Monday, August 27, 2018

Anti-Catholic Double Standard

By now, you’ve heard stories like this too many times. Father McFarlin had a reputation for sexual deviancy. He crossed the line in conversations with children with sexually suggestive language.
By 2005, his Bishops had investigated complaints by six different children in his diocese. But they didn’t report him to police or remove him from the priesthood.
Instead, they let him become someone else’s problem. They hid his behavior and let him go minister somewhere else.
In one memo, a bishop said, “This incident does not have to end McFarlin’s career,” and recommended the diocese conduct “a graceful exit.” He landed in another place where no one knew his record.
By 2011, he struck again, this time having sex with a 16-year old girl.
Like I said, it’s an all-too-familiar story.
Except, this was not really “Father” McFarlin, it was “Mr.” McFarlin, and he was not a priest, he was public school teacher.
And the people who covered for him were not bishops and cardinals, they were public school administrators and school district attorneys.
I took all the details for the scenario above, much of it verbatim, from a (rare) USA Today storyabout Kip McFarlin, a public school teacher at Orangefield Independent School District (Texas).
The greater problem
Perhaps the most shocking point in my recent article on the sexual abuse problem was the problem in the public schools. We wrote,
One study from Hofstra University laments that while there are a number of federally funded national studies on child sexual abuse, there are none that document educator sexual abuse. Gleaning what it can from related studies and databases, this report notes that 9.6 percent of students grades 8 to 11 have reported sexual abuse, and 21 percent of these alleged abuses are by educators.
This represents roughly (by my quick math) about 300,000 cases of sexual abuse.
By Dr. Joel McDurmon
https://americanvision.org/16723/the-big-double-standard-on-child-sex-abuse-no-one-is-talking-about/
Other sources confirm this problem is big—“far more common” than you want to believe. Further, just like the Catholic problem, public schools “continue to conceal the actions of dangerous educators in ways that allow them to stay in the classroom.”
Further, one study says that between 1 and 5 percent of teachers sexually harass or abuse students. Given that there are 3.2 million school teachers, those numbers represent between 32,000 and 160,000 predators in the schools.
Despite this startling problem being laid before the U.S. Department of Education in a 2004 study entitled, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of the Literature,” it was related to me that there are no updated stats or studies. Despite the overwhelming indications, there have been no national or even statewide studies of student experiences of educator sexual misconduct. Fifteen years have gone by since this study!
So, while they are raking the Roman Catholics over the coals, they are totaling ignoring—averting the eyes, covering the ears, running to avoid—the same issue in the public schools where all indications are the problem is far greater.
The double standard in law and the media
Meanwhile, the media are not only drubbing the Catholic Church for the same sins they ignore in the public schools, but now they have taken to a theme of how evil that Church is for lobbying against efforts to reform statute of limitations laws.

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