Meanwhile back in the world of faith-based child molestation

Dutch Roman Catholic Church 'castrated at least 10 boys

Suffer the little children to come unto me, indeed.

Sonofabitch!

Izzat really true? For reals? If so … I … words fail me.

So…he is molested by pedophiles in the church…then castrated by the church to cure his homosexuality? And to shut him up? And the government knew about it and was even there when it was being discussed??

:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::confused::confused::mad:

The only shocking thing is that people are shocked.

It was almost 60 years ago. The church now has a much more progressive attitude towards abuse victims.

Sometimes the Onion comes too close to the truth to be comfortable.

Oh, don’t fucking get me started. :mad:

Then again, why not. Years ago I wrote a post here on the Dope at the height of the scandal involving that deeply sick criminal pedophile, Cardinal Bernard Law of the Boston Diocese of the RCC. I wanted him stripped of his office and defrocked. Oh, how people went after me. Oh, the outrage. Oh, the indignation that I’d dare attack a Cardinal.

Check it out folks. That piece of shit is over and done. They went and squirreled him away in Rome, which is in of itself pretty appalling. Expected, but wow. Appalling. Now, he’s done.

Took long enough.

Dude needs to fly to Boston and turn himself in. Ooops, wait, that’d be the Christian thing to do, wouldn’t it?

I won’t wait up nights.

And then he has to confess to them that it happened.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that particular church against any form of birth control other than abstinences and rhythm method?

And here I thought the Catholic Church stopped cutting off prepubescent balls in the 1800s.

Uh, so is this supposed to be surprising or something? Of course kids who were queer (or who were perceived as being queer) got tortured. That’s not really news.

Cutting off people’s balls for reporting on you molesting them is so absurdly evil that it does make one wonder why on earth the Catholic Church is still allowed to exist.

Because they are a powerful religion. If they were some minor religion or a non-religious organization* they would long since have been driven to bankruptcy, legally dismantled, or outright destroyed by military force. Just imagine would would happen if it was discovered that, say, Microsoft was shielding pedophiles and engaging in the rest of what the CC has done. Even corporations are held to higher moral standards than religions are.

  • Besides a powerful foreign government that is - and a powerful government would still be condemned for something like this even if it was too dangerous to outright attack. A weak government on the other hand could expect a visit from some cruise missiles at the very least.

Not all Catholic priests castrate little boys.

Seriously though, you’re right. This was appallingly evil. But large entities, religions and governments, sometimes do amazingly evil things. The US government gave people syphilis without their knowledge or consent as an experiment. Should the entire government have resigned? I don’t intend on debating the issue over this shockingly shocking shocker, but I’d say the organizations are still around because they are A) powerful, B)long-lasting, and C) Do a service that is viewed as more good than harm.

To be picky about it, unless there’s another violation of research patients’ rights that I missed, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment failed to treat the participants once a known cure for syphilis was discovered. These men already had syphilis before participating, and the study was originally thought up as a long-term observational study to collect data on how syphilis progresses in people. This would be useful since this hadn’t been studied in a detailed fashion before, and anyway there wasn’t a cure when the study started.

Once a cure was found (by people outside the study), the researchers had a duty to inform their subjects and offer treatment, but failed to do so due to their interest in continuing to collect data on what syphilis does during its disease cycle.

What is it about the 1950s that made people such fucking assholes?

You missed the Cutler “experiments” in Guatemala, done under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service.

Look it up if you have a strong stomach.

Incidentally, both Cutler and Thomas Parran, the U.S. Surgeon General at the time, were faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, my alma mater. Pitt is trying to deal now with these revelations, and it has been somewhat trying for them. They have been forthcoming about their findings, which is more than I can say about some other universities.

Well, hell. I retract my statement above, and it turns out Cutler was (not surprisingly) involved in both the Tuskegee and the Guatemala experiments; the latter were in the 1940s.

As a member of my medical institution’s Institutional Review Board (which helps oversee safety and ethics of human subjects experiments conducted here), I thought I had a pretty decent background in the history of the failure of researchers to adequately, humanely protect their human subjects. Either I forgot about this shameful episode or never learned about it, and in any case, it is a failing on my part to not have recalled that this happened.

(And I’m sorry for the prolonged hijack. I’d just listened to Radiolab’s podcast episode about Alan Turing being sentenced to estrogen treatments in the UK to try to suppress his homosexuality, and I hate that I’m not surprised that this horrible reprisal against homosexual or molested youth happened around the same time period. May someday people learn of such things and be honestly shocked that it could ever have happened.)

The haircuts, I think.

This statement struck me as highly unlikely, and I believe my instincts were correct. If this is the thread you’re referring to, it doesn’t contain anything remotely resembling “attacks” on you. It does, however, contain a good deal of uncontrolled frothing by you.