Monday, June 18, 2007
260 reports of abuse yearly in Protestant churches
SEX SCANDALS Long-sought number surfaces
BY ROSE FRENCH
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The three companies that insure the majority of Protestant churches in America say they typically receive upward of 260 reports each year of young people under 18 being sexually abused by clergy, church staff, volunteers or congregation members.
The figures offer a glimpse into what has long been an extremely difficult phenomenon to pin down -- the frequency of sex abuse in Protestant congregations.
Religious groups and victims' supporters have been interested in the figure ever since the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis hit five years ago. The church has revealed that there have been 13,000 credible accusations against Catholic clerics since 1950 -- 228 a year.
Protestant numbers have been harder to come by because the denominations are less centralized than the Catholic church. Some of the only numbers come from three insurance companies -- Church Mutual Insurance Co., GuideOne Insurance Co. and Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Co. Together, they represent a large chunk of all U.S. Protestant churches.
Abuse reports don't always mean the accused was guilty.
Even with hundreds of cases a year ''that's a very small number. That probably doesn't even constitute half,'' said Gary Schoener of the Walk-In Counseling Center in Minneapolis. ''Sex abuse in any domain, including the church, is reported seldom.''
Insurance officials said churches are working harder to prevent child sex abuse by conducting background checks, installing windows in play areas and requiring at least two adults in a room.
Patrick Moreland of Church Mutual said churches are particularly susceptible to abusers.
''By their nature, congregations are the most trusting of organizations, so that makes them attractive targets for predators,'' he said.
BY ROSE FRENCH
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The three companies that insure the majority of Protestant churches in America say they typically receive upward of 260 reports each year of young people under 18 being sexually abused by clergy, church staff, volunteers or congregation members.
The figures offer a glimpse into what has long been an extremely difficult phenomenon to pin down -- the frequency of sex abuse in Protestant congregations.
Religious groups and victims' supporters have been interested in the figure ever since the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis hit five years ago. The church has revealed that there have been 13,000 credible accusations against Catholic clerics since 1950 -- 228 a year.
Protestant numbers have been harder to come by because the denominations are less centralized than the Catholic church. Some of the only numbers come from three insurance companies -- Church Mutual Insurance Co., GuideOne Insurance Co. and Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Co. Together, they represent a large chunk of all U.S. Protestant churches.
Abuse reports don't always mean the accused was guilty.
Even with hundreds of cases a year ''that's a very small number. That probably doesn't even constitute half,'' said Gary Schoener of the Walk-In Counseling Center in Minneapolis. ''Sex abuse in any domain, including the church, is reported seldom.''
Insurance officials said churches are working harder to prevent child sex abuse by conducting background checks, installing windows in play areas and requiring at least two adults in a room.
Patrick Moreland of Church Mutual said churches are particularly susceptible to abusers.
''By their nature, congregations are the most trusting of organizations, so that makes them attractive targets for predators,'' he said.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Celebrating Anita Bryant: The Mother of Gay Rights
Anita Bryant in 1977: "I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children"
In 1977, singer Anita Bryant successfully campaigned to repeal a Dade County ordinance banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians. [The recently called home Rev. Jerry] Falwell came to South Florida in support and two years later created the Moral Majority. Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly quickly joined Falwell in becoming outspoken opponents of gay rights."This is where they all had their stage debut," said Jack Rutland, executive director of the Stonewall Library & Archives and organizer of the exhibit "Days Without Sunshine: Anita Bryant's Anti-Gay Crusade ""In a completely unintended way, Anita Bryant was about the best thing to happen to the gay rights movement," said John Coppola, exhibit curator and former head of exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "She and her cohorts were so over the top that it just completely galvanized the gay rights movement."Rutland goes so far as to call Bryant the mother of the gay rights movementBryant, now 67, declined to comment when contacted at her Anita Bryant Ministries International Inc. in Oklahoma City.
That's probably because Anita herself hasn't fared so well.
Singing from the age of two, Bryant became Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and was a second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America beauty pageant. She had three big pop hits: "'Til There Was You" (1959); "Paper Roses" (1960); and "In My Little Corner of the World" (1960). In 1960, she married Bob Green, a Miami disc jockey, with whom she eventually raised four children. She became a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission in 1969, and nationally televised commercials featured her singing "Come to the Florida Sunshine tree", and opining that "A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine".concerns over homosexual recruitment of children inspired the name of Bryant's political organization, Save Our Children. Among Bryant's assertions during the campaign were "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children" and "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nailbiters."
Bryant was also a pioneer on the receiving side of getting "pied," as the YouTube video above shows. Before she took that pie in the face during an anti-gay press junket, such tactics were rare. So anyone who enjoyed seeing Ann Coulter pied should really thank Anita for leading the way.
But Anita's fortunes took a dive after she spoke out.
Her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission also was allowed to lapse because of the negative publicity generated by her political campaigns, the resulting boycott of Florida orange juice, and, at least reportedly, because of her divorce.Her marriage to Bob Green failed at that time and in 1980 she divorced him. She married her second husband, Charlie Hobson Dry, in 1990, and they have tried to reestablish her career in a series of small venues. Commercial success has been elusive, and they have left behind them a series of unpaid employees and creditors. They filed for bankruptcy in Arkansas (1997) and in Tennessee (2001).
Monday, June 04, 2007
Dr. James Holsinger was tapped by President Bush to be the nation's next Surgeon General
Dr. James Holsinger was tapped by President Bush Thursday to be the nation's next Surgeon General. Sure enough, Holsinger's record is mired with incompetence, zealous conservatism, and, of course, sizable campaign contributions to Republicans.
As Chief Medical Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs under Bush's father, Dr. Holsinger was neglecting our vets long before Walter Reed made it fashionable. A government investigation found "several cases in which incompetence and neglect led to the deaths of patients." Dr. Holsinger was forced to admit blame for the deaths of six patients in less than a year at a single Chicago hospital alone.
But the problems weren't limited to Chicago. In a Wyoming, a patient scheduled for surgery for a treatable cancer died after he was ignored for 45 days following the resignation of the staff urologist over a contract dispute. Thirty VA hospitals were found to have "high numbers of patient complications and other indicators of substandard care."
A decade later, Dr. Holsinger was appointed Kentucky's Cabinet Secretary for Health and Family Services. By the end of his tenure, a Kentucky newspaper found that the state was at the bottom of the nation for almost every health measure. Kentuckians die at a rate of 18 percent above the national average, the newspaper reported.
"We don't have to worry about foreign aggressors. We are killing ourselves off," said Dr. Baretta Casey, a Hazard physician and University of Kentucky professor. "I see a lot of illnesses similar to a third-world country," added Dr. Sandra Dionisio, a Kentucky internist trained in the Philippines.
"We've got some big mountains to climb," Dr. Holsinger said of the findings, a few months before he jumped ship for a cushy teaching job at the University of Kentucky.
So why does Bush want Dr. Holsinger to be the nation's top doc? For starters, he hates gay people. As president of the United Methodist Church's Judicial Council, Holsinger ruled in 2004 that "the practice of homosexuality is a chargeable offense for clergy" after a highly publicized internal trial for openly lesbian pastor Karen Dammann.
In 1991, Dr. Holsinger resigned from church panel studying homosexuality "because he felt certain its conclusions would follow liberal lines."
Last year, a Methodist pastor blasted Dr. Holsinger for essentially trying to embezzle some $20 million from the Methodist Church through a charity Holsinger chairs. Holsinger has lost in court twice on the matter but continues to appeal through the legal system.
The coup de grace of the Dr. Holsinger story is his more than $16,000 in political donations since 1998 all to Republicans, including George W. Bush. You can bet Cheney also had a role in the appointment since Dr. Holsinger specializes in cardiology.
Dr. Holsinger seems like a great choice for the VP to take hunting, but he hardly seems like the best candidate out of all the doctors in America to become our next Surgeon General.
But the problems weren't limited to Chicago. In a Wyoming, a patient scheduled for surgery for a treatable cancer died after he was ignored for 45 days following the resignation of the staff urologist over a contract dispute. Thirty VA hospitals were found to have "high numbers of patient complications and other indicators of substandard care."
A decade later, Dr. Holsinger was appointed Kentucky's Cabinet Secretary for Health and Family Services. By the end of his tenure, a Kentucky newspaper found that the state was at the bottom of the nation for almost every health measure. Kentuckians die at a rate of 18 percent above the national average, the newspaper reported.
"We don't have to worry about foreign aggressors. We are killing ourselves off," said Dr. Baretta Casey, a Hazard physician and University of Kentucky professor. "I see a lot of illnesses similar to a third-world country," added Dr. Sandra Dionisio, a Kentucky internist trained in the Philippines.
"We've got some big mountains to climb," Dr. Holsinger said of the findings, a few months before he jumped ship for a cushy teaching job at the University of Kentucky.
So why does Bush want Dr. Holsinger to be the nation's top doc? For starters, he hates gay people. As president of the United Methodist Church's Judicial Council, Holsinger ruled in 2004 that "the practice of homosexuality is a chargeable offense for clergy" after a highly publicized internal trial for openly lesbian pastor Karen Dammann.
In 1991, Dr. Holsinger resigned from church panel studying homosexuality "because he felt certain its conclusions would follow liberal lines."
Last year, a Methodist pastor blasted Dr. Holsinger for essentially trying to embezzle some $20 million from the Methodist Church through a charity Holsinger chairs. Holsinger has lost in court twice on the matter but continues to appeal through the legal system.
The coup de grace of the Dr. Holsinger story is his more than $16,000 in political donations since 1998 all to Republicans, including George W. Bush. You can bet Cheney also had a role in the appointment since Dr. Holsinger specializes in cardiology.
Dr. Holsinger seems like a great choice for the VP to take hunting, but he hardly seems like the best candidate out of all the doctors in America to become our next Surgeon General.
Holsinger's nomination will go before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, chaired by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) Presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT) sit on this committee.
mailto: help_comments@help.senate.gov
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Religious Right Leaders Leaders Not Telling the Truth About Hate Crimes Law
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