Cretin(s) of the moment

The 24 intellectual lightweights in the Tennessee Senate who passed Senate Bill 893, known as one of the "monkey bills" (the other being House Bill 368) for entirely good reasons. As you could guess, informed  opinion hasn't quite been on their side on the issue if the opinions of either the National Association of Biology Teachers or the Nashville Tennessean are anything to go by.

(Also on Lurker)

Netherlands: more facts Bill Donohue is sure to be (selectively) ignorant of

Bill Donohue's career (such as it is - read this, for example) as a near apoplectic defender of everything (he deems) good, proper and Roman Catholic seems rather short on anything resembling insight or perspective; my guess is that not much of that will change even in the wake of the following sickening report from the Netherlands:
 

Underage sexual abuse victims were castrated in Dutch Roman Catholic psychiatric wards in the 1950s, according to the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Castration was performed on young men who were thought to be homosexual, but also as a means of punishing those who blew the whistle on abusers, the paper quotes sources as saying.

NRC discovered proof of the forced castration of one young man and strong evidence that at least ten other abuse victims were subjected to the removal of their testicles. The proof includes court documents, medical records, letters from lawyers and private correspondence.

According to the paper, the practice was reported in 2010 to the Deetman Commission which completed its investigation of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church last December. The commission, led by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman of the Christian Democrat party (CDA), made no mention of the castration of abuse victims in its final report.

Even without the Deetman Commission's use of this report (on grounds of "insufficient evidence"), the report itself makes for some informative - if utterly disturbing - reading:

The number of victims that grew up as Roman Catholic, spent part of their youth in a
Roman Catholic institution and reported being sexually abused by an offender
working in the Roman Catholic Church before the age of 18 during the period
between 1945 and 1981 is approximately 10,000 to 20,000 (emphasis mine).
Their experiences ranged from very mild to severe.

Likewise, in another paragraph,

A total of roughly 800 names of perpetrators mentioned in the reports could be
traced to individuals who work or worked in dioceses, orders and congregations. At
least 105 of those 800 persons are known to be still living. It is not known how many
of these individuals are still in their jobs.

Now, considering that Donohue has authored some genuinely batshit attacks on people who have dared to take issue with the RCC on the subject of sexual abuse by priests (see examples here, here and especially here) I'm hardly expecting him to produce anything but another crazed, logic-deficient attempt to defend his Mother Church regardless of any proof that crimes were committed by any of its priests in the past. In fact, I'm making a private bet that I'll see an example of Donohue's latest seizure-like huffing and puffing in a matter of days. My guess? Probably something posted on Friday.