New York Times corroborates BBC 2006 account

Inaction and concealment involving the current pope and documented today by the New York Times make it difficult to believe the secret-keeping was not systematic, as alleged by BBC in 2006.

Please decide. View BBC’s Friday, September 29, 2006, Sex Crimes and the Vatican:

[H/T: Pam Spaulding]

Catholic sex abuse scandal in the South

She did not say, “It’s over.” What Laurie Goodstein did write for the New York Times is:

Roman Catholic bishops in the United States received fewer accusations of sexual abuse by the clergy in 2009 than in any other year since 2004, according to an annual audit based on self-reporting from Catholic dioceses.

The self-reported nature of the numbers does raise serious questions:

David Clohessy, national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, reiterated victims’ skepticism about self-reported abuse figures. He said it’s naive to think an institution that has concealed abuse and protected its own for so long would suddenly be honest and forthcoming

The same questions arose when Catholic Diocese of Charlotte press spokesman David Hains’ tried to minimize the problem in North Carolina by arguing that his diocese hasn’t had the extensive sex abuse problems of, say, Boston.

Returning fire today, Neal Evans wrote in the Asheville [North Carolina] Citizen-Times:

I beg to differ.

The St. Eugene’s music minister who also taught at Asheville Catholic School pled to a 30-year federal term for child pornography while his boss, then-pastor of St. Eugene’s, awaits trial for covering up that crime. There’s the music minister’s predecessor, who left after an internal investigation; the diocesan co-director of youth ministry, a priest reassigned to Virginia after allegedly abusing an adolescent; another priest who served in Tryon, Maggie Valley and Charlotte, removed based on “credible evidence”; the Charlotte priest, extradited from New Jersey, sentenced last year up to 10 years for sexually abusing an altar boy.

There’s much more. Priests involved in sexual abuse and cover-up have served in every Catholic parish and school in Buncombe County. Abused at St. Joan of Arc in West Asheville and now representing SNAP (Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests), I frequently receive calls from survivors and families, painfully but bravely sharing their stories of abuse and betrayal by their church.

Germany, Guam and Switzerland and other places an ocean away are by no means the only ones where new cases are surfacing. Every day, it seems. So that neither a papal pastoral letter of apology nor the processed-at-last resignation of an Irish bishop are solutions. They merely impinge on a problem whose sheer magnitude is still becoming apparent.

Richard Land echoed (or the echo)?

The Christian Coalition issued a statement yesterday which compared “Sunday, March 21, 2010,” when health reform was adopted, to “a very infamous day full of betrayal and deceit” like Japan’s “sneak attack on America at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.” And so on.

Did they steal that image from Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission chief Richard land? Who after all went on from his Pearl Harbor to forecast an electoral Battle of Midway (casting the Democrats in the role of the Japanese Imperial Navy), whereas the Christian Coalition took another path.

Coordinate it with him?

Or was the similarly ineloquent lack appropriate restraint merely perchance?

Wingnuts unfound

Flaws make Harris Interactive’s “Wingnuts” poll more distracting than informative, perhaps because it is touched by a promotional intent. The poll is driven by publication of a “new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America by John Avlon,” which deals with people who express extreme views of President Obama.

As Gary Langer writes for ABC News:

The purpose seems to have been to see how many people the pollsters could get to agree to pejorative statements about Obama. Quite a few, it turns out – but with what I see as a highly manipulative approach to questionnaire design.

The shaky findings are nonetheless startling. Harris reports:

This Harris Poll seeks to measure how many people are involved. It finds that 40% of adults believe he is a socialist. More than 30% think he wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns and that he is a Muslim. More than 25% believe he wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a world government, has done many things that are unconstitutional, that he resents America’s heritage, and that he does what Wall Street tells him to do.

More than 20% believe he was not born in the United States, that he is “the domestic enemy the U.S. Constitution speaks of,” that he is racist and anti-American, and that he “wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.” Fully 20% think he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” while 14% believe “he may be the anti-Christ” and 13% think “he wants the terrorists to win.”

Langer, director of polling at ABC news, points to the poll’s sampling issues before walking point by point from the poll’s “biasing introductory phrase,” through its lack of balance in choices offered respondents and other techniques which are outside the realm of best scientific polling practice.

At no point does this Harris Poll fall to the level of propagandistic accumulations like the anti-health reform stunt by National Center for Policy Analysis/ Salem Radio Network or essentially meaningless lists of unverified names like the one being accumulated on behalf of the Manhattan Declaration. Nor is it flatly dishonest, as the Christian Medical & Dental Associations is when asserting that its poll shows that “95 percent of faith-based physicians say they will be forced to leave medicine without conscience protections.”

Although Harris does go a little over the edge, as Langer explains:

Admittedly it’s a challenge to measure these sorts of sentiments. Unless carefully crafted, with balance and an approach that encourages due consideration and probes for meaning, simply asking the question can turn into little more than the old reporter’s trick of piping quotes. It’s a shopworn use of true/false and agree/disagree questions, one long overdue for retirement.

Harris indeed goes the next step by reporting its results as what its respondents’ “believe” and as opinions they “hold,” as if they themselves came up with these notions, rather than having them one-sidedly set before them on a platter. Call me what you will – and I know it can get nasty out there – but from my perspective, this is not good polling practice.

Another poll would be helpful. Until then, things probably aren’t as bad as they look.

After the fall

Republicans not only lost, public opinion is shifting toward the enacted health care reform [USA TODAY/Gallup Poll] and they must decide what to do, as Newsweek headlines it, “After the Fall.”

Will Republicans follow those who helped lead them into this abyss by, say, raving about the Battle of Midway?

Wiley Drake goes after all 219 who voted for health reform

Wiley Drake, the former Southern Baptist Convention second vice president who used to pray for President Obama to die, is now praying for the death of the 219 House members who voted for health care reform.

John Avlon reports at The Daily Beast:

Orange Country Pastor Wiley Drake fired off an email to his supporters this morning, telling them that all 219 Democrats have been placed on the “imprecatory prayer list.” “We’ll remember in November and pray Psalms 109 while waiting,” he urged, before listing each offending congressman by name in “Satan’s domain in Washington D.C.”

Just for the record, this isn’t a standard Southern Baptist practice. Back in May, Sing Oldham, vice president for convention relations with the SBC Executive Committee, observed:

I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of Southern Baptists reject any call to pray imprecatory prayers of death over any individual.

Or group of elected officials.

Waterloo, not Pearl Harbor

Debated for a year, health reform has in the mind of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission chief somehow become an aircraft carrier-based surprise attack:

Liberals across America are rejoicing today over their ‘historic’ victory. My message to them is, ‘Enjoy it while you can.’ This was a Pyrrhic victory of epic proportions. The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor won a ‘historic’ victory as well. Their celebrations were cut short six months later when most of them were killed at the Battle of Midway.

Richard Land’s curious view of World War II also came up in September, when he misappropriated Holocaust images to assault Obamacare. You may recall that he attracted attention as far away as Jerusalem with that, and was was driven to apologize at the time.

Land has a penchant for the counterfactual, and was joined in that on occasion this week by Baptist Press, which for example wrote:

The House of Representatives barely passed a controversial health-care bill Sunday, deeply disappointing pro-life Americans who hoped a small group of Democrats would block legislation they say will permit federal funding of abortion and likely increase the rate of the procedure.

Yet both Catholic and protestant pro-life Americans were famously divided on the issue, with pro-life/faith leaders applauding the Senate bill as pro-life. Thus some pro-life Americans were disappointed by the 219-212 House approval of health reform. While at the same time, some pro-life Americans celebrated passage.

Land’s radical denialism helped create the circumstances he seeks, with more of the same failed strategy, to undo. Former Bush speech writer David Frum has both commented on the magnitude of the defeat and explained that the legislation is effectively immune to repeal:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

As for the voter outrage about which Land speculates, it isn’t there except perhaps in a radical minority, and isn’t likely to emerge. As Nate Silver accurately observes today, “history suggests that endeavors of this nature (Medicare, Social Security, Romneycare) generally become popular and are appreciated by the large majority of voters once they become law.”

Fundamentally, the voters determined health reform’s fate

Nate Silver digs statistically down to the root of it.

He does explore how complex the decision was. Truly complex.

Even so, pull retiring Democratic members of Congress out of the mix. That done, as the chart at right illustrates, and the best predictor of their Sunday votes was “the percentage of the vote that Barack Obama received in each congressional district in 2008.

The voters decided this one, it seems.

It’s official: States don’t like the GCR report

Opposition to the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force’s progress report has become official. The Georgia Baptist Convention‘s Executive Committee voted to ask the task force to reconsider part of the document.

The head of another state convention said the report broke his heart.

The task force report affirms the Cooperative Program – Southern Baptists’ traditional method of collecting funds. State conventions collect CP funds from churches, keeping part and passing the rest on to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The GCR report also calls for a new category of giving called “Great Commission Giving” that would include CP, plus designated offerings to Southern Baptist, state convention and association causes.

The proposal has already been questioned by a Baptist editor, a pastor and a denominational expert.

David Lee, executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware, said in a Baptist Press article that he is concerned that the new giving category will not enhance financial support.

“What this new proposal suggests is tantamount to the local church saying to members, ‘We would like for you to give to the general fund, but if you had rather designate your tithe for the pastor’s salary or the student ministry or to buy a new bus, that will be OK,’” Lee wrote. “I fear that this new designation has more to do with making some of us feel better about how we already do things than it does about calling us to a higher level of stewardship and missions commitment.”

The Georgia convention Executive Committee asked the task force to reconsider and clarify:

The wide application of the phrase ‘Great Commission Giving’ for monies given through the Cooperative Program as well as to designated causes may cause some Baptists to surmise wrongly that the Cooperative Program is merely a subset of giving instead of the primary means of missions giving for Southern Baptists. A reconsideration of terminology may bring clarity to the GCRTF’s desire to keep the Cooperative Program as the central means of support for Great Commission ministries, while still acknowledging the important role that designated gifts play in mission support.

The Georgia convention’s statement says it wants the task force to “formally encourage and challenge local churches specifically to increase their support and sacrificial giving through the Cooperative Program.”

J. Robert White, the executive director of the Georgia convention, is a member of the task force and talked about the Great Commission Giving when the group gave its report.

White promised Executive Committee members that he would “represent their sentiments as effectively as possible at the group’s next meeting on April 26 in Nashville,” according to the Index. In an earlier interview with the paper, White said that there is a “critical” need for Southern Baptists to recognize the need for Great Commission Giving.

“The time for unity is here. Let’s unite under the theme of ‘Great Commission Giving.’ Let’s do it for our missionaries. Let’s do it for our ministries. Let’s do it for our Jesus Who commanded that we take the Gospel to the nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”

White also said some feared the new designation would lead SBC entities to solicit funds directly from churches, which would violate the SBC Executive Committee’s business and finance plan.

“It is absolutely essential that the boards of trustees of our entities exercise strict control over their entities to see that direct solicitation among our churches does not happen. Such solicitation is a direct threat to the very existence of the Cooperative Program.”

The question is how many churches will decrease their CP giving because of the new terminology, even without solicitation. The church of the only announced candidate for SBC president didn’t need solicitation. Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., has cut its CP giving from 10 percent to 3.5 percent, the Index reported.

The church’s pastor, Bryant Wright is running for president. The Index outlined the church’s giving patterns and noted a guest commentary in which Wright called for “a radical reprioritizing of Cooperative Program funds through our state conventions.”

Wright said state conventions which often use more than 60 percent of CP funds, should instead keep no more than 30 percent.

The task force report already calls for the North American Mission Board to end cooperative agreements with state conventions, a move that some say will kill smaller state conventions. The states would lose more than $50 million if the agreements end.

“One of the key elements missing from this report is what has been the marquee of Southern Baptist success in doing missions — cooperation,” Lee said. “Despite the call for unity, this new strategy will in essence pit the national SBC entities against state conventions and local associations, making us compete for resources.”

Replacing the Cooperative Program with any type of competitive program will bring about an official desurgence.

Aftermath

Regardless of whether health reform passes today, some have in the course of the debate unmasked themselves in ugly ways, and have helped to incite emotional reactions which may have drowned hope for a post-racial society in the old confrontation with hate.