Affirmative action racial discrimination imposed on Michigan citizens by Appeals Court

Jeffrey Folks at American Thinker has an important post on more judges defying the Constitution:

A Horrible Racial Preference Ruling in Michigan 

On Friday, a panel from the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Michigan's ban on affirmative action. In a split decision (Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action vs Regents of the University of Michigan), Judges R. Guy Cole, Jr. and Martha Craig Daughtrey had the presumption to overturn the wishes of a solid majority of Michigan voters who had approved the ban in a 2006 referendum ("Proposal 2"). The idea that two individuals could presume to annul the actions of a democratic majority is troubling. Far more troubling is the fact that, rather than interpret the law as established by the referendum, a federal court has decided once again to legislate from the bench.

The people of Michigan voted in 2006 to prohibit racial discrimination in publicly funded institutions. This of course prohibits affirmative action, which is a form of racial discrimination, in public institutions.
What was the basis for the court's overturning of the clear will of the people of Michigan (the referendum passed by 58 to 42 %):

In striking down the affirmation action ban, [Judge] Cole wrote that "[t]he majority may not manipulate the channels of change in a manner that places unique burdens on issues of importance to racial minorities." Whatever does Judge Cole mean by "manipulating the channels of change"? Or by "places unique burdens on issues of importance to racial minorities"? Rather than plain dealing based squarely on the Constitution, Cole has resorted to language so abstruse as to be mystifying.

So on what basis does a court of appeals judge declare that "the majority may not manipulate the channels of change in a manner that places unique burdens on issues of importance to racial minorities"?  On what basis are judges empowered to prevent the democratic majority from "manipulating the channels of change"?  Isn't a public referendum a legitimate channel of change? Aren't the appeals court panel themselves "manipulating the channels of change" by imposing their view on millions of Michigan citizens, without any rational basis in law or in the Constitution?

Mr. Folks:

This is not merely legal obfuscation -- it is obfuscation that seems a brazen effort to subvert the Constitution. What Judge Cole appears to be saying is that no "issue of importance" to minorities can be questioned or even discussed by the majority since any such discussion could be construed as "manipulating the channels of change." 

Cole's ruling also asserts that the affirmative action ban "unconstitutionally alters Michigan's political structure by impermissibly burdening racial minorities." It is true that Proposal 2 "alters the political structure"; that is to say, it makes a political decision. That is what legislatures and referenda are supposed to do -- not the courts....How is it that a referendum that restores equal opportunity for all can be seen as "burdening" minorities?

Exactly. How is it that colorblindness under the law places an unfair 'burden' on minorities? Isn't legally sanctioned racial discrimination exactly what has placed a burden? Isn't it good for all to ban racial discrimination under the law?

Mr. Folks:

Has Judge Cole considered that affirmative action programs that deny white and Asian applicants admission to college, hiring, and promotion at work might be "impermissibly burdening" to those individuals? How is it that a federal judge is permitted to place the interests of one racial group (his own, as it turns out) ahead of another? Nowhere in our Constitution is it stated or implied that one racial group shall be judged superior to another, no matter how poorly their ancestors were treated in the past. As the Sixth Court of Appeals panel has it, you might as well forget about getting an equal shot at being admitted to the best universities or having an outstanding career in the state of Michigan if you were born with the wrong skin color. Whites, Asians, and Jews might as well move to Texas.

In what universe is it moral or Constitutional to deny a Jewish kid or an Asian kid or a WASP kid or a black kid or any kid an opportunity in a publicly funded institution simply because of race?

I have no problem with an institution providing help to people who have individually suffered adversity. Lowering admission standards for kids from poor families or kids who have suffered objective individual  harm (e.g. a kid's family was the victim of clear measurable harm caused by bigotry). But such decisions must not be based on race, for three reasons:

1) Racial discrimination is explicitly outlawed in numerous federal and state statutes.

2) The Constitution prohibits race-based laws. The 14th Amendment provides all citizens the right to "equal protection of the law". Obviously, race-based government policies do not provide equal protection; they intrinsically favor one race at the expense of another.

3) Racism of any sort is morally wrong.

Mr. Folks:

That is not the way America is supposed to work. By granting preference to "minorities" as defined by the state, the Sixth Court ruling violates our nation's most cherished values of equal opportunity and fair play. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution specifies that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law." Clearly, the Michigan ban on affirmative action was intended to ensure that governmental entities within the state of Michigan conform to the equal protection clause. For the Appeals Court panel to strike down such a law on the grounds that it is unconstitutional is absolutely perverse.

In effect, what the Appeals panel has determined is that, because the ban enforces the equal protection doctrine, it is therefore unconstitutional. That, of course, is exactly the way it works in a totalitarian state in which the law is interpreted in conformity with the prevailing ideological whims of those in power.

You see in this lawless ruling the same rejection of genuine Constitutional principles that you see in the various prayer and evolution censorship rulings: the rulings are an inversion of the Constitution, which protects free speech, free exercise of religion, and equal protection of the law.

I detest racism. I detest it in all of its forms.  Affirmative action, regardless of how well-intentioned, is a form of racism.  I strongly believe in Martin Luther Kings timeless dream:

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

The time to make that dream real is now.

On Affirmative Action, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said it best in his Parents Involved ruling:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Ed Feser on God' s creation

Ed Feser is my favorite philosopher, except for Aristotle and Aquinas (!).  He is a master of clarity and profundity-- not an easy feat. His books on Thomism and atheism and the mind are among the best I've read.

Feser is a former atheist and now conservative Catholic (you can see why I like him).

Feser on God as Creator:

For the Thomist, to say that God is the First Cause of things is, first and foremost, to say that He is the cause of their existence at every moment at which they do exist. God creates things out of nothing precisely in the act of conserving them in being, and apart from His continual causal action they would instantly be annihilated. You, the computer you are using right now, the floor under your feet, the coffee cup in your hand – for each and every one of these things, God is, you might say, “keeping it real” at every instant. Nor is this causal activity something anything else could either carry out or even play a role in. Creation – which for Aquinas means creation out of nothing – can be the act of God alone.



Where creation is concerned, then, God is “first” cause not in the sense of coming before the second, third, and fourth causes, but rather in the sense of being absolutely fundamental, that apart from which nothing could cause (because nothing could exist) at all. As serious students of the Five Ways know, the sorts of causal series Aquinas traces to God as First Cause are causal series ordered per se, not causal series ordered per accidens. In the former sort of series, every cause other than the first is instrumental, its causal power derived from the first.... But where creation is concerned, Aquinas’s talk of intermediate or instrumental causes is only “for the sake of argument”; his point is that even if there were intermediate causes of the being of things, the series would have to terminate in a First Cause. In fact there is and can be only one Creator and He cannot in principle create through intermediaries. (That is not to say that God does not work through intermediaries in other respects. We’re only talking here about His act of causing the sheer existence of a thing or creating it out of nothing.)

Feser observes that a genuine understanding of God's creative power is utterly inconsistent with Deism. God is the cause of existence here and now, not merely the cause of the Big Bang, etc. He is the ground of existence, and His power of creation is unique; he does not assemble. He brings everything into existence out of nothing, and maintains everything in existence.

This understanding of God's creative power, expressed perhaps most fully by Aquinas, explains the Lord's answer to Moses from the burning bush. When Moses asked God his name, the Lord replied : "I Am."  God is not a "thing". He is not a part of creation. He is Existence Itself.  In Aquinas' words, God's essence is existence.

Feser:

So, while popular images of God as First Cause have Him knocking down the first domino billions of years ago, and while even Aquinas might seem to make of Him the distant terminus of a regress of simultaneous currently operating causes, nothing could be further from the truth. God’s relationship to the world is in Aquinas’s view much more intimate than that, indeed, as intimate as possible. At least where the sheer existence of things is concerned, He and He alone is directly causing them at every instant. He is, as the Muslims say, “closer than the vein in your neck.”

Nuts at Recursivity: 'Gee, that shiny object looks sooo.. interesting...'

There a quality of cluelessness to atheists and Darwinists. It's almost like an ideological autism. It's amazing the stuff that they ignore, and the stuff on which they obsess.  They don't see the stuff that matters.

Point of evidence:

The comment string on Jeff Shallit's blog Recursivity about a post of mine on the cognitive dissonance of a press story mourning the death of a couple of baby dolphins at the Baltimore aquarium. The dissonance is that the press would never publish a story mourning the deaths of children killed in abortion clinics-- killed by the tens of millions in the U.S..

I had said:

The death of a couple of fish makes the news. We kill a million human calves babies each year in abortion clinics. The media response is silence.

Blind to the real issue-- our bizarre silence about millions of aborted kids while we mourn a couple of dead dolphins-- the folks at Shallit's blog found a shiny object:

Fish.

Or, more specifically, my use of the word "fish" to describe dolphins, who are really aquatic mammals.

Take a look at the comment string.

The irony of course is that the idiotic comment string makes my point: these imbeciles obsess over trivia, wander off into incoherence and ignore salient reality. My post is about the incongruity of mourning dead dolphins when we don't mourn millions of dead children who we've killed.

Now of course, you could disagree with me that children in the womb are children, or even human. You could disagree with me that there's any incongruity in mourning dolphins while not mourning dead babies. Those issues can be debated.

But the entire comment string at Recursivity is about ... taxonomy, icthology, mind-reading, weighing the soul at death, sexism, and farts.

These people are mad.

Skepchick meets skepd**ks (aka atheists)

Skepchick is a young lady with a blog who's been moving in atheist circles recently. She gives talks on topics such as 'the Religious Right's War on Women',  yada yada.

Skepchick:

Last weekend I gave a talk at CFI’s Student Leadership Conference. They asked if I’d talk about the Religious Right’s War on Women, and I was only too happy to oblige because it’s an important issue that I enjoy discussing. The night before I spoke, though, I became aware of what I think is a pretty serious problem with anti-feminist thinking amongst the very people I was meant to be addressing.

You may recall that last week I posted this video, in which I describe an unpleasant encounter I had with a fellow atheist that I thought might serve as a good example of what men in our community should strive to avoid – basically, in an elevator in Dublin at 4AM I was invited back to the hotel room of a man I had never spoken to before and who was present to hear me say that I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed.

The night prior to my talk, I happened across a video rebuttal from a woman who I was told would be at the CFI conference. I was pretty frustrated, seeing a young woman who I’m sure is intelligent be so incredibly dismissive of my experience and that of other women in this community, and so uneducated about the fundamentals of feminist thought. She ends the video by asking, “What effect do you think it has on men to be constantly told how sexist and destructive they are?”

I made the mistake of replying to the uploader (stclairose) and some of the hateful commenters at 2 AM – never a good idea. My response to her question at the time was that I never called all men sexist and destructive, nor did I do it constantly. In fact, in my video I specifically said that most of the conference attendees – men and women – were awesome. What I should have added is this: for the men (and women) who are behaving in sexist and destructive ways, I hope that pointing it out to them has the effect of making them consider their actions and stop being sexist and damaging.

When I was discussing the video with friends the next day, I was blown away to be told that there were other student leaders who had expressed similar dismissive attitudes recently on Facebook and on other blogs. An hour or so prior to my talk, someone sent me this link to a post by Stef McGraw on the UNI Freethinkers site. I added a paragraph of that response to a slide for the intro to my talk, in which I hoped to call out the anti-woman rhetoric my audience was engaging in....

I hear a lot of misogyny from skeptics and atheists, but when ancient anti-woman rhetoric like the above is repeated verbatim by a young woman online, it validates that misogyny in a way that goes above and beyond the validation those men get from one another. It also negatively affects the women who are nervous about being in similar situations. Some of them have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and some just don’t want to be put in that position. And they read these posts and watch these videos and they think, “If something were to happen to me and these women won’t stand up for me, who will?”

After my talk, I met a ton of amazing young men and women who came to talk to me about their own experiences. Some were considering not attending the conference due to the anti-woman sentiments they were reading. Some told me that the previous year, they watched in horror as Heidi Anderson was shouted down while on the stage discussing feminist issues. I think that the intelligent, thoughtful, caring people I met at the conference were very much in the majority, but are often out-shouted by an angry minority. Over the next two days I would see that kind of angry bile dominating the #CFICON Twitter hashtag, demanding I retract my statements and apologize....

When Skepchick blogged about her experiences, Richard Dawkins, ever the gentleman, sent her some instructions via the Pharyngula combox (it's confirmed that it was indeed Dawkins):

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

Dawkins' 'lay back and enjoy it' advice didn't sit well with Skepchick:

This is especially interesting since Richard Dawkins sat next to me in Dublin and heard me talk about the threats of rape I get... I’ve spoken about [female genital mutilation] a lot, and the worst of my hate mail from atheists is about that.

So to have my concerns – and more so the concerns of other women who have survived rape and sexual assault – dismissed thanks to a rich white man comparing them to the plight of women who are mutilated, is insulting to all of us. Feminists in the west have been staunch allies of the women being brutalized elsewhere, and they’ve done a hell of a lot more than Richard Dawkins when it comes to making a difference in their lives.

That wasn’t the end, of course. Dawkins went on to compare my experience with his frustration at riding in an elevator with a person chewing gum (presumably he was once accosted by such a person who rubbed Bubble Yum into his silky white hair). You can read all his comments to date at Shakesville or one of the other sites linked above.

This weekend when I read Dawkins’ comments, I was, briefly, without hope. I had already seen thefuture of this movement dismissing these concerns, and now I was seeing the present do the same.

What is the point in continuing?

Skepchick includes a screenshot of one coprolalic message she got from a freethinker colleague about genital mutilation. You'll have to go to the link above to read it.


It's fascinating to watch this naif come to grips with the 'skeptical community'.  Heck, there are quite a few middle aged Christian guys who've dealt with these people for a while who could'a told her about them. I've never been propositioned sexually by an atheist, but a lot of them have told me to do lewd things, mostly to myself.

Skepchick is learning. The 'war on women' isn't from the religious right. We on that wing are trying very hard to [re]establish a Christian culture that is the anthesis of the free-thought sewer.

Why would Skepchick think that a libertine cult that acknowledges no objective moral law and expects no ultimate accounting for behavior would treat her as anything but prey? They're evolved, she's evolved, and they're just trying to maximize reproductive success, or at least get some practice with dry runs.

Who would'a guessed that atheists might be jerks?

Revolutions consume their children. The atheist revolution is no exception. Skepchick is realizing that in the atheist coven she's less on the podium than on the plate. Her next lucid moment will be when she realizes that her male skeptic colleagues take that Darwinian stuff quite literally. 

Shallit amidst the Klingons; Scientific Atheism finds its audience

Atheist crank Dr. Jeff Shallit invites you to his talk at Polaris 2011 in Toronto on July 16:

I'll be speaking at the Canadian science fiction & fantasy convention Polaris in Toronto on Saturday, July 16, and you're invited to attend.

My talk is at 1 PM and is entitled "Misinformation Theory: How Creationists Abuse Mathematics" and is described here. It's part of the skeptical track sponsored by the Centre For Inquiry and its Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism. Three others, including Larry Moran of Sandwalk, will also speak.

Here's the blurb on Shallit's talk:

Misinformation Theory: How Creationists Abuse MathematicsDescription: Creationist silliness is not restricted just to biology; they also like to abuse mathematics.

Jeffrey Shallitt of the University of Waterloo surveys some of this nonsense, starting from ?The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved? (1925) and finishing with the misinformation theory of the modern ?intelligent design? movement.

Area: Skeptic Track

Programming Team Member: David Ennis

Panelists: Jeffrey Shallit (M)

Note: No more Panelists are being accepted for this Panel. 

Equipment: LCD Projector, 6' Screen

Scheduled day/time: Saturday 1:00 PM

Last modified: April 20, 2011 

The delightful mental image of Shallit's talk about "creationist silliness" is that a fair portion of his audience will be dressed as Klingons.

The other talks on the agenda include:

Collecting Star Wars

How To Get a Head in the Klingon Empire

In Defense of Star Trek: Enterprise

Star Wars Costuming

Witchcraft and Wicca in Popular Culture

Harry Potter Reading

Adult Origami

Aliens 25th Anniversary: Retrospective and fandom Q&A

Alternate Alternate Mirror Alternate Universe

Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Series

Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome

Buffy Season 8

Costume Con 32

Costume Troubleshooting

Costuming Ghostbusters Style

Costuming vs. Cosplay

Could the Last Time Lord Become a Time Lady?

D&D Character Creation For Beginners

The Darkening Mood Lighting of Sci-fi

Does the World Need More Blade Runner?

Dungeons and Dragons - The Basics

The Evolution of Superstition: People, PCs and Pigeons

Fairy Tales For Grown-Ups

From Avatar to Zardoz: Politics in SF

Geek-Off: Stargate

Ghostbusters Photo Op

Introduction to Ball Jointed Dolls

Klingon Ceremonies and Rituals

Lego Building Challenge!

Midichlorians Ruined Star Wars

The Nature of the Modern Zombie

Should The Dark Tower Be Adapted?

Spiderman: The Musical? Really?

So A Vampire, A Ghost and a Werewolf Share a House...

When it comes to anime, the penis is mightier than the pen!

Why doesn't SF look like Star Trek anymore?

The Panel For People Who Caught VD Last Year

Now don't get me wrong. I like Sci Fi as much as the next guy, but don't you think that Shallit's little atheist screed just ... fits here?

Atheism is right at home with all sorts of superstition and goofiness. In fact, a study at Baylor showed that the godless are much more likely to believe crazy things than the average person. The most rational people: folks who are traditionally religious. 

It's really funny when some atheist crank with no expertise in natural science at all (Shallit's a mathematician) mocks real scientists (e.g Richard Sternberg, Mike Behe, Paul Nelson, Bill Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Scott Minnich, etc) in a presentation at a Star Trek/Wicca/Buffy-the-Vampire convention.

It's nice that Shallit finally found the proper forum for atheist science.

My challenge to defenders of Darwinian medicine

Defenders of Darwinian medicine assert that understanding the evolutionary cause of a disease process,  beyond the understanding of the proximate cause (i.e. the scientific cause, traditionally understood) is of significant value in medicine.

I believe that the evolutionary cause is a matter of speculation, and of no real value to medicine. It may be of value to evolutionary biology, but that's a different matter.

Here's my challenge:

Please provide examples of evolutionary speculation offered for any disease that has provided medical scientists with information valuable for management of the disease that was not already available from the proximate evidence.

Simple assertion of a hypothetical evolutionary cause-- the best example is probably the protection from malaria conferred by the heterozygote sickle cell trait-- is not sufficient to be of value in medical research and treatment. It is of value to evolutionary biology if true, but malaria treatment does just fine without it.

In my view, Darwinian medicine is all hat, no cattle. Show me the cattle.

The Catholic Church abuse scandal and public schools

Atheist Takis Konstantopoulos has a wry comment on my post about the media's disinterest in the wholesale killing of children in abortion clinics:

"Our culture is sick." 

I agree. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases

Atheists' concerns for chastity and the protection of children are situational. The concerns crop up only when Catholic-bashing is an option.  Otherwise it's abortion and bacchanalia.

For an honest appraisal of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, it's helpful to turn to the Executive Summary of the John Jay Report on the scandal entitled:

The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors

by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States

A Research Study Conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Between 1950 and 2002, there were 4,392 priests accused of abuse in the U.S., out of a total of 94, 607 priests who served during those years. 4.6 % of priests in the U.S. were accused of abuse.

This is a graph of the number of incidents reported/priests accused, by year:

Notice the peak in the years 1960-1990, with the rapid fall to 1950 levels beginning in the mid-90's.

The financial cost to the Church for these allegations exceeds $500,000,000.

The report notes:

• The majority of priests with allegations of abuse were ordained between 1950 and 1979 (68%).

• The majority of priests (56%) were alleged to have abused one victim, nearly 27% were alleged to have abused two or three victims, nearly 14% were alleged to have abused four to nine victims and 3.4% were alleged to have abused more than ten victims. The 149 priests (3.5%) who had more than ten allegations of abuse were allegedly responsible for abusing 2,960 victims, thus accounting for 26% of allegations. Therefore, a very small percentage of accused priests are responsible for a substantial percentage of the allegations.

• To date, the police have been contacted about 1,021 priests with allegations of abuse, or 24% of our total. Nearly all of these reports have led to investigations, and 384 instances have led to criminal charges. Of those priests for whom information about dispositions is available, 252 were convicted and at least 100 of those served time in prison. Thus, 6% of all priests against whom allegations were made were convicted and about 2% received prison sentences to date.

Of the priests accused of abuse,  6% have been convicted. That is,  0.3% of priests since 1950 have been convicted of abusing a minor.

That sexual abuse has ever been committed by a priest against a child is an outrage, and that any Church official has covered it up is no less an outrage. But the actual percentage of priests accused of abuse is small (4.6 %), the actual percentage convicted of abuse is much smaller (0.3%), and the vast majority of these acts of abuse happened decades ago.

It is fair to say that today a Catholic Church is one of the safest places for children to be, based on statistics.

How so?

First, the vast majority of sexual abuse of children occurs in the home.  Perhaps the greatest risk factor for child sexual abuse is a broken family (thanks, liberals). The presence of a man in the home who is not a biological relative of the child dramatically increases the risk of sexual abuse.

So, outside of the home (very high risk) and the Catholic Church (very low risk), where are children at risk for sexual abuse?

Public schools, it seems.

 

Sex Abuse by Teachers Said Worse Than Catholic Church

Jon E. Dougherty, Newsmax

Monday, Apr. 05, 2004

Now, on the heels of the Catholic abuse scandal comes another of historic proportions—one that has the potential to be much greater and far-reaching. According to a draft report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, in compliance with the 2002 "No Child Left Behind" act signed into law by President Bush, between 6 percent and 10 percent of public school children across the country have been sexually abused or harassed by school employees and teachers.

Charol Shakeshaft, the Hofstra University scholar who prepared the report, said the number of abuse cases—which range from unwanted sexual comments to rape—could be much higher.

"So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?" she told industry newspaper Education Week in a March 10 interview.

To support her contention, Shakeshaft compared the priest abuse data with data collected in a national survey for the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation in 2000. Extrapolating data from the latter, she estimated roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from a single decade—1991-2000. That compares with about five decades of cases of abusive priests.

Such figures led her to contend "the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests."[my emphasis]

Early Comparisons

The comparison of church-school sexual abuse cases began early—years before Shakeshaft's report was completed.

In June 2002, The Associated Press reported clergy abuse cases overshadowed teacher-student sex abuse cases, though the report stated the school cases were not "uncommon."

"Some experts point to what they see as a permissive attitude toward such relationships and a double standard because cases involving female teachers and male students are treated less severely," AP reported.

"The dynamics of the teacher-student cases are often different than the classic sexual abuse cases because they seem to involve consenting relationships between teachers and students," Finkelhor, director of the Center for Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, told the wire service. ". . . Clear boundaries have to be enforced."

Nan Stein, director of a project on sexual harassment in schools at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College, cited far fewer cases annually than Shakeshaft; she said she believes "several hundred" cases of student-teacher sexual abuse cases occur each year.

And six years earlier Education Week searched newspaper archives and databases, finding 244 cases in a six-month period. The allegations in that short 1998 study ranged from unwanted touching to sexual relationships and serial rape.

Currently, there is no single agency that tracks such incidents. And only a few national surveys, as of 2002, had been conducted on the subject of teacher-student sex—and most of them were sexual harassment studies.

"None of these studies—either singly or as a group—answer all of the reasonable questions that parents, students, educators, and the public ask about educator sexual misconduct," says Shakeshaft, in her draft report. "And certainly do not provide information at a level of reliability and validity appropriate to the gravity of these offenses."

The Death of Outrage?

What is also different about the school cases is the level of secondary media coverage it has—or, in this case, hasn't—received.

Yet, media coverage of the Catholic priest abuse scandal was nearly wall-to-wall; every major television news program, every major newspaper and wire service, and most mass market magazines covered the scandal relentlessly.

But, reports the National Catholic Register, a leading faith publication, "a search on the media database LexisNexis for "Charol Shakeshaft" turned up no articles eight days after" the Education Week report.

An online search by NewsMax.com found similar disinterest. Google.com's news database, for example, returned just four entries for "Charol Shakeshaft;" two were Catholic publications.

The Indianapolis Star and Christian Science Monitor only briefly mentioned Shakeshaft's data; the later publication couched her remarks about schools in an article primarily rehashing the Catholic church abuse scandal.

Yahoo.com's news search engine returned only three; two were similar stories from the Indianapolis Star.

'Serious' Issue?

Catholic leaders especially are wondering why more coverage of the issue, as well as more action by government education officials, hasn't been forthcoming, in the weeks since the Education Week story.

"If the country is serious about [sexual abuse of children] as a national issue, we have to direct our resources to where the problem is worse," Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an New York-based Catholic advocacy group, told the Register. "But instead what we get is a selective indignation that suggests there is an agenda here."

Indeed, even some judges express a more permissive attitude regarding teacher-pupil sex.

Case in point: In Hackensack, N.J., in the spring of 2002, a state judge sentenced 43-year-old teacher Pamela Diehl-Moore to probation for having sex with a seventh-grade student who was only 13 at the time.

Though prosecutors had argued for jail for Diehl-Moore, the judge in the case, Bruce A. Gaeta, disagreed. He put the onus on the student, saying the encounters with his teacher may only have been a way for him to "satisfy his sexual needs."

According to court transcripts, as reported by AP, Gaeta said, "I don't see anything here that shows this young man has been psychologically damaged by her actions. And don't forget, this was mutual consent."

He was referred to a judicial disciplinary committee.

That is one identifiable double-standard: relationships between male students and female teachers. For one, say experts, most school sexual abuse occurs between male teachers and female students. For another, male students tend to report sex with female teachers far less; they are treated less severely because boys see little wrong with the acts.

"I think our society sort of says to the boy: 'Congratulations, that's great. Everybody fantasizes about having a sexual relationship with an older woman,'" Bob Shoop, an education professor at Kansas State University and an expert witness in 30 court cases involving sexual abuse in schools, told AP.

Case Studies

Some of the most recent cases of school sexual abuse include the following:

In 2002, a California high school teacher ran off to Las Vegas with one of her 15-year-old students;

The same year, a Louisiana teacher was accused of having an affair with a 14-year-old student;

In the Bronx, one teacher was charged with the statutory rape of a 16-year-old former student;

In March, a 20-year-old Anderson, Ind. choir aide was charged with allegedly raping a 16-year-old female student—the two had a consensual relationship for three months before the girl asked to break it off;

A week earlier, an Indianapolis Public Schools substitute was caught having sex with a 15-year-old student in a vacant classroom;

A Washington state teacher was convicted of 10 counts of sexually exploiting minors by persuading them to pose nude for him—he then uploaded some of the images to a Web site;

Also in Washington, state officials say 159 coaches of girls sports have been fired or reprimanded over the last decade for sexual misconduct;

An investigation found more than 60 instances in the last four years of Texas high school and middle school coaches losing jobs as a result of allegations of sexual misconduct.

What Next?

Some states have specific laws banning sex between teachers and students. Many others, however, rely on statutory rape laws, but they sometimes do little to protect student-teacher sex that is consensual or between an adult and minor child close to the age of consent.

For her part, Shakeshaft believes more study of the issue is needed, but that officials and educators should take the available data in her report to heart now.

"Some individual districts might have changed some policies or had an in-service workshop, but really there hasn't been any systematic response to this issue," she said.

"It isn't as if we need to stop and wait for a study. I do believe we know enough to take some actions."

So where are all of the atheist howls of outrage about sexual abuse in public schools? Where is the media on this?  Birds chirping...

The sexual abuse of children in the Catholic church can be summarized by three observations:

1) It is reprehensible.

2) It is rare, and increasingly so.

3) The far more numerous and pervasive abuse of children in public schools has been almost completely ignored by the media, and utterly ignored by atheists.

4) Concern for chastity and for the protection of innocent children among atheists is situational.  Thanks to our atheist/libertine culture, the three most dangerous places for a child in our society are 1) the womb 2) the home 3) school.

5) It can be cogently argued that the safest place for a child in 2011 is in a Catholic Church.

6) The Catholic sex abuse scandal has been used incessantly by anti-Catholic bigots who hate Christianity to advance an anti-Christian agenda.