There are some really horrific stories coming out of Canada at the moment, tales of abuse, cover-ups and the murder of innocent children, truly disgusting. Lot's of people are rightly angry about this and want their Government to take some positive action, unfortunately, as is the way of things it seems, religion (i.e. Catholicism) is being given some special "untouchable" status. This is not unique to Canada of course, we have seen the same thing here and in other European nations (Ireland for example), it seems that there is a glaring blind-spot in our broader ethical thinking going on! For example, Canada is happy to pass laws to compel speech, i.e. mandate certain "words" be used by people around minority transsexual issues but seems reluctant to prosecute, investigate or even prevent child murder, can anyone else see the problem with this picture?
Change.org have a petition going at the moment on this, they suggest three simple steps that the Government could take to help focus the attention of the Catholic church on their lawful responsibilities, these are..
1. Stripping any preferential status that Catholic Institutions have under law
2. Banning all Catholic institutions from receiving public funds to deliver primary or secondary education.
3. Terminating all Catholic institutions tax exempt station until they surrender all records associated with current and past crimes related to the abuse and murder of children.
All of these measures seem perfectly reasonable to me, if this were a secular organisation we were talking about, say a company or charity, then no one would blink an eye, but because the organisation in question is a religion then some people seem to be reluctant to follow the same ethics, why?
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