I never got the hang of the url html…sorry. You had to tell me how to get a “picture”, remember?

Anyone who is interested in teacher abuse can start with the AP study that was released a year and a half ago and published widely.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003661136

However, a google search on ‘”teacher abuse” AP’ (omit the single ‘) brings up a sickening number of cases– some famous, others new to me.

Oh and Daniel? Please read more carefully– that is necessary if there is going to be a real discussion and not a shouting match. I did not say that teaching abstinence works better than a condom, et al., although that is obviously true. I said that it works 100% of the time and is 100% safe. It requires nothing more than the will to practice it. It also requires an act of the will to use condoms correctly 100% of the time. Yet you think that is going to happen and abstinence won’t?

By your phrasing, I am guessing you are a Brit. If I am right, you likely know you have the worst teen pregnancy rate in Europe and this despite massive sex ed, condoms and birth control pushed on children at ever younger ages. So what is the next step? Why advertising condoms and abortions on TV to bring the rate down!!! Apart from the fact that such a move is sheer evil, does it not suggest to you that current approaches to teen sexuality are failing children badly?

On a different note– can some kind soul (i am looking at you mk) give me the html for urls?

I don’t think catholic priests have any sort of monopoly on child abuse, far from it, but when I say institutionalised, I mean that knowledge of what was going on for many, many years (decades!) was hidden from public view, denied, refuted and twisted. Priests were moved, people silenced. Priests doing that were actively protected. When the hypocrisy became too much, that’s when the story broke.

Show me a Catholic, ANY Catholic, lay or religious, that defends this behavior and I’ll shut up.

What YOU don’t seem to get is that ALL of this behavior was WRONG and ALL Catholics admit it.

ALL abortions are wrong, but NO abortionists admit it.

You keep saying that because the church behaved badly they are hypocrites, and I keep saying that we have ADMITTED that the behavior was wrong. The POPE did NOT condone what was going on. Those were local bishops that moved their priests around.

Church TEACHING did not condone hiding the behavior of those priests. Church TEACHING CONDEMNS the behavior of BOTH the priests themselves AND the bishops that hid the behavior.

That’s what YOU are not getting.

Abortionists are people that kill babies. It doesn’t get much worse than that. How hard is it to make the leap that they are probably lacking morals in other areas?

I don’t care how man childrens parties John Wayne Gacy played the clown, the man was BAD. To make the statement, all mass murderers are bad people, so it’s no surprise that Gacy was probably bad even when he wasn’t killing teenage boys, doesn’t seem that far fetched to me.

To claim that people that kill thousands of babies without a twinge of guilt probably means that as a rule they are capable of OTHER horrible behavior, just doesn’t seem all that irrational to me.

So when an abortion doctor rapes his patient, or kills his wife, it seems like a no brainer to say, well, he WAS an abortion doctor after all…just as finding out that John Wayne Gacy robbed a bank would elicit the response, Well, it doesn’t surprise me, as he was a Mass Murderer after all…

Plus, this wasn’t an isolated abortionist behaving badly. Their are HUNDREDS of stories of abortionists behaving horribly in OTHER areas of their life…

the point is that when this happens, christians say “it was an isolated case”, but when abortion providers do something wrong, christians nod their head and say “yep, another one”. That’s hypocrisy, which apparently nobody understands.

To get back on-topic, you are all ignoring just as hard as you can the other factors in this story (pressure from her family, apparent lack of sex education) and focusing on the fact that an abortion doctor was doing his job…

If you don’t care that he was breaking the law, only that he’s “killing babies” then why focus on this doctor at all?

In your twisted world view, why is this doctor any worse? Is it because you secretly believe that in over 99% of the time the doctor is doing his/her job correctly?

The numbers of teachers abusing children has nothing to do with the pope’s willingness to actively protect priests who abuse children, the uproar isn’t (just) over the numbers but the fact that whilst not being condoned was actively enabled.

You need to get that through your head. When it is being enabled to that degree, it is institutionalised.

and Lily, I don’t know why you believe that “teaching abstinence” works better than a condom at preventing pregnancy and STD’s. Sure, if you can keep kids apart and physically unable to have sex they won’t be able to. The problem is, that whilst “not having sex” works, practising “not having sex” doesn’t.

And cases like this make me think, “Oh, if only teachers could marry…”

Wait a minute…

You see what you want to see, and hear what you want to hear. And we wonder why people like Tiller even exist…It becomes more obvious every day. We have a whole generation that doesn’t seem to be able to connect one thought to another…Everything makes sense, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the sacrament of sex!

Abortionists kill babies. Let that truth sink in, Daniel. Tiller killed a baby. It is irrelevant that abortion is legal. It is still immoral. No law has the power to make evil good or right wrong. Tiller is a murderer, as is every other abortionist.

The bad things include the attitude of the family if they pressured her, her lack of sex education that led to her getting pregnant, perhaps thanks to inane ideas that preaching abstinence actually works.

What a lot of baseless speculating! Maybe, the full moon made Tiller kill the baby! Maybe evil spirits took on the form of Michelle’s mother and made her force Michelle to have an abortion. Maybe the abortuary was really a resort in Tahiti. Since there are very few girls who don’t know the tie between sex and babies, we can dismiss, with the contempt it deserves, the proabortionists’ mantra of “lack of sex education”. By the way– abstinence works 100% of the time and it is completely safe, too.

Here you are completely off-topic and it isn’t even amusing or anything we haven’t heard 15,000 times this year so far:

Meanwhile, when there is institutionalized pedophilia, a pope who claims condoms make the aids situation worse, gay sex scandals and more, the same tarring and feathering with the same brush doesn’t happen.

There is no institutionalized pedophilia. (There has been a *huge* outcry by Catholics over the pedophilia and over homosexuals in the priesthood– and it is ongoing.) However, you need to get it through your head, as do a great number of people, that this is a pervasive problem in society. By every number anyone has ever published, the number of cases of pedophilia is lower among priests than in any other profession. Do you have a clue how many teachers have been arrested and convicted in just the last 5 years? Do you? How many over the last 20 years? It is a horrible crime and pretending that it doesn’t exist elsewhere in alarming numbers just victimizes children again.

The pope, by the way, is right about condoms. However, he is speaking from a moral perspective, not a medical one. It may be that that was an error of judgement, since so relatively few people are able to think morally, but errors of judgement are hardly the same thing as murder or pedophilia.

The bad things are the 19 misdemeanours he is going to trial for – remember too that he is not guilty until found guilty in a court of law – not for doing his job, but how.

The bad things include the attitude of the family if they pressured her, her lack of sex education that led to her getting pregnant, perhaps thanks to inane ideas that preaching abstinence actually works.

Performing an abortion – well, obviously some believe that to be a bad thing, although I shouldn’t have to point out to anyone that murder isn’t a crime the doctor is being accused of.

#12 is correct – this is a civil and perhaps criminal law case, not really anything to do with being pro-choice or anti-choice – hence I’ll repeat what I said before:

“Once again, we are reminded that abortionists who do bad things are not an aberration, they are representative of all abortionists…Priests and other [men] of faith on the other hand are immune from this standard, as any christian who strays is most assuredly not really a christian when s/he does so.”

Some seem truly ignorant that this is a non sequitur and believe that if you are a doctor who performs abortions, you are not only a murderer, but also by default it makes you a pervert, a rapist, a mysogynist and a whole host of other things. And not only this, but when one doctor is caught (and put on trial!) the system is rotten (even though it puts people like this one trial) and all doctors are rotten, even though the vast percentage of them do no wrong (other than the fact they provide abortions).

Meanwhile, when there is institutionalized pedophilia, a pope who claims condoms make the aids situation worse, gay sex scandals and more, the same tarring and feathering with the same brush doesn’t happen.

That’s also a tragedy, this hypocrisy.

If an abortionist adheres to the practice of abortion, the very thing that makes him an abortionist, then he is a “good” abortionist. Which by definition makes him a bad person. Which means doing abortions is NOT an abberation, but the very thing that he MUST do to be called an abortionist in the first place.

If a priest molests a little boy, you would be hard pressed to find ANYWHERE in Catholic Teaching, that promotes the molestation of young boys by priests. Therefore, priests that molest young boys ARE an aberration, as they are doing the very things they are supposed to be opposing.

By definition a priest should be trying to obey the 10 commandments. A good thing.

By definition an abortionist should be killing unborn children. A bad thing.

Priests molesting boys? An aberration.
Abortionists aborting babies? Typical.

That isn’t really true. If a man “of the cloth” strays, knows he strays, admits he strays and asks forgiveness for straying, then he absolutely is a true Christian. He is accepting Christian “TEACHING”…

If on the other hand a man claims to be a Christian, but advocates abortion, he is opposing Christian teaching. This is not straying. This is heresy. For instance, the priest that has invited Barack Obama to speak at Notre Dame. I question whether he is truly a Catholic at all. He is thumbing his nose at Church Authority and completely ignoring Church Teaching. He does NOT acknowledge his wrong doing, in fact he claims it is a good. This man’s Christianity would most definitely be called into question.

It’s not about straying. It’s about trying not to stray, and knowing what straying is.

We all sin…We all stray. But do we know it?