A STUDENT who had sex with a 13-year-old girl claimed he didn’t know it was illegal because of his strict Muslim upbringing, a court heard yesterday. Adil Rashid, 18, met the girl on Facebook and groomed her for two months before booking a hotel where they had sex.

But when cops arrested him, he claimed he did not know about the age of consent because of his Muslim education in a madrassa school.

He also said he had been taught a woman was “no more worthy than a lollipop dropped on the ground”.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4763915/I-didnt-know-sex-with-13-year-old-was-illegal-says-student-18-who-blames-Muslim-teaching.html#ixzz2J706514M

Documents from the late 1980s show that Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and another archdiocese official discussed strategies to keep police from discovering that children were being sexually abused by priests.

By Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers and Harriet Ryan, Los Angeles Times

January 21, 2013, 2:31 p.m.


Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, including keeping them out of California to avoid prosecution, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders' own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

--snip--

The confidential files of at least 75 more accused abusers are slated to become public in coming weeks under the terms of a 2007 civil settlement with more than 500 victims. A private mediator had ordered the names of the church hierarchy redacted from those documents, but after objections from The Times and the Associated Press, a Superior Court judge ruled that the names of Mahony, Curry and others in supervisory roles should not be blacked out.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-files-20130122,0,3114631.story

Protecting our children from religion and its symptoms—such as dichotomous thinking, the externalization of blame, and perpetual guilt—may be one of the greatest gifts that we can bestow. Some freethinking parents feel uneasy sharing their skepticism of religion with their children for fear of committing the parental sin of childhood indoctrination. But take heart—we don’t believe in sin, remember?

As Dr. McGowen has helpfully noted on his Parenting Beyond Belief YouTube channel, there is a difference between indoctrination and parental influence. Indoctrination, he says, is the presentation of only one set of ideas, and forbidding your children to question those ideas. Influence, on the other hand, is sharing your ideas with your children, but then saying as often as you can that there are other good people who have differing opinions, and encouraging your children to inquire of those other people themselves.

Although I was raised in a largely secular family, the mere absence of religion at home was not enough to prevent me from coming down with a bad case of religion as a youth. Just as keeping kids away from communicable diseases is not enough to ensure that they will not contract the diseases, we must proactively inoculate our children against supernaturalism. We do this by exposing them to innocuous strands of religion—religion as cultural curiosity rather than as the pernicious precondition of social acceptance and survival. Religious parents have traditionally been much better than secular parents at imparting their worldview to their children. Religionists know they need to “get ‘em while their young,” before their children grow up and are able to think for themselves, diminishing the chances that they’ll buy what religions are trying to sell.

Below are a few of the books, videos, and songs that my boys, ages 8, 6, and 4, have enjoyed and that I have found useful for imparting to them a skepticism for the supernatural, a recognition of some of religions’ peculiarities, and a sense of wonder and appreciation for the natural world. These recommendations are not comprehensive, but they are a place to start.

http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/parents/?p=587

Should one religious tradition be given preferential treatment in the United States? I think most of us would emphatically say, “No!”

So a new public opinion poll from the Barna Group has good news for us. The telephone survey, announced Jan. 18, found that 66 percent of Americans say no one set of values should dominate in this country. That’s two out three Americans on the right side, and that’s not too bad.

But Barna, an evangelical-leaning enterprise, also found some troubling statistics. Twenty-three percent of those polled say “traditional Judeo-Christian values” should be given preference in the United States. Among evangelical Christians that number rose to 54 percent!

I think this data tells us why we have so much trouble with the Religious Right. Most Americans have a live-and-let-live attitude toward religion. We make our own decisions about faith, and we expect others to do so as well.

But a sizeable minority of Americans is so sure they’re right about religion that they want the government to give their faith preferential treatment. Needless to say, there are a lot of problems with this approach.

http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2013/01/americans-and-religious-liberty-a-new-poll-yields-good-news-and-bad-news/

Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins.

The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”

--snip--

But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.

http://coloradoindependent.com/126808/in-malpractice-case-catholic-hospital-argues-fetuses-arent-people

Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins.

The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”

--snip--

But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.

http://coloradoindependent.com/126808/in-malpractice-case-catholic-hospital-argues-fetuses-arent-people