquirer was now:

  • Producing an antiracism workflow guide for the newsroom that provides specific questions that reporters and editors should ask themselves at various stages of producing our journalism.
  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Translation: the Inquirer would censor the news if it might show black or ‘brown’ people committing crimes. We noted the Sacramento Bee’s description of their policy:

Publishing these (booking) photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

As we have pointed out, Representative Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-MN) and state Attorney General Keith bin Ellison (D-MN) are supporting a ballot measure to eliminate the Police Department in Minneapolis, and while Philadelphia hasn’t been that stupid — at least not yet — it’s clear that the chickens are coming home to roost:

Police struggle to hire officers and 911 dispatchers as homicides and shootings increase

The Police Department is struggling to find enough officers and 911 dispatchers to hire, amid a surge in violence that is on pace to make 2021 the deadliest year in history.

by Mensah M Dean | Sunday, September 5, 2021

An Overbrook man called 911 last week after hearing breaking glass outside his house and looking out to see a teen breaking into his next-door neighbor’s car, then running off.

Realizing he had just witnessed a burglary in progress, the man raced to his car to give chase. Along the way, he said, he repeatedly called 911 for help — and the phone rang and rang with no answer.

Far from unique, his experience of reaching for help by dialing 911 — to no avail — is being played out across the city as the Philadelphia Police Department grapples with a vacancy crisis among officers and 911 dispatchers.

Finding enough officers and dispatchers has been a challenge, according to department officials, as interest in such jobs declines amid calls for police reform and the national racial reckoning sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. In Philadelphia, city and police union officials say, the decline in interest in policing can also be attributed in part to District Attorney Larry Krasner’s stepped-up prosecution of police misconduct.

There’s more at the original

The Philadelphia Police Department, authorized to have 6,380 officers, is 371 officers below strength. There are only 252 dispatchers, out of an authorized strength of 353, 101 vacancies, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw stated that the city has imposed mandatory weekend overtime for 911 dispatchers to make up the shortfall. The story notes that Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Soros’ stooge Larry Krasner, has made prosecuting police ‘misconduct’ a priority.

Would you want to be a police officer in the City of Brotherly Love, with far-left idiots like Mr Krasner just salivating at the chance to catch a mistake and prosecute yet another police officer?

It seems that Philadelphia doesn’t even need to dismantle the Police Department, the way the #woke are trying to do in Minneapolis; instead they’ve inflicted a festering wound of a hundred cuts, one which is slowly dismantling the department, because the #woke simply do not believe in law enforcement.

At least, not until one of them is the victim.

The real divide in America is not between Republicans and Democrats, conservative and liberals, or even urban and rural. No, the real divide is between civilized and barbarian. The problem for the left is that, as barbarians, they have surrendered to the wants and mercies of the strongest, and most of them are weaklings.