Woody Allen and the Double Standard
by E. Michael Jones
A priest friend of mine was just suspended for child abuse. I wasn’t planning to write about it, but the God who is the Lord of History put Woody Allen on the front page for the same crime, and suddenly it felt as if I were committing a sin of omission if I didn’t write about it. The “it” in question is the double standard.
The accusations leveled against priests are always vague. Diocesan spokesman Sean McBride said the abuse occurred within the Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese, but that, “out of respect for the alleged victim’s identity and specific request, we are reticent to put forth the exact location of the allegation.”[1]
McBride failed to tell us that the alleged victim in this instance is dead, and that the abuse claim was filed by the deceased man’s mother. In effect, the church convicts the priest in the court of public opinion by claiming that there is “sufficient evidence that the abuse did occur.” Given the paucity of information, there is, in other words, no way to evaluate the claims. I called the priest and asked him if the accusations were true. He admitted to touching the boy, but denied any sexual behavior, which should have exonerated him since diocesan guidelines specify a “delict against the sixth commandment,” i.e., sexual behavior.
McBride failed to tell us that the alleged victim in this instance is dead, and that the abuse claim was filed by the deceased man’s mother. In effect, the church convicts the priest in the court of public opinion by claiming that there is “sufficient evidence that the abuse did occur.” Given the paucity of information, there is, in other words, no way to evaluate the claims. I called the priest and asked him if the accusations were true. He admitted to touching the boy, but denied any sexual behavior, which should have exonerated him since diocesan guidelines specify a “delict against the sixth commandment,” i.e., sexual behavior.
Unlike the accusations against my priest friend, Dylan Farrow’s claims are specific:
when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.[2]
The same media which automatically assumes that every Catholic priest accused of abuse is guilty as charged lets Hollywood celebrities off the hook by insisting that they are innocent until proven guilty. The legal system as it exists now prevented both Fr. Seculoff and Woody Allen from having their day in court. In Connecticut, the legal system was intimidated by Woody Allen’s wealth and fame. In Indiana, the Church derailed legal investigation by applying its own procedures. As a result, we’ll never know the truth of the allegations. In both states, the statute of limitations has run out. In the case of Woody Allen, this is taken as proof of his innocence. In Indiana it is taken as proof of a Catholic priest’s guilt. After being accused of the same crime, Woody Allen had a full page of the New York Times put at this disposal to defend himself. Father Seculoff, on the other hand, was forbidden to speak to fellow priests.
“It’s important to note that Woody Allen was never prosecuted in this case and has consistently denied wrongdoing; he deserves the presumption of innocence,”[3] said the New York Times reporter who published Dylan Farrow’s letter. Sony Pictures said something similar: “We have had a long, productive and rewarding relationship with Mr. Allen,” Sony Pictures Classics, which released “Blue Jasmine,” said in a statement. “Mr. Allen has never been charged in relationship to any of this, and therefore deserves our presumption of innocence.”
If Sony Pictures, the distributor for Allen’s films, were a Catholic diocese, Dylan Farrow could sue it for damages. In the real world of American law, Hollywood gets an exemption because it is rich and powerful and epitomizes Jewish America. But the Church is driven into bankruptcy by lawyers like Chicago attorney Marc Pearlman, “who has represented about 200 victims of clergy abuse in the Chicago area.”[4]
No matter how it frames the issue, the Church shares the culture’s view that every Catholic priest who is accused of sex abuse is guilty until proven innocent. Church has found the priest guilty by claiming that the accusations are credible. The trial, if it ever comes to that, is a mere formality. The Catholic priest gets suspended pending an investigation, which invariably takes years. The priest’s reputation is destroyed. Nothing can restore it. The diocese in effect pronounces the priest guilty before the investigation begins. The Church, in fact, solicits abuse claims:[5]
If anyone has been the victim of sexual abuse by a member of the clergy, please contact the diocesan Victim Assistance Coordinator, Mary Glowaski at (260) 399-1458 or the Vicar General, Monsignor Robert Schulte at (260) 422-4611.[6]
Given solicitations like the above and the fact that the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend had a “Report Sex Abuse Button” on its homepage, it is not surprising that three more people came forward to level charges. The next set of charges was vaguer than the first, but the diocese considered them “credible,” and once that judgment had been made, the case was closed. There will be no trial. The Church is following its own rules here, as “delineated in the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People (USCCB 2002, 2005, 2011).”[7]
In compliance with those rules, Bishop Rhoades “directed that these allegations be forwarded to the Indiana civil authorities and the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”[8]
In compliance with those rules, Bishop Rhoades “directed that these allegations be forwarded to the Indiana civil authorities and the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”[8]
Instead of asking why the Church has internalized the commands of its oppressors and imposed upon itself rules that apply to no other institution in this country, the local bishop concluded his statement with the usual pious boilerplate: “Bishop Rhoades asks everyone to please pray for all parties involved, especially for those that have come forward, as well as Fr. Seculoff, our priests, parishioners and all the faithful during these painful and difficult days.”[9]
There will never be a trial because the Church has already convicted one of its own in the court of public opinion. There will never be a trial in the Woody Allen case either, but for different reasons. As Dylan Farrow pointed out:
I would be made to recount my story over and over again, to doctor after doctor, pushed to see if I’d admit I was lying as part of a legal battle I couldn’t possibly understand. At one point, my mother sat me down and told me that I wouldn’t be in trouble if I was lying - that I could take it all back. I couldn’t. It was all true. But sexual abuse claims against the powerful stall more easily. There were experts willing to attack my credibility. . . . After a custody hearing denied my father visitation rights, my mother declined to pursue criminal charges, despite findings of probable cause by the State of Connecticut - due to, in the words of the prosecutor, the fragility of the “child victim.” Woody Allen was never convicted of any crime. That he got away with what he did to me haunted me as I grew up. I was stricken with guilt that I had allowed him to be near other little girls. I was terrified of being touched by men. I developed an eating disorder. I began cutting myself. That torment was made worse by Hollywood. All but a precious few (my heroes) turned a blind eye. Most found it easier to accept the ambiguity, to say, “who can say what happened,” to pretend that nothing was wrong. Actors praised him at awards shows. Networks put him on TV. Critics put him in magazines.[10]
What follows the Church’s capitulation to the culture is negotiations among lawyers leading to the Church’s bankruptcy. In late January 2014, the Diocese of Helena, Montana announced that it “plans to file for bankruptcy protection Friday from two lawsuits alleging the church covered up sexual abuse by clergy members.”[11]
The Diocese of Helena had to file for bankruptcy protection because “Several insurers have filed lawsuits challenging those claims, saying they should not have to pay damages for abuse that occurred before their policies went into effect.”
The Diocese of Helena had to file for bankruptcy protection because “Several insurers have filed lawsuits challenging those claims, saying they should not have to pay damages for abuse that occurred before their policies went into effect.”
The same thing may well happen in Chicago.[12] As we have pointed out elsewhere in these pages, the trouble started in the ‘60s with the sexualization of the culture in general and the culture of the Catholic clergy in particular. Carl Rogers set out to liberate the Immaculate Heart order in Los Angeles, and the result was Lesbian Nuns. The same sort of thing happened at Notre Dame summer schools for the clergy during the ‘60s, as we have also documented in these pages. Most people have normal appetites; since the Church was never going to allow married priests, the clergy who wanted normal lives left, which increased the percentage of homosexuals among the Catholic clergy. The next fatal step occurred when the Church substituted counseling for traditional Church discipline. This was a major source of the problem in Chicago. When “a 13-year-old boy reported in 1979 that a priest raped him and later threatened him at gunpoint to keep quiet,” the Archdiocese of Chicago did not investigate the matter and punish the perpetrator. Instead, they “assured the boy’s parents that . . . the cleric would receive treatment and have no further contact with minors.”
Successful Institutions
In a recent column, Robert Kaplan wrote, “Successful institutions treat everyone equally and impersonally.”[13] This means that the American legal system is not a successful institution. It is characterized by a double standard. When it comes to sexual abuse, the rich Jew is innocent until proven guilty, but the Catholic priest is guilty until proven innocent. The same legal system that is used to exonerate Woody Allen is used to destroy Catholic priests. The double standard is impossible to ignore. In Philadelphia, ADL board member and DA, Lynn Abrams announced that she was going to investigate clergy sexual abuse, but only the Catholic Church got investigated.
Rabbis are notorious for suppressing sex abuse claims and demanding that they be adjudicated internally, something that Rabbi Eliyahu Fink brought up when he decried “the stereotypical lackadaisical approach to sex abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community.”[14] According to Rabbi Fink’s reading of the American double standard on sex abuse, “larger-than-life figures in the secular world” are “given a free pass on abuse. Their accusers are also silenced.”[15]
As Cardinal Rodriguez has pointed out, the sex abuse scandal is a club that has been used to beat the Church into submission. As if to prove him right, the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee on the Rights of the Child attacked the Church’s handling of sex abuse cases around the same time that Dylan Farrow accused Woody Allen of child abuse. What claimed to be concern for children soon revealed itself as an attempt to change Church teaching. According to a Yahoo news article, the committee:
urged the Vatican to amend its canon law to identify circumstances where access to abortion can be permitted for children, such as to save the life of a young mother. It urged the Holy See to ensure that sex education, including access to information about contraception and preventing HIV, is mandatory in Catholic Schools. It called for the Holy See to use its moral authority to condemn discrimination against homosexual children or children raised by same sex couples.[16]
When the Polish bishops’ conference recently attacked gender theory, claiming that it undermines the traditional family and sexual morality, they were accused of trying to “to shift attention away from a paedophile priest scandal.”[17] The defenders of the sexualization of Polish culture claim that gender theory is “science.” The Church, on the other hand, claims that it poses “a mortal danger to families, child sexual orientation, and humanity.” When an impasse of this sort arises, accusation of sexual abuse can be used to bring the church in line.
After the Polish bishops released their pastoral letter over Christmas, pundits like Adam Szostkiewicz, a “leading Polish religious affairs commentator,” brought up the sex abuse scandal: “Someone advised the Church to find a topic that would make people forget about the paedophile scandals that Polish media was fixated on these last few months.”[18] Szostkiewicz went on to claim that “the Church has turned ‘gender’ into a grab bag and tossed everything into it: civil unions, gay marriage, abortion, in-vitro fertilisation, gender equality and sexual education,” when in fact, it should be obvious that gender theory promoting things like sex education, gay marriage, pornography, etc. is one of the main ways that the modern regime imposes its will on the population it ostensibly represents. Sexual liberation, as I have said in Poland and elsewhere, is a form of political control.
But now it seems that that form of control is unraveling. In order to keep the proles under control in France, the regime has increased the gravity of the charges they are willing to level against them. After the most recent of a long line of anti-gay marriage protests, Interior minister Manuel Valls warned that “somber forces” were at work in France. The anti-gay marriage demonstrations were converging with the anti-Jewish demonstrations. M. Valls is upset: “We are witnessing a union of extremes, never before seen in France... [Last week] was the first time for a long time that people have screamed their hatred of Jews in the street. A block of protest is forming, a rebellion which is anti-elite, anti-state, anti-tax, anti-parliament, anti-press ... but also, and above all, anti-Semitic, racist and homophobe.”[19] Who brought this about? The very Hollande government that is wringing its hands because it happened. Is it really surprising that the French protesters would link the Jews and gay marriage? Didn’t Joe Biden say the same thing? Evidently M. Valls is afraid that the world has reached France. Unfortunately for the regime, M. Valls attempt at smear tactics isn’t having the desired effect:
One protester, Alain, 67, a businessman, said: “Valls thinks that he can contain these protests by painting us all as dangerous extremists. When I was young, every left-winger was accused of being a communist. Now, to this government and the mainstream media, every right-winger is a fascist.”
The Jewish support for gay marriage has created its political opposite: radical Catholics who now hold the Jews responsible for the moral corruption they have spread through France. The Independent thinks that Alain Soral is behind this convergence, but as Soral has pointed out, the government itself is responsible. When asked why the government called him an anti-Semite, he responded by saying that the Hollande government was controlled by Jews. The proof lay in the accusation. Duh.
The Independent does its best to reduce gender theory to a “modest programme” which “consists of trying to persuade girls that they can perfectly well drive tractors and boys that they can be ballet dancers if they want to.” But the French aren’t buying it. A 42-year-old mother of three sees gender theory as an attempt “to destroy the family. It is all part of the same plan as the gay marriage law, to impose a completely new set of values on French society.” The Independent condemns as an “obscene rumour” the claim that “there would be masturbation and cross dressing in primary schools,” but is the rumor so far-fetched?
Anyone who has read Wilhelm Reich, the father of sex education, knows that its primary goal is to promote masturbation among children, girls specifically. The convergence between “anti-Semitism” and opposition to gay marriage may be “somber” news to the regime, but it’s hardly surprising. It’s an indication that the French know how to put two and two together. The French get it. The Polish bishops get it. The one group that still doesn’t get it is the Catholic Americanists who have internalized the commands of their Jewish oppressors. The bishops who have lived by the Americanist sword are going to die by it. The sexual Americanism of people like Bryan Hehir and Joseph Cardinal Bernardin will find its final expression in bankruptcy court, as the legal system destroys the Church in America one diocese at a time.
Recently one of our correspondents sent us a list of anti-Semitic websites.[20] “I wasn’t even mentioned,” I wrote to one of my Jewish friends, “What have I done wrong?” His response is instructive: “The problem [?] is that you are not anti-Semitic. Also, you represent traditional Roman Catholicism and that is their greatest fear. So that they cannot bring attention to you.”
Greatest Fear
The thing the Jews fear most is not racism or anti-Semitism, which is a form of racism, but a Catholic repudiation of the failed experiments of Vatican II and a return to the traditional teaching of the Church, as expressed by St. Paul (I Thess 2) when he referred to Jews as “enemies of the entire human race.” But as St. Augustine indicated, even those who hate the Logos, become, through the cunning or reason, pawns of the Logos they hate. The Jews, in other words, are bringing about the very thing they fear the most. Catholics in Poland and France are not becoming anti-Semites; they are waking up to the fact that the Jews control their respective countries and are using “gender ideology,” i.e., gay marriage, sex education, pornography, performance “art,” etc., as the main form of social control. Sexual liberation is political control, and the plan on how to control a culture through sexual license was written by Jews, Jews like Wilhelm Reich. Is it surprising that people are waking up to this fact?
As the report of the UN committee on the rights of the child makes clear, the campaign against sexual abuse is really a campaign to change the teaching of the Church. It is an attempt to bring the Church in line with the secular orthodoxy regnant at places like the UN, the EU, and the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It is ultimately an attempt to destroy the Church. Unlike the Polish bishops, who understand how to contend with a hostile regime, the American bishops seem determined to embrace the Americanism that is determined to destroy them.
The Tribe and pornography
http://www.culturewars.com/2013/Darkmoon.htm
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/06/11/woody-allen-psychoanalysis-and-sexual-taboos/
The Tribe and pornography
http://www.culturewars.com/2013/Darkmoon.htm
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/06/11/woody-allen-psychoanalysis-and-sexual-taboos/