The Atlantic: Why Does the Catholic Church Keep Failing on Sexual Abuse?

Perhaps the most pressing problem for the Church is how it deals with failures at the very top—and in other countries where abuse cases are only now beginning to surface. “The lacuna in the Charter is around accountability of bishops,” O’Malley said. This is the first in a long list of problems that have bedeviled Church leaders and exacerbated mistrust among survivors and parishioners. Bishops, whose leadership role in the Church is supposedly modeled after Jesus’s apostles, often serve as the highest-ranking Catholic officials located in a given area. But even senior clergy have little ability to exercise control over one another. Currently, there is no formal mechanism in place for punishing or removing one of the thousands of Catholic bishops across the world when he is accused of wrongdoing, short of the intervention of the pope. [...]

But even in Boston, where the archdiocese released a list of credibly accused priests in 2011, the disclosures have been controversial and confusing. For one thing, abusive priests serving in the Boston area who belonged to religious orders, such as the Jesuits, were not included on the archdiocese’s 2011 list. According to O’Malley’s letter from the time, “the Boston Archdiocese does not determine the outcome in such cases; that is the responsibility of the priest’s order or diocese.” The cardinal expressed “hope that other dioceses and religious orders will review our new policy and consider making similar information available to the public.” Many of these organizations, which are all accountable to different civil laws, have still not done so. [...]

Fundamentally, there is a gap between the way the Catholic hierarchy seems to imagine the solution to the sex-abuse crisis and what the public—even Catholic laypeople—sees as possible ways forward: radical changes to the priesthood, including eliminating the requirement of celibacy, and greater roles for women and laypeople in the hierarchy. “It may be at a point now where, regardless of how ancient [the Church] is, for it to survive, it’s going to need to be willing to consider changes … to the way the organization runs,” says Helen Drinan, the president of Simmons University and the former senior vice president for human resources at Caritas Christi, a now defunct Roman Catholic hospital system that was once the second-largest health-care provider in New England. [...]

Popes lead the global Roman Catholic Church, and yet on the issue of sexual abuse, they have often been among the last to recognize the full gravity of the problem, or to act. Perhaps this is a function of insulation, and caution by Roman advisers. Perhaps this was compounded by the bias, held erroneously for so long in the Church, that sexual abuse is an American problem, and is effectively a local concern. It has taken nearly two decades since the revelations in Boston for a pope to bring top clergy together for an extensive discussion on sexual abuse. But even Francis has cautioned against “inflated expectations” for the February meeting: “The problem of abuse will continue,” the pope said at a recent press conference.

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The Atlantic: The Bored Sex

Jane’s perseverance might make her a lot of things: an idealist, a dreamer, a canny sexual strategist, even—again channeling typical anxieties—unrealistic, selfish, or entitled. But her sexual struggles in a long-term relationship, orgasms and frequency of sex notwithstanding, make her something else again: normal. Although most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it. [...]

“Moving In With Your Boyfriend Can Kill Your Sex Drive” was how Newsweek distilled a 2017 study of more than 11,500 British adults aged 16 to 74. It found that for “women only, lack of interest in sex was higher among those in a relationship of over one year in duration,” and that “women living with a partner were more likely to lack interest in sex than those in other relationship categories.” A 2012 study of 170 men and women aged 18 to 25 who were in relationships of up to nine years similarly found that women’s sexual desire, but not men’s, “was significantly and negatively predicted by relationship duration after controlling for age, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction.” Two oft-cited German longitudinal studies, published in 2002 and 2006, show female desire dropping dramatically over 90 months, while men’s holds relatively steady. (Tellingly, women who didn’t live with their partners were spared this amusement-park-ride-like drop—perhaps because they were making an end run around overfamiliarity.) And a Finnish seven-year study of more than 2,100 women, published in 2016, revealed that women’s sexual desire varied depending on relationship status: Those in the same relationship over the study period reported less desire, arousal, and satisfaction. Annika Gunst, one of the study’s co-authors, told me that she and her colleagues initially suspected this might be related to having kids. But when the researchers controlled for that variable, it turned out to have no impact.

Many women want monogamy. It’s a cozy arrangement, and one our culture endorses, to put it mildly. But wanting monogamy isn’t the same as feeling desire in a long-term monogamous partnership. The psychiatrist and sexual-health practitioner Elisabeth Gordon told me that in her clinical experience, as in the data, women disproportionately present with lower sexual desire than their male partners of a year or more, and in the longer term as well. “The complaint has historically been attributed to a lower baseline libido for women, but that explanation conveniently ignores that women regularly start relationships equally as excited for sex.” Women in long-term, committed heterosexual partnerships might think they’ve “gone off” sex—but it’s more that they’ve gone off the same sex with the same person over and over.

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openDemocracy: Was Symon Petliura “an antisemite who massacred Jews during a time of war”?

The army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was perhaps the worst perpetrator. The UPR had declared independence from Russia in January 1918, becoming the focus of many nationally conscious Ukrainians’ desire for liberation. It spent the next three years trying to defend itself from various enemies before the Bolsheviks finally defeated it at the end of 1920. However, according to the most reliable statistical investigation, its troops were responsible for about two fifths of all pogroms and half of the total deaths.[...]

On 14 October 2017, the recently created Day of the Defender of Ukraine, the municipal government of the city of Vinnytsia erected a statue to Symon Petliura. This created consternation among many Jews in Ukraine and abroad, not least because the statue was in Ierusalymka, Vinnytsia’s historical Jewish quarter. Yet it also provided the Kremlin with further ammunition to discredit Ukraine as a bulwark of fascism and antisemitism. “Petliura was man who had Nazi views,” reacted Vladimir Putin at the time, “an antisemite who massacred Jews during a time of war.” [...]

The pogroms were not UPR policy. They were outbursts of military indiscipline during which UPR troops and commanders, proceeding from the prejudice that Jews supported the UPR’s enemies, punished entire Jewish communities, brutally and without discrimination. Some perpetrators had only a very loose affiliation with the UPR.

However, the view of Jews as hostile was not simply held by a few rogue units or irregular peasant partisans. Representatives of the UPR in powerful positions singled out Jews for special punishment. For example, the commandants of the cities of Dubno and Kremenets’ exacted a extraordinary tax from the local Jewish community as a punishments for its perceived disloyalty to the UPR.

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Aeon: The first God

At coronation, the throne name of the king was revealed. When construction on Gem Pa-Aten began, in the 2nd or 3rd regnal year, the king still used his birth name Amenhotep. But before the project was completed around his 4th or 5th year, without explanation he dropped that name and adopted the name by which he is known in history: Akhenaten. It means ‘He who is beneficial to the Aten’. The blocks from early in the project that had ‘Amenhotep’ written on them were erased and replaced by his new name.

The iconography of the deity in this temple (and the others at Karnak) was altered to reflect the king’s changing theology. The falcon image virtually disappears, only to be replaced by the ubiquitous sun-disc with extended Sun rays, and the extended name ‘Re-Horakhty who rejoices in his horizon in his name of Shu which is in the Aten’ is written in a cartouche, a device used to identify royal names. With the jubilee, Akhenaten seems to signal that the Aten was now the ultimate ruler, replacing Amen-Re. [...]

A decision was also reached around the 5th or 6th year to abandon Thebes and establish a new capital in middle Egypt called Akhet-Aten (also known by the modern Arabic name ‘Amarna’), meaning ‘the Horizon of Aten’. This pristine land had not been sacred to any deity before. No city or temples previously stood there. Only temples to Aten were built there, and the largest was called Gemet Pa-Aten. With the move of the royal family to Akhet-Aten, a third and final form of Aten’s name is introduced: ‘Living Re, Ruler of the Horizon, Rejoicing in the Horizon in His Name of “Re, the Father, who has come as the Aten”’. Gone are ‘Horakhty’ and ‘Shu’, two deities, and only Re the sun-god who manifests his power in or through the visible Aten or sun-disc remains. The king no longer tolerated any divine name or personification of a force of nature that could be construed as another deity. [...]

Atenism was a monotheistic experiment. But what instigated such a radical shift from the polytheistic orthodoxy that had flourished in Egypt for millennia, and what led to the demotion of Amen-Re from his preeminent status, a position he had held for centuries? Here, there is little agreement among Egyptologists. There are those who think that this religious move was designed to wrest power from the Amen priesthood’s dominance that challenged the crown itself. Simply put, it was a political move. But this view does not adequately consider Akhenaten’s genuine devotion to Aten as reflected in the incredible temples dedicated to him, not to mention the intimacy expressed towards Aten in the hymns.

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Foreign Policy: The Future of Politics Is Coming to Poland

Since the implosion of the post-communist left in the mid-2000s, Poland has been governed alternatively by the national-conservative Law and Justice and the centrist Civic Platform, which have finished first and second in every election during that period. Together, they currently hold some 80 percent of seats in parliament and continue to dominate in the polls, with a combined 65 percent or so support. They set the agenda, with their mutual antagonism fueling Poland’s toxic political environment, often dubbed the “Polish-Polish war.” This was especially evident in the wake of the recent murder of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, with initial hopes for a display of national unity quickly dashed as the two political camps began using the tragedy to attack one another.

However, there are reasons to suspect that this duopoly may be more fragile than it appears. Polls consistently show Kaczynski and Grzegorz Schetyna, the leader of Civic Platform, to be the country’s two most distrusted politicians. A poll published this week found that 71 percent thought Kaczynski should retire from politics. Just as Civic Platform lost power in 2015 having run out of ideas and energy after eight years in office (and has recovered neither since), Law and Justice, although it has governed effectively and introduced some popular policies honed during its long period in opposition, appears now to be struggling for inspiration. [...]

The most noteworthy development has been the launch, last Sunday, of a long-awaited new progressive party called Spring, led by Robert Biedron, a liberal former mayor and member of parliament. He describes Civic Platform and Law and Justice as part of the same problem, repeatedly emphasizing that he does not wish to engage in their war and saying in a recent interview that the two of them are a “corpse we will bury.” Yet it has been striking that, since announcing plans to re-enter national politics, Biedron has focused his attacks primarily on Civic Platform, despite in theory having much more in common with it than with Law and Justice. It is clear that, while he wants to remove Law and Justice from power, he sees his initial challenge as establishing a separate identity from the existing opposition and competing with it for votes. A poll in September 2018 showed that among potential voters for Biedron’s party, 61 percent would be defectors from Civic Platform, with the remainder from other centrist and left-wing parties.[...]

Alternatively, however, Biedron has the potential to energize nonvoters, those who are opposed to Law and Justice but, until now, have been unimpressed by the alternatives. Given Poland’s consistently low turnout (around 50 percent in the last three parliamentary elections), this creates great potential for disruption.

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BBC Three: Does God Hate Me? | Queer Britain - Episode 1 (May 7, 2017)

Riyadh Khalaf explores the relationship between someone's faith and sexual identities.

In this episode, Riyadh meets a dis-fellowed Jehovah's witness, a Muslim woman seeking a marriage of convenience, and trans-masculine Christian, Elijah, as he is renamed in church.

Queer Britain is a six-part series, and new episodes will be released each Sunday morning. If you would like information or support about the topics covered in Queer Britain, there are organisations in the UK that can help. 

The Guardian: How Ukip normalised far-right politics

Since the Brexit vote in 2016 Ukip is no longer primarily concerned with attacking the European Union. Now led by Gerard Batten the party has started to normalise far-right ideas and has given roles to figures including Tommy Robinson.

Think Progress: Kansas bill claims LGBTQ community is a religion to justify every kind of discrimination against it

But what makes HB 2320 truly unique is how it frames the rationale for such a massive reversal: It asserts that LGBTQ identities constitute a religion, and if the state of Kansas were to support any law that recognizes that religion, it would be in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.[...]

In other words, being gay is a matter of faith. And while It may not be an institutionalized religion, it is — these lawmakers assert — the equivalent of secular humanism, which was recognized as a religion by the Supreme Court in a unanimous 1961 decision overturning a Maryland state requirement that candidates for public office profess a belief in God. The government can’t pass laws that require a person “to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion,” the Court explained, nor can it privilege religions that include a belief in God over nonbelievers or over religions that do not include such a belief.[...]

Though all seven of the lawmakers who sponsored HB 2320 are white, they contend at length that LGBTQ equality is particularly offensive to people of color. Much of the bill is inexplicably dedicated to drawing a distinction between race and LGBTQ identities despite the fact that it’s entirely superfluous to the bill’s stated purpose. In this way, it echoes a long history of equality opponents trying to “drive a wedge” between LGBTQ people against people of color.[...]

Leaving no doubt as to whether these lawmakers intended to equate bestiality with homosexuality, the bill explains, “All forms of parody marriages equally erode community standards of decency.” As marriage between a man and a woman does not contribute to the same erosion, the state has a compelling interest in providing for this sort of matrimony exclusively. Furthermore, as some taxpayers believe that such “parody marriages” are immoral, taxpayer money that supports benefits for those marriages violates the consciences of these taxpayers simply by mandating that they pay taxes.

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