24 August 2003

DRUNK LEVEL:  7
(Drunk Level is measured on a scale on 1-10 - zero being dead sober - depending solely on how shitty - aka. pissed, blotto, pickled, drunk - I was when I wrote this. DL should be considered in any syntax errors, as well as grammatical faux paux and continuity errors. If you have issues with the actual content - what I am saying - well, go fuck yourself).

I was in a bar into my third drink when this news came to me for the first time, via WWOR UPN-9 news (actual text from The New York Times, motto:  "All the news that's fit to print, or else our reporters make it up, whatever sells, right Jayson Blair?")

John J. Geoghan, the former priest whose abuse of children over decades opened the door for a scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church, was strangled by another inmate in a Massachusetts state prison, officials said yesterday.

For those of you that perhaps were (a) religiously irrelevant or (b) under a rock last couple of years, Father Geoghan became the pariah for all pedophile priests, the lightning rod of all claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the United States over the last few decades.  What were the charges, you ask?  Well, let me quote:

In January 2002, Mr. Geoghan was convicted of groping a 10-year-old boy in a pool and given the maximum sentence. Other criminal charges were pending, as well as civil cases involving more than 130 people who said he had abused them.

That's one hundred and thirty pending cases.  Let me put this into perspective for you.  If you walked out of your house right now - I mean RIGHT FUCKING NOW - and fucked a hundred little boys in the ass, you'd be about thirty behind ol' Father Geoghan.  Which would be too bad for ol' John-boy, because from what I can tell, he'd be more comfortable behind you.

And it wasn't like no one knew about the real-life version of Uncle Ernie from The Who's "Tommy" times 130, because there was a huge amount of evidence of complaints against him:

His case also showed the degree to which the Roman Catholic hierarchy knew about problem priests and shuttled them among parishes, showing what victims said was more concern for the church's reputation than for the safety of children.

Mr. Geoghan's abuses date back to his first assignment as a parish priest, at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Saugus, an area north of Boston where he served from his ordination in 1962 until 1967. And they continued until the 1980's through a swath of suburban Boston parishes, in the bedrooms of his parishioners' children, at his family beachfront home, while he prayed, even at a Boston Red Sox game, victims said.

Now, I know that being a Red Sox fan means knowing what it's like to take it in the ass for all eternity, but aren't we being a little too literal here?

"The entire country, I would argue, and certainly every single Catholic, owes an enormous debt to the men and women who he victimized and were strong enough to come forward," Mr. Clohessy said of Mr. Geoghan. But he added, "Despite the horrific damage he caused, no one deserves to die like this."

A lawyer for many of Mr. Geoghan's victims, Mitchell Garabedian of Boston, said that 147 people had come to him since 1994 saying they were abused by Mr. Geoghan. He said his clients would rather have seen Mr. Geoghan serve time in jail and undergo more trials, so more details about his activity could be made public.

"Many of my clients have never expressed any vindictiveness whatsoever," he said

This, coming from a people following a religion that has shown vindictiveness for crimes against its own - what part of Exodus did Moses say, "You know, we really didn't like being enslaved, but did all those Egyptian soldiers have to drown?  Couldn't they have been sent to counseling?"  Yes, no one deserves to die like that, Mr. Clohessy, and no child deserves to be sodomized by a person who claims to represent God.

Phil Saviano, founder of the New England chapter of the Survivors Network, said he expected many of his victims to feel responsible for Mr. Geoghan's death.

Yeah, I'm sure there are 130 grown men right now who are honestly upset that the man who fucked them in the ass when they were little boys got whacked in prison.

"He needed to be off the streets and away from children," he said, "but that prison sentence was never meant to be a death sentence."

Hey Phil, if it had been, say, a guy named Bob who lived down the block from you who had buggered 130 little boys, would you have said the same thing?  Or is it just because he was a "priest"?  (Yes, I used the quotation marks as a form of sarcasm).

There are two groups of people in this world that I have absolutely no compassion for:

I've always believed that you would be more humane to kill someone than to rape them.  You kill them, they're dead.  End of story, close the drawer.  Beat the shit out of them, bruises heal, cuts heal, swelling goes down.  You rape them, you fuck them up for life.  They might as well be dead.  Guy rapes a girl?  She can't get close to another guy ever.  I've known women who were assaulted by guys.  I would have no compunction about killing someone I knew did that to a woman.  I can't watch "The Accused."  If I hear a story about it happening to someone, I turn into Bud White in "L.A. Confidential."  No matter how miserable a cunt a woman can be - and trust me, I've been with and known the worst - NO ONE deserves that.

But, I digress.  Sort-of.  The point is, child molesters should be stripped of their humanity.  I remember someone saying a long time ago that guys in prison accused of crimes against a child have a very low survival rate.  You murdered twenty people?  Good job.  Burned down a city block?  Here, have a smoke.  Fucked a little boy is the ass?  Buddy, you're in for a WORLD of hurt.

Now, let's leave my distaste for the Catholic Church aside.  I'm Catholic, just in case you were wondering.  And let's forget the long and sordid history of varying degrees of despicable acts performed by people in the employ of, and people in the name of, the Catholic Church and God and Jesus H. Christ.  And, for that matter, my hatred for organized religion in general.  I mean, after all, how many thousands - nay, MILLIONS - of people have given their lives and had their lives taken involuntarily over their version of the almighty deity, be it God, Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, etc. etc. etc.

Let's bring it down to the most basic level.  What Owen Morgan, a professor I once had in that greatest of all college courses, FAS332 - Human Sexuality, said about sexual relations and societal taboos thereof: it's not whether a penis was in a vagina, it's about the way people treat people.  Hindu, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Zoroastrian, I couldn't give two shits.  As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what deity or subversion thereof you believe in, but that you believe in something.  And that you treat every human being with the respect they deserve (unless they're Geoghan or a fuck-up subspecies thereof).  If you treat people the way Johnny G. treated little boys, you deserve to be whacked in prison.  Actually, you deserve worse.  I don't know the details surrounding the apparent strangulation of Geoghan, but I guarantee you I could concoct ten ways worse to die without even firing up the majority of my brain which is lying dormant right now at 0147 hours on a Sunday.  And when the FUCK is that Percoset gonna kick in that I took two hours ago along with all the alcohol?

Oh shit, again, I digress.

In short, my position is this:  John J. Geoghan, the former priest whose abuse of children over decades opened the door for a scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church, was strangled by another inmate in a Massachusetts state prison, and deserved every bit of what he got, and probably a lot worse than he received, and no one, not one person, should shed a tear.  There are 130 - and maybe more, who knows - grown men who once were young boys who Geoghan molested.  Young boys who believed in the Catholic Church, believed in the idea of God in Heaven and all being right with the world, believed that the Church was supposed to be a place where you were safe, believed that their service as an altar boy (or whatever) in that Church was something they should do, and NEVER, NOT ONCE, believed that the parish priest would do the unspeakable things that John J. Geoghan did.

When you cross yourself tonight, when you hit your knees and pray to your omnipotent deity, don't waste your precious airtime with your respective Almighty praying for the soul of John J. Geoghan.  There are bacteria inside your toilet bowl more deserving of your prayers.  What matters in this world is NOT what color your collar is, or what religion you follow, or what deity you believe in, or what country you live in.  What matters is how you treat each other.

Remember Dr. Morgan's words.  It has nothing to do with the technicalities, what matters is, how do you treat each other?  Hanji Hanjour believed in his Allah.  He probably prayed five times a day facing Mecca just like a good Muslim.  Does that mean he was a good person?  When he flew a jet with innocent people into the Pentagon (and I assume I have my hijackers and their flights right) on 11 September 2001, was he following the spirit of his religion?  Every religion preaches one thing (usually): treat each other well.  It's the fucking nutcases that fuck it up for everyone, the Richelieus and bin Ladens and Jim Bakers of the world.  John J. Geoghan probably believed in God.  He probably believed in the Ten Commandments, the Passion, the Exodus, and all that fun stuff.  Does that absolve his heinous crimes?  No.  So should we feel any worse for John Geoghan than we would have for any other serial pedophile, which is, white collar aside, what he was?  Any lay person accused of 130 cases of sexual misconduct with children over three decades and the death sentence would have been called for from the farthest reaches of humanity, slap a plastic collar on his neck and a good talking-to is suddenly the punition du jour.  Ah, the power of cheese.

I've said it before, I'll say it now, and I'll say it again in the future, more than once I'm sure:  the most inhuman crimes against humanity have been committed by humans carrying the standards of their religions, believing that they were committing their acts in the service of their deity, or hiding their own personal desires for power or gratification - sexual or otherwise - under the cover of same religion.  Religion has become a way not of bringing a moral base to the masses, not a system of beliefs by which human beings may achieve a greater sense of community, but rather a way for a few people to exercise power over a mass of others irrespective of national borders.  One doesn't need to gain control over the masses by lines drawn on a map, but rather by herding the weak into a psychological corral based on religious dogma, playing to their basest need for validity for their existence as a part of a greater scheme in an effort to control them into doing your will.  And once said sheep are in said corral, the religious sheepherders can bugger the flock to their hearts' content, all the while deluding themselves and the flock that it's for the good of the whole.  And when the truth comes to light, they use their position as "God's servant" as a shield to deflect the punishment that the flock would have received for the same crimes, because after all, they were God's servants.

In other words, people suck.

By the way, I popped the second Percoset a half-hour ago, do these things really work?