Bill Donohue is an evil little man

Donohue is also an amazing fellow, always able to top himself in serial excuses for the crimes of the church. His latest escapade is to pardon a priestly abuser because his victims were over some magical age.

The head of the influential Catholic League says that the priest who allegedly sexually abused 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin did not engage in pedophilia because ‘the vast majority of the victims [were] post-pubescent.”

Bill Donohue made the argument during a raucous debate on Larry King Live Tuesday night, during which he repeatedly pointed the finger to homosexuality — rather than pedophilia — as the cause of the church’s sex abuse problems.

He’s playing word games, and managed to successfully derail the discussion into a debate over how young the victims have to be for it to count as pedophilia — Donohue is claiming that once a kid is over 12 or 13, he’s fair game. At that age, it’s just homosexuality.

Where to even begin? The problem is not the sex of his victims, it’s that this was a priest abusing his authority, acting as a sexual predator on much, much younger members of his flock — young people who were in his charge, who were dependent on him, and who had been indoctrinated with the belief that they should trust the priest. Donohue is resorting to arguing that because a 13-year-old had pubic hair, he had the full autonomy of an adult and the abuse of the priest was simply a love affair between equals. And that is bullshit.

It’s a mistake to get into an argument about a chronological dividing line at all. The one thing Donohue is really good at, though, is spewing out distractions, and that’s what he has accomplished here — he’s obscuring a clear pattern of abuse with a lot of irrelevant noise.

That’s a rather severe penalty for woo

Ali Hussain Sibat seems to be a bit of a kook. He was on a silly television show in the Middle East in which he’d make paranormal predictions, and he also was making a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. The latter was considered just fine; the former has got him in big trouble. The Saudi government convicted him of sorcery and is planning to decapitate him.

Now that is barbarism. Here in America we let fortune-telling frauds get rich, instead.

Dont speed in Seattle!

I’ll be visiting the family in the Pacific Northwest later this summer, and I’m going to be very, very careful on the road. The police are authorized to torture you for traffic violations; the courts have recently decided that a case of a pregnant woman who was tasered for refusing to sign a traffic ticket was a fair use of force.

The woman was driving her 12-year-old to the African American Academy in Seattle when she was pulled over on suspicion of speeding in 2004. The child left the car for school and a verbal spat with the police resulted in the woman receiving three, 50,000-volt shocks, first to her thigh, then shoulder and neck while she was in her vehicle. An officer was holding Brooks’ arm behind Brooks’ back while she was being shocked.

Brooks gave the officer her driver’s license, but Brooks refused to sign the ticket — believing it was akin to signing a confession. She was ultimately arrested for refusing to sign and to comply with officers asking her to exit the vehicle.

You know what the police should do in these cases? Add penalties to the ticket, refer it to the courts, and hit her up with extra fines. Wrestling her out of the car and zapping her with intent to cause pain is a bit out of line, and really didn’t contribute to the enforcement of the law.

The court’s decision is bizarre.

The majority noted that the M26 Taser was set in “stun mode” and did not cause as much pain as when set on “dart mode.” The majority noted that the circuit’s recent and leading decision on the issue concerned excessive force in the context of a Taser being set on Dart mode, which causes “neuro-muscular incapacitation.”

Stun mode, the court noted, didn’t rise to the level of excessive force because it imposes “temporary, localized pain only.”

So it’s OK for the police to cause pain for traffic offenses? Maybe they should be equipped with cattle prods.