“ He is angry at me for going to the police and the doctor. I should have let the church handle this without outside interference.”

I live in Australia where there has been a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse. An astonishing percentage of people in churches, schools and other institutions under the control of churches and governments, sexually abused thousands of children; and the people in charge covered it up…. oops, I mean handled it without outside interference. An Archbishop, who rose to No 3 apparatchik in the Vatican, was subsequently convicted of abusing two boys, one of whom died before his abuser was brought to justice. This fucking monster devised something called The Melbourne Response, which was the way the church handled sexual abuse without outside interference by intimidating victims and their families. Another current issue is the efforts being made in Israel to prevent the extradition to Australia of a former School Principal who is charged with having abused scores of children in her “care”. It was a Jewish school and the former Principal’s protectors are ultra orthodox religious people. WTF! The third current issue in Australia is the pending legislation to protect “religious freedom”, which is another way of saying protect the ability of bigots to say outrageous things in public about people they hate while purporting to “love”.

Reading this post was like reliving all of the foregoing and more. Worse still, it comes with the realisation that your country, as incapable as it is of doing anything about gun violence, is unlikely, for the same reasons, ever to bring the monsters you’ve written about to their knees. They will get away with it, even if the rest of the country grows TFU, because their right to abuse and intimidate is protected by the first amendment.

As a famous war leader said: The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step. Decent people must never cease to call out arseholes. Thank you for doing so as often as you do!