A little hyperbole
Two senators -- one Democrat and one Republican
-- have come under fire for recent comments about hot-button issues. Let's try
and sift through the commentary and the hyperbole of their respective statements
to get to the truth
Sen. Richard Durbin recently referred to the
camps for enemy combatants who are being held at Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of
our times."
Sen. Rick Santorum wrote an
article two years ago in which he stated that the cause of the problem of
pedophiles holding positions of power (usually priests) within the Catholic
Church could be rooted in the liberal, anything-goes attitude of Boston,
Massachusetts.
I am assuming both men
were exaggerating things when they made their statements. Quite frankly, there
is nothing wrong with a little bit of hyperbole, especially when you're trying
to compete with the runaway bride for news ratings points. Maybe hyperbole is
the only way to get a point across.
But
what points were they truly trying to make?
Rick Santorum pointed out that priests
are human, and can make human, or earthly mistakes. True enough.
I don't necessarily consider Boston to
be any more liberal than any other major city I've been in; certainly not more
liberal than any cities on the east coast.
I'm not even here to dispute the point
that priests may be susceptible to images that flash across a TV screen, a movie
screen, or right in front of them; they are, after all, human just like the rest
of us.
Where I have to draw the line is
the thinking that the entire pedophile priest problem took place in Boston.
Just about every diocese in this country -- and maybe in others, too -- has had
some degree of difficulty in getting this problem under control. It's not just
a Boston thing, and anyone who wants to argue otherwise needs to look at the
aggregate numbers.
(And yes,
pedophiles still account for less than 1% of all priests, so I'm not condemning
an entire group of people for something a few bad apples
did.)
So why is the duality between
religious leader and pedophile pretty much uniquely a Catholic problem? We're
not hearing about Methodists, or Muslims, or Hindus, or any other religion
struggling with this. That's not to say it doesn't happen, hasn't happened, or
won't happen. It can. But with Catholics, there are two mitigating factors
that may make the problem more widespread in that religion than in
others:
First is the fact that they
require their priests to be celibate. Perhaps a child wouldn't seem an
attractive sexual partner if the priest knew that he could go home to a wife who
may be willing to ease some, um,
stress.
Second is the way the church
shames the gay people into denying who they are. Given the choice of living a
life of shame and fear of expression, perhaps that makes the celibacy of the
priesthood more attractive to someone who has been taught that their feelings
are wrong.
An isolated incident can be
dealt with. It's the systematic stuff that landed the Catholic church where it
is now. Not Boston.
Dick Durbin's
comments weren't any better. Based upon unclassified and non-classified
documents that are currently available, the only comparison between our prisons
at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib (among others), and the Soviet gulag that has
any merit whatsoever, is the archipelago concept that Solzhenitsyn put forth in
his books. That is to say, because each prison has some degree of autonomy
and doesn't communicate thoroughly with each other, each prison is an island
that can't quite match any other. Just like the
gulags.
Sporadic documented torture
notwithstanding, they do not have, and do not deserve, to be compared with the
camps where people essentially were forced to work until they dropped, in a
labor camp that is tantamount to
slavery.
I don't believe we have all of
the necessary information to properly judge our prisons at Guantanamo or Abu
Ghraib. The torture is probably a lot greater than we have been led to believe,
and I wouldn't be surprised if upper echelons of the Pentagon were in on it.
That doesn't make them gulags.
Posted: Sun - July 24, 2005 at 09:49 PM