re: #85 Jaerik

Which is sort of the point I’m trying to make, here.

I can only participate in so many “Child abusers are bad, lock ‘em up” chest-thumping, moral outrage threads before I get tired of it. Of course it’s horrible. Of course we need a way to punish these people. It’s one of the worst crimes I can imagine. It just happens so damn often, I assume we’re all in agreement on this point by now, and don’t need a multi-hundred post pile-on thread all fervently agreeing with one another.

But beyond a certain point, the engineer in me needs to find patterns, and figure out institutional reasons why these problems keep occurring. While I don’t think incidences of pedophilia are any higher in the church than in the general population, that’s damning with faint praise: if not, what’s the point? And if the policy of sexual repression has no evident effect on human behavior, shouldn’t we focus on altering the policy so that such transgressions effect the least amount of innocent people possible?

we?…who is we?…it’s the Catholic Church that’s the subject