Racketeers protect themselves
The Catholic church is evil chapter eleventy billion.
Washington’s Catholic leaders sued state leaders and county prosecutors Thursday, alleging that a controversial new law requiring priests to break the confessional seal to report suspected child abuse is “a brazen act of religious discrimination.”
Oh piss off you evil theocratic shits. Your “confessional seal” has protected who knows how many child rapists and torturers.
The new law adds clergy to a list of other professions, such as health care workers and school personnel, who are mandatory reporters of abuse. But the church’s lawsuit pushes back on a provision of the law that does not allow carve-outs for things said during confession, and exposes priests to potential arrest.
Long overdue. The church is a goddy Mafia, and it’s about damn time for it to be subject to the same laws as everyone else.
That decision by lawmakers violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, alleges the lawsuit filed in Tacoma’s federal court by leaders and priests in Washington’s three archdioceses, including Seattle archbishop Paul Etienne. It names Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown and a host of local law enforcement officials, who could be tasked with enforcing the law.
Tensions remain over the balance between what the church says violates the sacramental seal of confession and a duty to report child abuse or neglect. The Catholic church has been
wracked by a decades-long clergy abuse scandal that led to generations of trauma and the bankruptcy of the Spokane diocese. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice declared the law “anti-Catholic” and worthy of a federal investigation.
The law is anti-priestly rape and official secrecy around and protection of same.
“I’m disappointed my Church is filing a federal lawsuit to protect individuals who abuse kids,” Ferguson said in a statement to The Seattle Times.
That’s how his church is though.
Terrence Carroll, a retired King County judge who co-founded Heal Our Church, an alliance of practicing Catholics seeking reforms, said the lawsuit filed Thursday is part of a “broader resistance to transparency” by the church. “The issue comes down to what’s more important here, transparency on the part of the church and the protection of children, or this small part of the confession?” Carroll said.
Carroll said that while confession is part of religion, the actual protection of children is not that separate from the practice of religion, and he believes the church should be prioritizing the protection of children. He noted that the Washington state Constitution guarantees religious freedom, “except for licentious behavior,” and said he believed the DOJ’s claims of anti-Catholic bias are “propaganda” that may have encouraged the bishops to file the lawsuit.
Because Trump and his people are in favor of protecting Catholics who abuse children.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, has previously said the bill was crafted after she read a 2022 InvestigateWest article detailing how Washington Jehovah’s Witnesses hid child sexual abuse for decades. Similar versions of the bill had failed in previous legislative sessions and were the subject of heated lobbying by child advocates and the Catholic church during the 2025 session.
It’s in the nature of religious sects to do this. Religion is special, it’s mysterious, it’s magical, it’s holy, it’s taboo. It mandates belief in supernatural beings and events, and it protects itself first and people later. It’s a very long con.
But isn’t what they’re claiming not “equal protection” but special privileges? Does any other profession or individual have the legal right to keep knowledge of criminal activity of which they have been informed secret? Can I open up my own magic booth where normal laws don’t apply because of rules that I made up myself?
Why yes, but of course theocrats aren’t going to see it that way.
The ‘argument’ by the church is that if the pedophile cannot confess without fear of being reported, then they won’t confess, and therefore they will retain the sin on their soul, and thus will go to Hell when they die.
To which I say, in the remarkably unlikely circumstance that Hell is a real state of existence, then pedophiles who have not taken every step possible to atone (including, at the very least, confessing their crimes to the secdular authorities and accepting judgement accordingly) are one of the few groups of people I would actually be fine with suffering eternal torment.
Also, does it come as a surprise to anyone that Trump wants to narrow the field of people required to report CSA? As an almost certain kiddie-fucker himself, this would only help him. Hell, he could even take it as an opportunity to start bragging.
It’s been a hell of a long time since I last opened a Bible, but I am 100% certain that there is nothing in the teachings of Jesus, Paul, or the Bible as a whole that grants priests the right to forgive sins and run a protection racket for sinners.
And I’m with Freemage, sometimes I encounter reports of a crime so heinous I really do wish there were a Hell.
Perhaps, if the Catholic Church still struggles mightily with the idea of outing a confessing predator, it could ease its conscience by turning over their extensive records on pedophile priests to the relevant authorities? That would at least be a step in the right direction.
Therapists already operate under those rules. People still go to therapists, and some of them will go into great detail with a new patient that they are bound by law to report any admissions of a crime, or a planned crime. Do people give them that information? I don’t know…but they do still go to therapists, and it’s likely if they’ve committed a crime, they will say something in an unguarded moment that may not amount to an admission, but might be suspicious and need to be reported.
Of course there are pedophiles among therapists, but if they’ve tried to roll back this regulation, I haven’t heard a lot of news of it.
Teachers are also required to report. Most people who deal with individuals in a way that could lead to admission of a crime are required to report.
The church wants something special to accrue to them because they are the church.
The Catholic Church as far as I am aware is incorporated in such a way as to make it un-prosecutable at law. So if a Catholic went to confession and confessed to a murder, the Church would be within its own traditions and charter to withold that information from the police. If this were not so, Catholics would be prosecuted every day for crimes confessed to their parish priest, and it all would never be out of the news.
For the Church to claim a special privilege of not having to pass to the police confessions of crimes can only keep parishioners going to confession in the knowledge that their sins, crimes, murders or whatever will be kept confidential, while at the sime time preserving the psychologial dependence of the confessor on the priest. And that would keep both the congregations in the pews, and money flowing in to the Church Treasury.
At the same time,all a ‘protty’ is obliged to do is confess his or her sin directly to God in a private prayer, not necessarily involving the parson in any way. And I am not aware of any reports of protestant clergy tipping off the police about anything either. So win-win-win for believers, and lose-lose for some victims of crime.