Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for the Obama administration, Dr. Donohue drops another bombshell:

The problems with the IRS extend beyond playing politics with conservative groups seeking a tax-exempt status. I have never made this public before, but given the heightened interest in the way the IRS has conducted itself, the time has come to disclose what happened. 

Just weeks after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I was notified by the IRS that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating the IRS Code on political activities as it relates to 501(c)(3) organizations. What the IRS did not know was that I had proof who contacted them to launch the investigation: Catholics United, a George Soros-funded Catholic organization.

The IRS was contacted on June 5, 2008, to launch a probe of the Catholic League, and the letter sent to me was dated Nov. 24, 2008.

Does the Obama administration have no shame? Are there no depths to which it will not — wait, what’s that? Obama wasn’t inaugurated until January 2009? So this actually happened under George W. Bush? And Catholics United never made a secret of its concerns about the Catholic League’s tax status? Nor is the group really funded by George Soros? And Donohue has a history of complaining to the IRS about liberals?

Oh. Never mind.

When being constantly outraged and on the attack is how you make your living, you’re bound to get a little sloppy with the details now and then. We’ve seen before what happens when the Catholic League’s William A. Donohue, PhD, starts out with a complaint and then has trouble backing it up with actual evidence, and it isn’t pretty.

When it comes to the church’s sex-abuse crisis, Donohue’s got his reactions all set, regardless of the facts. Is a bishop being criticized for mishandling accusations against an abusive priest? The bishop must be defended; he’s done nothing wrong; the media (and/or leftist Catholics) are plainly out to get him.

Sometimes, though, the facts just don’t line up with Donohue’s interpretation. The recent case of Newark’s Archbishop John J. Myers and Fr. Michael Fugee was a tough one; to maintain that Myers was a good guy getting an unfair rap, Donohue was forced to play lawyer — a lawyer who doesn’t know what the word “or” means. Thus, as Mark Silk explained yesterday, Donohue resorted to insisting that the New Jersey Star-Ledger had smeared Myers by calling for his resignation “because he allegedly did not hold Fugee to the terms of the agreement. As will soon be disclosed,” Donohue said, “this accusation is patently false.” And therefore “the entire editorial board of the newspaper should resign immediately.”

But Donohue’s argument that the accusation was false rests on an obviously erroneous reading of the archdiocese’s court agreement to keep Fugee away from minors. Donohue insists that “the court agreement expressly allowed Father Fugee to have contact with minors, provided he was supervised.” Here’s what the court order actually says:

It is agreed and understood that the Archdiocese shall not assign or otherwise place Michael Fugee in any position within the Archdiocese that allows him to have any unsupervised contact with or to supervise or minister to any minor/child under the age of 18 or work in any position in which children are involved. This includes, but is not limited to, presiding over a parish, involvement with a youth group, religious education/parochial school, CCD, confessions of children, youth choir, youth retreats and day care.

Now, we know Donohue sometimes has trouble understanding things he reads through his fog of resentful fury. But he wants to insist that the above plainly states that Fugee is permitted to do any of the itemized activities as long as he’s being “supervised,” when in fact there are a number of “or”s after that initial phrase about “unsupervised contact” that make it very clear the restriction is not thus limited. Is it even possible to read it that way in good faith?

Let’s say Donohue really did think he was making a good argument. He knows now how wrong he was, not just because people like Silk have carefully, patiently explained his errors to him, but also because the Archdiocese has now admitted that yes, Fugee was in violation of that agreement. (Previously they had said he wasn’t.) So here was what should have been a moment of truth for the Catholic League: in trying to protect a bishop from calumny, they have actually smeared an entire newspaper editorial board and muddied an important issue with a lot of false assertions and bad arguments. And that document in which Donohue’s argument was so totally wrong? He’d bragged about how widely he’d distributed it — he didn’t just send it to “every bishop in the nation”; he also bothered “over 200 employees at the [Star-Ledger], including those who cover ‘food news’ and ‘soccer.’” A big-time screwup like this could really hurt Bill Donohue’s credibility, right? And it could really embarrass the bishops he’s so eager to defend — especially the ones who’ve gone out of their way to cheer him on without reservation. It could make them all look like they’re much more invested in playing identity politics and stoking Catholic persecution complexes than they are in being honest and living up to their promises to protect children from abuse. So the only thing to do is issue a straightforward retraction and apology, right? Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, Mollie did a superb job cataloging Bill Donohue’s shortcomings both as a crusader against anti-Catholicism (which obviously includes using the occasion of World AIDS Day to call people with HIV promiscuous) and as a surrogate for the conservative movement (giving Dick Morris a run for his money). Her conclusion was pointed: “Seriously, your excellencies and eminences: what will it take to make you rethink the wisdom of encouraging Bill Donohue to act as your public interpreter?” Wish I knew. Donohue has said lots of offensive things on a variety of topics, but his record on one subject in particular ought to give Catholic bishops considerable pause before lending him support: the sexual-abuse scandal.

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the clergy of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph are divided on the question of whether their bishop should resign after being found guilty of one count of failing to report suspected child abuse. (A diocesan school principal warned the diocese about about Fr. Shawn Ratigan’s “inappropriate behavior with children” in May 2010; seven months later disturbing photos of little girls were found on Ratigan’s laptop; Finn didn’t restrict Ratigan until February 2011; and the police weren’t notified until May 2011.) The Times story is ugly: One priest goes on the record recommending the bishop step down. Another says his liberal colleagues are using Finn’s travails to push for a new, less conservative bishop. More than one hundred thousand people have signed an online petition urging Finn to step aside. The diocese has spent $1.4 million on legal fees. And the Times spoke with two priests who say that at a recent meeting of diocesan clergy Finn denied any wrongdoing. Yet he agreed to a set of stipulated facts that led a judge to render a guilty verdict. “I truly regret and am sorry for the hurt these events caused,” Finn told the judge at the time. And now he’s privately telling priests that he did nothing wrong?

Of course, none of that troubles Donohue. When it comes to defending Bishop Finn, Dr. D. is all in.

Read the rest of this entry »

By now you’ve likely seen the New York Times story by Sharon Otterman about the push to canonize Dorothy Day: “In Hero of the Catholic Left, a Conservative Cardinal Sees a Saint.” We might discuss the pros and cons (mostly cons, I think) of telling this story this way, lining up the players on either side of a left/right divide. I will say that I think the article is most interesting when it steps outside that framework and visits Maryhouse to talk to Martha Hennessy, Day’s granddaughter, and then St. Joseph House for a discussion with volunteers. The Catholic Worker context of those last few paragraphs makes the struggle over Day’s place in Catholic culture wars seem as petty as it is.

What I really want to talk about, though, is this paragraph, speculating about what might be motivating Cardinal Timothy Dolan to support Day’s cause:

“It is an opportunity for him to demonstrate that conservative Catholics are not uncaring, without accepting liberal principles in how you service the poor,” said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a conservative antidefamation organization. “She was not, like many liberal Catholics today, a welfare state enthusiast.”

When the bishops won’t speak to the NYT, who will speak for the bishops? Our friend Bill Donohue stands ready as always to step into the breach. Take note, all those who get offended when anyone suggests that the U.S. bishops’ recent forays into public-policy discussions have been self-defeatingly partisan. It is true that most (though not all) of the more vocal U.S. bishops try to avoid sounding overtly partisan when they speak to political issues. Donohue has no such compunctions. Which is just one reason the bishops ought to be concerned about allowing him to position himself as their surrogate in the media.

We’ve been over this before, and whenever Donohue comes in for criticism, someone will surely say, “I think there’s a real need for what he does, but….” By “what he does” I believe such people mean the “antidefamation” work of the Catholic League — protesting insults to and attacks on the Catholic faith and people. I actually would not agree, but let’s set that aside. Is that, in fact, what Donohue does? Is it the principal work of the Catholic League? I don’t think so. Yes, Donohue occasionally finds a legitimate insult to get worked up about. But for the most part, he is a public figure who engages in conservative Catholic identity politics for fun and profit. Read the rest of this entry »

It has never seemed the best hill to die on, but apparently Catholic League president Bill Donohue doesn’t know how to quit defending Bishop Robert Finn, who was found guilty this week of one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse. (Be sure to read David Gibson’s post on the devastating Times story.) Back in November, Donohue declared that Finn was “an innocent man,” and flew all the way to Kansas City just to show how much he meant it. “In an ideal world,” Donohue claimed, “there would have been no charges whatsoever: there was no complainant and no violation of law.” Yes, and in an ideal world, when a U.S. bishop learns — nearly a decade after the 2002 wave of scandals broke — that one of his priests has crotch shots of kids on his computer, after having learned about a detailed letter of complaint about the guy from a Catholic school principal, the bishop would report the priest to the proper authorities, in accordance with civil and canon law. But that’s not the world Bishop Finn was living in. So now he stands convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse. In other words, Finn is not an innocent man. That’s why he issued a statement — both through his lawyer (.doc) and on his own behalf (.doc) — that contains apologetic-sounding words arranged in a way that avoids actually accepting responsibility for his failure to report the pornographer priest Ratigan. (Do yourself a favor and read Mark Silk on that and more here.)

You’d think Finn’s conviction would be enough to force Donohue back from the ledge, or at least show a measure of contrition. But no. He’s going all the way over. In his latest pronouncement, magisterially titled “Assessing Bishop Finn’s Guilt,” Donohue purports to bust some myths about the Finn case. Instead, he perpetrates some myth-making of his own. Let’s have a look. Read the rest of this entry »

A kind correspondent, concerned for our souls here at Commonweal, passed along a photocopy of a column in the latest issue of the Catalyst, which – as you are no doubt aware – is the newsletter of William Donohue’s Catholic League. Donohue mentions Commonweal, you see:

A radical atheist organization took out a vicious full-page ad in the New York Times ripping Catholicism, and professed Catholics agreed with it. The ad, “Quit the Catholic Church,” was paid for by the Freedom From Religion Foundation; it ran on March 9.

…Many of the comments about the ad that were posted on the websites of liberal Catholic media outlets agreed with the ad. America, Commonweal and the National Catholic Reporter ran several statements of support.

Wait, that’s not true. On what grounds does Donohue claim that we ran a “statement of support”?

Some wondered why anyone would object. For example, Gerelyn at Commonweal questioned, “Is there something in the ad that is untrue?”

Aha. As I am sure Gerelyn would be the first to tell you, when Gerelyn, or any other commenter, leaves a comment on a post here at dotCommonweal, that comment is not from Commonweal. Is it possible that Donohue does not understand how blog comments work? (It wouldn’t be the first time that this distinction has caused trouble for someone in search of infidelity on the Catholic Left. It’s funny that the confusion never seems to work the other way.)

Donohue goes on, “Some who could not bring themselves to condemn the ad teach at Catholic colleges.” He first criticizes something Tom Beaudoin, a Fordham professor, wrote at America‘s blog (“Blaming the victim was never put more crudely,” he says, which when you think about it is a pretty bold statement coming from Bill Donohue). That wasn’t exactly a “statement of support,” either, but at least he’s moved on to reading things actually posted by magazine contributors. Then he turns back in this direction:

Not to be outdone we have the Commonweal contribution of Father Robert P. Imbelli. He also teaches theology at a Jesuit institution, this one being Boston College. He was delighted that the Times ran the cartoon that accompanied the ad. The cartoon, which featured what appears to be Cardinal Dolan, shows the New York archbishop screaming at a woman “Over Something This Small” (it shows a picture of the pill with the inscription, “Birth Control”). Father Imbelli opined, “Happily the punchy cartoon was spared the censor’s ax.” He had nothing to say about the propriety of the hate speech directed at his religion.

These are not isolate examples, for if they were they would hardly be worth mentioning; Commonweal and the Reporter regularly feature self-hating Catholics…

Here’s the post from Fr. Imbelli that led Dr. Donohue to call him a “self-hating Catholic.” (It happens to be the same post that provoked the above-quoted comment from Gerelyn — a comment I am fairly confident she viewed as dissenting.) All I can say is, the distinction between “comments people leave on our posts” and “statements endorsed by Commonweal” appears to be just the beginning of Dr. Donohue’s comprehension issues.

What I think I like best about this is the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger conclusion:

Over the years, America and Commonweal have published some brilliant articles that challenge the accepted wisdom in Catholic circles. That is why it is distressing to note some of the commentary they are featuring these days.

It’s true – why, I can hardly count the times Donohue has recommended our brilliant articles challenging accepted wisdom to his fellow Catholic Leaguers. How sad to see him forced to reconsider the high opinion in which he has always held us, and the deep respect and careful attention he has always brought to reading Commonweal. As Cardinal Dolan has said, “Keep at it, Bill! We need you!”

When Laurie Goodstein wrote in the New York Times about the Catholic Church’s attempt to compel SNAP to release its records, she got “no comment” from the church’s lawyers and personnel. So, like any journalist with a deadline, she turned to “William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York,” for his take:

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”

He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.

He can’t give you the names, but man, if he could, you’d be so totally impressed, because Donohue is on the inside track! This was followed by a quote from USCCB spokesperson Sr. Mary Ann Walsh insisting that Donohue was wrong and “there is no national strategy.” When I read that article, I thought, “Given how eager he is to use them to get attention for himself, perhaps the bishops will learn to be wary of embracing Donohue and lending him credibility as an ‘advocate’ for their cause.” A week later, Archbishop Dolan wrote a post on his blog on the New York archdiocesan website linking to a “report” on the SNAP story by “Catholic League president William A. Donohue, Ph.D.” (Italics his.) So much for that.

I mention all this because today, the resolutely crude political satire blog Wonkette took notice of a recent tweet from Donohue, from which blogger Rebecca Schoenkopf drew the joking conclusion that “Catholics Are Against Adoption Now.” Attempting to defend Mitt Romney’s wife from CNN commentator Hilary Rosen, who said something dumb about Ann Romney never having “worked a day in her life,” the Catholic League responded:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Catholic League president’s latest defense of Bishop Finn outlandishly claims that “in an ideal world, there would have been no charges whatsoever: there was no complainant and no violation of law.” Of course, as Mark Silk points out, whether there is a complainant is irrelevant because Missouri law requires mandatory reporters such as Bishop Finn to inform civil authorities “immediately” when they have “reasonable cause to suspect that a child has been or may be subjected to abuse or neglect or observes a child being subjected to conditions or circumstances which would reasonably result in abuse or neglect.” A Jackson County grand jury believes Finn should have not have waited to inform the police about the lewd images of children that had been found in Fr. Shawn Ratigan’s possession. That’s why they’ve charged the bishop and the diocese with a class A misdemeanor of “failure of mandated reporter to report.”

Not that Donohue needs to wait for a jury to decide the case. No, he already knows Finn is “an innocent man.” You can tell he really means it because he flew to Missouri to stage a rally in support of Finn outside the offices of the Kansas City Star (Donohue is not the newspaper’s biggest fan). Apparently Donohue and the dozens gathered for the rally are not bothered by implications of Finn’s agreement with neighboring Clay County — a tacit admission that, nearly a decade after Dallas, the bishop still hadn’t been doing enough to keep kids safe. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, at his indispensable blog Spiritual Politics, Mark Silk pointed out that Justice League President Bill Donohue, PhD, managed to be not wrong about something important. Last week victims attorney Jeff Anderson released a 2003 letter from Archbishop Timothy Dolan (now of New York, then of Milwaukee) to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asking that a pedophile priest be laicized. “The public display that will now take place in the criminal trial in California, to say nothing of the civil suits that could arise there, makes the potential for true scandal very real,” Dolan wrote. Anderson called that document a “smoking gun” proving “Dolan’s desire in concert with the Vatican to think about one thing: secrecy and preservation of their own reputation.” Donohue pointed out that in Catholic parlance “scandal”

is defined as “a word or action evil in itself, which occasions another spiritual ruin.” In other words, once the public finds out more about Becker, his misconduct will give scandal to the Church by causing the faithful to question their faith. For that reason, and for his past record, Dolan said he wanted him out of the priesthood.

Mark gave Donohue props for pointing out Anderson’s distortion, and, in a coda to his post, wrote:

If anything has become clear over the past quarter-century, it is that the doctrine of scandal has been the occasion of greater scandal in the Catholic Church than the sexual abuse itself. Nothing has done more to drag the Church into disrepute–and to alienate the laity–than the revelations of cover-up. It’s time for the doctrine to go.

I winced when I read that. Apparently Donohue did too. After claiming Mark lacks “ethical standing” (whatever that is) as a Jew (classic Dr. D.) , Donohue issued a press release titled “The Scandal of Church Critics.” (See what he’s doing there?)

Imagine a Catholic professor telling observant Jews that they need to change one or more of their doctrines. If such a character could be found, I would be the first to tell him to mind his own business.

As Mark correctly notes, the Catholic notion of scandal is a medieval teaching, not a matter of revelation. (Although you’ll find the term in 1 Corinthians and the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John.) Meaning there’s nothing wrong with non-Catholics using common human reason to evaluate it. You might even say it’s natural. So the good doctor is wrong to claim that Mark has no business opining on this particular Catholic teaching. What Donohue doesn’t point out, however, is that Mark doesn’t have it quite right.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is almost amusing to read that Catholic League prez Bill Donohue doesn’t care that the speaker of New York’s City Council, Christine Quinn, is a lesbian who vigorously supports same-sex marriage. He announced on the steps of City Hall that she is “a very good Catholic,” The Daily News’s Frank Lombardi reports.  So what if the city government’s most powerful Democratic elected official  boycotts the St. Patrick’s Day Parade because the organizers won’t permit a gay and lesbian group  to march under its own banner? So what if she is allied with the city’s major abortion-rights organizations?

All that Quinn had to do to get Donohue’s approval  was to support his crusade for the owner of the Empire State Building to light up the spire in honor of Mother Teresa when her centenary arrives on Aug. 26. But it didn’t work. The AP reported that the owner refused and finally explained his reasoning after weeks of silence:

“The Empire State Building celebrates many cultures and causes in the world community with iconic lightings, and has a tradition of lightings for the religious holidays of Easter, Eid al Fitr (marking the end of Ramadan), Hanukkah, and Christmas,” owner Anthony E. Malkin said in a statement Wednesday.

But the real estate mogul said the privately owned building “has a specific policy against any other lighting for religious figures or requests by religions and religious organizations.”

Donohue retorts that the Empire State Building has honored Cardinal John O’Connor and Pope John Paul II. (And it also lights up to honor the parade that Council Speaker Quinn boycotts.)

Call the decision not to honor Mother Teresa inconsistent and foolish. But does it make the skyscraper’s owner a “bigot,” as Donohue charges?

The controversy might  be a little funny if it weren’t for the threatening tone of the Catholic League’s statement, which concludes that Malkin’s  decision “is something he will regret for the rest of his life.”

Mother Teresa, pray for us.

So says Catholic jabberer-in-chief Bill Donohue, explaining how he travels to his frequent TV appearances. Who could doubt it? The man can talk. Donohue shared that tidbit in his fiesty reply to NCR editor Joe Feuerherd’s takedown. In a follow-up post, Michael Sean Winters did most of the heavy lifting required to rebut Donohue’s rebuttal, but I’d like to say a bit more about one of Donohue’s favorite topics.

Like a Tourette’s patient, Donohue won’t stop insisting that the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal is really a gay problem. We’ve been down this road before. As made clear by the scholars conducting the USCCB-commissioned study of the causes of the crisis, homosexuality is not a predictor of sexual abuse. Yet Donohue thinks that because 81 percent of the victims were male the real cause was homosexuality. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, Donohue asserts that three-quarters of the victims were postpubescent, noting that the American Pediatric Association says boys start puberty at age ten. In other words, the more postpubescent male victims we find, the more likely it is that we’re looking at a gay problem. Obvious, isn’t it?

Not quite. First, John Jay researchers did not measure the pubescence of victims. They collected two sets of data about victims. One, the “Cleric Survey,” recorded the victims in the following age groups: 1-7, 8-10, 11-14, and 15-17. Researchers presumed that victims aged 11 to 14 were postpubescent; according to the Cleric Survey, 50.9 percent of victims were aged 11 to 14. That’s why on page 56 of the “Nature and Scope” study the researchers claim that “the majority of alleged victims were postpubescent.” It’s not clear to me why John Jay would make that claim, given that researchers didn’t collect data on victims’ pubescence and that the DSM-IV defines a pedophile as someone with recurrent sexual desires for prepubescent children “generally aged 13 or younger.” The American Pediatric Society actually says that for males the onset of puberty–not its conclusion–usually occurs between the ages of 10 and 14. So why would John Jay presume that victims between 11 and 14 years of age were postpubescent? What’s more, according to the Cleric Survey, nearly 73 percent of victims were 14 or younger.

John Jay also collected individual surveys for every victim about whom there was data. The “Victim Survey” has a different age breakdown. Table 4.3.2 of the “Nature and Scope” study shows that 60 percent of victims were 13 or under. Granted, the Victim Survey data set isn’t as large as that of the Cleric Survey, but it is broken down more carefully. Again, it remains mysterious why a bullet point in the Nature and Scope study summarized only one set of data about victims as: “The majority of alleged victims were postpubescent, with only a small percentage of priests receiving allegations of abusing young children” (4.2 Summary). As far as I can tell, that conclusion doesn’t follow from any data collected by John Jay.

Permit me one last repetition. Again and again, Bill Donohue, PhD, and his ilk chant the mantra: 81 percent of victims were male, therefore the crisis is caused by homosexuality–as if the data speak for themselves. They do not. Like the phenomena from which they’re drawn, the data are complicated. Just 3.4 percent of the total number of credibly accused priests were responsible for more than one-quarter of all allegations. What conclusions can be drawn from that kind of data? One set of data groups victims across the ages of pubescence, making it difficult to tell which were the targets of true pedophiles and which were not. Another set of data simply lists victims by age. On at least one point, however, both sets of data on victims agree: about 73 percent of victims were 14 or younger.

None of this is to say that homosexuality did not play a role in the crisis. The fact that, according to the Victims Survey, about 25 percent of victims were 15 or older is troubling and deserves investigation. That’s what the “Causes and Context” study is doing. You know, the one whose lead researchers have already reported that homosexuality is not a predictor of abuse. Even a limousine conservative should be able to see that.

The National Catholic Reporter‘s June 16 editorial, “Spin without End in Abuse Scandal,” takes issue with the Catholic League’s ad on the June 7 New York Times op-ed page. NCR writes:

The clergy sex abuse crisis — some would have us believe — is largely about priests taking advantage of or being seduced by older teenage boys. In other words, it’s a gay thing.

That’s the view of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, as articulated by the group’s president William A. Donohue.

“Too many sexually active gays have been in the priesthood, and it’s about time they were routed out,” Donohue told Fox News at the height of the scandal. The clergy sex abuse crisis is “a homosexual scandal, not a pedophilia scandal,” he said on NBC’s Today Show.

The line in the Catholic League’s ad that NCR finds problematic is this: “81 percent of the victims were male, and most were not little kids–they were post-pubescent (the identical figure was reported in cases found between 1950-2002).”

This figure has been used and abused in several quarters as proof that the sexual abuse scandal is really a gay-priest problem. Those who cite the 81-percent figure in this way typically pair it with some version of the following (from the second link in the last sentence): Since 78 percent of the victims were adolescent (between 11 and 17), this is clearly an issue of homosexuality, not sexual abuse, strictly speaking.

Let’s look at what the 2003 John Jay study actually says. From the Executive Summary:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female.

I’m no statistician, nor am I suggesting that homosexuality had nothing to do with any of the abuse, but it strikes me as obvious that the age breakdown as offered by John Jay–not Bill Donohue, Russell Shaw, or ur-Diogenes–complicates the claim that the sexual-abuse scandal is best characterized as a “homosexual scandal.”

Do the math. Certainly it’s true that 78 percent of the victims were between the ages of 11 and 17. But does it follow that these victims were, as Donohue has it, “not little kids”? If you break the numbers down as John Jay does, you see that 51 percent of victims were between 11 and 14. Is it certain that “most” of those children were postpubescent? The DSM-IV, after all, defines pedophilia as involving sexual activity by an adult with a prepubescent child–13 or younger.

Rather than conflating the groupings in the direction of postpubescence, what if we conflate downward? We get this: 73 percent of all victims were under 14 years of age. Doesn’t fit so neatly into the category of “gay problem” now, does it?