It lets me know that the individual(s) that have done this have too much free time. They aren’t involved in the community and it lets me know one of two things: 1. that just some kids have come through and did it or 2. that they are individuals that actually support this group that want to scare tactic me and so on to try and get us from the viewpoints that we hold that or and (sic) they just don’t like anybody that’s against it. I really don’t know,

—

Pastor Joe Gutierrez of the Church on Fire, quoted in Bash Back! Strikes queer-hating church — Fort Wayne, IN

Seriously, “someone must have a lot of free time” as a way of minimizing someone else’s opinion/action is so obnoxious. And so what? Why is the idea of having free time such an insult anyway? I wish I made better use of my free time, and had more of it.

The Daily Dish reader thinks abuse of girls happens less because girls have less sustained contact with priests, and it’s also possible that this lack of contact makes abuse of multiple female victims more difficult. However, the reader’s comments do reveal an interesting dichotomy: the girl-abuser is sad, pathetic, and fucked-up, while the boy-abuser is evil. Might this idea permeate the Church, and might it stem at least in part from the idea that homosexuality is itself a sin, and that gay men are naturally predatory and depraved? One Slate commenter thinks so, writing, “[T]he reason they focus so closely on the male victims is that then the church can (very, very wrongly) claim that homosexuality, not pedophilia, is the true sin in this situation.” But the true sin, of course, is abusing a position of trust to harm children — and this is no less wrong when the victim is female.

— The Forgotten Victims Of Priest Sexual Abuse: Girls - Catholic church sexual abuse

If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites — a penchant for “positive thinking” and unwarranted optimism, which takes the theological form of the “prosperity gospel.” Since “God wants to prosper you,” all you have to do to get something is “name it and claim it.” A 2000 DVD from the black evangelist Creflo Dollar featured African-American parishioners shouting, “I want my stuff — right now!”
Joel Osteen, the white megachurch pastor who draws 40,000 worshippers each Sunday, about two-thirds of them black and Latino, likes to relate how he himself succumbed to God’s urgings — conveyed by his wife — to upgrade to a larger house. According to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, pastors like Mr. Osteen reassured people about subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house.” If African-Americans made any collective mistake in the mid-’00s, it was to embrace white culture too enthusiastically, and substitute the individual wish-fulfillment promoted by Norman Vincent Peale for the collective-action message of Martin Luther King.

— The Recession’s Racial Divide