Our oldest is in the school play, and the teachers running the practices are driving me crazy with their inability to manage their practice times with any kind of efficiency or consideration for the parents that have to get students to and from these practices. Short version is that every night this week, Katey has been kept at least 25 minutes late for one of these three-hour events (and they start at 5:45 PM), and last night she was 40 minutes over-due. I'm not mad at her, but I am frustrated at the "directors" inability to manage the practice schedule.
So, background aside, I'm sitting in the car for a full 50 minutes waiting for the child. Not much else to do but listen to the radio, right? I'm dialing through the satellite channels and stop at the "liberal left" station to see what the "majority" has to say about the state of the world.
The program is the Mike Malloy Show, who is a professed liberal and (judging by his website and program intro) an advocate of tolerant, open-minded acceptance of all voices and lifestyles in the American political arena. However, I didn't have this show on for more than a few minutes when the level of hatred and the spiteful, venomous nature of what the man was saying became almost too much to listen to.
Many is the time when, in the past, I have criticized such conservative radio personalities as Hannity or Limbaugh (especially Limbaugh) for taking their opinions of the "left" to extremes and reducing their position as pundits as a result. Today, there are literally hundreds of public voices criticizing conservative radio hosts as "angry, obstructionist, racist, sexist supporters of a white male-dominated status quo" political system... but none that I have heard are as venomously hateful towards specific individuals or established institutions, such as Hannity and the Catholic Church, as Malloy.
The details of what he said are too nauseating to repeat here with any enthusiasm, but suffice to say that he made the public assumption that the root of Hannity's political opinion rests with his abuse at the hands of Catholic priests as a young child. This "measurable and specific" topic of discussion then led (seemingly... he is hard to follow at times) to a rant about the Roman Catholic Church as the root of all evil, and that it should be violently disbanded and every priest punished for the millions of children abused at their hands. He went on for some time about the "truth" of the Church finally coming out in the accusations of the millions of people who were molested and abused by priests over the years, and that this truth was undeniable and the final evidence of the evil inherent in mainstream Christian religious practice.
If we were to take Malloy at his word (a disturbing thought, believe me), then that must mean that education should be taken out of the hands of "private" institutions, such as the Church, and placed exclusively in the hands of secular government-funded structures within the existing American education system. Seems logical, right?
In 2004, the Secretary of Education initiated a study of the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse in the US education system. The results were staggering, and actually prompted one official to state that the problem of sexual abuse in the public school system was 100 times as bad as anything the Catholic Church has been accused of in the last 25 years.
18% of males and 82% of females will be the victims of sexual harassment by a school district employee during their high school career, and a full 14% will have intercourse with a teacher during that time. This is a national average here... not some isolated, problem school district with no over-sight or regulation. In a report published in 2000, it was found that 290,000 students were targeted for abuse by teachers and staff between 1991 and 2000 ALONE. That is more than TWICE as many of ALL the complaints filed against the Catholic Church in the US since 1950 (fully 38% of which were found to be groundless or determined by investigating authorities as false claims).
Since 1950, more than 12,000 reports of abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy were made, and 7,700 of these were investigated as crimes, with a total of 4% of all US Catholic priests at the time falling under these investigations. That's roughly 4,400 priests who allegedly committed a crime over the period of nearly 60 years resulting in the 12,000+ complaints and 7,700 investigations by police or public authorities. Terrible crimes, and the guilty should be brought to justice swiftly, as dictated by our legal system. I do not make light of that at all.
I'm simply amazed that someone like Malloy can make the blanket, ignorant accusations against the Church in general, when the very organs of the government they are advocating to educate our children are found to have as much as 18% of their teachers and staff proven to harass and abuse children and teens at the taxpayer's expense!!! I mean, honestly... 14% of ALL girls in this country face the prospect of having intercourse with a teacher by the time they get out of PUBLIC SCHOOL, and the Catholic Church has a "sexual abuse scandal" that has utterly captivated the media of this nation? 8% of all male children face the prospect of sexual abuse at the hands of teachers/coaches/school staff (compared to less than 4% in Catholic schools over the last 50 years)... and priests are labelled as the threats to boyhood innocence in this country?
The hypocrisy and ignorance of the "liberal" portion of this nation staggers the imagination. This is the path to "Hope and Change" in this country, and THIS is the direction that our President is promoting as the best for everyone: more government control and regulation to ensure the fair and equitable distribution of benefits to all.
Nauseating.
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