(image credit: attribution unknown)

In honor of Rae. :)

Constance and Christine!

ACLU Senior Counsel Christine Sun and Constance McMillen at the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition's Second Chance Prom. (Image credit:  Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom!'s Facebook Group)

Pedophiles, Gay Men, The Catholic Church and The Church's Spurious Correlation Theory

It's been a bad week at blogging for me. Some health stuff has me kind of shaken up. But it doesn't have me so shaken that I'm not reading the news and keeping up with all the commentary on the Catholic Church and all the spurious theories about gay men being pedophiles. 

Clearly the Church, and especially gay anything have become something of a hot button topic for me. I've got that Irish Catholic side of the family, the great uncle who was a deacon and plus I've got, and have long had, some very dear friends who are gay. Including the happily, but not legally since they live in Florida, 'married' couple who have lived across the street from my mother since 1973. Yeah, Ned and Charles are just so fly-by-night... why should they be allowed to marry? Personally, I'm really thinking I can't say a thing that's negative about their right to be legally married or make health decisions for each other until I've been with my husband as long as they've been together. (I've got another twenty years then... And Charles gave me such good advice right before I got married: "think before you speak". What can I say, the man has known me since I was twelve.) This whole business about gay marriage, and heaven forbid gay adoption, is beyond mind-boggling to me. What is the big deal if gay people want to get married and adopt kids? I think they should have the opportunity to make the same mistakes and enjoy the same perks as all the rest of us.  In fact, I insist they should. But it's definitely the minority view here where I live in Florida, where we are so backwards on some things that it's a miracle that we don't live in some kind of reverse entropic state where time's arrow has been reversed. Today I was at the Juvenile Courthouse and actually heard someone praise Anita Bryant. A concept so intellectually retro that just wrapping my head around it, I'm probably getting younger while writing this post.

The Teflon Pope in Malta reassuring people.

(Image credit: Associated Press)

So earlier this week, the Teflon Pope assured us that he will take action on the sex abuse scandals rocking the Church. It's been more than a month since he spoke about the scandal that started making big waves in Ireland. He's been pretty silent about Germany, where his reputation is somewhat damaged. Then there's Brazil. Or Norway. Or Malta. Or India, a great outpost to send your pedophile priest who's under extradition. And so very many reminders of Boston. The damn Boston Globe won't shut up on the subject. The New York Times and Washington Post are also part of the axis of... well, you get it. 

Anyway, it's been a month since he last spoke about the issue and so I'm thinking Pope Benny is starting to hear that parishioners are seriously bothered. Attendance is dropping like a rock in the Catholic Church in recent times, as it is. Which also means tithing is down. Which might be even worse now, because people don't want to give money to an organization that was tacitly condoning (by not defrocking, not turning over to police pedophiles, who were then reassigned so they could molest boys and girls elsewhere). What can we say? Money talks. It talks much louder than people shouting that they or their children were molested, raped and traumatized. And so now the Teflon Pope is saying he is just so very contrite and that the Church will address these many, many (it might be better to borrow from mathematics and use a many factorial here: many!) wrongs. Friends on facebook have likened this to believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. (I love my friends...)

But in the meantime, among the faithful, or should I say the hateful, there are all these ugly rumors that swirl. That gays are pedophiles, that it isn't a Church problem, it's a gay problem. Of course it is! Gays are responsible for all the earthquakes going on (oh, wait a minute... that was promiscuous women... sorry) Heck, there's even a repellant organization called the American Family Association with a Mr. Bryan Fischer who thinks that gays can't be trusted to be on the Supreme Court because they are so very wrong, against the laws of nature and of man. (I suppose pointing out that homosexuality exists in nature and that it used to be illegal for people of different races to marry in some states and territories would be pointless...) A few of my obviously far too liberal friends made observations about Mr. Fisher's position, especially Irma who pointed out that if a gay Supreme Court justice was likely to be biased in favor of gay rights, then a heterosexual one was equally likely to be biased in favor of heterosexuals and therefore to be potentially discriminatory! (I'm sure that form of discrimination is just what Mr. Fischer had in mind, though...)

So about this business of pedophiles and gays, Dr. John Cantor has a great op-ed piece addressing the issue on CNN.com. It's a concise and trenchant analysis of the relevant medical literature which just fails to show any correlation between being gay and being a pedophile. In fact, you could easily turn his statistics on end a bit, and can see that the preponderance of pedophiles (about 70 - 80%) are heterosexual. There's a lot of hard evidence that pedophilia and hebephilia are neurodevelopment perturbations, which is a very elegant way of saying that it's a subset of brain development that is off in the tail section of the bell curve, or not average. Pedophiles and hebephiles appear to have less "white matter" in the brain. Dr. Cantor published an article in Neuropsychology on the topic in 2004, and another in the Journal of Psychiatry Research in 2008 (J Psychiatr Res. 2008 Feb; 42(3):167-83. Epub 2007 Nov 26.). Dr. Cantor's findings have been further supported by independent findings of neurodevelopmental structural differences in the brain  in Germany, published in 2007 (Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007 Jun; 64(6):737-46.). The topic of pedophilia and brain development is thus a very loaded one. Because basically, if your brain is wired that way, you're screwed. There is no cure and, therefore, the effort expended on treating pedophiles may be completely misdirected. For instance, slapping them on the wrist and saying "bad priest" and sending them to India really isn't going to work. Taking away their access to children might seem an obvious step, but you know, nothing with the Catholic Church has ever been obvious. (Look at telling people in HIV-ridden Africa that they shouldn't use condoms, for instance...)

Anyway, since I had an argument with a long time friend the other day about homosexuality and brain differences (like they don't believe that the brain was different first, they think it became different because the people chose to be gay- just don't even get me started...) I went back and looked at some of the more recent results of brain scans of heterosexual men and women versus self-reporting homosexual men and women. Those ever liberal Swedes published a really interesting study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June 2008 (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jul 8; 105(27): 9403-8. Epub 2008 Jun 16 and of course y'all know how prestigious the National Academy of Sciences is, right?). Take a look at their summarized brain symmetry images. Compare homosexual men and heterosexual women, and homosexual women and heterosexual men. 

Covariations with the respective amygdala seed region in hetero- and homosexual subjects. The Sokoloff scale indicates T values. Clusters detected at T = 3.0 are superimposed on the standard MR image of the brain. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (copyright 2008).)

Based on the foregoing, I have definite thoughts on these results. Since they suggest neurodevelopmental hard-wiring of same-sex attraction, it would mean that this is one of those things you just can't 'cure' and that maybe it wasn't even a choice. And if we can't cure it, we should just acknowledge it and like we do with people of different races or religions or such, give people with these different brains rights if they aren't harming people because of those differences (see hard-wired differences detailed above, in contrast). Because if I'm HoM or HoW how would that difference in my brain count as being any different from my not being blue-eyed if the world was supposed to be mostly blue-eyed? Can't fix me if I don't have blue eyes, right? You can put me in contacts just like you can try to force a person who's gay into a straight lifestyle. But my eyes will still be hazel and the other guy will still be gay. And I don't think I should be told I can't marry or adopt children or keep my job or feel safe in my community just because I have hazel eyes. I really just don't. Do you?

On being being prickly, Irish, worthy of abuse, and Team Constance

Last week, Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor had a great column in the Washington Post. It was so great, so complete, and so pointed that I really didn't think I could blog about it at all. It felt like it would be superfluous or diminishing. I'm sure just about everyone who's reading this blog remembers 1992, when Sinéad O'Connor tore up a photo of JPII on Saturday Night Live while singing, a capella in her rich Irish mezzo, Bob Marley's War. "Fight the real enemy", she said as she shredded the photo. So much of her column stayed with me. I emailed the address she provided. I told her she was great and I was proud to be an O'Leary and Irish, along with her. 

Sinéad O'Connor, 1992, NBC (Saturday Night Live)

In her column, she asked, whether "Irish Catholics, because we daren't say 'we deserve better,' should be treated as though we deserve less" in response to the Teflon Pope's wholly inadequate apology for the decades long events that are still being revealed in Ireland. The events that despite the growing number of reports in places like Norway, the US (just google it, okay- there are way too many to choose from and I don't want anyone to feel singled or left out), Germany and even probably in India (nothing like knowing how to convert people, right?), the Teflon Pope seemed to suggest were just an Irish problem. Well, this week, a lot of people seemed to deserve so much better than what they got.

As one site, Get Religion, claims, the press just doesn't get religion... Of course, I suppose there have been all manner of defenses of the Catholic Church, which definitely in my mind, still isn't quite getting what it deserves. Defenses or should I say... offenses, when trying to defend the indefensible? For instance, the Bishop of Tenerife is really just outstanding in his claim that some of the adolescents were consenting and therefore it was okay for supposedly sworn to celibacy priests to have molested them. Though, in fairness, the Vatican went out of its way to distance itself from the Brazilian Cardinal Scherer, who spoke about exorcism rather than incarceration as the solution the other day. And they also tried to do the same (though it was a bit harder to do that with their own elected defender who spoke in an unprecedented fashion right before the Teflon Pope on Easter Sunday Mass), with Father Cantalamesso, who likened the persecution of Jews to the present "persecution" of the Church over the fact that they've sheltered pedophiles for decades if not centuries. (Of course, the Brazilian Catholic Church holds an especially cherished place in my thoughts because of their opposition to the abortion obtained by the 9 year old who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Did I mention they ex-communicated the mother, the child, and the doctors that saved the 9 year old child from delivering twins? They didn't, as I understand it, ex-communicate the stepfather. I have a lot of wonderful Brazilian friends but somehow I just don't have friendly feelings for the Catholic Church there, which has the largest number of Catholics of any country in the world. Yeah, it's an old story from last year, but still, talk about not getting what you deserve, for anyone involved.) 

Yesterday, as Maureen Dowd so 'adversarially' pointed out, "How can we maintain... faith when our leaders are unworthy of it?" How perfectly she captures not just the Church but even politics at this juncture, or even... public high schools in Mississippi and Massachusetts where there are further examples still of people not getting what they deserved. Sometimes I find Maureen a bit... edgy. I've always enjoyed her fire and ire, though sometimes I think she gets abrasive and deters some of the choir. And I think she knows that about herself. Because she got her brother Kevin, who's evidently really devout, to give her comments on the situation with the Catholic Church, Ireland, and the Teflon Pope. His comments, “In pedophilia, the church has unleashed upon itself a plague that threatens its very future, and yet it remains in a curious state of denial," are rather daunting when you consider that she describes him as truly one of the faithful. 

But I find what Maureen Dowd says to be true, across the board this week. "Our leaders are unworthy." Whether we're talking about Phoebe Prince (latest), whose face and fate just linger in my mind. She was the child who it seems didn't dare say she deserved better and whose school faculty, administration and fellow students didn't seem to think she deserved better either.

Phoebe Prince, CBS News

Or Constance McMillen, on whose behalf, along with so many other teens and adults who are persecuted for their sexual orientation, I just signed an ACLU petition to my legislators. (I'm sure those of you who have kept up know about how Constance was tricked into attending a decoy prom so that she definitely wouldn't attend the real prom arranged privately by other students and their parents from her school. They even made a Facebook page called "Quit Yer Crying Constance" and posted photos of themselves at the real prom, and some of the students were all bent out of shape when their public Facebook photos were picked up and maligned all over the blogosphere. Like so many others who are Team Constance, I fanned the mean page so that I could post to say I love Constance and I'm not afraid of a girl in a tuxedo.)

Constance McMillen

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

The bad press for the Catholic Church and the Teflon Pope just spins on and on. While South Hadley High and Itawamba Agricultural High School certainly aren't in the same league as an organization covering for pedophiles, I'm not left feeling appreciably better about whoever it is that's running things. It certainly doesn't seem like a higher power should be letting all these many, many things, both great and 'small', go so very wrong. 


I guess in my rather tenuous belief system, if I have faith in anything it's that cruelty in any form is just plain wrong. 

Gays Attending Proms as a Civil Right

Constance McMillen you're a Goddess!!!

(source: Associated Press Staff Photographer)

I've been busy with a sick child but, of course, my mind still churns away. And what have I been thinking about? I've been thinking about my tax dollars and public schools...

Since public school is partly funded with my tax payer dollars, all I can say is:

Dance with whomever the F@#$ you please!!!!

Prom is one of those 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness' deals. Especially on the tax payer dime.

I simply do not understand school districts and regions who would rather punish the majority than permit the minority to dance with whatever partner they're crushing on. (Additional article)

Oh wait a minute... by punishing the majority you can foster hate for the minority. Yeah, now I get it. Right... let's make everyone think they can't have Prom because of the gay girl. Yeah. For sure.

Message to the establishment:

Prom night is stupid and I skipped it and went out somewhere else with friends as a 'sticking it to the man' statement about the establishment. And newsflash! in high school, with one surprise exception, I already knew who was gay and who was straight in 1976. And I didn't give a damn about who they were dancing with, making out with, or any of that. But actually, knowing that the principal of my school broke up the marriage between teachers Mr. And Mrs. B. and got Mrs. B. pregnant was kind of a way worse example of morals than knowing Dave W. liked boys. Dave W. was so very sweet and talented. And he still is. 

Obviously, I will be joining Personal Failure in Hell. I'm so very proud. At least I know I'll be in good company, have stimulating conversation and read good books.

And Constance, if you ever read this, you're the BOMB for sticking up for what you believe in at an age when so many kids couldn't tell you what a civil right was if their life depended on it...