Fact-Checking the BillDo
Recently, BillDo farted the following onto the intertubes:
Moreover, Jenkins wrote that “Out of 100,000 priests active in the U.S. in this half-century, a cadre of just 149 individuals—one priest out of every 750—accounted for over a quarter of all allegations of clergy abuse.” In other words, almost all priests have never had anything to do with sexual molestation.
(italics in the original).
Just for comparison, the Wikipedia page for Crime in Detroit, Michigan, says that the murder rate there was 40.1 per 100,000 people in 2009.
Assuming that each murder was committed by a different person, this means that about one Detroiter out of every 2500 accounted for all of the murder in 2009. In other words, almost all Detroiters are not murderers.
So by BillDo’s reasoning, Detroit does not have a murder problem. Good to know. Presumably if I gave him a glass of water with only one part of arsenic in 750, he’d drink it.
Aside from satire and jokes in the blogosphere (which are getting really overdone), almost no one thinks that some very large fraction of priests are child-molesters. To informed people, the real scandal is that the Church used its power and moral authority to cover up and suppress what was going on, and handled cases in a way that massively exacerbated the problem, rather than stopping it (eg. using remote Arctic parishes as a dumping ground for perps, rather than getting them permanently out of the ministry and turning them over the the civil authorities). The institution, itself, was a major part of the problem — not just the relatively small number of bad priests.
But BillDo is as usual too busy playing the victim card to get that.
Eamon Knight wrote:
I have the opposite opinion here of BillDo – I think he gets that all too clearly and is doing what many social conservatives appear to do when faced with an indefensible position; try to draw attention away from the real problem. I’m willing to bet that his next screed on the topic will be “blame the victim” (or did he already play that card and I’ve just forgotten it in my BillDo-outrage exhaustion?)
The Google knows all and sees all:
All kneel before the Google.
Eamon Knight:
You’re right, of course, that the church is to be blamed more for the coverup than for the abuse itself (though I’ve seen estmates that there are 50-100 more sexual abusers among Catholic clergy than in the population at large; which, if true, would suggest that the church may have played a role in the abuse itself).
But hey, it’s BillDo. There’s enough fail to go around. I just pointed out one litte bit of it.