After all, some Muslims fall apart into frightened hysterics when someone draws a cartoon. It’s happened again; a couple of Muslim kooks have been arrested for threatening to murder a cartoonist. Lars Vilks’ crime was drawing Mohammed as a dog.

Although it could have been greed that motivated them.

In 2007, a group linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq offered a $100,000 (£66,000) reward for killing Mr Vilks, and a 50% bonus if he was “slaughtered like a lamb” by having his throat cut.

Either way, they’re pathetic criminals.

It’s more of the same; the deeper they dig into the Irish Catholic Church, the filthier it gets. The latest news is a revelation from the senior cleric in Ireland.

Cardinal Sean Brady, primate of all-Ireland, admitted he was present at meetings where two abused teenagers were made to sign vows of silence.

He was part of a cover-up. In a case of known sex-offender priest, Brady helped conceal the truth about this monster by compelling the victims to silence. And now he shows no guilt, saying “Frankly I don’t believe that this is a resigning matter.” Why? Because he was only following orders.

I’ve heard that excuse somewhere else, before.

Wow. Bill Donohue is going to love Andrew Brown. Brown has written a defense of the Catholic church titled “Catholic child abuse in proportion“; you can tell right away exactly where it is going to be going. ‘Only’ 4% of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and as much as 27% of American women report a history of childhood sexual abuse (to quote just a pair of statistics he uses), therefore, Catholic priests aren’t that bad. Which means…

Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won’t stop a steady trickle of scandals; but I think that objectively your child is less likely to be abused by a Catholic or Anglican priest in the west today than by the members of almost any other profession.

He doesn’t mention any statistics on any other profession. So kids are more likely to be raped by your local policeman, college professor, grade school teacher, construction worker, farmer, dentist, carpenter, plumber, doctor, or whatever than your local priest? Brown hasn’t shown any evidence at all that that is the case. And I think he would have an even tougher job trying to demonstrate that rapists in these other professions do it while carrying out their duties, or while wearing a uniform of propriety in quite the same way priests do.

As for this claim that priests now have tight safeguards…I haven’t seen any evidence at all of that. The Catholic church doesn’t seem to be cleaning house at all, nor does it have any history of doing so; the pattern has been to hide and protect abusers in their ranks, until they are dragged out into the light by secular investigations.

And then Brown goes ahead and lists a series of reasons why the pattern of Catholic abuse has been regarded with an especially deserved horror. Doesn’t he even read what he writes?

So why the concentration on Catholic priests and brothers? Perhaps I am unduly cynical, but I believe that all institutions attempt to cover up institutional wrongdoing although the Roman Catholic church has had a higher opinion of itself than most, and thus a greater tendency to lie about these things. Because it is an extremely authoritarian institution at least within the hierarchy, it is also one where there were few checks and balances on the misbehaviour of the powerful. The scandal has been loudest and most damaging in Ireland, because it came along just at the moment when the church was losing its power over society at large, and where it was no longer able to cover up what had happened, but still willing to try. Much the same is true in the diocese of Boston which was bankrupted by the scandal.

Hmmm. Andrew Brown is a member of a beleagured institution, journalism, which by his own argument should have just as large a proportion of people who carry out child rape in the execution of their responsibilities as do Catholic priests. I think he therefore has a responsibility to turn whistleblower and report all of his colleagues who have gone out to interview children and abused their authority to obtain sex. Surely, the Guardian must be harboring nests of pedophiles that the newspaper protects by shuffling them out to distant assignments when their crimes become excessive.

Stop protecting child-raping journalists, Brown, and come clean. You’ve convinced me, they must be just as bad as the Catholic priesthood.

There are two very encouraging facts about this article on scientology in the NY Times.

One is that it got published. Once upon a time, newspapers and magazines hesitated to criticize scientology at all, because they’d immediately sic an army of lawyers on the publication, and any journalists involved face some fierce harassment. They probably still do that, but their triumphantly oppressive days are over.

The other is this fascinating disclosure.

The church is vague about its membership numbers. In 11 hours with a reporter over two days, Mr. Davis, the church’s spokesman, gave the numbers of Sea Org members (8,000), of Scientologists in the Tampa-Clearwater area (12,000) and of L. Ron Hubbard’s books printed in the last two and a half years (67 million). But asked about the church’s membership, Mr. Davis said, “I couldn’t tell you an exact figure, but it’s certainly, it’s most definitely in the millions in the U.S. and millions abroad.”

He said he did not know how to account for the findings in the American Religious Identification Survey that the number of Scientologists in the United States fell from 55,000 in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008.

That’s a rather precipitous fall. If they can keep shedding believers at that rate, this will be scientology’s last decade.

It certainly isn’t the Netherlands.

This isn’t news any more. News would be an official Catholic organization that wasn’t a front for repressed perverts and apologists for child abuse.

A young child at a Boulder pre-school has been kicked out for an awful crime. The child was enrolled in a Catholic preschool, and also has two mommies. I’ll leave you to guess which of those two is the awful crime.

According to teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, a meeting was held Tuesday to discuss the issue. The staff was told a student would not be allowed to re-enroll because of his or her parents’ sexual orientation. The staff members were also told not to talk to the media.

Another interesting twist is that the staff at the school are described as “disgusted” with the decision; it came from on high, straight from the priests at the archdiocese. It’s a case of the more secular staff knowing what the decent thing they ought to be doing is, and the religious buffoons using their holy dogma to do evil.

Back when we bought our house, one of the things that we liked about it is that it’s a somewhat quirky place, with an odd layout and a few old 50s touches. One thing I didn’t care for is the decor of the upstairs; it’s got this vivid scarlet carpeting everywhere, and one of the bedrooms was (it’s been repainted now) wallpapered with bright green shamrocks. I joked that we could open a brothel for leprechauns up there if we wanted to make a little extra money.

You know, if I’d been moving into the Vatican, instead, I’d probably have made a similar joke — all that garish, gaudy excess and all the men wondering around in flamboyant dress would have probably moved me to joke that we could open a brothel for gay priests here.

What do you know, it’s true. There is a gay prostitution scandal in the Vatican right now. I am in awe. On top of the child abuse scandals in Ireland and Germany, this is just icing on top of a rotten, wormy, corrupt cake.

And this afternoon, I’m going to have to sweep the upstairs bedroom for any sneaky leprechauns.