Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com has a new client for its stenography services: The Catholic League's Bill Donohue. Remember that CNS' publisher, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell, is on the Catholic League's board of advisers probably has something to do with the whole stenography thing -- not that CNS is disclosing this conflict of interest to its readers.
CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman is Donohue's personal stenographer. In a Dec. 14 post, he let Donohue rant about a son succeeding his father as New York Times publisher, making the bizarre complaint that "no women were interviewed for the top spot." No women were interviewed either for the top spot in the Catholic Church the last time that job opened up, but we don't recall Donohue complaining about that.
On Dec. 18, Chapman was the servile stenographer for another Donohue rant, this time about the Boston Globe -- who in Chapman's words "has turned stories about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests into a cottage industry-- not publishing the names of staff members accused of sexual harassment. Donohue ultimately huffs, "We need Hollywood to do a 'Spotlight' film on the corruption within the Boston Globe," forgetting that a couple instances of sexual harassment at a newspaper have nothing whatsoever in common with the decades of systematically covering up sexual abuse of children in the Boston diocese.
Speaking of which, Chapman was the silent stenographer again for another post in which Donahue ranted about too many gays in the priesthood and blaming them for the sexual abuse crisis:
"Though it is not considered polite to say so, most people know that homosexuals are responsible for the lion's share of the problem in the Catholic Church," said Donohue. "This includes those who insist they are gay-friendly."
"We do know that in the U.S., 81 percent of the clergy victims were male, and 78 percent were post-pubescent, meaning that homosexuals committed most of the abuse," said Donohue, "less than 5 percent of the abusers were determined to be pedophiles (see the John Jay College of Criminal Justice reports on this subject)."
In fact, as we've repeatedly documented, Donohue is lying about this. The John Jay report not only found no correlation between homosexuality and the child sex scandals, the report's researchers explicitly warned against doing exactly what Donohue is doing:
"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse."
A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls -- a ratio found to be about 80-20.
"It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior," Terry said. "Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity." Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.
Donohue frequently lies about this, so you'd think Chapman would want to fact-check his claims instead of playing the servile stenographer. But we know fact-checking the things conservatives say -- particularly conservatives who are friends with the boss -- is not a big priority at Chapman's CNS.
