What’s wrong with watching porn?

Cross posted

Now that the Labour party caucus has castigated the people concerned, and some MPs have been sin-binned, and it might be possible to be heard above the rapidly subsiding roar, I’m going to add my tuppence worth.

For people reading in Australia and further afield, New Zealand has been having its very own little ministerial and MPs expenses scandal. But being New Zealand, it’s all very small beer. No moat cleaning or duck houses or pricey toasters as there were in the UK. In NZ, it’s been a matter of ministers having a few drinks on the taxpayers’ tab, or getting a massage, or putting some purchases on the Crown plastic instead of a personal one (notably some golf clubs and a bike). Even then, the money was refunded almost before the bill came due, but the minister in question nevertheless thought that the taxpayer was a jolly good source of short term credit.

The biggest offence seems to have been one minister who spent his lonely nights in hotels watching pay-per-view porn, and putting it on the Crown tab. Again, it was all repaid, well before the minister left office, and several years before the press got wind of it. He tried in the first instance to pretend that he was just a movie buff, but when a little bit of press digging revealed that his movies cost $19.95 each (the standard price for porn) and regular movies cost $14.95 each, he had to change his tune. To his credit, when his cover was blown he fronted the press, admitted his misdeeds, made his apologies, and asked for forgiveness.

The issue in the NZ press and the NZ blogosphere has been whether or not it is appropriate to put private expenditure on taxpayer funded credit cards, even if the private expenditure is subsequently repaid. The answer is no. I agree with that answer.

Everyone has very very carefully said that watching porn is not an issue. Oh no, what a person does in the privacy of their own room is their business and its private and there’s no public interest in poking our noses in there and people’s sexuality is their own affair.

Hmmm….

You can’t be raped if you’re wearing skinny jeans

WTF!

This is an actual heading in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Rape of woman in skinny jeans ‘not possible’

A jury asked for more information about how a woman’s clothes were removed during an alleged rape (I have to say ‘alleged’ because the accused has been acquitted).

During the trial the jury sent a note to the judge asking for more information about ”how exactly Nick took off her jeans”.

”I doubt those kind of jeans can be removed without any sort of collaboration,” the note read.

But you know what, even if she did ‘collaborate’, and I’m not for a moment suggesting she did, it’s rape from the moment she says, “No” or “Stop” or “I don’t want to do this” or tries to get away or gives any of the myriad indications that she no longer agrees to sex. And that’s what this woman says she did. Even before the alleged rapist pulled her jeans off, she struggled to get away.

It’s just a sick version of the “she was asking for it because she wore revealing clothes” trope. Only this time it’s dressed up as being about logic and evidence; she was asking for it because you couldn’t possibly tear those clothes off a woman.

This woman, by the way, weighs a mere 42 kilos. She’s tiny. Why didn’t the jury give any consideration to that in their deliberations?

Can the Pope be impeached?

Pope Benedict XVI

Something is rotten in the Vatican.

It seems that when Benedict XVI was Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich and Freising, he approved “rehousing” a priest who was accused of child abuse. That means that instead of turning the matter over to the civil authorities, and allowing it to be investigated, he took active steps to ensure that the matter was covered up. That particular priest was later convicted of abusing more children.

Benedict’s PR corps has sprung into action, saying that there have been “aggressive attempts” to drag him into the scandal surrounding priests who abused children and the cover-up by the church. (I can’t find a relevant press release on the Vatican site, just an invitation to accredited journalists to attend a press conference, I think… my knowledge of Italian lies somewhere between non-existent and extremely scanty.)

“Aggressive”. Meaning, their subjects are getting a bit uppity, asking awkward questions, daring to demand that the church’s hierarchy lives up to the ideals it imposes on others.

The spin doctors have also said that Benedict’s participation in the cover-up was “unwitting”. Right… if you believe that, then I’ve got a rather nice painted ceiling in a spiffy basilica in Rome to sell to you. Even so, he was the chap in charge in that diocese, and it happened on his watch. Funny how this allegedly erudite and punctilious man, known as a micro-manager, didn’t known about this event in his diocese. Or maybe it was like being part of the Hitler Youth. Just following the rules, you know. Obeying orders and all that. (There’s some quick Vatican footwork going on with respect to that episode too.)

There’s some very fancy Vatican two-step going on with the blame game and pedophile priests. Take a look at this statement.

[Monsignor Zollitsch, Archbishop of Freiburg] added that paedophilia was not confined to the Roman Catholic Church. [link]

Indeed it is not. Neither is the covering-up of paedophilia purely a Catholic phenomenon. But when a man stands in front of a congregation one day, and tells them how they ought to behave, and purports to act as a channel for God, and the next day rapes a child, then there are two things wrong with his actions. The first is the terrible crime committed against the child, and the second is being a sanctimonious hypocrite. If the Catholic church wants to claim that it is an institution devoted to holiness, then its clerics need to hold themselves to a much higher standard of behaviour than other institutions, and the church itself needs to show that it will not tolerate such horrible sins.

And then there’s this statement from Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who is the Vatican’s prosecutor for clergy sex abuse cases.

Only about 10 percent of the case dealt with “acts of true pedophilia,” Scicluna said, while 60 percent of the cases involved priests who were sexually attracted to male adolescents. Some 30 percent of cases dealt with heterosexual abuse, he said. [link]

I’m not sure what “true pedophilia” is, but I’m guessing that it’s to do with pre-adolescent children. I wonder if that means that Scicluna thinks that it’s not as bad abusing adolescents? Even so, there are still two problems here. One is that many of those adolescents will almost undoubtedly be below the age of consent. And the second is the hypocrisy charge. Because no matter what, when any priest of the Roman Catholic church has sex with any individual, consenting or non-consenting, adult or child, he is breaking his vows, and not living up to the standards that he preaches.

I also detect the makings of a very nasty sidestep here. Benedict has made some horrid statements about homosexuality, saying that it is intrinsically disordered, and that homosexual men can not be allowed to become priests. He is profoundly anti-gay. And in this statement, his delegate is blaming the majority of pedophilia on gay men. It’s a classic scapegoating move.

Benedict is up to his ears in the cover-up of sexual abuse by priests. He wrote the 2001 instruction to clergy to keep abuse cases confidential (that’s a polite way of saying, “cover-up”). Cardinals and bishops world-wide took that as instructions not to go to the police. Now it turns out, of course, that they were the ones who made the mistake. Apparently it was never supposed to be a ban, just something to protect the victims.

At the Vatican, rules on handling sexual abuse were “never understood as a ban on making a complaint to civil authorities,” Monsignor Charles Scicluna said.

But Irish bishops have said the document was widely taken to mean that they shouldn’t go to police. And victims’ attorneys in the United States say the document shows that the church tried to obstruct justice. [link]

The Vatican has tried to make some reassuring noises, saying that even though it hasn’t prosecuted many cases of priests abusing children, it has imposed its own penalties.

[Sicluna] said that 60% of the cases had not come to trial, largely because of the advanced age of the accused, but that they faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions”, including being required to live in seclusion and prohibition from celebrating Mass. [link]

In other words, the offenders have been allowed to run away and hide, and they have never faced prosecution by the authorities in the countries in which they live. It’s criminous clerics all over again.

I see an on-going, organised, liturgy of lies, and failures to tell the truth, a determination to be untruthful and to dissemble. Benedict seems to be completely unable to face the horrible reality that abuse of children has been systemic in the Roman Catholic church. Even worse than that, it now seems that he has assisted in allowing clerics to escape prosecution for their crimes, and he continues to allow the church he leads to cover-up and minimise these terrible deeds.

I do not think that this is just a matter of one bad man in power leading the church astray. Benedict was elected by the College of Cardinals in 2005, only four years after he sent out his cover-up rules. The men who elected him knew that he was responsible for that directive; they knew the calibre of the man they were electing. They too must bear some of the responsibility for allowing this man to become the leader of the church.

Of course, they might shuffle their feet, and claim that it is the holy spirit working through them who elected Benedict. But do they really think that this is what the holy spirit is working for, a church that engages in lies and deceit and sophistical obfuscations. Or perhaps the ghostie is playing a long game, hoping that the maldeeds of the church hierarchy will become so noisome that the whole structure will collapse. That is of course, somewhat immoral with respect to the treatment of the people who are damaged en route, but I suppose god might be a utilitarian after all.

What of the ordinary Catholics, the priests who are doing good and faithful service, the people sitting in the pews, doing their best to lead good lives, and to follow the teachings of their god? I suppose that many of them just accept the church hierarchy as something over there, far away from them, and get on with the affairs of their own parish. Others, I think, must feel that the church they love is being stolen from them, and the only thing that they can do is keep gong to church, and hope that they will in time, be able to take it back. And others must actually support the Pope and his scarlet cohorts.

The problem is that it is impossible to tell which Catholics support the Pope, and which are just people hoping to save their church. At present, their attendance in the pews looks very much like support for the church hierarchy, and for its misdeeds. When will they stand up, and demand change?

Full of win

I clicked through to the article about training bar staff to intervene to reduce the risk of rape, thinking, “No doubt it will all be all about telling women to stay safe.”

I was wrong.

Dr McGregor said staff … needed to be aware of the sexual risks for heavy drinkers.

“We are teaching bar staff how to keep patrons safe – identifying predatory males, and being aware of the consent laws,” she said.

“They don’t understand that it’s rape if you have sex with someone who is so stupefied by alcohol or drugs that they can’t give consent.

…

Programme co-ordinator Kylie Tippett said the workshops trained bar staff to watch out for “red flags” such as patrons being sexually harassed, being plied with double or triple drinks or drugs without their knowledge, simply getting drunk very quickly, or leaving the bar with no way to get to their next destination safely.

She said security staff could approach offenders and say, “We have noticed your inappropriate sexual behaviour towards women or men this evening. We don’t tolerate harassment on these premises – either stop or you’ll be asked to leave.”

There’s not a word of victim blaming in it. Perhaps that’s because the programme has been put together by police and ACC, in conjunction with Rape Prevention Education.

It’s not sex – it’s …

Another case for the “It’s not sex, it’s rape” files, except that this time, I’m not sure that “rape” is the right word to use.

This case concerns murder and sexual violation. It could be triggering, so the rest of the post is below the cut, and I’ve included some blank space so that you can flick past this on your feedreader without having to read the details, even inadvertently.