Blame It On The Queers

A high ranking Vatican spokesman yesterday blamed the escalating scandal over child molestation in the Catholic Church on too many homosexuals in the priesthood.

Who will be the next scapegoat? Feisty nuns? Secular humanists? Somebody has to take the blame for this nasty business and it couldn’t be the fault of all those Cardinals and Bishops who supposedly run the place.

No, the Church is more than blameless. Altar boys are being tied up and sodomized, but the Church is the victim rather than the perpetrator of these horrific acts. That was the far-fetched logic of a Vatican preacher who, just before Easter, likened pedophile priests to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, comparing attacks on the hierarchy to anti-Semitism.

The Bishops are being subjected to media criticism, not slaughtered like cattle in extermination camps, so it’s not a very good analogy. But consider: could the Vatican preacher have charged his critics with carrying out an Inquisition? A witch hunt? The Holocaust was a poor choice, but at least it didn’t raise memories of heretics burned at the stake.

A good friend of mine, who spent many years as a Jesuit priest before leaving his vocation to marry and raise a family, asked my opinion about the unfolding drama. I told him my own view counts for little. Since I’m not a Catholic, whatever I think or say can be dismissed and discounted as the prejudices of an outsider. I told my friend that ultimately, it would be up to officials in the Church to clean up their own house and make restitution for wrongs committed.

He suggested that thousands of conscientious priests resigning, in mass protest, might be the kind of jolt needed to get the higher-ups quit their stonewalling and come to terms with this problem of their own making. Perhaps. But unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. Instead, blame it on the queers.

Festival of Freedom

How do you say “welcome” in Sudanese, Nepali and Russian?  Despite language barriers, the expression of hospitality was unmistakable when refugees from those countries, along with asylum-seekers from Bhutan, Burma and the Congo, gathered for an interfaith Passover Seder last night.

Passover or Pesach, called the “Festival of Freedom” in Jewish tradition, commemorates the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt.  Yesterday’s celebration, jointly sponsored by Ohavi Zedek Synagogue and Vermont Interfaith Action, brought the old story up-to-date as new arrivals recounted their personal narratives of escaping regimes more brutal than anything imagined in Pharaoh’s time … schools turned into prisons, hiding from soldiers in the jungle, years spent in make-shift bamboo huts in re-location camps before finally making their way to America.

Jews, Catholics, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Friends, Presbyterians and Evangelicals rubbed shoulders with Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus, sharing the ritual foods like parsley dipped in salt water---a reminder of tears—and bitter herbs, recalling the bitterness of slavery in “mitzrayim,” a Hebrew term meaning any place of oppression, whether ancient Egypt or more modern hell holes.

The night concluded with prayers for peace from Lao-Tze, St. Francis, and the Buddhist dharma. 

I was grateful to participate in an event that exemplified religion at its best—building bridges rather than barriers among the world’s peoples, and strengthening relationships among those of differing cultures and faiths.

For a planet torn by too much religious, racial and national conflict, last night’s Seder was a bright moment of hope.

Racism in Rutland?

It’s an ugly picture that conjures up memories of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was sodomized with a broomstick by Brooklyn police in 1997, creating a national furor.  But this picture is in progressive, pristine Vermont.

A video taken New Year’s Day has just been released that shows a Rutland police officer, Michael Nesshoever, repeatedly firing a pepperball launcher at a detainee named Jamek Hart, who is constrained in a holding cell with his feet shackled and hands cuffed behind his back.

The pepperball pistol, which works something like a paintball gun and is ordinarily used for crowd control, fires three pellets at a time.  The video shows the detainee, whose pants have fallen to the floor, being hit repeatedly on the bare skin of his lower legs and buttocks.  At least twenty shots were fired at the helpless man, according to the head of the Rutland Police Commission.  As the pepperballs strike, the victim’s angry rants and protests turn to screams of pain before he falls to the floor.  Police then place a bag over his head–reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.

At least three police officers, all of whom are white (with one sporting a “skinhead” style haircut), were involved in the assault on Hart, who is black.

The director of Vermont’s ACLU, Allen Gilbert, warns against assuming the brutality was racially motivated.  “People usually jump to that conclusion if an incident involves a person in the minority, but it’s not necessarily the case,” the Rutland Herald reports him cautioning.

Maybe or maybe not.  Police have a hard job and have to deal with some unsavory characters.  And perhaps these particular officers abuse all their prisoners, regardless of color.  But when white cops on an all white force gratuitously torment and torture a black man who is bound hand and foot, powerless to resist, it certainly looks like institutionalized racism to me.