Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

-
I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 


I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.


I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 


All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  


The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  


On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  


Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 


I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 


In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 


Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 



In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 


I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 


I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?


It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 


(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 


Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 


Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania isPhiladelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control. 


Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control.  Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)


The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bring Pennsylvaniaunder the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 


PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  

While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family inToledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites.  

Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice .  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come. 

July 23, 2011

.

Pennsylvanians Find Phillie Phanatic More Qualified to Be President Than Donald #Trump: Poll

Pennsylvanians Find Phillie Phanatic More Qualified to Be President Than Donald #Trump: Poll 

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/sports/csn/phillies/Poll_shows_Pennsylvanians_find_Phillie_Phanatic_more_qualified_to_be_President_than_Donald_Trump-382263871.html

.

They – Governor Tom Corbett – Mayor Michael Nutter – Archbishop Charles Chaput - Went to the Vatican and all they got was a Lousy Tee Shirt

Governor Who?

@GovernorCorbett I feel bad for the Pope...he cannot escape immoral politicians like Tom Corbett.
— Aaron (@posas13) March 26, 2014

Going in much pomp and expectations to capture Pope Francis to honor Pope Benedict’s scheduled appointment to a $100 million Philly Catholic Family Fest in 2015, the delegation got 5-6 minutes in the rain with other pilgrims.

Francis is busy or does he not want to waste his valuable private time with corrupt Pennsylvania politicians?

We shall see how much time American Barry Obama gets later this week.

http://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-pa-delegation-pope-visit-canceled-0326-20140326,0,7289174.story#ixzz2x5BfLfQ

  

The local delegation had expected an extended private meeting Wednesday at which they would have urged Francis to visit the city when the Philadelphia Archdiocese hosts the Eighth World Meeting of Families, a Vatican-sponsored gathering expected to draw hundreds of thousands to the city in 2015.

But Meg Kane, communications coordinator for the much-ballyhooed trip to Rome, sent word out at about 11:30 p.m. Rome time that the delegation would not be meeting with Francis at his residence, as had been long planned.

(Thanks Dave)

.

Pennsylvania Political Whores Corbett Nutter and Chaput Off to Rome to Woo Pope Francis for Expensive TaxPayer All-Expense Paid Visit to Philly in 2015 – Tuppence to the Poor

I know that whenever a major dignitary, head of state, comes to New York for a major state visit, the price tag to the taxpayers is usually in the tens of millions of dollars. The Fed usually kicks in some funds under the table because New York is host city to the United Nations.

And the price tag for such events goes up all the time. Benedict’s Trip to Madrid Spain in 2011 cost an estimated 72 million dollars that cash strapped Spain forked out for a Catholic event in a “Catholic” country.

I know that Francis is popular at the moment and all that, meaning he does not seem to be half the prick that Benedict is and or John Paul was in real life but get a life Catholics.

Governor Corbett who cuts back on school aid, food stamps and everything else non-white-surburban middle class wants to drum up a visit of Francis to a Catholic Family Conference in Philly in 2015.

Benedict had already promised and hey it will bring an estimated 100 million dollars into the local economy but it will probably cost 100 million in overtime for police, added security, barriers, patrols, electronic scanning devices etc.

The Catholic Governor who protected the Sandusky child abuse set up at Penn State for years as Attorney General says that they are not going to use tax payers money to fund costs of this Pape Fest. Yeah right. 

Pennsylvania taxpayers are about to get screwed for a Catholic Party on the Parkway in Philly.

Off to Rome with Governor Corbett, Mayor Nutter and Charles Chaput in search of his red hat, kissing up to the pope and hoping for a Catholic party at taxpayers’ expense for the cash strapped Philadelphia Archdiocese that must close parish after parish to make up to the devil may care spending like a Drunken Sailor in Rome outside a male brothel of the, of late, not so great Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia/Rome, retired now to a palace in Knoxville Tennessee.

http://articles.mcall.com/2014-03-08/news/mc-pa-corbett-philly-pope-20140307_1_pope-francis-vatican-catholics

The last Holy See to visit Philadelphia was Pope John Paul II in 1979. His outdoor mass along Benjamin Franklin Parkway drew more than 1 million.

 If Francis were to come to Philadelphia, it would be his first trip in to North America, Corbett said. The city's large media market and geographic location, halfway between New York city and Washington, D.C., makes it the perfect designation for Francis to make the cross-Atlantic trip, the governor said.

 In June 2012, when Benedict named Philadelphia as the host site for the family gathering, Chaput admitted he was nervous. The archdiocese was going through a tough period, he said, alluding to the prosecution of Monsignor William Lynn, whose conviction on child endangerment charges related to covering up sexual assaults of children recently was overturned. In January, Lynn was freed on bail pending an appeal.

 But Chaput said his confidence grew after the region's and state's business and religious communities reached out to him to offer assistance. Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders have come together to join the host committee, chaired by Nutter, a Democrat ,and Corbett, a Republican, Chaput said.

 "It's a miracle," he said.

 The committee has raised $5 million so far, Chaput said. More is needed to help offset the cost of the event and give a donation to the poor.

.

Monsignor Lynn, Clergy Pedophile Enabler, Bribed Out Of Jail? Philadelphia the Most Corrupt Archdiocese in America?

On the one hand your have.

”The Philadelphia archdiocese says it doesn't change its pledge to protect children and remove abusive priests.”

And then you have a bunch of typical greasy palmed Pennsylvania judges saying that Monsignor Lynn is not responsible for the welfare of children in the archdiocese. How convenient.

Cake and Eat It Too.

They don't call Charlie - "Chaput The Fixer" for nothing(-$).

http://start.toshiba.com/news/read/category/Top%20News/article/ap-pa_court_reverses_church_officials_convi-ap

Monsignor William Lynn has served 18 months in prison after a jury found he endangered a boy by helping protect a predator-priest. But an appeals court on Thursday overturned the child endangerment conviction, saying Lynn was not legally responsible for the boy's welfare.

Lynn's lawyers hoped the 62-year-old Lynn would go free, but the Superior Court has instead sent the bail issue back to the trial court.  

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams vows to oppose bail and appeal the ruling.

Victims' advocates are outraged by the ruling.

. 

RC Church Allentown PA / Lehigh County Intitutional Bigotry – Vic Mazziotti and Andy Baker in Bed Together on Bigotry Issues But Definitely “Not Queer” or so they claim?

Msgr. "I Wanna B Bishop!" Andrew Baker - Commissioner Vic "I Ain't Queer" Mazziotti
(In some Roman Catholics Circles - Being anti-gay Bigots is the New Black)

My civilised (British spelling) friend Dave sent me a link to remind what I am missing and what is it like sometimes to live among the Neanderthals in Northeast Pennsylvania.  lol

Bishop Barre’s Consigliere Rev. Andrew Baker Defends Lehigh County Government’s Bigotry toward Same Sex Couple Benefits.

The Republican big guy in Lehigh County recently made it clear that same sex couples, married in other states, have no right to marital benefits if working in Lehigh County government, both because same sex marriage is not yet a civil right recognized in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania but more importantly, the Roman Catholic Church has ultimate veto power over Commissioner Vic Mazziotti to even use his brain (theoretical presence assumed there) in the matter. The church thinks for him. May I suggest Vic send his paycheck from the County straight to the Vatican. LOL

And the Bishop’s right hand yes man stooge Msgr. Andy Baker in charge of the Italian Cathedral, is backing up Vic Mazziotti’s right to bigot up the place in name of Holy Mudder Church. 

What a bunch of Neaderthals living in northeast Pennsylvania.

Visitor’s beware.

http://lehighvalleyramblings.blogspot.com/2013/12/allentown-priest-worries-about-gay.html

Even its most strident cheerleaders will agree there are many problems in Allentown. Violent crime. High unemployment. Terrible schools. Extreme poverty. Hunger. Homelessness. It's a place where a church, any church, can do so much good. So what does one Allentown priest do? 

 Attack the gays. 

 In a snippy letter to the editor, a Catholic Allentown pastor has taken aim, not at any of Allentown's real problems, but those damn queers. Andrew Baker, a Bishop wannabe housed in comfort at Allentown's Cathedral, calls same sex benefits a "potential harm to the common good" and likens them to extending maternity benefits to men. 

 Gays, incidentally, are manufactured in Greece by Satan and then shipped all over the world. 

 Baker has condemned the gay menace before. In 2002, while doing a stint at the Vatican with all the other Bishop wannabes, the obscene wealth did not trouble him a bit. But he sure was bothered by gay priests. In an essay, Baker called homosexuality a "disorder" and worried that gay priests could ruin the good gig priests have at places like St. Catharine of Siena, where rich people can pretend they're just like Jesus Christ. Except cleaner. 

 I'd be a little more worried about pedophiles. 

 If you google Baker, you'll learn that he's very concerned about gays and "religious freedom." But not much about poverty, illness, homelessness, violence. 

 Make that man a Cardinal! 

 Baker does not speak for the Church. Nor does Vic Mazziotti, a Lehigh County Commissioner who hid behind Baker's robes to justify a vote denying same sex benefits in that County.

http://articles.mcall.com/2013-11-13/news/mc-lehigh-county-2014-budget-override-20131113_1_executive-matt-croslis-republican-commissioner-percy-dougherty-2014-budget

For a second time, Lehigh County commissioners on Wednesday struck down a provision in the 2014 budget that would extend benefits to same-sex spouses. 

Republican commissioners blocked Democratic Executive Matt Croslis' veto that would have restored funding for the new program, which the commissioners eliminated in a budget amendment... 

Republican Commissioner Vic Mazziotti said he opposed the expansion because the state does not recognize same-sex marriage, and for a religious reason.

 "I'm a Catholic, and in the Catholic Church individual members of the church aren't permitted to determine what is appropriate and not appropriate," he said. "The church's position on same-sex marriage is clear. 

They do not support it. Were I to vote for this, I would be cooperating with behavior that my church does not condone. … No faithful Catholic could vote for this amendment." 

 In defense of all the cuts, board President Lisa Scheller argued that the county has a spending problem and decisive action is needed to avoid a tax increase in 2015. 

 While the benefits were allotted $219,000 in the original budget, Croslis readjusted the estimate down to $50,000, based on evidence from other large employers. 

 "I'm a practicing Catholic as well," Croslis said. "When it comes to this, our policy discriminates."

.


.

Feedback on Tea Party Creep Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, Pennsylvania – and other Holier than Thou Burb Bubble Land People just Like Him

We have this problem here in America Lately.  The press gives free rides to people like Ted Cruz or idiots in the Pennsylvania State (H8) Legislature like Rick Saccone and Daryl Metcalfe who pass this feel good Guido stuff that plays well in their bubble world existence in the Burbs.

That they are thinking that what they feel good with on lily white green lawn suburbia is what I want which it ain’t.  They claim, most of these Tea Party shits to be Christian, but they do not have a clue about life or people, empathy or compassion. That many in fact if you look at them closely have lived in the burbs all their lives or they are lifers in the military and then come out and get elected to cushy little jobs to backwater burbs.

They are building the new Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School in Cranberry Township Pa. which is the home base of Daryl Metcalfe, there in a rich burb of Pittsburgh. That the old North Catholic there had to climb further into the burbs to escape the blacks in the inner city that want to get a better education etc. No doubt Cardinal Wuerl will be proud of the new WHITES ONLY BURB catholic high school. 

Mission of the RC in America of late seems like it is to sell off all the old immigrant built inner city real estate and locate to the white safeness of the burbs. Many of the best inner city schools and high schools in America have bit the dust in favor of locating to the burbs to escape the reality of diverse 20^th century America etc.

Rep. Rick Saccone, Pennsylvania Church Merged with State Legislator and Iraq War Torture Expert

I can guess why some Politicians want and need a National Day of Fast to Atone for their own sins, but please do not drag me into your personal hell foxhole comrade.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-04-22/news/0904210044_1_words-torture-techniques-water-boarding

Public officials, media outlets and members of the public who use the words torture and coercion interchangeably are making a huge mistake - one that could threaten our safety and security.

Formerly top-secret documents declassified recently by the Obama administration describe in detail 10 interrogation techniques, including the now-infamous water-boarding. This has led to the unfortunate branding of all coercive techniques as torture.
...

  

We cannot apply absolutes to these ambiguous scenarios. We need reasonable guidelines that allow discretion for those risking their lives to gather the information needed to protect us.

 And finally: Shall we address water-boarding? It is critical to remember that contrary to the portrayal in some media, enhanced techniques were used principally on hardened terrorists who refused to cooperate through rapport building and other noncoercive methods.

 For example, intelligence officials believed Abu Zubaydah, a hardcore terrorist and planner of the 9/11 attacks, retained valuable insight into the inner workings of al-Qaida at the highest levels. He had successfully resisted all other methods of interrogation. However, it is almost impossible to train to resist water-boarding. Ultimately, he lasted 32 seconds. Given this context, I am confident most Americans would not object to using that technique.

 U.S. policy must authorize the use of certain interrogation methods that fall below the threshold of torture. We cannot allow our enemies to draw a moral equivalence between compelling a prisoner to kneel for 10 minutes and chopping off his fingers one by one. Our government must insist that making a terrorist uncomfortable should not be confused, or in any way equated, with torture.

 Richard Saccone, a retired counterintelligence agent, teaches international relations and political science at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., and is the author of "The Unseen War in Iraq: Insurgents in the Shadows."

http://www.amazon.com/Unseen-War-Iraq-Insurgents-Shadows/dp/1565911342

Customer Book Review:

Counterintelligence for the layperson. Richard Saccone's up close and personal vantage point in Iraq, especially Abu Ghraib gives the outsider a unique perspective that is missing from liberal and mass media reports of the Iraq war's counterintelligence challenges. It is a compendium of scenarios that reveals the depths of what we face in Iraq from Titan defense contractors' hiring of local interpreters to the undeniably soul-ess manner in which the enemy tortures and kills innocents in their quest for an untenable goal. Particularly compelling are his descriptions of the Abu G prison and how insufficiently trained and overworked government and military guards/Military Intelligence sometimes miss important clues on smuggling and intelligence gathering.

Mr. Saccone parts the veil on what happens inside Abu G. Reports from biased Red Cross evaluators to the rabid liberal international and U.S. media on how prisoner treatment are truly one-sided and do not paint an accurate picture of how the U.S. is the preferred administrator to the inmates. Although American leadership did allow Abu G excesses in the scandal, the prisoners are far more fearful of the harsh treatment and living conditions under Iraqi hands.

. 

Ted Cruz and His Involvement in the Child Abuse “Kids For Cash” Scandal in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Mother Sandy Fonzo - Texas Political Advertisement 2012

I see that Senator Ted Cruz believes that a capitalist’s money is never too dirty to earn - as in the case of sideline child abuser (guilt by association ?) and real estate developer Robert Mericle, in the still ongoing “Kid for Cash” “Build Kids Jails for Profit” scandal in northeast Pennsylvania in Wilkes Barre.

I say ongoing because Robert Mericle pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain agreement in 2009 but is yet to be sentenced in that case. Is he free on bail like the two judges were free on bail for a time or is he sitting in some “for profit” prison waiting for his minimum agreed to sentencing?

(Waiting for a Republican Presidential Pardon in 2017 Mr. Mericle?)

Disclaimer:

Before I go any further.

Red Ted from Red Texas did not offer his lawyering services for hire in any part of the actual abuse of children by falsely jailing them scam by Mericle to partner up and create artificial demand, building “for profit kids jails” in connection with bribing scumbag judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan.  

This scandal got hushed up real good by being ignored by the national media. 

Red Ted only helped Robert Mericle to sue an insurance company to help with financial damages to victims (kids and their parents) for false imprisonment and what do you call it “Child non-Abuse”?

The insurance company rightfully refused to pay out on Mericle’s real estate business’ involvement in, that was the backbone of the scam to defraud children of their youth and innocence and get into the with it modern “prisons for profit” gulag in America capital business portfolio.

In his senatorial primary fight, Ted got accused of shit in a political advertisement by mother Sandy Fonzo, whose child committed suicide after being fucked over by Mericle Real Estate Inc and his Bribe Judge fuck buddies.

In all probability, the political ad was a bit over the line, but then as we have since seen, nothing over the line or obscene, is too far for Red Ted to go.

Whatever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2009/10/child-abuse-judges-conahan-ciavarella.html

http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/kids-for-cash-scandal-getting-attention-in-texas-political-race-1.1343739

http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/24/dewhurst-super-pac-ad-cruz-responsible-for-mans-suicide-video/

http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/oct/11/ted-

cruz/ted-cruz-says-david-dewhursts-camp-called-him-chin/

.

Ken Cuccinelli – Another Santorum Trying to Impose Catholic Sharia Law In Virginia? Virginia Should Change its Age of Consent Laws to Conform to Regional Standards

Ken Cuccinelli and Rick Santorum,
two sides of the same Sharia Coin

The church ladies in Virginia have the age of consent at 18 years of age. Virginia is surrounded by North Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland where the age of consent is 16.

The ancient definitions of sodomy is technically anything but straight missionary sex and inside a marriage.

Oral sex, Straight or Gay is Technically “Sodomy” by RC Church Sharia Law.

Cuccinelli is screaming about a 47 year old man propositioning a 17 year old girl for oral sex and states that if a struck down by a federal court Sodomy law is not reinstated that a bunch of children offenders (age 17? Children) will go free from prison and lose the stigma of being sex offenders etc.

Maybe Virginia should just lower the age of consent to 16 similar to other nearby Southern States and Ken Cuccinelli should get the F*** out of our pants and out of our bedrooms.

Boy these Republicans seem to want to watch too much porn – in our bedrooms! Free and at our expense?

Ken Cuccinelli and Rick Santorum, two sides of the same wooden nickel Coin.

Get a life Ken and get the Santorum out of our lives.

.

No Vision – Just Ambition – In America Today

http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=80779

I started writing this less than a week ago and I thought Oh No, another sour grapes thing about the RCC in the seventies in Philly that drove the masses out of the churches and schools in time or at least in the inner city as they are now calling my old neighborhood.

As some friend has described to me, with planned or likely closings of RC churches here, there actually, there will be no RC churches in the Frankford and Harrowgate sections of the city soon. 

My own grade school closed in 2003. And the economics of it all is not necessarily racist. The state and city screw things up with popular school vouchers legislation or threat of its passage which from a distance I do not know much about.  

I do know that as soon as you add money to a system with school vouchers or even employer covered health or dental care, you directly or indirectly inflate the basic cost of doing business. That is economics and some politics.

That education in America is big business with student loans, seven hundred dollar college text books etc. That is economics and politics.

The real crux of the matter was that jobs first went south and then overseas and emptied the local factories of very marginal jobs of the average factory workers when those jobs went south. That is economics.

Without a job - you and your environment become dysfunctional. Not rocket science to understand. 

The above bill board in the shabby shopping district of downtown Philly at Third Street and Market Street was where us factory workers went to find bargains that the department stores  further up the street could not offer us. We paid cash. We had no credit.

The money for that billboard came out of the archdiocese’s coffers or some non-profit organization or the obsessive compulsive wallets of Koch Brothers or Mellon Scaife types doing their social experimentation on the masses.

Like I said I started to write this a few days ago, stopped and erased it. I was inspired at first by the historic photo archives picture because of the date and the subject matter – abortion.

1971 was about the time I stopped going to church.  I was tired of the Sunday pulpit demands to write my state legislature to demand that Catholic Sharia Law on Contraception become the law in Pennsylvania.

Science had made a paradigm shift thing and the new chemistry of birth control just overwhelmed the boys in the RC clergy. They have never caught up.

It is a funny thought and I have mentioned it one way or another in the five years since I started this blog, the church left me, us behind when it abandoned spirituality and went straight for the economic and political approach to human sexuality.  

That if an ambitious Cardinal Krol was not hell bent on becoming pope, and attended his flock with some love instead of a Wharton Spreadsheet; maybe the economics and politics of the inner city and the racial divides could have been addressed.  

That some jobs in factories could have been saved, that there would have been less racial fear and less white flight to the suburbs and places like Frankford or Harrowgate would still have catholic grade schools, high schools and even churches there today.

In other words, there was no vision.  There seemed to be only ambition to achieve some corporate religious agenda.

There was no Vision.  There was only Ambition.

And that stagnation, which ignores the heart or the spirit of things and life situations that matter to us locally, could have been addressed by mature efforts and solutions. 

So it goes. 

.

Sausage Fest - Penn State Board of Trustees

Sausage fest BTW is an urban street term by where a bunch of males get together to do whatever and their number far exceeds any number of possible females present. Kinda like a motorcycle club.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_State_University

There are 32 members of the Penn State Board of Trustees. With the Governor and State Cabinet members automatic appointees along with the Governor crony appointees, that makes 11 out of 32 or one third of the Board of Trustees beholding to Tom Corbett, the Republican Governor.  No wonder he can be an absentee member at most meetings.  His buddies have got his back.  ( All guys by the way, no females, sausage fest?…)

Then you have about one third of the Trustees appointed by the Alumni.  ( 9 seats – 3 females )

Then the agribusiness people get 6 votes.  Penn State was the original Farming College of the State of Pennsylvania before MasterCard and Visa took over.  ( 6 seats – 1 female )

And the last 6 seats are for business and industry – CEOs/Wall Street – ( 6 seats – 2 females )

That makes 6 females out of 32 or 19% of the Board of Trustees.

But not to worry about the guys outnumbering the chicks. The University sets aside $10,000 out of student activities fees for the one Saturday in November “Cunt Fest” that actually has females trying to address legitimate female issues on a largely outnumbered in the Board Room atmosphere at Penn State.

In a preliminary response to NCAA inquiries, the Board has already set aside $2.6 million dollars of taxpayer's money as a penalty of sorts for the whole Sandusky/Paterno Sausage Fest S.N.A.F.U. situation over at the Athletic Department.  The money is earmarked for Pennsylvania groups dealing with female rape and child abuse issues.

As for the daily and weekend Keg Fest that makes Penn State the drunkest University in the nation, Playboy’s top ten list of Party Colleges does not list Penn State because the top ten list has to do with amateur level and not “professional” industrial strength institutions on the matter of alcohol consumption. Whatever.

All in all a very large isolated dysfunctional secretive male dominated organization funded mostly on the taxpayer’s dime and setting the standards of excellence regarding child rape and criminal cover up etc. in house.

Just a normal slice of 21^st Century Corrupt Crony Corporate American Pie.

Have a nice day. 

Statute of Limitation Loophole May Finally Bring USCCB Treasurer Bishop Bransfield to Justice for Sexual Misconduct

Apparently, Bishop Bransfield’s, of Wheeling WVA, name got mentioned in the Monsignor Lynn trial in Philly and having the bishop as the center of accusations of sexual misconduct in conjunction with another miscreant friend priest (guilt by association?).


Bransfield crossed the state line of Pennsylvania in 1980 when he went to work at the USCCB parish church, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC. The Pennsylvania statute of limitation on the accusations against Bransfield froze in 1980.


Don’t hold your breath on justice though.  It is Montgomery County where White, Relublican and Catholic are synonyms.  The original accusations from 2007 against Bransfield got lost in e-mails in the County Prosecutor’s office there just like similar charges of evil got lost in the Sandusky Paterno Pedo State Cover Up.  Democrats may not be less perverted than Republicans but the Republicans can sure cover it up better in Pennsylvania.


http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20120708_Review_of_2007_allegation_a_W_Va__bishop_had_fondled_a_Montco_student.html?c=r

Bransfield has been the leader of the Wheeling-Charleston Diocese since 2005 and an elected treasurer for the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. Before that, he spent more than two decades working at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington and rose to become its rector, a prominent post within church circles.A nephew, Sean Bransfield, is a vice chancellor for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Another relative, Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield, is a ranking officer at the U.S. bishops' conference. 

Michael Bransfield had never been publicly accused of misconduct until his name emerged during the trial for Msgr. William J. Lynn and the Rev. James J. Brennan.Two men testified that they talked to or saw Bransfield during years they were serially raped and molested by one of his friends and seminary classmates, Stanley Gana.One of the witnesses said Gana regularly put him on the phone with Bransfield when Gana was serially abusing him in the 1980s. During one phone call, he said, Bransfield told him: "I'm going to have Stanley put you on a train and come down and see me sometime." 

The second witness reported seeing Bransfield driving a carload of adolescent boys near a farm Gana owned in Northeast Pennsylvania. 

"They're his fair-haired boys," Gana allegedly told the teen as Bransfield drove away. "The one in the front seat he is having sex with." 

Prosecutors in the case also took aim at Bransfield after a priest from his diocese unexpectedly resisted a subpoena to testify at the trial. In the sidebar conference, Blessington told the judge that he believed Bransfield was behind the delay.

Catholic Cultural War Against the Vagina – 40 Years Later

(GOP towing the Catholic Party Line - September 28, 1969, was declared Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Day in Pennsylvania at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown.  Left to Right, Cardinal Krol of Phila., Karol Wojtyla, Gov. Ray Shafer (R) of Pennsylvania.)

The  Catholic Culture  War Against the Vagina Continues – Forty Years Later

I sat through a few minutes of the CSPAN-2 the other day with speeches from the floor of the United States Senate delivering the same crap I heard in the Catholic church in the late sixties about Birth Control that drove me forever from that church.  That Senators Roy Blunt and Kelly Ayotte sounded today like the cookie cutter no thought priests of that faith forty years ago.

Here is a repeat of my previous blog:

Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

I had a nightmare last night.  I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet. 

I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again. 

All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag.  That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.  

The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.  

On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.  

Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence.  In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes. 

I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time.  The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare. 

In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly. 

Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II.  Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.  Oh there were protestants out there.  We saw their churches dotting the landscape.  Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays.  Didn’t care.  The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools. 

In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.  They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights.  But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968.  They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,  I figured that out later along the timeline. 

I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth.  Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King. 

I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader.  Huh?

It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian.  Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life.  I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc. 

(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.) 

Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature. 

Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place.  But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted.  “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”  I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.

Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control. Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality.  (No user manual necessary.)

The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bringPennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality. 

PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.  While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites. 
Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion.  The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice.  It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg.  Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape.  Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on,  the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily.  Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore. 

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over.  The best, I fear, is yet to come.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/07/historic-beginnings-of-american-culture.html

.