(Former NYC Mayor) Edward Koch on Anti-Catholicism

Jerusalem Post, Thursday Apr 08, 2010 http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/koch/entry/he_that_is_without_sin

Koch's Comments: He that is without sin, let him cast the next stone - enough already

Posted by Ed Koch

I believe the continuing attacks by the media on the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI have become manifestations of anti-Catholicism. The procession of articles on the same events are, in my opinion, no longer intended to inform, but simply to castigate. &&& The dynamic evidence page It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Parents Do It -- Often!

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_rape#Rape_of_children:

Psychologists estimate that 40 million adults, 15 million of those being men (Adams 1991), in the United States were sexually abused in childhood often by parents, close relatives and other elders on whom they were dependent. According to the National Center for Victims of Crime 46% of rape committed in the United States is perpetrated by a family member.

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Judges Do It Too?

ARTICLE: LITIGATING WOMEN'S RIGHTS AS HUMAN RIGHTS: THE CASE OF UNITED STATES v. LANIER

Spring, 1998

7 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Women's Stud. 329

Author

Mary-Christine Sungaila *

Excerpt

In 1992, David Lanier, the elected Chancery Court judge for Dyer and Lake Counties in Tennessee and heir to his family's local political dynasty, became the first sitting judge to be convicted under 18 U.S.C. 242. ² Section 242 provides for federal prosecution of government officials who breach the public trust by unjustly using their authority to deprive others of their constitutional rights. ³ Judge Lanier's unconstitutional abuse of power was manifested in a particularly shocking way: he sexually assaulted and raped, in his chambers, female court employees, employee applicants and litigants over whom he had continuing jurisdiction - once while wearing his judicial robe. ⁴ He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison on five misdemeanor and two felony counts for his assaults on five women. ⁵ But the saga of Judge Lanier did not end there. Initially affirmed, his convictions were subsequently overturned upon en banc rehearing by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. ⁶ The majority en banc opinion concluded that federal charges under 18 U.S.C. 242 should never have been brought. ⁷ The court reasoned that at the time Judge Lanier committed the assaults it was not well-established that sexual assault amounted to a violation of the constitutional right to bodily integrity, and Judge Lanier therefore had no notice that his conduct amounted to a federal (as opposed to only a state) crime. ⁸ Supreme Court review followed, ⁹ and the case instantly became one of national importance. The media widely ... &&&

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Even (Heterosexual, Non-Celibate) Anglican Clergy Members Do It Too!?! (Say It Ain't So, Joe!)

The Age, http://www.reformation.com/CSA/AustrailianAnglicanScandal1.htm

Major sex abuse uncovered in Anglican Church

July 16 2003

A South Australian police task force into child sex abuse within the Anglican Church had identified 217 victims and 48 possible offenders, police said today.

However the number of victims could rise to more than 400 as investigations continued, Police Commissioner Mal Hyde said.

Mr Hyde today likened the scale of police investigations into child sex abuse to those for the infamous Snowtown bodies-in-the-barrels murders in 1999.

"We have well over 200 matters to follow through on at this stage, with the possibility of that number increasing significantly," he told reporters.

"By anyone's measure that's a very, very significant and complex investigation to carry forward.

"I certainly don't know of any similar investigation on this scale within this state.

"The Snowtown case would have to rank up there but in a different kind of way."

Of the 217 victims identified, police said 136 cases involved the Anglican Church while the others related to other churches and organisations.

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Do Police Officers Do It Too?

Southern California -- this just in

Rape charges filed against Westminster police officer, state corrections officer

April 6, 2010 | 7:03 pm

A Westminster police detective and a corrections officer were charged Tuesday in the alleged rape and kidnapping of a 25-year-old restaurant worker in Ontario.

Westminster Police Det. Anthony Nicholas Orban, 30, was arrested Saturday on suspicion of kidnapping the woman at Ontario Mills Mall and raping her at gunpoint. Corrections Officer Jeff Thomas Jelinek, 30, from the Chino Institution for Men, was arrested on suspicion of carjacking and is being as an accessory to the crime.

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Teachers Do It Too

Middle school teacher charged with rape of student

Middle school teacher charged with rape of student

By TERRI SANGINITI • The News Journal • April 2, 2010

A Colonial School District math teacher was jailed today after allegedly engaging in sexual activity with one of his middle school students and soliciting nude photos from another.

State police charged Umar Ahmad, 37, of Denny Circle in Bear, with felony first-degree rape and felony sexual solicitation of a [female] child, agency spokesman Senior Cpl. Jeff Whitmarsh said.

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Baptist Leader on Sexual Misconduct by Baptist Clergy

Associated Baptist Press (April 5, 2010), http://www.abpnews.com/content/view/5017/9/: Catholic sex-abuse cases share window in Baptist house

By Norman Jameson

Monday, April 05, 2010

Norman Jameson (ABP) -- It's easy for non-Catholic Christians to observe from a distance the clergy sex-abuse controversies that torment the Catholic Church. We take comfort that the deviant behavior of sick "celibate" priests did not occur within the confines of our own churches. ... Sex abuse in the church is not a Catholic crisis alone. A skeptical public repulsed at news of a priest abusing 200 deaf boys lumps local church leaders into the same putrid pot. All Christians are stained in the sweep of the same broad brush, but a Baylor University School of Social Work study released last fall suggests that tainting is not without foundation. The study found just over 3 percent -- or seven women in a typical congregation with 400 adult members -- have been victims of clergy sexual misconduct since they turned 18. American Catholics have instituted rules that immediately and forever remove a man from the priesthood who is shown to be guilty of abuse. The pope apologized for the sexual abuse of minors and pledged that pedophiles would not be allowed to become priests in the Catholic Church. The Vatican even instituted reforms to prevent future abuse in the U.S. by requiring background checks for church employees and issued new rules disallowing ordination of men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies." Sex-abuse cases also rock Baptist churches. Individually they are just as bad, and collectively we are doing a lot less than the Catholics about resolution. Southern Baptists as a national entity have nothing in place to prevent abusers from carrying their satchels of pain to another church or to yank credentials from an abusive clergyman. A motion to institute a national registry of abusers was rejected by the Southern Baptist Executive Committee in 2008 on the basis of church autonomy. The Executive Committee recommended instead that churches run background checks through an already available U.S. Department of Justice system. That system contains names only of those convicted of a crime and not those times when a church forces a minister to leave and keep the reasons unstated to avoid lawsuits or embarrassment. We want to forgive and redeem, so we too easily accept apologies and promises of the offender never to do it again. Several websites list Christians charged with sex abuses and crimes, and a shocking number of them are Baptists. The list of stories related to the arrest of Baptist church staff across the country for crimes against members of their flocks stretches on and on. ... Writing recently about churches and sexual abuse, Christian ethicist David Gushee said: "The Baptist situation may be no better than the Catholic, only shielded more deeply from view. This situation demands reform, immediately, for the sake of the vulnerable and abused children among us -- not to mention for the sake of the gospel witness, so desecrated by the abuse behind our stained glass windows."

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Heterosexual Sexual Predation & Celibacy & Protestant Sexual Predators

Yesterday the New York Times carried an article -- along with some inevitable words of opprobrium by a representative of SNAP -- about a Catholic priest who sexually assaulted a woman.

Question 1. Does this case have a connection with the issue of celibacy? Question 1A. Are celibate male clergy members more likely to stalk and sexually assault women than non-celibate male clergy are? Is that hypothesis counterintuitive? Are there statistics to back up that hypothesis?

Question 2. Do non-celibate non-Catholic male clergy members stalk and sexually assault women more often than celibate Catholic clergy members do?

Question 3. What is newsworthy about this story about a male Catholic priest who sexually assaulted a woman? Has no Protestant male clergy member recently sexually assaulted a woman? I don't understand the point of the story -- unless, that is, I impute base motives or prejudices to the New York Times.

I guess I'm on a campaign. So be it.


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The dynamic evidence page
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A Closer Look at Spindle Law's Evidence Module

Top level:

Proof:

Admissibility:

Weight and sufficiency:

See the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Inference from Signs

People long ago -- in the ancient Greek world -- talked much about inference from signs. Indeed, what we today call factual inference was not discussed under the heading "evidence," which then had a quite different meaning. See James Allen, Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence (Clarendon 2001). By the late 19th century talk about inference from signs was largely passe [accent over the "e"]. However, Charles Saunders Peirce revived talk about signs. The strange breed of theorists known as semioticians aside, scholars today do not think about signs the way the ancients did. Rather, theorizing about signs is viewed an adjunct to abductive inference. However, the ancient debates about inference from signs -- or, in any event, some of those debates -- may be pertinent to modern theorizing about drawing inferences about matters such as human writings and utterances. Moreover, although we do not want to import "intelligent design" theories into modern theorizing about inference, some sort of talk about evidence as some sort of cosmic "sign" may be necessary -- because, as Einstein and others have noted, that the universe is or can become (to some degree) intelligible to the human mind is a great mystery (and it is doubtful that crude forms of evolutionary biology will resolve this mystery in a non-circular way).

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

Redone Taxonomy of First Part of the Law of Evidence and Proof

I have tentatively redone the outline of the first part of Spindle Law's evidence module. The major sections of the the first part of my taxonomy of the law of evidence now look like this:

Do you approve? Disapprove?

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The dynamic evidence page

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Disappearing and Moving Corpses, Statistical Analysis, and Causal Explanation

In an earlier post I mentioned Stanislaw Lem's The Investigation, which was originally published in Polish in 1959. As I reported earlier, in Lem's novel "corpses mysteriously begin disappearing from mortuaries in and near London. A statistician is brought in to help with the investigation." I have not yet read the whole book. However, I skimmed ahead this morning and I found that the statistician has reappeared. In the interim, corpses have apparently been moving about. The question is, perhaps, who or what has been moving them or making them move. However, the statistician -- Dr. Sciss -- believes that is the wrong question:

"This isn't a criminal investigation, it's a scientific study." He [Sciss] stood up and continued. "What do you want--an explanation? You'll get it, don't worry."

"... This case has nothing at all in common with criminology. No offense of any kind was committed, no more than when someone is killed by a meteor."

"You mean that the operative causes are ... forces of nature," Gregory [a police detective, the novel's hero] asked....

"... Can you define those 'forces of nature' you mention so glibly? The problem in this case is strictly methodological. ..."

...

"Please look over here." [Sciss points at a map of England. The map is covered with red speckling in different degrees of density.]

... "Do you recognize the lightest area over here?"

"Yes. That's the area of Norfolk where the bodies were stolen."

"Wrong. This map shows the distribution of deaths from cancer in England for the last nineteen years. The region with the lowest death rate--that is, less than thirty percent...--falls within the boundaries of the area in which the corpses disappeared. In other words, there is an inverse proportion; I have formulated an equation to express it, but I won't go into that because you wouldn't understand it." ...

"It is your primary duty to respect the facts. Some corpses disappeared. How? The evidence suggests they walked away by themselves. Of course, you, as a policeman, want to know if anyone helped them. The answer is yes: they were helped by whatever causes shells to be dextrorotatory. But one in every ten million snail shells is sinistrorsal. This is a fact that can be verified statistically. I was assigned to determine the connection between one phenomenon and other phenomena. That's all science ever does, and all that it will ever do--until the end. Resurrection? Don't be ridiculous. The term is used much too loosely. ...[T]he corpses moved around, changed their positions in space. I agree, but the things you're talking about are nothing but facts--I have explanations!"

...

"A phenomenon is subject to analysis only if the structure of its events, as in this case, conforms to a regular pattern. ... If I were to ask why a rock falls, you would reply that it is due to the actions of gravity. Yet if I asked what gravity is, there would be no answer. But even though we don't know what gravity is, we can determine its regular pattern of action."

I wonder how the story unwinds. I will have to find out. It appears that a motive force underlying the plot is a struggle between statistical explanation and causal explanation! Which one prevails? Or is the victor an entirely different type of explanation? If so, what?

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The True Origin of Holistic Theories of Evidence and Inference?

See Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Pocket Books 1987).

A very belated hat tip to Alex Paykin, investigator extraordinaire!

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