Bricker, I can’t read the mind of the author of the second comment, but I believe it expressed the sentiment that those poor people who have the audacity to confront the good cardinal about his misdeeds compromise the subset of criminals who aren’t imprisoned, but should be.
And by the way:
Har-har-HAR-de-har-HAR! 
I do.
And I guess you should, too, but it seems you don’t regard “Fighting Ignorance,” as of any particular interest.
I’m sorry you don’t. I still do.
But since I’m doing my fighting of ignorance on a board whose stated mission is fighting ignorance, your opposition seems misplaced.
Thank you Mr. Data. That will be all.
Banging on about the legalistic meaning of criminal when it’s obvious the writer was using it in a colloquial sense is not fighting ignorance.
Yes. To take one example, I vigorously defended Ted Kennedy against someone who was calling him a murderer, despite the fact that I was not then nor am not now much of a Ted Kennedy fan, and would have been happy, from a PR perspective, to let the matter lie.
Oddly enough, there was much appreciation from the SDMB masses for that courageous stance.
Oddly enough, no one stepped up to point out how “murderer” could be used in multiple contexts and so I should let it go.
And in my very first response, I alluded to that very possibility, didn’t I?
Sure, and if the thread was “So, did Cardinal Mahoney technically commit a crime”, your input would be valuable and interesting. Instead it’s “jesus, that guy Cardinal Mahoney’s got some serious balls for a child molestor”, and then you’re getting all technical about whether he’s a “child molestor” or just someone who abetted child molestation. Surely you can see the difference?
Mmm, Data seemed incapable of disingenuous or dishonest and fallacious reasoning, or of refusing to face the points being made to him. He also was genuinely interested in understanding how humans work, and wanted to be and act and feel as much more like them as he could.
So I’d go with “Sheldon”.
That’s fine.
I mean … it’s not fine in the sense that I literally support the consequences outlined here, but that I’m fairly comfortable, in reading that, that I’m reading hyperbole.
Hmm, I do not recall that thread. But assuming it was as you describe, I appreciate your even-handedness… although to a certain extent you did not answer my question, which was not so much “would you EVER” but “would you ALWAYS”. We all have a limited amount of time and energy to devote to posting on the SDMB. We can’t post every comment we might like in every thread we might ever possibly want to respond to. I therefore strongly suspect that your choice of what threads to engage in and what threads not to engage in is at least influenced, if not dictated, by factors such as “hey, the Catholic Church is an organization which I’m a member of, and care passionately about, and thus consciously or subconsciously would like to defend”. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and it should not be taken as evidence of bias or hypocrisy.
It’s not a possibility, it’s a certitude, and it renders the rest of your posts pointless and a waste of our time.
Taking this back to the actual intention of the OP, Cardinal Mahoney has said:
Bolding mine.
Later in this thread, Bricker has said about Mahoney:
So Bricker, a comment and then a question for you: Mahoney is clearly saying that he is asking God to forgive those who express anger and outrage at him. He is not asking for forgiveness for himself from God, but rather is asking God to forgive others for their behavior towards him.
So given this, do you feel that when you called Mahoney "a betrayer of trust, a slime, a sellout, a man who should be reviled. ", you committed an act that requires the forgiveness of God? Do you see anything wrong with a senior member of your church telling you directly that you have now committed an act that requires the forgiveness of God?
Really, without the side-track of the precise definition of “criminal”, what do you think of Mahoney’s assertion that YOU should be the one that God forgives?
Mahoney’s expression of his feelings about the anger directed at him for his part in the coverups merely add fuel to the fire. He may feel he’s apologised enough, but it’s not up to him to decide that, really. That’s up to the people whose trust he betrayed.
Can we please get of the Bricker Hijack, and back to the actual OP where whether or not actual laws were broken and to the point that his blog post, was the most self aggrandizing, blame the victim, tone deaf, heartless piece of shit I have ever seen.
Will it make Bricker shut up if BigAppleBucky agrees that when he said
He meant,
“There should be laws in place such that behavior akin to that done by Cardinal Mahoney can be tried in a fully legal court proceedings subject to a jury of their peers such that if one performed the acts spelled out in the proposed statute that were akin to those performed by Cardinal Mahoney , they would likely be convicted guilty by said jury and be incarcerated in prison for a lengthy duration as so described by the said statute.”
Also Bricker is it necessary that every comment be a laid out along similar lines in order for you to not hijack the thread?
I am allowed to say that the Washington Wiazards suck without having to produce the etemology of the term, for fear that you will claim that they in no way resemble vacuum cleaner?
I would also ask the Bricker describe in what way Cardinal Mahoney is a slime given that he appears to be entirely solid and made of meat.
Whatever you say, Mr. Outliar.
But sticking to the current topic, are there, or are there not, long-standing statutes that make it a crime to knowingly act to conceal, in whole or in part, a criminal’s connection to a particular crime?
Y’know what? I’m offended by this. I’m offended that you claim to think that since I don’t give a crap whether a man who committed acts that are IN FACT NOW ILLEGAL and has been COLLOQUIALLY called a criminal in a fucking message board thread is in fact TECHNICALLY an ACTUAL CRIMINAL, and that I’m annoyed that someone would hijack said thread to quibble about the difference, means that I don’t care about fighting ignorance.
I don’t think you actually think that. You’re acting all injured because someone yet again dared to point out that the Catholic Church is less than perfect, and you came into this thread looking for targets and had to scrape up something you could fling poo at. Go to hell, you incurable pedant.
Good one, Arty! Fucking invite the guy to bore you to tears with legalistic citation and jurisimprudence. Whatsamatta you?
Heh. Sometimes I feel sorry (and, yes, admiration) for Bricker when he gets ganged up on by the Dope.
This is not one of those times.
Here’s the problem:
I believe him. That is: I believe BobLibDem would be perfectly comfortable in sending Mahoney to jail even without a specific criminal statute that was violated.
And that attitude scares me much more than a hundred marauding Mahoneys does.
I’m not getting all technical because I believe someone posted something that was just blowing smoke. I’m getting technical because I believe there’s a great deal of value in reminding people why we have laws and a system of justice.
When I was a public defender, I saw people like that all the time. Some of them were prosecutors. They frightened the crap out of me, because they genuinely believed that the specifics of the law didn’t matter – they were prosecuting a bad guy, and so he deserved to be convicted.
I hate that attitude, and I try to expose it whenever I can. We have a system of laws precisely so that some prosecutor can’t decide he doesn’t like you and stick you in jail. The price we pay for that system is a heavy one: sometimes we are confronted with monsters and have to accept that they go free, even though they did some bad shit. And when we stop remembering that, we start down a bad road indeed.