In our brave new world, multicultural and diverse as it is, our moral sensibilities can often be rattled by the brutishness and ignorance of many cultural traditions that make their way to our shores. As some of you reading this blog may remember, my heart bleeds for the way African children are tortured due to a dangerous mix of new and ancient religious superstitions. The Christian crusade to possess Africa has re-ignited the belief in witchcraft, and the victims tend to be unwanted children. The sheer amount of suffering happening in places like Uganda and Nigeria is enough to make one ill, but it gets worse when this type of violence is excused as merely a matter of “religious freedom”.

When Swedish prosecutors attempted to bring two Congolese parents to justice after they systematically tortured their daughter, the defense was able to argue that exorcisms were part of their religious freedom. Combined with too little physical evidence (those horrible scars could have been anything, they say), the prosecution was unable to get a conviction.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with my right wing counterparts who despair multiculturalism, albeit for entirely different reasons. I don’t believe that all cultural achievements are equal. I believe many traditions are barbaric, dehumanizing, misogynistic and unworthy of being maintained. Religious freedom is simply a new way of framing dangerous or hateful practices in such a way that masks their true nature. Why are we so fucking gutless in the face of religion? The torture of any child is indefensible, and we have laws to protect them. Why do we chose instead to protect ideas whose time has long since passed?

What do you get when you take a violent, homophobic young man and combine it with the power of religion? You get two deaths, a slam dunk for the prosecution, and the feeling that all of this could have been prevented if people stopped being such gigantic suckers. The murderer in question, Peter Lucas Moses, had his followers call him Lord, and used fear and isolation to control them.

Prosecutors said the case came to police’s attention in February when a young woman escaped from a house at 2109 Pear Tree Lane house, where she had lived with McKoy, Jadon, eight other children and three women charged in connection with the two slayings – Jadon’s mother, Vania Rae Sisk, 25, Lavada Quinzetta Harris, 40, and Larhonda Renee Smith, 40.

One of the two deaths was a 4 year old child, killed because Moses was convinced he was gay. An incident where young Jadon “slapped” another child in the buttocks was all the gusto Moses needed. He made his “wives” set up sound equipment in the garage, and with the music blasting in the background, he shot poor Jadon in the head.

He snuffed the life out of Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy a few months later for an equally arbitrary and stupid reason: she apparently lacked the ability to conceive, and expressed a desire to leave. At first, he tried to strangle her to death with an extension cord, but once that failed, he used the same gun he shot Jadon with to finish the job.

What’s even more messed up about this story is Antoinetta had managed to escape to a neighbor at first, who didn’t call the police because she thought the woman may have been mentally deranged. How I pity the false hope McKoy must have had as she was dragged (literally) back into the house. I bet she was really hoping the police would show up. They did, but months later after an escaped cult member told them about the murders. It kind of makes you wonder how many cults out there have similar skeletons in their closet, eh?

After Christina Anderson was raped by fellow congregationalist Ernest Willis and got pregnant as a result, the pastor of her fundamentalist Baptist church forced her to move to Colorado and read an apology letter aloud to her congregation before she left. Classy.

Ernest Willis is charged with forcibly raping Christina Anderson twice during the summer of 1997, when she was his children’s baby sitter and he was 39. Lawyers for Willis, now 52, say in court documents that he will admit having sex with the girl once but maintains it was consensual.

Ah, the old Polanski defense. Wonder how well it’ll work for him considering Willis’ defense team is also trying to bar Anderson’s testimony that he tried to offer to drive her to get an out of state abortion, and he also offered a “code 3“, effectively a punch to the stomach in the hopes of causing a spontaneous abortion. Why, those sound like the actions of a man engaged in a consensual affair, doesn’t it?

Pastor Phelps claims he helped the police investigation, but he’s obviously a liar since the cops only discovered where Christina was after friends tipped them off that she was living under a different name in Arizona, where she was being home-schooled by other fundy yahoos.

It’s a proud tradition in all Abrahamic religions that girls are to blame for everything. In the Bible, when Aaron and Miriam both complain Moses’ new wife is a foreign chick, only Miriam gets leprosy for her questioning of the prophet. How many females have been tortured, beaten to death, or immolated under the watchful gaze of the Church?

(Update: Ernest Willis was found guilty and sentenced)

You’ve got to admire Bill Donohue – in a rather sick and twisted way – for his unique ability to always “up the ante” of shitty things to say. He’s really an artist of sorts, effortlessly dispatching the truth whenever it seems to be inconvenient, and compensating by making outlandishly false statements, all in a futile attempt to defend what is arguably one of the most corrupt institutions in the world. To defend monsters, one must become a monster.

The latest “Donohism” is a difficult one to top however: he’s accusing the media of improperly reporting the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children. Most were willing participants, and the real problem was homosexuality:

“The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that ‘more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.’ In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia,” Donohue wrote.

“What accounts for the relentless attacks on the Church?” he asked in conclusion. “Let’s face it: if its teachings were pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and pro-women clergy, the dogs would have been called off years ago.”

Don’t blame all these priests, says Bill, most were participants who enjoyed what was happening. The real villains were the sodomites, everyone! After all, they wanted to put their penises where God had strictly forbidden it, and we all know if you don’t listen to sky-daddy, he will send a tidal wave after you.

It’s in situations like this I wish I could produce a report that could explain the depth of all the sexual abuse that occurred to both men and women…Oh wait, silly me, it turns out there are a ton of them, with more popping up all the time. Perhaps the most comprehensive of which is the Ryan Report, a difficult and lengthy volume detailing all aspects of abuse of Catholic-run institutions in Ireland. So without needing to trust Billy-boy at his words, we can instead rely on the litany of statistics on female sexual abuse by clergymen. I’ll go out on a limb here and say it was definitely not consensual:

Reported abuse ranged from inappropriate fondling and touching to oral/genital contact, vaginal and anal rape. There were 128 reports of sexual abuse from 127 female witnesses (34%). One witness reported that she was sexually abused in two different Schools. Witnesses described their experience of sexual abuse as either acute or chronic episodes occurring throughout their admissions in the Schools. Witnesses reported being sexually abused by religious and lay staff in addition to other adults, the majority of whom were understood to be directly associated with the Schools. Witnesses also reported being sexually abused by co-residents.

Before you feel entirely too depressed over the fact such stupidity still makes the air on a regular basis, take comfort in the knowledge, so long as people like Bill speak for their churches, the job of demonstrating the poisonous nature of religion is made much easier. Bill is a cruel, stupid brute whose actions undermine the false idea that religion moralizes an otherwise evil creation. In other words, with fuckheads like Bill at the wheel, it’s a lot easier for these morons to careen off a cliff.

When Abraham is an old man, says the Bible, he enters a covenant with God that offers – in exchange for the tips of everyone’s penises in perpetuity – a guaranteed 400 years of misery with the promise of inheriting someone else’s land.

Abraham makes the rather undiplomatic agreement for the sake of his descendants, and proceeds to cut every male’s foreskin with a blade. Most of the men, the vast majority of them slaves, are all adults and the invention of anesthetics is still many moons away.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s probably you should avoid trusting what a senile old man claiming to hear the voice of God tells you. Unfortunately for a 3 month old in Portland Oregon, the Bible has received the greatest publicity campaign in the world, declared by educated and uneducated alike to be the definitive source of all Western morality.

When the boy’s mother – indoctrinated since childhood as to the benefit of reading this vile tome- decided to follow the same covenant Abraham made with God, she did so in much the same fashion. 29-year-old Keemonta Peterson circumcised her child, and after he cried in agony for 2 hours as the blood continued to flow out of his body, her malfunctioning maternal instincts finally kicked into high gear long enough to call the hospital and avoid him death. By the time he arrived, the child was listed as critical. The doctor testified the pain for the baby would have been immense.

He has since luckily recovered, although no details have emerged as to the condition of his penis. The mother is facing charges, and must now visit her children under supervision. Where did all of this misery begin? Did it start in her childhood, as the ludicrous concepts of religion were drilled into her impressionable brain?

I’m glad her lawyer didn’t try to argue endangering your child is a form of religious expression, like some people. It seems as though we’ve humored the nonsense of faith for so long we’re shocked people act on it. People like Keemonta may be crazy, but they got helping getting there.

Is anyone really surprised by this headline? Considering the fact that the Catholic Church has always exploited the fact there exists a statute of limitation for child rape, it’s really no surprise they are fighting a number of bills that would eliminate this convenient legal loophole. What worried them the most is the fact that victims could now sue offending priests retroactively, and this has the Church shitting bricks.

Michael C. Culhane, spokesman for the Connecticut Catholic Conference, testified last year that changing the rules retroactively was not fair. “We therefore request that any changes be prospective and not have any retrospective effect,” Culhane said in 2010.

So not fair! Think about all those molesters that could be brought to justice after they were so careful not to get caught in the time allotted. It’s almost like giving someone a cookie and then taking it away before they get to take a bite. Oh the humanity!

Bye asked Culhane why no other institution, beyond the church, had any problem with the bill. Culhane said he did not know why.

I think I can venture a guess: the systematic cover-up on every level of the church would make many high ranking officials also culpable of these crimes. It’s more than just the abuse going on: it’s also the effort of the Church to shield these evil men from prosecution, and this is what the Church fears.