Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  We’re talking not about “a few bad apples” but about the whole edifice of religion top to bottom. An impartial inquiry into child abuse at Roman Catholic institutions in Ireland found that the top Church leaders knew that sexual abuse was endemic in boys and girls institutions. A nine-year government inquiry investigated a sixty-year period when more than 35,000 children were placed in a network of “reformatories,” “industrial schools,” and “workhouses.” The children suffered physical and/or sexual abuse that more than two thousand witnesses confirmed to the commission.95

  Church authorities in league with government enablers were placing children in these camps until the 1980s. Physical and emotional abuse was a built-in deliberate feature of these “homes” for young men and women. The inquiry proved that child rape defines Irish Catholicism as surely as the sign of the cross once did. The state-ordered investigation into cover-ups by the Dublin Archdiocese revealed that church officials had shielded scores of priests from criminal investigation over several decades and did not report any crimes to the police until the mid-1990s.96

  This was much the same behavior as happened in the United States: The Church’s leaders spent much more time protecting their institution than their flock, let alone children. For instance, an ac- quaintance of mine in the Boston area, Cardinal Bernard Law, with whom I’d worked on various Massachusetts “pro-life” initiatives and fund-raising efforts, left Boston for Rome “in a hurry” after he was being investigated for enabling child-molesting priests to remain in ministry.

  I have a photograph of the two of us (back when Law was a mere archbishop), with Law sitting next to me at the head table at a banquet held by Massachusetts Citizens for Life, where we both spoke. Law was a hand-on-your-forearm political operative. He possessed the sort of smoothness that is achieved only after years of deftly “handling” people in a climb to power. Those sorts of political instincts depend on the practitioner being perceived as a “good guy” and had transformed Law into a glad-handing, remembereveryone’s-first-name shell of jovial bonhomie.

  After his “fall” Law was whisked off to the Vatican and “reassigned.” Then Pope John Paul kept him on as a cardinal! In what has to be one of the strangest (and unintentionally revealing) “defenses” of Cardinal Law, according to a report by National Public Radio, Deal Hudson (a conservative Roman Catholic activist) tried to somewhat exonerate Law by saying that, after all, what Law did wasn’t so unusual! National Public Radio’s Boston station (WBUR) filed this report: “‘There is a particular animus being manifested toward Cardinal Law,’ said Deal Hudson, president of Catholic Advocate and director of InsideCatholic.com, two conservative Catholic Web sites. ‘When you stand back and look across the United States at all the dioceses and the way this scenario was repeated in so many dioceses and in some cases with even higher levels of abuse cases, I don’t think that animus is fair.’”97

  After rescuing Law from his American accusers, Pope John Paul II made Cardinal Law a member of the so-called Pontifical Council for the Family! According to the Boston Globe, the pope’s new “family expert” had, under questioning by the Boston police, admitted that when a priest committed a sex crime, his practice was to only seek the analysis of “therapists” in residential treatment centers before deciding whether to return a priest accused of sexually abusing a child to the pulpit. According to countless media reports from the Boston Globe to WBUR, Cardinal Law became the first bishop in America shown to have actively participated in the cover-up of child molestation.98 Despite substantial amounts of documentation that demonstrated his deep involvement with covering up the molestation of thousands of children, Law refused to step down as archbishop of Boston. After he left Boston, there remained a significant number of undisclosed priests in the Boston area who had confessed to molesting children and who—as I write this—continue to work as priests. Law declined to disclose the names of these “shepherds.”99

  And this is the church that “conservative” bishops and priests in the Anglican and Episcopal communions in the United States and the United Kingdom have since been joining in droves because the Roman Catholic Church has preserved “pure” doctrine that condemns homosexuality as a sin! So “breakaway” Anglicans and Episcopalians (and not a few Evangelicals, too) are received into the “true church” by popes and bishops eager to swell their ranks with laypeople and priests who just can’t abide having homosexual marriages between monogamous, law-abiding gay men and women blessed in their churches but are happy to throw their hats and/or miters into the ring alongside the miters of the leaders of a worldwide network of pedophiles and their enablers.

  Go figure.

  I remember my reaction when back in the mid-1980s I heard the first rumblings about the Boston Diocese’s sex abuses before the scandals broke wide open. At that time I had several friends who had recently converted or were about to convert (in good faith) to the Roman Catholic Church because they (like me) were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the merger of the Evangelical world and the entertainment business and the celebrity culture of personality cults. Conditioned by years of poor-little-Us Evangelical victim-think, I assumed that somehow the priests and bishops were being “badmouthed” and had been set up by “Them.” This must be another wicked plot by the Liberal elite, I thought, and the other enemies of the pro-life movement!

  I remember talking over my sense of the bishops having been “set up” with my friend Thom Howard, a well-known Protestant author and convert to the Roman Catholic Church. (He lost his job teaching at Protestant Gordon College because he became a Roman Catholic.) What neither of us asked each other at the time was why both communities—Evangelical and Roman Catholic—were continually mired in sexual scandal and (as was even then becoming evident) so much criminal behavior. Nor did I wish to ask myself why I thought that conservative religionists like me had a right to “speak out” on so-called moral sexual issues, such as gay rights, given that my own Christian community was rotten to its core.

  The hypocrisy I participated in continues. Roman Catholic bishops in North America have led the “moral” crusade against gay marriage and stem cell research with no sense of irony. And much of the abuse of children that took place worldwide was on Pope John Paul II’s watch. And he did all he could to cover up Cardinal Law’s activities and even rewarded him with a plum assignment in Rome. Notwithstanding, a Vatican ceremony (early in 2011) moved John Paul II one step closer to “sainthood!” Meanwhile Roman Catholic bishops—while presiding over the bankrupting of the church from lawsuits and while fighting off prison sentences for themselves and/or their priests—found time to denounce President Obama’s health care reform, which aimed at helping 34 million uninsured poor people, as “proabortion.”

  And how were those moral “family values” Old Testament Jews (Mom so idealized) doing in their modern Levitical incarnation? According to National Public Radio (to cite just one of scores of reports), in 2009 four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn were sued and/or arrested for abusing boys. As NPR reported, “That’s a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she encountered dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward.”100

  And according to the same story:Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes says he has 10 active sexual abuse cases involving Orthodox Jews—including a school principal.... And Hynes says there could be many more.

  Yeshivas are private schools, which means they don’t have to report accusations of sexual abuse to civil authorities. “I’ve got no way to know if there’s a pattern of concealing the conduct,” he says. Hynes says the Jewish leaders—like Catholic bishops—try to handle these affairs internally, through a rabbinical court. It’s a practice that infuriates him. “You have no business taking these cases to religious tribunals,” Hynes
says. “They are either civil or criminal in nature, or both. Your obligation is to bring these allegations to us and let us conduct the investigation.”101

  And how are women treated by these most “observant” of “Real Believing Jews,” as Mom called them? Esther Rachel Russell’s 2006 documentary about domestic abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, Shame, Shanda, and Silence, reveals a sad fact: Orthodox Jewish women tend to stay with violent abusive partners. And abuse is rampant in this biblically patriarchal enclave of devotion to God.102

  As for the “moral authority” of the North American Evangelicals, one of their leading organizations and the organizers of the annual presidential prayer breakfast, the Family (or the Fellowship), ran a residential “ministry” for many years before it drew unwelcome media scrutiny in 2009 and 2010. The Family specialized in housing and indoctrinating members of Congress in its Washington, D.C., C Street residence in order to “take back” the world for Jesus. The Family also had worked actively for years to influence both American politics and foreign leaders and had done so with great “success.”

  Several leading Family members—Senator John Ensign of Nevada, governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford, and former representative Chip Pickering of Mississippi—were all found guilty of adultery. This would be meaningless to anyone but their wives except for that all three defined their political careers by loudly advertising their so-called Christian family values. Sanford admitted to an affair with a woman in Argentina. Ensign admitted that his family had paid $96,000 in hush money to his former mistress and her family. Pickering is said to have conducted his adulterous affair within the walls of the Family’s C Street complex.

  Then there was George Rekers, who played an important role in many of the most extreme Evangelical assaults on gay people’s rights. His career started in 1982 with his publishing a homophobic “textbook,” Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality. Rekers was a cofounder with James Dobson of the gay-bashing Family Research Council. In 2010 Rekers was found to be “in a class by himself” when it came to sexual hypocrisy (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted). A Baptist minister with a bent for “curing” homosexuality, sixty-year-old Rekers was caught by a Miami New Times reporter with a twenty-year-old male escort at Miami International Airport. The “couple” was returning from a ten-day trip to London. Rekers’s only mistake, he told Christianity Today magazine, was to hire a “travel assistant” without proper vetting. Rekers said, “[My assistant] did let me share the gospel of Jesus Christ with him, with many Scriptures in three extended conversations.”103

  Sex scandals seem to be the only actual interdenominational ecumenism that exists; perversity unites many Christian groups, as does their propensity to judge others. We’ve arrived the point where I think I may (only half-jokingly) safely say that all Evangelical antigay activists and all conservative Roman Catholic bishops are probably closeted gays hiding behind their loud antigay public proclamations and/or that all these same “traditional family values” leaders will eventually be shown to have committed adultery and/or enabled child molesters—when not calling press conferences to denounce “godless Liberals,” gay rights, and stem cell research!

  There is an attending level of smarmy hypocrisy expressed as “we hate the sin, but love the sinner” that is as ludicrous as it is twofaced. For instance, in 2010 top Evangelical leaders participated (as I mentioned before, they have clamored to do each year for decades) in the Washington schmooze-fest “prayer breakfast” organized by the Family. At that very moment the Family was also hock deep in yet another scandal, this time in Uganda.

  The story of the Ugandan legislation to kill gays for being gay was intertwined with the Family and also with representatives of the wider “respectable” American Evangelical community. According to many press reports, the genesis of the antihomosexual Ugandan bill may be traced to a three-day seminar in Kampala in March 2009 called “Exposing the Truth Behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda.”104 This seminar was led by Evangelical leader and hero to the Religious Right Scott Lively. He is best known for his Holocaust revisionist book The Pink Swastika, which claims homosexuals founded the Nazi party and were responsible for death camp atrocities.

  According to sources who attended the conference (and who were later widely quoted in the press), Lively told his Kampala audience, “I know more about this [homosexuality] than almost anyone in the world.... The gay movement is an evil institution. The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”105 The results of the seminar were dramatic. “The community has become very hostile now,” Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, said in an interview. “We have to watch our backs very much more than before because the community thinks if the Ugandan government is not passing the law, they will deal with [gay] people on their own.”106

  For decades Evangelical leaders have jockeyed for good tables at the Family-run “prayer breakfast.” (My father, to his credit, always called the Family a “fascist cult” and “evil,” long before its bizarre actions came to anyone else’s attention. He refused all the many invitations to attend the prayer breakfast, let alone speak at it, as he was asked to do several times.)

  After the Family was reported to be hock deep in the Uganda scandal, Evangelical leaders still turned up in droves anyway! They did this even though David Bahati, the man behind the kill-the-gays legislation, was deeply involved in the Family’s work in Uganda at that time, and a minister in the government of Uganda and was also helping to organize the Family’s National Prayer Breakfast.107

  A day before this “prayer” farce, I participated in a press conference held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign. I did so to call attention to the antigay activities of the Family. “Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for,” said one of our presenters, Gene Robinson (the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church). “I call upon our president to make himself known to be in opposition ... to this violation of human rights for all of God’s children in Uganda and beyond,” Robinson concluded.

  At our press conference a gay Ugandan who was seeking asylum in the United States gave a detailed account of the harassment he withstood “from my fellow Christians in Uganda.” Given the multiplying death threats he was receiving for speaking out, Moses (not his real name) addressed reporters with a paper bag over his head to conceal his identity. He described in detail how “one would rather die than come out of the closet” in religiously conservative Uganda. He also spoke about how American Evangelicals had egged on the Ugandan authorities with the American Evangelical-propagated pseudoscientific myth that homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle” that can be “cured” by Jesus and/or therapy and that therefore people who remain gay do so out of choice.

  When Moses spoke at our press conference, his hands gripped the Press Club lectern, and when he released that grip, they trembled. He had every reason to be fearful.

  As the New York Times later noted in a news story (January 2011) the dire influence of the Evangelical “leadership” on gay issues in Uganda continued to have its effect:David Kato knew he was a marked man. As the most outspoken gay rights advocate in Uganda, a country where homophobia is so severe that Parliament is considering a bill to execute gay people, he had received a stream of death threats.... A few months ago, a Ugandan newspaper ran an anti-gay diatribe with Mr. Kato’s picture on the front page under a banner urging, “Hang Them.” On January 26, 2011, Mr. Kato was beaten to death with a hammer ... “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S. Evangelicals in 2009,” said Val Kalende, the chairperson of one of Uganda’s gay rights groups, in a statement. “The Ugandan Government and the so-called U.S. Evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood.” Mrs. Kalende was referring to visits in March 2009 by a group of American evangelica
ls, who held rallies and workshops in Uganda discussing how to make gay people straight, how gay men sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” intended to “defeat the marriage-based society.”108

  I hugged Moses after he concluded his remarks and discovered that his back was drenched in sweat even in that ice-cold airconditioned room. I spoke next, and I felt ashamed to be holding forth at so little personal cost. I could speak from that podium without risk of more than a few e-mails from people who wrote things like “You fucking fag lover” and “Your father would be ashamed of you” while Moses faced death for standing up against the religion-led lynch mob. Nevertheless, I know a little about what he was enduring because I’m used to certain types of “correspondence,” like this e-mail (typos in the original) that I happened to receive when working on this chapter. From: D—Date: Mon, Sep 27, 2010 10:27 am

  I just read what you wrote in support of our Muslim Marxist, Lying SOB POTUS. He is a shill for the NWO and wants to bring the USA down to 3rd world status. He refuses to show his longform birth certificate, and tha means he is hiding something, like he is not constitutionally eligible to be in the position that he findshimself in. A LIAR is what he amounts to, and that kind of person does not represent me or mine. You are a jaded idoit. ... I work for a living, you should try doing the same thing, cause your ideology and your writing sucks.... Do not reply ... You must be a communist also, you look like one.... RATFINK!

  Moses faced daily threats for being who he was. But I chose to leave the Evangelical fold and also chose to support candidate and then President Obama, knowing full well that I’d attract the attention of the many people gleefully wallowing in the subterranean river of sewage that flows wide and deep just under the surface of American life. Moses hadn’t chosen anything. He was hated for merely trying to fulfill the natural longings he was born with and that I was allowed to indulge on that far-off sweet-flower-strewn mountainside with my French petit amie.