ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

This case illustrates the shameless double standard employed by 'intellectuals', artists and liberals about crime and criminals. Retuers does a good job of summarizing the issue.



Would Polanski get a pass
if he were a pedophile priest?
Posted by Tom Heneghan



PARIS, Sept. 28 - It’s hard to watch France’s political and cultural elite rush to support filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition to the United States on a decades-old sex charge and not wonder exactly how they interpret the national motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

It’s tempting to ask whether they’re defending the liberty to break the law and skip town, respecting the equality of all before the law and championing a brotherhood of artists who can do no wrong.

Here in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner declared the arrest was “a bit sinister … frankly, (arresting) a man of such talent recognised around the world, recognised in the country where he was arrested — that’s not very nice.” He and his Polish counterpart have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the issue.

Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said “just as there is a generous America that we like, there’s also an America that scares us, and that’s the America that has just shown us its face.”

Directors, actors and intellectuals have been signing a petition demanding Polanski’s immediate release.

Almost all the focus is on the argument that Polanski is a brilliant director, the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year old dates back to 1977 and the victim herself says she wants the whole issue to be forgotten.

Almost completely ignored is the fact that he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing, which added a crime to the original crime.

There is such a widespread assumption that all artists and intellectuals would automatically support Polanski that Paris papers today — both the left-of-centre Libération and the conservative Le Figaro — wrote with an air of surprise that Hollywood was not storming the barricades to back him.

The French Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit made headlines by bucking the trend and saying he was “ill at ease” with the rush to absolve Polanski of raping a minor and the culture minister should have been more cautious in his comments.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, Hollywood’s hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the objections by Polanski’s supporters and concluded: “Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country … the Justice Department and L.A.’s district attorney are right to seek extradition.”

And almost nobody in the media here in France asks the tough questions that Fr. Tom Reese, S.J. did in his Washington Post blog post entitled “Father Polanski would go to jail”:

“Polanski’s defenders … argue that he should not be punished. They say that the girl was willing and sexually experienced and she has forgiven him (after receiving a settlement). They even cite his tragic childhood and life as an excuse. And besides, it is ancient history. Such arguments from paedophile priests would be laughed out of court and lambasted by everyone, and rightly so…

“The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse, but what about the film industry? The world has truly changed. Entertainment is the new religion with sex, violence and money the new Trinity. The directors and stars are worshipped and quickly forgiven for any infraction as long as the PR agent is as skilled as a saintly confessor. Entertainment, not religion, is the new opiate of the people and we don’t want our supply disturbed.

“Is there a double standard here? You bet.”

There’s a lot to say about the different ways Americans and French approach the law. But let’s go right to Tom Reese’s question. Do you think Polanski’s supporters cut him slack they wouldn’t think of permitting for a paedophile priest? Is the entertainment industry setting our values?

[That Heneghan would even pose those questions the way he does - rather than stating them as outright fact is just as worrisome as the shameless double standard!]

And an unexpected 'God bless...' to Fr. Reese for seeing the utter fallacy and moral perverseness of the double standard.


A related story, which is ultimately more significant for the deliberately unpublicized facts that it brings up to the UN:


Vatican envoy to UN defends
Church's response to sex abuse
By Sarah Delaney




VATICAN CITY, Sept. 30 (CNS) -- The Vatican has defended its response to the problem of sexual abuse of children by priests, saying that the Church had been "cleaning its own house" and that other religions and institutions were similarly tainted.

The Vatican delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Council said in an oral statement Sept. 22 in Geneva that Church authorities fully understand the gravity of the issue of child sex abuse by clergy and have taken measures to eliminate the problem.

The statement was delivered on behalf of Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's representative to U.N. organizations in Geneva, as a formal reply to criticism of the church by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, a London-based organization.

Keith Porteous Wood, IHEU representative, accused the
church of covering up allegations of the sexual abuse of children, seeking to reduce criminal sanctions and monetary compensation to victims, and avoiding full assumption of responsibility.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said that, as the Vatican's envoy, Archbishop Tomasi exercised his right to reply to "a very hard and unjust attack."

The statement read by Msgr. Hubertus van Megen, a member of the Vatican delegation to the Human Rights Council, said, "The Church is very conscious of the seriousness of the problem" and cited canon law, which calls for punishing priests involved in sexual abuse, including removal from the priesthood.

The statement cited a 2004 study by the U.S. Department of Education that concluded sexual abuse of students in U.S. public schools by school employees "appears to far exceed the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church." [But of course, we would never see that reported by the ideologically selective liberal media!]

According to the Vatican statement, "we now know that in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5 percent and 5 percent of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases."

The Vatican statement quoted a Christian Science Monitor article that reported on a 2002 study by Christian Ministry Resources, which concluded that "most American churches being hit with child sexual abuse allegations are Protestant," and that a similar rate was found within the Jewish community.

"As the Catholic Church has been busy cleaning its own house," the Vatican statement said, "it would be good if other institutions and authorities, where the major part of abuses are reported, could do the same and inform the media."

The statement also said that in an upcoming report by the Vatican to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. body that monitors countries' implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, "a paragraph will be dedicated to the problem of child abuse by Catholic clergy."

Archbishop Tomasi's statement also distinguished between pedophilia, adult sexual attraction to prepubescent children, and ephebophilia, adult sexual attraction to adolescents.

It said that of all the priests involved in abuse cases, 80-90 percent "belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the age of 11 and 17 years old."

The International Humanist and Ethical Union reacted to Archbishop Tomasi's reply on its Web site by saying that the Vatican was "comprehensively missing the point" by arguing that sexual abuse of children occurred in other religions and institutions.

"No doubt there are abusers in all walks of life," the new statement read, "but our point was not the abuse itself but the cover-up in which some of the highest officials of the Church were implicated." [Yada, yada, yada - all based on false reporting by hostile media like the BBC. It's not the Church that's missing the point - it's stridently self-righteous elements like this union!]

The union describes itself as a world umbrella organization embracing "humanist, atheist, rationalist, secularist" positions.


And the following concerns a much broader issue. I am surprised liberals have not jumped up and started firing all their guns for this controversial position. It is the reasonable thing, but the problem is how each nation's law allows defines protected speech that 'does not incite hate' - assuming it accepts the necessity to ban inciteful language.


Vatican says NO to protecting
free expression when it incites hatred
By Carol Glatz



VATICAN CITY, Oct. 1 (CNS) -- While the freedom of expression is a right, states are not obliged to protect expression that incites hatred and tramples upon other people's rights, a Vatican official said.

The Vatican's representative to U.N. agencies in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, said the freedom of expression should take into account the "principles of social ethics such as truth, solidarity, tolerance and fairness."

These are principles that "form the cornerstone of justice, equity, respect for privacy and subsidiarity," he said Sept. 30 at a U.N. Human Rights Council session focusing on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance.

Freedom of expression "is not only a right but also a duty that needs to be strengthened," said the archbishop, who sent his remarks to Catholic News Service.

"Protecting the freedom of expression, however, is not an absolute obligation," he said, because the aim should be to uphold the good of society and protect everyone's enjoyment of religious freedom and belief.

"Any form of incitement to hatred that affects the human person and his/her rights is unacceptable," and society should not be protecting freedom of expression at all costs if it comes at the expense of the life and dignity of real people, he said.

Archbishop Tomasi said episodes of religious intolerance that undermine the rights of people of any religion or belief are increasing and "practically all religious minorities are discriminated (against) around the world."

A solution that strikes a balance between supporting the freedom of expression and curbing hate speech must be found, he said.

"Laws are not enough. A new outlook is required" to motivate people to use all forms of communication in ways that build up the human community and enrich people's well-being and spirituality, he said.


Interesting point. Back in the mid-1970s, my application for a 6-month Harvard fellowship offered to Third World journalists was turned down because the essay I submitted for the purpose was a consideration of exactly what democratic governments could do to minimize hate-inciting rhetoric, particularly in the media!

It must have read like anathema to the board of judges awarding the fellowship. Obviously, I could have chosen the safe way and written about something that warms the liberal heart, but I chose to be headstrong, so there!