An argument for gun control that might finally resonate with wingnuts

A tragic story: a man stuffed a gun in his pants and it accidentally went off, shooting him in the penis and leg.

Let’s forestall the usual comments: no, he didn’t deserve to be mutilated this way, OK? But still, this kind of event is what we should worry about more, and which will occur far more, than some murderous villain blazing away at innocents with a gun. Accidents will happen, and the more casual (and incompetent) people end up with deadly weapons in their hands, the more often these irreversible and unfortunate errors will occur, and they will inevitably occur with far greater frequency than homicidal sprees. The best thing that can be said is that at least no one was killed…this time.

Although this particular man will be reluctant to ever hang out with his gun-toting companions in the future. Especially with the little detail that he shot himself with a pink pistol.

Perhaps they should have tried this technique on the priests?

I don’t know how the Catholic Church manages to hold itself together in the face of all these revelations. The Dutch church was practicing the usual heedless barbarities.

Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said.

A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported.

Although it does suggest a better solution. Like the priesthood of Cybele, perhaps the Catholic priesthood ought to demand voluntary self-castration as a prerequisite to admission? I understand that they’re already having problems getting recruits, and this certainly wouldn’t help — but at least the ones you would get would be much more dedicated.

Wait, no…one thing we don’t need is more dedicated Catholic fanatics.

Sophisticated theology

Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Catholic diocese has been apparently involved in major cover-ups of child abuse scandals during his tenure.He has promoted all kinds of sneaky maneuvers to keep priestly child rapers out of jail.

“Sounds good — please proceed!” the cardinal, now retired, instructed in 1987 after the aide, Msgr. Thomas Curry, cautioned against therapy for one confessed predator — lest the therapist feel obliged to tell authorities and scandalize the archdiocese. The two discussed another priest, Msgr. Peter Garcia, who admitted specializing in the rape of Latino immigrant children and threatened at least one boy with deportation if he complained.

That last sentence jarred me. So the priests are so explicit that they are now specializing in particular flavors of children? They must be parsing Holy Writ very precisely.

The Republicans really hate women

They’re still going at it, and the latest effort in New Mexico will take your breath away with its sheer vindictive nastiness.

Should a recently introduced bill in New Mexico become law, rape victims will be required to carry their pregnancies to term during their sexual assault trials or face charges of “tampering with evidence.”

Under HB 206, if a woman ended her pregnancy after being raped, both she and her doctor would be charged with a felony punishable by up to 3 years in state prison:

Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.

They really, really want you to keep that rape-baby, don’t they? Imagine finding yourself pregnant from a rape and then being told that because you were the victim of a heinous crime, your right to autonomy is being suspended. The victim is now the criminal.

This law is so absurd and extreme that it will never ever be passed, and its author’s political career has just been self-destructed, right? Right?

What was that about his Catholicism again?

William Oddie, the Catholic writer for the Catholic Herald who writes about Catholic concerns, is very irate. It seems a popular celebrity recently died, and the newspapers were fulsome in their obituaries, praising his charitable works and his lifelong generosity, but almost none of them mentioned that he was a devout Catholic who attended Mass several times a week, and that he even had a papal knighthood.

But why not mention that an important part of his life was attending daily Mass? There’s a deep dedication in the life of a man who gives away 90 per cent of everything he earns and so tirelessly does all the other things he did. You’d think that an obituarist would want to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though they couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human goodness.

There must be an anti-Catholic conspiracy in the media!

Unfortunately, the celebrity was Jimmy Savile, the fellow who was revealed to have been raping children for decades, “one of the most prolific sex offenders” in Britain.

I have to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though Oddie couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human evil.

And say, doesn’t the careful omission of his religious background therefore represent a pro-Catholic bias in the media?

The death of Aaron Swartz

Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn’t know much about him, but now I’ve learned two things.

One, he was a victim of depression. I’ve never experienced this personally — at worst I can say I’ve been sad and stressed at time — but let’s be clear about something: depression is something altogether different. Swartz wrote about his depression, and got across a little bit about what it actually feels like. This is good communication.

Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak – the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none.

Two, I’m outraged at the criminal abuse by the justice system that exacerbated his problems. The man was hounded to death, threatened with long prison terms by MIT and JSTOR, the journal archive service.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

You might be wondering what awful crime he committed that justified arresting him and confronting him with a 50 year prison sentence: he downloaded scientific research articles and then made them available to others (Wait…apparently, he didn’t even share them, but just downloaded them via MIT’s protocols). Uh-oh. I’ve done this…just not on the scale of Swartz’s efforts. Swartz was committed to Open Access.

This is the problem: not that Swartz opened the door to scientific research, but that we’re laboring under an antiquated system of scientific information storage that privileges profit-making over open access to the results of publicly-funded research.