Beware of the Keepers of Morality!

The Los Angeles Times investigated the records of the Boy Scouts of America, and their report suggests that the Boy Scouts have an altar boy problem, or more properly, a priestly problem. Or perhaps it is that the Catholic Church has a Scoutmaster problem.

I have told, before, of learning of a rogue Lutheran minister in San Francisco who left his wife to make music with the female organist, that it was not uncommon for Lutheran Synodical leaders (or Bishops) on the East Coast, or the Midwest, to ship clergymen--they were all men, at that time--out west "for a new start".

Everyone knows what a shameful history the Catholic Church has with priests who were not skilled enough to get a job coaching at Penn State, who systematically sexually abused young boys, and how the hierarchy of the Church covered up for them. Just paying reparations for a small fraction of the abusers has nearly bankrupted several dioceses.

To compound the outrage of the way the Boy Scouts has hidden and denied and covered up its own history of sexual abuse, the Boy Scouts have been hounding us for years, refusing to allow gay boys to become Scouts, or young girls to become members. All the while, the leaders of the Scouts have been covering up the sexual abuse committed by its own leaders.

There ought to be a special place in hell for the men who abuse young boys. Maybe the Catholic Church, which is very good at heavenly real estate, could arrange something, and even find a coach or two to lead them in calisthenics. There is a guy in San Francisco who can recommend an organist to play happy music.

If none of that works out, maybe they should just run for public office, and propose laws to keep women from showering together.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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