Saturday, February 9, 2013

Documentary Commentary: 'Mea Maxima Culpa'

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is a compelling 2012 documentary by director Gibney that explores the issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. A not altogether illegitimate response to yet another documentary on child sex abuse in the Catholic church might be "Yeah, yeah, we've heard all that before!" It is in itself unfortunate, of course, that people should become inured to horror because it has become commonplace. Mea Maxima Culpa, however, includes a great deal of newly revealed material, and explores the subject in some ways that have not been widely done previously.

Mea Maxima Culpa explores its subject matter through the eyes of four deaf adult men who as children were molested by priest Father Lawrence Murphy at the church boarding school in Wisconsin where they each lived for a number of years. It then goes into a broader examination of the worldwide phenomena of pedophile priests; how this has manifested in other countries, such as Ireland; and the complicity of the Catholic Church in covering up the problem and its monumental efforts to suppress public knowledge of it.

One focus of the documentary I found fascinating was the number of priests and church officials who heroically struggled to expose and combat the problem of pedophile priests but who were suppressed and silenced by the institution of which they were part. This aspect of the film, however, points out the importance of acknowledging the efforts of these clergy and remembering that the issue of child sexual molestation was not universally approved of or covered up even within the church.

An obstacle faced by victims faced by such abuse, the documentary points out, was that even people outside the church were not interested in helping them and were thus at least passively complicit in the problem. Parents told their children how terrible it was to say such horrible things about priests, police dismissed victims as troublemakers, newspaper editors suppressed relevant details from published articles. Some of this resonated with me personally, because my parents taught me when I was growing up to never criticize people in authority, no matter who they were or what they had done. This, they said, would reflect badly on me, not on the people in question. I was never molested by a priest and, despite being raised Catholic never even knowingly met a pedophile priest, but it is profoundly disturbing to consider that I was told in advance that I simply needed to keep things like that to myself. This was not because my parents wanted me to be molested, of course, but simply because they were products of a Rust Belt factory town culture where everyone was part of a strict hierarchy and "knew their place"; in that world, there was nothing worse than being the outsider or the person who stood out, and so they were trying to protect me from the threat they perceived as being most palpable.

Mea Maxima Culpa will likely also resonate with other viewers for any number of reasons. It began showing on HBO in 2013 and will likely become available through other venues as well over the coming months, and I would encourage anyone who is interested to check it out.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

The Right to Bare Arms

If there is one thing conservatives are good at it is observing appropriate gender roles. But, while the boys are all posting pictures of AR-15s, asserting their 2nd Amendment rights to be able to slaughter entire classrooms of children, and ranting about "tyrants" and "despots," what are the girls supposed to do? Complain about Michelle Obama's sleeveless dresses, of course! Yes, ladies, that's what the guys have been going on about when you hear them talking about "bare arms." So, while they are showing off their guns, you can complain about Mrs. Obama showing hers.

This particular line of complaint did, of course, catch me off guard the first time I saw someone post about it, but after that it was not surprising to see it again and again. What could be more conservatively responsible, after all, than to simply reiterate someone else's already existing thoughts? Leave it to the liberals, hippies, communists, homosexuals, etc., to profligately reinvent the wheel and needlessly waste all those words on original composition every time they need to say something. With that in mind, following are some stock responses you can feel free to use anytime you see a conservative lady complaining on Facebook or other social media about the First Lady's fashion sense (and it had better be a lady doing it, because only a man who was gay would care enough to complain about this, and his very existence would anger God and make baby Jesus cry).

* "They obviously have a different fashion sense in Washington, D.C, than we do here in Texas!" (Note: Feel free to swap out "Texas" for Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, or whatever center of haute couture you happen to be from.)

* "I guess I kind of agree with you, but I don't actually think black people look good in anything."

* "Yeah, if the First Lady had lunch lady arms she probably wouldn't be showing them off, either."

* "You're right! If she is going to be everybody's First Lady then she is going to need to appeal to the Walmart crowd, too."

* "Yes, she really is stupid if she hasn't figured out that people are watching her like vultures and waiting to criticize everything she does!"

Enjoy! And you can easily customize any of those responses by preceding them with "LOL!", following them with a winky face emoticon -- ;) -- or some other minor addition. And have you got some of your own? If so, please post them as a comment here so that we can all appreciate and share them!