Thing One, Thing Two with Hillary Clinton

A tripwire question for Democrats and Republicans alike

by Gaius Publius

A brief conjunction of statements from 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is (a) rumored to want to run again, and (b) representative of what most "centrist" Democrats think, even if she doesn't re-emerge as a candidate.

Thing One: Nations, Close Your Borders

Clinton seems to want to bow to the right, once again, on immigration, by urging European nations to close their borders to refugees and immigrants:

Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists

...In an interview with the Guardian, the former Democratic presidential candidate praised the generosity shown by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, but suggested immigration was inflaming voters and contributed to the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU.

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

Nothing says #Resistance like confirming the right-wing world view.

Thing Two: But Open Your Hearts to Hope and Values

Yet she has love in her soul for those she would have others reject:

May we all open our hearts and reach across tables today. May we all find hopes and values in common. May there be pie. Happy Thanksgiving.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 22, 2018

One way to tell a "centrist" Democrat, among the many thousand other ways, will be on immigration. Those who signal to frightened America that they "get it" about the dark-skinned foreign other don't deserve your vote, whatever else they might say about "hope" and "values."

Bonus Thing: Using Immigrant Children to "Send a Message"

In 2014, President Obama said this about the Honduran immigration crisis during which thousands of unaccompanied minors crossed the border into the U.S. (quoted here):

“Our message absolutely is don’t send your children unaccompanied, on trains or through a bunch of smugglers,” President Obama said in a June 2014 interview with ABC News.... “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back."

During the 2016 Democratic primary debates, Sanders and Clinton clashed over that policy, with Clinton defending it and Sanders opposed. About that disagreement, PolitiFact said this:

Sanders said that when undocumented children were streaming across the border, Clinton said, send them back.

That is a bit of an oversimplification. Clinton did not say they should be sent back no matter what. She set the condition that the government should first identify responsible adults to care for them. However, she expressed a preference that as many as possible be sent back. That message was part of the administration’s policy to discourage more young people from attempting the trip.

We rate this statement Mostly True.

Time, in its coverage of that debate, added:

Clinton defended the [Obama administration] policy, arguing it was necessary to send a message to discourage other families from sending their children on a dangerous journey. She highlighted her opposition to deportation raids and her calls to end family detention.

Normally, "sending a message" is associated with Trump immigration policies, but I guess not always.

The clash over immigration policy in general runs not only deep in the country, but deeper in the Democratic Party than most will acknowledge. Watch for signals about "borders" and "security" as candidates position themselves for a place in your hearts and a 2020 presidential run.

GP
    

Economic Inequality Is Expensive… And Destructive

Lately you've been hearing a few political leaders, particularly Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Brian Schatz and Bernie Sanders in the Senate and some of the Progressive Caucus members in the House, talking about steeply rising income inequality. They're talking about the kind of inequality that's part of vicious cycle that inevitably leads to oligarchy, plutocracy or outright fascism, in which a few families, through an accumulation of wealth and power, can dictate the laws and even the societal norms and control the mechanisms of enforcement to such an extent that they can virtually enslave an entire passive population.

It can't happen here? The manifestations are already undeniable. The greed and rapacity of the .01% has become so overbearing and their refusal to pay their fair share of taxes so debilitating that a UNICEF report I ran across this morning, a report that would have scandalized an empowered middle class anytime between the time Harry Truman was president until the beginning of the new normal under Ronald Reagan. The report goes a lot deeper than the shocking chart at top of the page which ranks 29 developed countries according to the overall well-being of their children. The 5 countries ranked at the very bottom include 4 of the poorest-- Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Greece-- plus the U.S., which is both one of the richest and one with the least economic equality. Those 5 countries, along with Italy, Portugal and Spain, have child poverty rates higher than 15%. The only countries that have allowed the child poverty gap to widen to more than 30%. are Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and, of course, the United States.

Some of the manifestations of America's rush to the bottom:

• The only developed countries with infant mortality rates higher than 6 per 1,000 births are Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and the United States.

• Only in Greece, Hungary, Portugal and the United States does the low birthweight rate exceed 8%.

• Only Canada, Greece and the United States have childhood obesity levels higher than 20%. The United States had the highest proportion of children overweight at both the beginning and end of the decade, reaching almost 30% by 2009/2010.

• Romania, the UK and the United States have the highest rates of teenage births (above 29 per 1,000).

• Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the United States are the only countries in which the homicide rate rises above 4 per 100,000. Almost all other countries fall into the range of 0 to 2.5 per 100,000.

The video above is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on CBS' This Morning on Thursday. At the 4.30 mark he was asked what he thinks about income inequality. Keep in mind he has done more than almost anyone else in the country to accelerate economic inequality, paying his bankers an average of close to $400,000 annually-- and taking annual compensation for himself of tens of millions of dollars. After a couple of seconds of stutters and stammers he said "Income inequality is a very destabilizing thing in the country. In other words, it's responsible for the divisions in the country. The divisions could get wider. If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems. If you can't deal with problems you can't drive growth and you can't drive the success of the country. It's a very big issue and something that has to be dealt with. One of the ways of dealing with it is to make the pie grow and people are better at making the pie grow but I have to say too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people… If you grow the pie but too few people enjoy the benefits of it in the fruit, then you'll have an unstable society."

About 2 weeks earlier CBS' Money Watch sat down to interview economist Thomas Piketty about the implications of his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. They began, "Piketty's thesis: that the rate of return on capital, such as real estate, dividends and other financial assets, is racing away from the rate of growth required to maintain a healthy economy. If that trend continues for an extended period of time-- if wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of a few-- then inequality is likely to get worse… [I]nequality is evident in what are by now a host of familiar symptoms. Stagnant pay, except among the super-rich. Soaring health care and education costs. The diminished expectations commonly found in young, especially those lacking college degrees, and old alike, as retirement becomes something to endure rather than to enjoy. And at the bottom of the income distribution, a road to nowhere as the avenues of upward mobility that once led to the American Dream are closed off. In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor has today reached 'spectacular' heights, Piketty says in an interview, rising to levels not seen in a hundred years. And America, a self-described classless society, has been revealed as far more socioeconomically stratified than 'old Europe,' notwithstanding its ancient history of inherited wealth."

Piketty: "The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s. And largely these fiscal institutions were invented in America because the U.S. didn't want to become as unequal as the patrimonial societies of 19th century Europe. There was this strong feeling of American identity, of a country where everyone gets a chance, and you don't want to perpetuate extreme wealth concentration across generations. You want people to be able to become rich, of course. But you also don't want the wealth to perpetuate itself over time and across generations without [constraint]. This is why progressive taxation was first invented in the United States… The share of total primary income going to the top 10 percent was about 30-35 percent of total income until the 1970s. That started to increase a lot in the 1980s and is now around 50 percent."

MW: But are you suggesting that there is something inherent in capitalism that fosters inequality?

TP: It's really a matter of the choices that are available to us as a society. Capitalism and market forces are very powerful in producing wealth and innovation. But we need to ensure that these forces act in the common interest. We want capitalism and market forces to be the slave of democracy rather than the opposite.

Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals. We need to make sure that we use these forces in a way that's consistent with our common interests and, in particular, the interests of disadvantaged groups. Ultimately, that's a matter of political choices and political institutions.

MW: Speaking of the choices we make as a nation, you write that a progressive tax on capital-- property, stock holdings and corporate profits, for instance-- is a better way of reducing inequality than a progressive tax on income. How so?

TP: In the past, there have been many debates between people who want only a wealth tax and no income tax and some people who want only an income tax and no wealth tax. And in fact, this debate goes beyond left and right. You have some people on the right who hate income taxes and who just have a tax on the stock of wealth, and some people on the left who feel the same. It's been a very hot debate forever. What I try to emphasize in the book is a more balanced view in the sense that both a tax on the income flow and a tax on the wealth stock have merit. We need both.

In particular, a progressive income tax is a better way to try to control the rise of managerial compensation at the very, very top. That's useful particularly in the U.S.

Now, in the future, taxation of wealth is going to become more and more important because wealth is likely to become more and more important. So the quantity of wealth that you accumulate relative to one year of national income or one year of GDP tends to rise in countries with a slowing growth rate or slowing population growth.

In the U.S., population growth has been a key driver of the overall growth of the country. Population in the U.S. used to be 3 million at the time of independence, and it's now 300 million. Is the rate of population growth going to be the same in the future-- is America's population going to be 900 million a century from now? Nobody knows. It could be that the rate of growth will continue. But if it slows down, this will have important implications for the relative importance of wealth and annual income.

I can't make predictions about the immigration patterns in the U.S., but it is likely that at some point population growth will slow down, as it did in Europe and Japan. Immigration can counter this for a long time. But if it happens that you have this growth slowdown, then the quantity of wealth accumulated in the past relative to one year of national income or GDP will tend to rise.

The other reason it's important is because our system of property taxation both in the U.S. and in Europe comes directly from the early 19th century. Property taxes in the U.S. aren't progressive-- it's proportional. Also, it doesn't take into account financial assets or liabilities. It's only based on the value of your real estate. This is because in the early 19th century, most wealth was based on real estate and land. Few people had financial assets and liabilities.

But this isn't appropriate for the the 21st century. For instance, you now have people whose home value is below their mortgage, which means they have a negative net wealth. Yet they keep paying the same property tax as people with no mortgage and those who have a very high net wealth. So this system isn't working well.

MW: You also endorse the idea of a global tax on capital as a way of reducing inequality, while at the same time conceding that such a remedy is "no doubt a Utopian ideal." Isn't it unrealistic to think that countries around the world will use tax policy specifically to combat inequality?

TP: If we're talking about a global tax administered by a global government, then it's not realistic. But there's a lot that can be done at the national level. Particularly in the U.S., you can have a more progressive income tax and a more progressive wealth tax. It's not like everybody is going to go to Mexico or Canada.

The U.S. is sufficiently large that you can go a long way toward the kind of progressive wealth tax that I describe in the book without any problem. The U.S. represents one-quarter of world GDP, so there's a lot you can do when you're that big. The U.S. doesn't have to ask permission of the United Nations or the European Union to change it's tax system.

The reason it's difficult to change the U.S. tax system lies elsewhere. The problem isn't international competition or whatever. It has more to do with the U.S. political system. In particular, property taxes are local, not federal, so that makes it difficult. But this is more a problem of internal political organization.

In fact, it was exactly the same problem with the income tax a century ago, which is that the U.S. Constitution made it impossible for the federal government to have an income tax. Then the Constitution was changed and the income tax was adopted. So the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprises. I am reasonably optimistic about the future. Democratic institutions can respond to threats, as they have in the past.

…MW: Beyond a global capital tax, what policies do you favor for reducing inequality in the U.S.?

TP: Better access to education-- that's really the key. In the book, I talk about access to top U.S. universities, and I give some numbers on the average income of the parents of Harvard undergraduates. Right now, this corresponds with the average income of the top 1 percent of the U.S. distribution.

This is quite extreme when you think about it. It's really hard to believe that, just on the basis of merit, it should be this way.

Of course, no country has found the ideal system when it comes to combining efficiency and equal opportunity in its education and university system. Speaking as a Frenchman and a European, I'm certainly not pretending that the university system in France is working well, because in fact it's not efficient and not fair. I'm not trying to say it's easy to solve the problem. The point is that it's a major challenge for every country to have better access and more equal access to skills and higher education.

More transparency also would be useful. One problem with the admission system in a number of universities is that there's no transparency-- we don't know the role that merit exams play, versus parental [influence]-- it's pretty opaque.

…MW: What role do you see for government in reducing inequality in the U.S.?

TP: The most obvious ways government can help by is by providing better access to education, more progressive taxation of income and wealth, and a higher minimum wage… For a long time, America defined itself as a counter-model to the sort of patrimonial societies associated with "old Europe." And it's a bit paradoxical that the U.S. is now reaching the kind of inequality that we saw in pre-World War I Europe. The structure of that inequality is different-- today's inequality in the U.S. relies more on very high managerial compensation and less on high levels of inherited wealth. But it could be that in the future you're going to combine both.

And, as if on cue, this weekend saw the floating of rumors, again, that Mister 47% could be a viable presidential candidate for the Party of Greed and Selfishness. Both Joe Scarborough and Brian Schweitzer have said so out loud; many other conservatives will only say it when there are no microphones around.

Maine's Tea Party Governor Paul LePage Wants To Abolish Child Labor Laws

Politics isn't something polite people people discuss at dinner, especially not with strangers. Not since high school when the class year book referred to me as gallant, has anyone accused me of being polite. The first day of my Galapagos cruise a few weeks ago, we hadn't even boarded the ship yet when I ferreted out that one of my fellow passengers was not just a Republican from Chicago, but a Republican from Chicago enamored of Rahm Emanuel! I despaired that everyone on the ship was going to be a Republican. But then I met Sheron and Stephanie, a sparkling and delightful mother/daughter team from northeastern Ohio. Sheron never misses a Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes show. We had every breakfast, lunch and dinner together for the entire cruise.

One day Sheron told me her 92 year old father told her the only thing that never changed about the Republicans in his lifetime is that they are still trying to undo all the accomplishments of the "Old Man." No, not God, FDR. Just this year alone, we watched the Republicans cut the food stamps program to shreds, refuse to extend unemployment insurance, attempt to deprive working families of health insurance 47 times, try to lure Democrats into "compromises" to reduce Social Security benefits and to go along with their mania about cutting back on Medicare, while voting to abolish environmental and Wall Street regulations that protect ordinary Americans from greed-obsessed predators. Sharen's father was correct. The GOP has nothing to offer but destructiveness and an agenda of fluffing the wealthy and super-wealthy.

The latest manifestation came yesterday, not in Texas, Mississippi, Utah or South Carolina but at the 73rd annual Maine Agricultural Trades Show. There, one of the country's most ignorant and backward GOP governors, Paul LePage, told attendees that he thinks 12 year old children should be working-- no not doing their school homework… doing the work his rich donors would like to pay them to do for less than adults would take to work. LIke most Republicans, LePage would like to repeal a piece of New Deal legislation known as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (which established the minimum wage, guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime and prohibits most employment of minors. This law was the result of progressive activism going back to the beginning of the 1900s but it took the Republican economic excesses of the 1920s and the inevitable Great Depression that followed-- when desperate adults were willing to work for the unfair wages employers offered children-- that Congress finally passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. Finally sick to their stomachs at the Republicans' crusade against working families, the voters defeated even more Republicans in 1936, leaving them with only 88 seats in the House and 16 in the Senate. That year FDR was reelected against Alf Landon, who ran on a ticket to repeal Social Security. Roosevelt won every state but two and Landon managed to win only 36% of the national vote. The law excludes agriculture and to this day as many as half a million children pick almost a quarter of the food currently produced in the U.S.

Maine's own child labor laws, going back to 1847, have always been aimed at keeping children in school. Minors under the age of 16 may not be employed in the following occupations:

1. Any manufacturing occupation;
2. Any mining occupation;
3. Processing occupations (such as filleting fish, dressing poultry, cracking nuts, or laundering by commercial laundries and dry cleaners, etc.) when performed in a processing industry such as a plant;
4. Motor vehicle driving and outside helper on a motor vehicle;
5. Operation or tending of hoisting apparatus or of any power-driven machinery other than nonhazardous office machines or machines in certain retail, food service, and gasoline service establishments;
6. Construction occupations involving:
a. Maintenance and repair of public highways;
b. All roofing occupations;
c. All trenching and excavation operations;
7. (Federal law prohibits minors under 16 from doing any construction work.)
All work in boiler or engine rooms;
8. Outside window washing that involves working from window sills, and all work involving the use of ladders, scaffolds or their substitutes;
9. Cooking (except where visible to the public) and baking;
10. Occupations which involve operating, setting up, adjusting, cleaning, oiling, or repairing power-driven food slicers and grinders, food choppers and cutters, and bakery-type mixers;
11. All work in freezers and meat coolers;
12. Occupations involving the use of power-driven mowers or cutters, including the use of chain saws;
13. All warehousing occupations, including the loading and unloading of trucks and use of conveyors;
14. All welding, brazing, or soldering occupations;
15. Occupations involving the use of toxic chemicals and paints;
16. Selling door-to-door (except when the minor is selling candy or merchandise as a fund-raiser for school or for an organization to which the minor belongs, such as Girl Scouts of America) or work in a traveling youth crew;
17. All occupations on amusement rides, including ticket collection or sales;
18. Any placement at the scene of a fire, explosion or other emergency response situation. (See Section D. Junior Firefighters); and
19. All occupations that are expressly prohibited for 16-and 17-year olds.

Conservatives and reactionaries like LePage have never been happy with the government intervening to prevent exploitation by "the makers." In his speech he said Maine is failing to use one of its most valuable resources-- it's youth.

“We don’t allow children to work until they’re 16, but two years later, when they’re 18, they can go to war and fight for us,” LePage said. “That’s causing damage to our economy. I started working far earlier than that, and it didn’t hurt me at all. There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store sorting bottles at 12 years old.”

LePage has said previously he started working when he was 11. Maine law requires students who want to work before they reach the age of 16 to get a work permit from their school superintendent and meet other requirements.

LePage also told show attendees he believes Maine can strike a better balance between conserving its natural resources and developing its economy and that doing so would bring prosperity.

“You’re the folks we want to bring prosperity to,” he told several hundred people at a luncheon at the show, held at the Augusta Civic Center. “If the revenues go up, I can go golfing. If not, I’m going to have to continue working 80 hours a week.”

LePage didn't mention what every conservative harbors in his heart or whatever they have that substitutes for a soul-- the reinstatement of slavery… which would allow "the makers" to play even more golf. Meanwhile, today, on the 50th anniversary of the War Against Poverty, the Republican Party has been amping up its war against the poor. Rubio, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, who has consistently insisted America replace the safety net with more tax breaks for the rich, are making speeches about how to "fight" poverty. This was President Obama's statement this morning:

As Americans, we believe that everyone who works hard deserves a chance at opportunity, and that all our citizens deserve some basic measure of security. And so, 50 years ago, President Johnson declared a War on Poverty to help each and every American fulfill his or her basic hopes. We created new avenues of opportunity through jobs and education, expanded access to health care for seniors, the poor, and Americans with disabilities, and helped working families make ends meet. Without Social Security, nearly half of seniors would be living in poverty.  Today, fewer than one in seven do. Before Medicare, only half of seniors had some form of health insurance. Today, virtually all do. And because we expanded pro-work and pro-family programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, a recent study found that the poverty rate has fallen by nearly 40% since the 1960s, and kept millions from falling into poverty during the Great Recession.

These endeavors didn’t just make us a better country. They reaffirmed that we are a great country. They lived up to our best hopes as a people who value the dignity and potential of every human being. But as every American knows, our work is far from over. In the richest nation on Earth, far too many children are still born into poverty, far too few have a fair shot to escape it, and Americans of all races and backgrounds experience wages and incomes that aren’t rising, making it harder to share in the opportunities a growing economy provides. That does not mean, as some suggest, abandoning the War on Poverty. In fact, if we hadn’t declared “unconditional war on poverty in America,” millions more Americans would be living in poverty today. Instead, it means we must redouble our efforts to make sure our economy works for every working American. It means helping our businesses create new jobs with stronger wages and benefits, expanding access to education and health care, rebuilding those communities on the outskirts of hope, and constructing new ladders of opportunity for our people to climb.

We are a country that keeps the promises we’ve made.  And in a 21st century economy, we will make sure that as America grows stronger, this recovery leaves no one behind. Because for all that has changed in the 50 years since President Johnson dedicated us to this economic and moral mission, one constant of our character has not: we are one nation and one people, and we rise or fall together.

This morning, Rep. Chellie Pingree, Maine's progressive leader, blasted Republicans in general without singling out LePage or his latest dysfunctional crusade.

Because of heartless Republican obstruction, 3,300 jobless Mainers now have to choose between putting food on the table or heating their homes in this bitter cold.

This should never be a choice anyone has to make… Take a look at this tragic fact: since the expiration of emergency benefits at the end of December, 4 out of every 5 unemployed Mainers have been left out in the cold without benefits. This number ties New Hampshire for the highest in the Northeast and is well above the national average for the number of unemployed not getting benefits.

Not only that, the Maine economy loses $1 million each week that unemployment benefits remain expired. That's $1 million not being pumped in the local economy to help small businesses grow or struggling families make ends meet.

Just Lock Up All The Kids…

by Suzanne Turner

Consider this:

• The U.S. has more children in custody than any other developed country.

• The number of juveniles incarcerated as adults has increased by more than half over the last decade.

Two years ago then-12-year-old Cristian Fernandez was charged as an adult in the death of his younger brother, David Galarraga. He faced a mandatory sentence of of life-without-parole. On Friday, Cristian accepted a plea bargain that allowed him to serve six years in a juvenile facility.

But not all children are so lucky. In past because Cristian’s prosecutor was the some-would-say-infamous Angela Core (who was also the prosecutor in the Trayvon Martin case) Cristian’s case received an avalanche of international publicity. He also had a top-shelf pro bono legal team-- estimated at over three million dollars worth of pro bono legal support.

But what happens to kids who don’t have an internationally respected legal team behind them?

The pre-high-priced lawyer early days of Cristian’s case might provide some clues:

How about not being told what you’re charged with, kept alone in an adult facility for nearly a month, then spending some time alone with a very nice lady who feeds you a good meal and gets you to tell her all about it? No lawyer present, no adult present, just you and the lady? Oh, and video of this “confession” gets to live on the Internet forever, even after a judge rules it inadmissable?

Yep, here it is:



How about finding out the mother didn’t bother to take her youngest son to the hospital for nearly eight hours after the alleged incident? Or how about state prosecutor Angela Corey (aka Florida’s Medea mother/monster), claiming life in prison is not what she meant at all, AT ALL, but that she couldn’t get what she needed in the juvenile system. Except, ack, everything she needed was in the juvenile system.

Okay, there has been a ray of hope. Three recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have brought the U.S. from the dark ages to … hmmmm … the early 16th century. In Miller v. Alabama, Sullivan v. Florida and Graham v. Florida, SCOTUS has decided against the death penalty for juveniles, has limited certain life without parole sentences and has had something (somewhat unclear) to say about life sentences for kids in general. So, we’re not cutting of kids’ hands any more, or even stoning them to death. But… what are we doing?

And this all begs a much larger and less newsworthy question both for Cristian Fernandez and the larger population of children in jail. How are they being educated and prepared for adult life? What happens when they get out of the system?

So, where are we?

• There a gadjillion kids who don’t have multi-million dollar defense teams to help them-- and many of them are in Florida.

• Even though recent SCOTUS rulings have outlawed hanging naughty children or shooting them on sight, there’s a long way to go to humanize the system.

• We have no idea how well the children in our bulging-at-the-seams juvenile justice systems are being educated or prepared for post-detention life.

So, despite not sentencing Crisitan Fernandez to life in prison, here we are, at the beginning of a new millennia, with a juvenile justice system that puts Oliver Twist to shame.

From 2001 Forward Every Single Priest Sex Abuse Case Went To Ratzinger

The Vatican is finally holding one of its own accountable, but not a member of the pedophile ring that has completely taken over the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy or of the financial swindlers who run the Vatican. Instead, they're punishing a whistleblower, the fascist Pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison "for leaking confidential documents to the media."

Mr. Gabriele, 46, remained impassive as the chief judge, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, pronounced the sentence “in the name of His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, gloriously reigning,” in a wood-paneled room in the Vatican City tribunal, in a nondescript palazzo near to the apse of St. Peter’s Square.

The verdict capped one of the most embarrassing episodes in recent Vatican history after a tell-all book based on dozens of the documents leaked by Mr. Gabriele revealed accusations of financial misdeeds, infighting and widespread tensions within the Vatican.

The court formally sentenced Mr. Gabriele to three years in prison and required him to pay court costs. But the sentence was reduced to 18 months after the court acknowledged several extenuating circumstances, including the butler’s public recognition that he had betrayed the pope’s trust. The court also took into account Mr. Gabriele’s belief, “albeit erroneously” that his motivations for leaking the documents had been pure.

Before the verdict, Mr. Gabriele addressed the court and told the three judges: “I am not a thief.”

Speaking with little emotion in his voice, Mr. Gabriele said that “he felt the strong conviction deep inside to have acted exclusively for love, a visceral love, for the church” and the pope.

For several months, beginning in November, the butler gave a number of documents to a journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who published many of them in the book “His Holiness: the Secret Papers of Pope Benedict XVI.” The most embarrassing revelations pointed to alleged misdeeds within the Vatican’s administration and its chief financial institution.

Two weeks after the book was published in May, Mr. Gabriele was arrested when hundreds of photocopied documents were found in his apartment inside Vatican City, where he lived with his wife and their three children. Mr. Gabriele spent nearly two months in a holding cell at the Vatican before being released to house arrest.

The Pope is said to be considering pardoning his former butler. Normally Vatican criminals don't get convicted of anything or even face trial. The real Vatican crimes get covered up-- and very, very systematically. In Chris Hayes' book about the crisis of authority, Twilight Of The Elites, he gets into the notorious case of Jesuit child rapist John Leary, then president of Gonzaga University in Spokane. Hayes' point was not about the rapes, per se, but about the cover-up, which went beyond the Church right into the police department. Instead of arresting Leary, the police just told him to get out of town within 24 hours. That kind of thing happens all the time when elites are caught in criminal acts. It's rare, for example, that a congressman is arrested and tried for his crimes. They're just told to resign and disappear. Mark Foley may be the most recently notorious of that lot but even more recently Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) was caught in serial electoral fraud and was let off the hook by the Michigan Attorney General (a "law and order" Republican) in return for a resignation. No arrest, no trial, no accountability. McCotter will be back on top of the world in no time. Foley, by the way, was a guest on Bill Maher's show Friday night.

Because Leary was a brilliant and charming university president, his case hasn't ever been treated for what it was, a serials of grubby criminal attacks on young boys.

[I]n 1965, Leary spotted a young adolescent boy of around 12, who lived in the neighborhood near Gonzaga University, riding his bicycle by the school. Leary lured the boy into his office and molested him. University officials found out about it somehow and called a meeting with the boy. They asked if Leary had done anything inappropriate. He explained what happened, said attorney Michael Pfau, who is representing the alleged victim in the planned lawsuit.

According to Pfau, the officials said, "Don't tell your parents; we'll take care of it."

And take care of it they apparently did, orchestrating a stunning cover-up that allowed Leary to expand his pedagogical legend despite allegations that he'd abused several boys. He left Spokane, and Gonzaga in 1969 at the private insistence of the Spokane police. The university said he left for "health reasons."

...In 1965, an 18-year-old freshman at the Jesuit Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., learned he'd landed a plum assignment.

The boy was from a Washington family of committed Catholics. He was considering a vocation in the priesthood... The idea was that the Gonzaga student would drive Rev. Leary to a town across the state where the university president was speaking. They'd rent separate hotel rooms, spend the night, and drive back to the university. According to the boy's now late-middle-aged recollections, he fell asleep in his own bed. Leary stripped naked, got on top of the sleeping boy, and tried to penetrate him. Leary wasn't extremely violent, but he was forceful, persistent, and the boy had to fight Leary off. Eventually, Leary relented and made up an excuse for his behavior.

The next day Leary persisted, this time talking about sexual matters, embarrassing the young man. The few hours' drive home was excruciating, he recalls, according to Doug Spruance, a Washington state attorney representing the former student in possible litigation over the alleged attack. Because of the nature of the case, Spruance did not name his client, nor make him available to interview.

The young man became depressed. His grades plummeted. He dropped out, and remained bitter during the next 40 years that he'd been unable to complete his college education.

Soon after there was an agreement between the Jesuits and the Spokane police "under which Leary wouldn't face charges of molesting victims if he left town within 24 hours." He went on molesting boys in similar situations for years to come. As the biggest newspaper in eastern Washington state wrote, "the Spokane Police Department and Jesuit hierarchy orchestrated a stunning cover-up that preserved the reputation of the institution and a man revered as a leader in Spokane," which has a long and very sordid history of tolerating child rape among it's elites. "Jesuit leaders created an 'artificial scenario' in which they stated Leary had resigned for health reasons during a trip to the East Coast. Gonzaga officials perpetuated the story of Leary's 'illness,' even as the priest moved from one Western university to another in the years that followed. Leary died in 1993."

Rev. John D. Whitney, the Jesuits' current provincial superior, issued a statement calling the reports "deeply distressing," though he admitted rumors of Leary's predatory activities had churned in university and Catholic circles for four decades. Gonzaga President Robert Spitzer refused to comment but sent out a boiler plate Catholic statement claiming the university regretted its actions and sought to assure the community that it has made changes to the way it reports and investigates inappropriate sexual behavior. "We're not like this anymore," said Whitney. But they are-- right up onto St. Peter's throne. And everyone conspires to make believe the Church is something other than a pedophile criminal operation. That's why Hayes included them in a book about the breakdown of Authority in society. The Pope himself, after all, forced the Irish Church to back off from plans to start turning priest rapists over to the police. Hayes:

The broad outlines of the scandal are familiar. For decades priests sexually molested children, using their clerical status as protection. When church authorities were alerted, they simply moved the predators to new parishes, where the abuse would continue. This didn't just happen a few times: it was, it appears, a policy. In 2007, when the Irish Church dealt with its own burgeoning crisis by crafting a policy that would require bishops to report suspected abusers to civil authorities the Vatican sent a letter expressing its reservations about "mandatory reporting" and instructing the bishops that the Code of Canon Law (as opposed to secular law) "must be meticulously followed." The command, in other words, was for bishops to shield their wayward priests from prosecution, to administer whatever justice would be administered in secret, within the fold of the church.

Out of the damn pool, kid! It's only for children who have a live-in, legally married mom 'n' dad

With a happy update -- see below

It's about time someone blew the whistle! OK, kids, alla youse outta da pool, and any a youse who who ain't living wit' yer legally married fodder and mudder, well, may God have mercy on yer soul.

by Ken

This story has been gnawing at me in the week or so since I first heard about it: a two-year-old boy who was barred from "family" membership, the only way he would have been allowed to used the club's pool, at an athletic club in southwestern Virginia because his family doesn't fit the club's definition of "husband, wife and their children ages 21 and younger living at home."

By this standard, which requires children to have parents who are husband and wife, little Oliver Trinkle Granados's family is obviously grossly defective. He has two fathers, Will Trinkle and Juan Granados, who are automatically ineligible to be married in Virginia.

It's not as if dads Trinkle and Granados were trying to get away with anything. They registered for the family membership in good faith on May 15, making no attempt to misrepresent who they are. Trinkle pointed out to reporters, "Our family membership at the Y has been no problem for the last two years." So they were taken by surprise when they were informed by a club employee nine days after they registered that their membership shouldn't have been accepted and had been invalidated.

As Neil Harvey reported for the Roanoke News on the suit that the Trinkle-Granados family has filed against the club:

Trinkle said that were he and Granados to apply for individual Roanoke Athletic Club memberships, their son would not be able to use many of the gym facilities, including the swimming pool.

"The Children's Rules provide that only children on a family membership may use the youth services room, the track, group exercise, cardiovascular, Nautilus, LifeFitness, Keiser and gymnasium," the complaint states. It also said Trinkle's membership and initiation fees had not been repaid.

If you want to think not-so-badly of Roanoke Athletic Club and its owner, Carilion Clinic, a major regional health-care provider, you could speculate that the rule was originally conceived to protect the club from being scammed by unrelated persons trying to pass themselves off as a "family" for the purpose of taking advantage of family-plan rates. After all, if you're going to have family memberships, it's reasonable that you have guidelines as to what constitutes a family.

But the way the RAC's rules ares written, and especially the way they're enforced, it does seem clear who the real-world target is. Will Trinkle has said in a statement that he was told by someone speaking for Carilion that "they were 'tightening policies' so no families like us would ever 'get as far' as we had." (Neil Harvey reported, "Carilion spokesman Eric Earnhart declined to comment on the pending litigation Wednesday.")

I read somewhere that some bozo cited DOMA as a reason why RAC couldn't recognize Oliver's unmarried parents as a "family," which is idiotic; DOMA has nothing whatsoever to do with athletic-club memberships. And while it's true that Virginia doesn't recognize even civil unions, let alone marriage, for same-sex couples, as reporter Harvey points out, "private institutions are not necessarily bound to follow the same definitions as those that are public." And the state has nothing, as far as I know, that remotely resembles a definition of "family."

Still, none of this is what's been gnawing at me about the case. (Yes, it has become literally a "case.") I mean, another case more or less of blatant homophobia? That's just a big yawn.

No, I've been thinking about that definition of "family." Look at it again:

"husband, wife and their children
ages 21 and younger living at home"

While this obviously rules out kids who have two parents of the same sex, it isn't exactly a walk in the park for kids whose family unit is untainted by "teh gay" or "teh lez." One assumes that RAC does periodic sweeps of the pool demanding that every kid produce: (a) a parental marriage certificate showing that he or she has two parents who are legally married, (b) a birth certificate or adoption papers showing that the husband and wife are the child's actual parents (remember, it says "their" children" [emphasis added]), and (c) some sort of additional documentation -- I'm hard-pressed to think what exactly -- to prove that the aforementioned parents are both alive and "living at home." And presumably any of the small fry who can't comply are yanked out of the pool and paraded under a banner reading "Filthy Little Bastards."

But of course it's not just little bastards who are yanked out of the pool. I suppose you can understand why it's necessary to eliminate kids who may be living with two parents who may be their actual parents but who aren't husband and wife. That's a sin, and God just hates it. You can even maybe sort of understand the thinking in eliminating kids whose parents are divorced. After all, at least according to some people, God hates that too. But jeez, kids who've had one or more parent taken away by, you know, God? Now that's really a tough standard.

Anything for the family, I guess. And think about it, would you want your kids swimming with kids who may have had a parent die? Isn't that disgusting? I mean, we have to draw the line somewhere.

Which brings us back to the same problem I talk about every time the subject of "family values" or its hypervigilant subset "defenders of marriage" comes up: the people who have stepped forward to draw those lines. By and large these are people who are psychologically deeply disturbed, and might way more usefully be on the receiving end of a crusade for mental health, people whose marriages and families are essentially breeding grounds for sociopathology, people who -- from the depths of their disturbance -- are mostly interested in punishing people who don't share their mental and moral incapacities.

Today they've taken charge of the swimming pools and athletic facilities. Tomorrow . . . ?

CHANGE.ORG HAS BEEN KEEPING WATCH
ON THE CASE OF OLIVER AND HIS DADS

And they've gotten up a petition, which you can check out and, if you like, sign here.


HAPPY UPDATE: "THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE
CHANGE" -- THE CLUB GETS THE MESSAGE

Michael K. Lavers reports in the Washington Blade:

A Virginia health club that rescinded a gay couple's family membership announced on Thursday that it will now offer "household" memberships to unmarried couples with children under 22.

"Since opening our doors over three decades ago, we have always strived to provide the very best in service, programs, and staffing," said Bud Grey, vice president of Carilion Clinic, which oversees the Roanoke and Botetourt Athletic Clubs, in a post to its Facebook page. "Our goal has been, and always will be to encourage and inspire health and wellness among all members of the communities we serve. In keeping with this goal, and in recognition of the many contemporary households that can benefit from our facilities through discounted membership fees, we are pleased to announce that we have expanded our Family Membership into a new Household Membership." . . .

"A household consists of a primary member and up to one additional household member that permanently lives in the household, and any of their dependent children under the age of 22 who also reside in the household on a permanent basis," he wrote. "Club dues will not change; dues for the Household Membership will be the same as the Family Membership it is replacing. There is no requirement to amend your membership." . . .

Will Trinkle told the Blade: "We're very happy that famlies prevailed in the end -- all families." The lawyer who filed the suit on the Trinkle-Granados family's behalf, John Fishwick, commented: "It took a lot of courage to bring a lawsuit like this. This is how you make change."

By the way, reporter Michael Lavers notes that Roanoke Health Club's parent company, Carilion Clinic (which "operates seven hospitals and more than 150 other health care facilities" in southwestern Virginia), is "the largest employer in Roanoke."

#

What Is It With Child Rape And Organized Religion?

If you watch closely, barely a day will pass when there isn't some scandal somewhere about a cardinal, bishop or priest raping a child or covering up the rape of a child by another cardinal, bishop or priest. It's almost impossible to separate the Catholic Church from systemic child molestation. But that isn't fair. Many psychopaths seek out careers in organized religion and there seems to be a tendency among people in organized religion careers to rape children. Society should do something about that. And it's certainly not just the Catholics. The Mormons are probably the worst child predators of all-- but they're just best at not letting the news leak out of their own closed community. Romney's Finance co-chair, Frank VanderSloot, a neo-fascist billionaire from Idaho, is probably best known for covering up Mormon child molestation in his state. I just got back from a trip to New York, where the problem with religious perverts preying on children isn't among Mormons, like in Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Wyoming, but with Hasidic Jews. Who would even imagine such a thing? And, like the Mormons, the Hasidics are very careful to keep their scandals inside the community. Keeping sex scandals out of the press always take precedence over protecting children from serial sex abusers.

My friend Danny lives on the far west side of Greenwich Village, where there are a lot of transvestite street hookers. "At least a third of their business," he swore to me, "comes from Hasidics driving in from Brooklyn." You could have knocked me over with a feather. [UPDATE: Danny called to say that I made a mistake and that some of the Hasidics who drive into his Manhattan neighborhood looking for "chicks-with-dicks" are from New Jersey and Westchester. "They're not all from Brooklyn," he said.] Who knew? Apparently everybody... at least everybody inside the tight-knit Hasidic world. Not many others. The rest of us see stuff like this report in the Daily News:

A mass rally for men only drew more than 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews to Citi Field Sunday to denounce the Internet and its pervasive impact on family life.

An overflow crowd of another 20,000 bearded men sporting long black coats and big black hats filled nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium for the unprecedented attack on modern technology.

Unable to enter the Queens stadiums because of the strict separation of the sexes enforced by the organizers, more than 15,000 Hasidic women watched the speeches at six sites across the tristate area-- thanks to live-streaming on the Internet.

The rally was organized by a little-known rabbinical group called Ichud Hakehillos L’tohar Hamachane-- the Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp-- to spread the word that online activities can lead to porn, child abuse and other acts of immorality.

But Eytan Kobre, who runs a Jewish family weekly magazine in Brooklyn and serves as the group’s spokesman, insists it is not calling for a ban on Internet use, but wants to use filters to manage it.

“With one click, all of a sudden, you lose control and are whisked away to a world you never intended to see, and it overtakes your life,” he said. “As a community, we are asking, is it worth it?”

Kobre cited social media like Facebook and Twitter that he argues can lead people away from prayer, community and family and cause social ruination.

“I know that Facebook ruins marriages,” he said.

Patrick McHenry is not Hasidic but...

Facebook, huh? How about religious fanaticism? Earlier this month the NY Times started exposing a scandal as repulsive and hideous as anything related to the Catholic Church. It's not just about demented religious nuts raping children. It's about demented religious nuts covering up and endangering children-- an a D.A. who went along for his own careerism.

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

By cooperating with the police, and speaking out about his son’s abuse, Mr. Jungreis, 38, found himself at the painful forefront of an issue roiling his insular Hasidic community. There have been glimmers of change as a small number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, taking on longstanding religious and cultural norms, have begun to report child sexual abuse accusations against members of their own communities. But those who come forward often encounter intense intimidation from their neighbors and from rabbinical authorities, aimed at pressuring them to drop their cases.

Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.

...Pearl Engelman, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, said her community had failed her too. In 2008, her son, Joel, told rabbinical authorities that he had been repeatedly groped as a child by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school briefly removed the official but denied the accusation. And when Joel turned 23, too old to file charges under the state’s statute of limitations, they returned the man to teaching.

“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

The New York City area is home to an estimated 250,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews — the largest such community outside of Israel, and one that is growing rapidly because of its high birthrate. The community is concentrated in Brooklyn, where many of the ultra-Orthodox are Hasidim, followers of a fervent spiritual movement that began in 18th-century Europe and applies Jewish law to every aspect of life.

Their communities, headed by dynastic leaders called rebbes, strive to preserve their centuries-old customs by resisting the contaminating influences of the outside world. While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now argue that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and consider publicly airing allegations against fellow Jews to be chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name.

There are more mundane factors, too. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews want to keep abuse allegations quiet to protect the reputation of the community, and the family of the accused. And rabbinical authorities, eager to maintain control, worry that inviting outside scrutiny could erode their power, said Samuel Heilman, a professor of Jewish studies at Queens College.

“They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community,” Dr. Heilman said. “The deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world.”

Scholars believe that abuse rates in the ultra-Orthodox world are roughly the same as those in the general population, but for generations, most ultra-Orthodox abuse victims kept silent, fearful of being stigmatized in a culture where the genders are strictly separated and discussion of sex is taboo. When a victim did come forward, it was generally to rabbis and rabbinical courts, which would sometimes investigate the allegations, pledge to monitor the accused, or order payment to a victim, but not refer the matter to the police.

...The degree of intimidation can vary by neighborhood, by sect and by the prominence of the person accused.

In August 2009, the rows in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Brooklyn were packed with rabbis, religious school principals and community leaders. Almost all were there in solidarity with Yona Weinberg, a bar mitzvah tutor and licensed social worker from Flatbush who had been convicted of molesting two boys under age 14.

Justice Guston L. Reichbach looked out with disapproval. He recalled testimony about how the boys had been kicked out of their schools or summer camps after bringing their cases, suggesting a “communal attitude that seeks to blame, indeed punish, victims.” And he noted that, of the 90 letters he had received praising Mr. Weinberg, not one displayed “any concern or any sympathy or even any acknowledgment for these young victims, which, frankly, I find shameful.”

“While the crimes the defendant stands convicted of are bad enough,” the judge said before sentencing Mr. Weinberg to 13 months in prison, “what is even more troubling to the court is a communal attitude that seems to impose greater opprobrium on the victims than the perpetrator.”

And, because of the huge political clout in the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn, the corrupt Machine politician who holds the District Attorney's job, Joe Hynes, leaves all these matters to the community-- meaning to the primitive Bronze Age rebbes who have all the power over their brainwashed followers. Normal Jews living in the 21st Century-- rather than the 18th-- find this as bizarre and unacceptable as anyone else would.

Former mayor Ed Koch told me he thought Hynes "made a terrible error here."
"This community does not deserve to have any preferential treatment" and "he should treat them exactly as he would anyone else," he said.

Koch, who is Jewish, said Hynes should prosecute the rabbis who interfered with victims reporting accusations of abuse.

"We're all equal under the law and they have to subscribe to the law without getting preferential treatment," Koch said. "It's just dead wrong. And there's no explanation to make it right in any way."

Michael Fragin, an Orthodox Jew and Republican political operative, said amending legal strategies to accommodate religious leaders puts people in jeopardy.

"I think that's inappropriate," he said of Hynes' reported strategy. "I think we should expect one standard when it comes to legal issues. If someone commits a crime against me, I don't want them held to a lesser standard. And as a parent of six, I want my kids to be safe. Safety, for any parent, is the most important thing."

Michael Lesher, an Orthodox Jewish attorney who represents abuse victims, says that not publicizing the names of the Orthodox Jews accused and convicted of sex crimes has "done much more to obscure crimes in the Orthodox community than to fight them," as he wrote last month.

Lew Fidler, a Democratic councilman from Brooklyn who, years ago, ran two of Hynes' political campaigns, defended the D.A.'s response to the times.

"It makes sense to me," Fidler said. "One size does not fit all. It makes sense to me intuitively that sometimes the full frontal assault is not what gets you the most [results]."

He said these communities are heavily controlled by rabbis whose dictates carry more weight than police, school and elected officials.

Fidler said Lesher, in calling for the names of sexual abusers to be made public, doesn't appreciate the dynamics of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

"I wish Lesser was right that in any community, people would never sweep something like this, hush hush, under the rug," Fidler told me. "And obviously there's a big push-pull in the Orthodox community on this that I don't see eye-to-eye with. But I think Joe Hynes has to live in the real world and he has to live in the world that they're in."

Fidler knows firsthand how influential rabbis in this area can be.

He was heavily favored to win a special election for a State Senate seat covering Borough Park, but found himself repeatedly attacked for, among other things, once having described himself as a "bacon-and-eggs kind of Jew."

It wound up going to a recount. Fidler, a popular Democrat, leads his little-known Republican opponent with just 87 votes, with an additional 119 paper ballots to be counted on Monday.

By the way, these religious fanatics-- all denominations-- are dangerous to society. If you're not registered to vote, keep in mind that these religious people do vote. The Hasidics vote and the religious extremists from all faiths vote. And they vote their hatred and hypocrisy. Watch this video and decide if you need to vote or not:

The Ugly Truth-- Child Molesters

Today's NY Times poses an obvious question by Euripidean scholar Daniel Mendelsohn: "What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?" Before reading it, keep in mind that Coach Sandusky-- like most child predators-- was very much "straight," a seemingly "normal" married man with children. When I heard how Sandusky was using his charity as a lending library to get underage children into his clutches, it reminded me of extreme right-wing Republican leader Spokane Mayor Jim West, who did very much the same thing. West was a GOP heavyweight in Washington state, a loudmouthed Republican pol who, to a great extent, actually made his career based on his vicious homophobia... before being caught molesting young boys in a case that sounds entirely like Sandusky's. He made a big deal about getting married, proposing to his wife from the floor of the Washington state Senate. I wrote this in 2005, a year before he died:

Jim West is currently the Mayor of Spokane. But for 25 years West has used his positions of authority-- as a sheriff's deputy, Boy Scout leader and powerful politician-– to lure young boys into his web. It looks like West was one of the typical Republican closet cases who desperately tried to show the world how aggressively homophobic he was to try to prove he wasn't gay. West wasn't just another two-bit Republican pol; he was the Washington State Senate leader and one of the most powerful GOP leaders in the Northwest. So how homophobic was West (while he was molesting underage boys)? Early in 1986, West introduced a bill to bar gays and lesbians from working in schools, daycare centers and some state agencies. The bill called for firing state workers whose sexual identities became known. That same year he voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex. Needless to say he vigorously opposed every gay rights bill that ever came up and, of course voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2003, as Senate majority leader, he bottled up a gay rights bill in committee, where it died. Once he became Mayor of Spokane he opposed giving benefits to domestic partners of City Hall workers but was beaten with a veto-proof majority on the City Council. Jim West is a sick cookie, a sick Republican cookie.

Yesterday the FBI raided his home and confiscated his computer and other records as part of an on-going Federal Investigation into corruption allegations. West has been using his office to offer City Hall jobs to young men he met in gay online chat rooms. The FBI obtained the federal warrant to search West's home after convincing a federal judge there was probable cause to believe a federal crime had been committed. The warrant said there was sufficient evidence to believe that West "knowingly and willingly engaged in a scheme to entice others to engage in sexual activity with him through offers and grants of city of Spokane jobs, internships or appointments." West's secret life started unraveling in May when a local newspaper, the Spokesman-Review, started publishing the details of a thorough investigation into the Republican politician's double-life. His well-documented crimes against young boys go back into the 1970's when he was a deputy sheriff and a Boy Scout leader. West, who is clearly delusional, refuses to resign and is fighting a recall drive, does acknowledge using "poor judgment," but denies doing anything illegal. Nothing illegal? Does this sound legal to you? West and the members of the Pac NW Pedophile clan have been accused of using an at risk boys camp, Morning Star Boys Ranch, of which West is on the Board of Directors, as a kind of library to check out young boys for camping trips and hiking. It is alleged that during these trips the clan molested the young men. West, who resigned last week from the boys ranch Board of Directors, admits he "vaguely remembers" that he "maybe took one kid on a hike or camping trip once."

West, typical of the kind of cornered-rat-Republican on getting caught, is playing as if HE is the victim. After strenuously denying everything, he's now starting to crack and this horribly vicious, hate-filled homophobe who has used a career in public office to try to destroy the lives of innocent gay men and women, now tries to say he is being attacked because he is gay! "I'm being destroyed because I am a gay man, which is fine," this vicious right-wing child-molester/blowhard whined. Recently West lashed out against "sex Nazis" who try to regulate private sexual behavior, so deluded that he fails to recognize that he built his whole career on exactly that! "Because I am a gay man, because of this double life, it has been hell." My heart is not breaking for Jim West as more and more of his victims are coming forth to testify against his deprecations. By the time Bush and the Republicans are swept out of government we're going to have to build a new super-prison just to house the Republican politicians caught up in a culture of arrogant corruption and abuse of power beyond anything ever seen in this country before.

At the end of his life he was shunned by his Republican colleagues, as much because they thought he was "gay" as because he was raping defenseless children. The answer to Mendelsohn's question in today's Times reveals a similar "ugly truth," one, he points out, that goes "stubbornly undiscussed."

Whichever version of Mike McQueary’s story you choose to believe-- his grand jury testimony, in which a “distraught” Mr. McQueary, then a graduate assistant to the football team, “left immediately” after witnessing the former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky sodomize a young boy, or the e-mail recently leaked to the press, in which he wrote, “I did stop it, not physically ... but made sure it was stopped when I left that locker room”-- the mind recoils at the grotesque failure to intervene more forcefully. How could a grown man have left the scene without taking the child with him? Mr. McQueary wants us to imagine that his brain was racing during those “30 to 45 seconds,” that he “had to make tough impacting quick decisions.” But it seems clear he wasn’t thinking at all-- and it’s hard not to wonder why.

I think it was the gender of the victim.

Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).

Mr. McQueary’s reluctance to treat what he allegedly saw as a flagrant crime, his peculiar unwillingness to intervene “physically,” the narrative emphasis on his own trauma (“distraught”) rather than the boy’s, the impulse to keep matters secret rather than provide rescue, all suggest the presence of a particularly intense shame, one occasioned less by pedophilia than by something everyone involved apparently considered worse: homosexuality.

Mr. McQueary’s refusal to process the scene he described-- his coach having sex with another male-- was reflected in the reaction of the university itself, which can only be called denial. You see this in the squeamish treatment of the assaults as a series of inscrutable peccadilloes best discussed-- and indulged-- behind closed doors. (Penn State’s athletic director subsequently characterized Mr. Sandusky’s alleged act as “horsing around,” a term you suspect he would not have used to describe the rape of a 10-year-old girl.) Denial is there in the treatment of the victims as somehow untouchable, so fully tainted they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be rescued. For Penn State officials, disgust at the perceived gay element seems to have outweighed the horror of the crimes themselves. (“Perceived,” because psychologists generally deny that pedophiles possess adult sexuality-- something that can be described as “gay” or “straight” in the first place.)

The denial is hardly surprising. In a culture that increasingly accepts gay life, organized athletics, from middle school to the professional leagues, is the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment. Anecdotal and public evidence for this is dismayingly overwhelming. Most recently, Sean Avery, of the New York Rangers hockey team, has been ostracized and ridiculed merely for making a short video in support of New York’s same-sex marriage act. (Anti-gay slurs are such an ingrained part of Ranger fans’ cheering that some gay fans have stopped attending games.)

What lurks behind so many male athletes’ vociferous antipathy to homosexuality seems to be deep anxiety about masculinity, the very quality that aggressive team sports showcase. After all, a guy is never so much a guy as when he’s playing a violent game or hanging with his teammates afterward in the showers and locker rooms, “horsing around.” The familiar ferocious anti-gay swagger many athletes affect is likely meant to quash even the faintest suspicion that anything tender or erotic animates naked playfulness between men.

But true masculinity, like true sportsmanship, contains other virtues, too: forthrightness, honesty, fair play, courage in difficult situations, readiness to acknowledge error, concern for the weak as well as admiration for the strong. In their handling of Mr. Sandusky, the leaders of Penn State’s legendary football program failed to display a single one of these qualities. Maybe it’s time for a new kind of sports hero. What else are we supposed to conclude when grown men, trained to brave 300-pound linemen, run away from boys in trouble?

UPDATE: Dale Kildee

Child sex abuse always seems to come from Republicans. But retiring Michigan Congressman Dale Kildee (D) has been accused by distant relatives of sexually abusing an underage male relative, a second cousin, over 50 years ago. He denies the allegations, and the drama promises to play out big-time this week. The charges against Kildee look insane and don't pass any smell tests.