More horrifying stories are emerging from the Altoona diocese. What needs to be kept in mind is that that area of Pennsylvania is perfectly ordinary and fairly conventional — it is no pit of depravity. It just happens to be a region where Catholic amorality is getting exposed.

“Father Francis McCaa was a monster,” the grand jury stated.

The investigation found 15 of his alleged victims, abused between 1961 and 1985.

“In some cases children tried to report their abuse to their parents … but were not believed … the grand jury aches at hearing the hopelessness these victims felt when being offended on by a pastor they were taught to respect and honor,” the report says. Some parents punished their children for accusing the “friendly” monsignor, the report says, though at one point the bishop at the time, James Hogan, was confronted by a group of “outraged parents” and promised action.

Hogan met with district attorney Gerald Long and assistant DA Patrick Kiniry, both now serving as judges in the area, the report says, though no charges were brought.

McCaa was removed from the diocese and replaced with a priest who is also named in the report as a pedophile.

McCaa retired in 1993 and died in 2007.

I guess he’s in heaven now. I wouldn’t be surprised if St Peter is in on the coverup.

Omer Aziz wrote an article critical of Sam Harris. So, as he likes to do, Harris invited Aziz to a “debate”. Without even considering the content, we can conclude that Harris is a dishonest clown. Take a look at the conditions he set:

So I accepted his offer and every onerous condition that came with it. Once again, all the terms were set by him: I would have to read the essay word for word, he could stop me whenever he wanted, I could not record the talk, and Harris reserved the right not to air it if it was “boring”—a standard to be defined only by him, and only after the fact.

They talked for four hours. Then, later:

A few weeks later, I was surprised then to find the following email in my inbox:

I just listened to our recorded conversation, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t release it as a podcast. Even if I took the time to edit it, I wouldn’t be doing either of us any favors putting it out there. The conversation fails in every way — but, most crucially, it fails to be interesting.

Better luck next time…

Sam

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The grand jury report on the Catholic sexual abuses in Altoona-Johnstown is available for reading, and I’m sorry, it’s practically pornographic. What these people were doing to the children of their community, with the compliance of the police who turned a blind eye to their behavior, is obscene.

In 1971, Father John Boyle groped the genitals of a 15-year-old boy in the basement of St. Edward’s Church in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania on numerous occasions. Boyle also kissed the boy and performed oral sex on him. The boy was confused. He could tast the alcohol on Father Boyle’s mouth. He concluded that what was happening to him must be what the Church called the “mystery of the Church and Priesthood.”

It goes on and on like that for 145 pages. I could not bear to read much of it. But it’s clear that the diocese was knowingly shuffling pedophile priests around, doing nothing about them, and basically enabling the rape of children for decades.

They even had a pay-out schedule for offenses when they were caught at it!

That’s a lot of money. It’s telling that the church hierarchy was willing to fork over that kind of cash rather than actually punishing and stopping their bad priests — and that tells you the whole thing was rotten, root and branch.

Some priests in the Catholic church think that saying 7 is the “age of reason” is synonymous with declaring open season on boys above that age.

Bishop Robert Cunningham of the diocese of Syracuse, NY doesn’t think priests should take all of the blame for decades, if not centuries, of sexual abuse against young boys. According to Cunningham, the “age of reason” in the Catholic church is seven, so those boys are culpable for their actions.

We can at least get the ones who rape 6 year olds then, right?

But this argument doesn’t even make sense. We don’t say that adult women are culpable for their rapes, so being mature and rational doesn’t even come into it. They are victims. These children are victims. They didn’t choose to be abused, it was forced on them.

The only way you can legitimately use this “age of reason” excuse is to suggest that any priests who were under 7 years old were not fully responsible for their actions.

Maryam Namazie wants you all to sign a petition. Would you believe the Iranian state still wants to murder Salman Rushdie, and has put a bounty on his head?

We, the undersigned, are outraged to learn that forty state-run media outlets in Iran have raised $600,000 (£420,000) to add as bounty to Ayatollah Khomeini’s death fatwa on writer Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses.

We condemn the Iranian regime, its fatwa and the added bounty and stand with Salman Rushdie and the many Iranian freethinkers and writers languishing in prison or facing the death penalty for exercising their right to free expression and thought.

The Iranian regime must face global condemnation for its incitement to murder.

I am opposed to state-sponsored assassination of any kind, but to condemn a person to death for writing words on paper is simply appalling. Rushdie has been under this edict of death for almost 30 years now, and it has to stop.

If you’re wondering what this is about, you might want to read up on the latest news about Australia’s favorite defender of priestly pedophiles.

How Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court is mysterious — oh, wait, no it’s not, he was appointed by Reagan and congress basically rolled over for him — but he’s always saying such stupid stuff. The latest is a dismissal of the right of atheists to exist in America.

[Scalia] told the audience at Archbishop Rummel High School that there is no place in the country’s constitutional traditions for the idea that the state must be neutral between religion and its absence.

To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from? he said. To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?

That’s right. I thought it was clear: the government doesn’t get to interfere in private matters of conscience. It’s a concept that really isn’t that hard to understand. There should be no federal bias in favor of Baptists over Catholics, or Christians over Muslims, or religious vs. non-religious — it’s just not their job. It’s worrisome that a Supreme Court justice thinks it is their job.

His excuses are also incredibly stupid.

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I’ve been through Burns, Oregon a few times — don’t remember a thing about it. It’s a nice long empty drive through fairly arid country: lots of rock and sagebrush, and an occasional shallow marshy stream adding a little green to the landscape. There are towns, mostly consisting of a gas station, a tiny post office, and maybe a little cafe, but you just drive on through, because it’s two hours to the next town, and you really want to get this trip over.

So having a mob of ‘militia’ take over a town there isn’t just a criminal act, it’s a cowardly act. They picked a quiet little place which is probably mostly conservative, but conservative in an old-fashioned way that says you leave your neighbor along, and they found themselves a target that is far away from anyone else who might tell them “no”.

I know the kind of people who committed this criminal invasion, too. They also come from small isolated places, the kind where there aren’t many people to talk to, except a few family and friends. They work all day at something mindless and get out of the habit of thinking; they get together with their buddies, or their father, or their grandfather, and they start bouncing their resentments and theories and lonely thoughts off of one another, and there’s no check against reality — it all just reverberates back and forth and gets fed now and then by talk radio and pretty soon they’ve got a goddamned mythos that ennobles them as heroes of the land and the government as their enemy. It’s the only enemy they’ve got. It’s pretty empty out there on the edges of the Palouse. The struggle is against loneliness and low wages and hard work and a future of low prospects, and there isn’t much heroic about fighting those. It’s hard to get your ego fed raging against a hay-baler or that danged bitter wind.

The worst of them are little angry men who get a rush from carrying a gun. And they egg each other on over some little bit of news that frustrates them, and soon enough a gang of idiots are carrying out an act of armed sedition. Nothing too dangerous, it’s not like they rushed a National Guard armory, where they might have gotten shot and where the government might have felt compelled to act fast. Nope, they picked their target with a complete lack of courage.

They took over the headquarters of a regional bird sanctuary, and terrorized the nearby small town. You really can’t get much more picayune than that.

What the government ought to do is bring up a unit of trained soldiers, fire a few warning shots, and tell the criminals to lay down their weapons. But I’m sure that’s what is causing some hesitation is the fact that a battle over a bird sanctuary occupied by twits in gimme caps isn’t exactly going to get featured in the curriculum at West Point. It’s not as if Burns, Oregon is a strategic chokepoint in the War on Terror.

These are clowns who got to caper on the evening news in their prior stunt at Bundy Ranch, and now they’re escalating. Their next act of treason will be bolder. I’m afraid it’s time to stop pussyfooting around and shut these bozos down, call them what they are — domestic terrorists — and bring the whole ratpack into court. Without their guns.

It’s not even as if they’re protesting an injustice. The two ranchers they claim to be defending were convicted of setting fires on federal land, and they aren’t arguing against that: instead, they’re trying to claim that these few farmers have right of ownership over land held in federal trust for all of us — they aren’t demanding fair play, they’re demanding to be given big chunks of property which they’ve already been allowed to use for grazing. They aren’t out for truth, justice, and the American way — this is simply a bunch of yahoos committing extortion for personal gain.

Oh, but there is a little something else: religious fanaticism. These are yokel terrorists, high on self-righteousness, believing god has called on them to die for their cause. To die for an undefended building on a bird sanctuary.

What a bunch of goobers.