>Two-Of-A-Kind

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The George ‘Oy! My Aching Back’ Rekers scandal keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Rekers was a founder of the Family Research Council until the scandal broke, but he has now been erased from their website.

Rekers was a professor at the University of South Carolina, but search its website today and you’ll find he no longer exists there.

Rekers was a member of NARTH [National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality] but has resigned and is no longer on their website, save for his “I am not gay” stance.

But then we have the other fallout; the Bill McCollum fallout.

McCollum is running for governor of Florida, but as soon as the story broke that his one-time expert witness, one George Rekers, for Florida’s gay adoption trial was photographed traveling with a male escort from RentBoy.com, McCollum began distancing himself from Reverend George Rekers with a series of misleading statements in an effort to spread the blame. But, as is always the case with those who do the wrong thing and then lie about it, the truth comes out.

While McCollum now says he didn’t want Rekers to testify, letters from 2007 are surfacing which show that it was the Department of Children and Families [DCF] who initially declined to use Reker’s expertise, and expressed concern over his outrageous fees, but it was Bill McCollum who personally and aggressively pushed Rekers as a witness.

In one letter, McCollum wrote, “I believe that this expert and his testimony are necessary to ensure a successful result in this case.” McCollum also rejected DCF’s plan to spend taxpayer money on the expert witness, and his own Department of Legal Affairs paid George Rekers over $120,000, even though DCF only agreed to pay $60,900.

Here is a little Fiction v Fact from the Florida Democrats website:

• FICTION: McCollum “defended his agency’s handling of the case, and steered the blame toward the Department of Children and Families, which he said hired him. ‘I think our team’s done what it should do,’ he said. ‘We’ve been defending the Constitution of the state and we’ve been representing the Department of Children and Families, who hired him and paid him and needed expert witnesses and he was available and credentialed.'” Story HERE.
• FACT: Attorney General Bill McCollum personally urged that the state hire George Rekers, the anti-gay psychologist. Story HERE.

• FICTION: McCollum implied that DCF was to blame in a statement to the press: “The contract was executed at the direction of the Department of Children and Families” without any mention of the 2007 disagreement. Story HERE.
• FACT: DCF said they were concerned about the potential costs of Rekers’ testimony. In a July 2007, letter, DCF’s chief wrote to McCollum: “Due to declining state revenues, this department is under a mandate to reduce its budget by a minimum of $72 million this year. As such I am reluctant to an open-ended contract which could, as you point out, result in an obligation” over $60,900. Story HERE.
• FACT: DCF agreed to McCollum’s team hiring Rekers as long as the cost was limited to $60,900–Rekers was paid over $120,000. Story HERE.

• FICTION: McCollum’s office found that “Rekers was so embarrassing, even back in 2008, that McCollum’s office blamed DCF for finding him. That infuriated a DCF official, who said the Attorney General’s Office found him, which McCollum now confirms.” Story HERE.
• FACT: McCollum, in a letter, agreed that DCF initially refused to hire Rekers, mainly due to the exorbitant cost of his services, and instead DCF wanted to hire Walter Schumm, a professor of family studies at Kansas State University. McCollum wrote: ‘Dr. Schumm is a good expert, but his areas of expertise are different from Dr. Rekers.’ Story HERE.

Keep lying, McCollum, It only shows how much you and George Rekers are two-of-a-kind.

>What’s This?

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After years of moving pedophile priests from parish to parish so they can molest again; after decades of monumental cash settlements to victims of child sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy; after months and months of laying blame for the scandal at the feet of anyone, and everyone, else, from the LGBT community, to the Jews, to Pro-Choice advocates, to the media, the Pope has finally come clean.

Finally.

In his most thorough admission of the church’s guilt in the sex abuse scandal, Pope Benedict has said that the greatest persecution of the Catholic Church “is born from the sins within the church,” and not from a campaign by outsiders.

Finally.

The Pope also said the Catholic church has been tormented by problems of its own making, “in a truly terrifying way….The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice….Forgiveness cannot substitute justice.”

Finally.

Benedict now promises that the church will take action to protect children and make abusive priests face justice; he has begun accepting the resignations of a few bishops who either admitted they molested youngsters or covered up for priests who did.

Still, for some, myself included, it really isn’t enough. While the Pope is scolding his own church, and accepting resignations, no one has been actively punished or defrocked, even those who have admitted to sexually abusing children. Some feel his words are merely words and that action should follow.

Finally.

>Add One More To The List

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Well now. To The Jews, The Gays, The New York Times, The Pro-Choice group, The Marriage Equality People, we can add another reason why Catholic priests are sexually molesting little boys.

TV Eroticism and Internet Porn.

It seems that a Roman Catholic bishop in Mexico is blaming our TV and computer habits for the sex abuse scandal facing the church.

So many reasons, yet none are the fault of the church.

Bishop Felipe Arizmendi: “With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it’s not easy to stay celibate or to respect children. If on television and on the Internet and in so many media outlets there is pornography, it is very difficult to stay pure and chaste. Obviously when there is generalized sexual freedom it’s more likely there could be cases of pedophilia.”

Let me get this queer. If I, say, head over to DavidDust for his Undies On Sunday post, I’m apt to get myself in such a dither that I’ll head on over to the local Catholic church looking for an altar boy.

Or, what happens when I’m channel surfing and I run across an episode of Sex And The City, or, goddess forbid, Spartacus? All that pent up sexual frustration I get from seeing Samantha’s latest boy-toy, or seeing the hot nekkid mens will push me out the door to look for children to molest.

Hey, Bishop Felipe Arizmendi? Instead pointing fingers out, try focusing inward. The scandal is pedophiles, not Jews, Gays, Pro-Choice, Newspapers, TV, or the Internet.

Look inside, Bishop.

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>Calls For Help Still Go Unanswered

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In an effort to save what little face they have left, the Catholic Church in Germany set up an abuse hotline for people calling in to seek advice and report abuses. Nice try. Except that on the first day the hotline was so overwhelmed with calls that it had to be shut down.

Apparently, over 4,000 alleged victims of physical and sexual abuse by Catholic priests called for help; far more than the handful of therapists assigned to deal with them could answer. In the end, just 162 out of 4,459 callers were heard before the system was shut down. The head of the project, Andreas Zimmer, admitted that he wasn’t prepared for “that kind of an onslaught’.

And the scandal continues to grow.

Earlier in the week stories surfaced that Bishop Mixa, an ally of the Pope, was accused of beating children, though the allegations have been denied. Still, several children have come forth to say he beat them with fists and a carpet beater while screaming; ‘The devil is in you and I will drive him out!’

Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who was appointed the bishopric of Trier last year, reported that 20 priests are suspected of having sexually abused children between the 1950s and 1990s, and that three of the cases had been passed on to public prosecutors, with two more soon to follow.

And there is still anothe rcase of pedophilia that Pope Benedict allegedly knew about, this time in the U.S. The Reverend Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became pope, declined to take action.

When the problems of the Catholic Church and it’s abuses, from sexual to physical to emotional, reach all the way to the highest peaks of the churcvh, then the people deserve to hear the Pope respond.

But he stays silent.

Unlike the victims.

>Can The Pope Resign?

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With the ongoing scandal that is the Catholic Church getting bigger and more lurid everyday, there is talk of the Pope resigning. Each day there are new revelations of abuses by church officials to cover up and protect pedophiles, including the news that the current Pope, while a cardinal, aided a pedophile priest into therapy, and then reassigned him to another parish where he began molesting young boys again.

Ireland. Germany. Australia, The US. All sites of new cases of child molestation brought against a church which still seeks to pride itself on protecting children and hating the LGBT community. Many are calling this scandal the Catholic church’s Watergate, and wonder if the Pope will take the same route Nixon did in the 1970s and leave his position. So, with all this mess, people wonder if the Pope should resign; and can he, if he wanted to do so?

Well, as things stand now, and under almost any imaginable scenario, Pope Benedict–aka Benedict Arnold to the children of the church–is not about to resign. The scandal the church currently faces would be nothing compared to the scandal of a pope quitting.

But it has been done before. The last time a papal resignation occurred was during the Great Western Schism in the late 1500s and early 1600s when Pope Gregory XII issued his resignation at the Council of Constance through his delegates. The council deposed the two other rival popes, allowing for the election of a single, legitimate pope.

Before that, in 1294, there was an old Italian hermit who had been elected and named Pope Celestine V against his will. Celestine issued just two major decrees: the first provided for the abdication of a pope, and the second provided him the right to abdicate,

So, you see, it’s been at least 500 years since a pope called it quits. And today, for a variety of bureaucratic reasons, it is next to impossible for a Pope to resign. The Catholic church’s Code of Canon Law states–and if it sounds like gibberish, it is–that: “[i]f it happens that the Roman Pontiff resigns his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely and properly manifested but not that it is accepted by anyone.”

Not accepted by anyone? Huh?

So, the Pope can resign, because it’s been done before, but the church’s own codes make it nearly impossible for him to do so.

I mean, it isn’t like he’s Sarah Palin or anything.