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The better view is that the right wing equivalent is religious leaders. I don't typically indulge in the priest jokes (except the funny ones), but it's a pretty universal problem:
The Witnesses the Southern Baptists:
The pattern isn't: Left Wing political leaders engage in sex abuse because leftist libertinism. The pattern is: Religious Leaders engage in sex abuse, Left Wing political leaders are religious leaders. Leftists like Chavez are preaching a religion, an ultimate truth about Life the Universe and Everything, and once you get in that deep the sex abuse starts.
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
If we want to make that comparison, then do public school teachers, too.
This "comeback" whataboutism sucks. Priests and political activists don't have limitless access to children for 8 hours a day, 300 days a year. Of course teachers fuck kids, but on a per-hour-around-kids basis, religious leaders are in their own special class.
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It doesn't even have to be a religious (including leftist-"religious" or other ideological) leader; whenever you have some group with motivations and ability to deny or cover up allegations, that group ends up attracting the sort of people who want to do things they'll need to deny or cover up.
Being part of any sacrosanct Noble Cause can do it, if the cause's actually-noble followers are afraid that making ignoble leaders' transgressions public would unfairly reflect badly on the Cause - this works if the Cause includes an "ultimate truth", but it also shows up in non-profits, charitable organizations, environmentalist organizations, police organizations... Even a mundane worry like "we don't want to scare kids away from the Boy Scouts just because of this one bad apple" can do it, for a while.
The inverse of power can be a form of power, if it attracts internal or especially external sympathy. Any group that feels marginalized has bad incentives, when members feel like other members' transgressions might unfairly reflect badly on them - there are cases among racial minorities, political factions, some religious groups where the abusers aren't among the leadership, some sexual orientations and kinks.
This is probably one reason why religious cults are such dangers; even if they're not showing any of they typical cult warning signs, any small religious group gets "feels marginalized" from being outnumbered by non-believers and gets "Noble Cause" from its religion, and so is doubly attractive for abusers.
I pseudo-apologize pre-emptively for bringing up my favorite hobby horse/pet peeve, which is that these so-called "actually-noble followers" are actually not noble, due to their actions, i.e. prioritizing their Cause's optics over justice for the victims of their leaders. As you say, if you believe that the Cause has some "ultimate truth" that supersedes all else (which, IME, applies exactly as well and often to non-profits, charitable organizations, etc. as any other religious organization), you can justify this line of thinking.
However, the issue there is that no truly noble follower of any Cause would be ignorant of the pattern of people who have followed some Cause in the past; to follow a Cause without skeptically analyzing the forces that would lead you to being convinced by the Cause is something I'd consider unambiguously ignoble. And one pattern that any follower of any Cause must notice is that most people (likely almost everyone) in the past who was convinced by a different Cause was wrong. Therefore, anyone who believes strongly in their Cause can't actually conclude anything about the correctness of their Cause; their strong belief in it doesn't provide any meaningful information for determining its correctness.
If God came down and proved His existence and then declared that This Cause is the Correct one, then perhaps noble followers of This Cause would be just in allowing [bad behavior] as a necessary cost for accomplishing This Cause. Perhaps. But, AFAICT, God never did that (and never existed, but that's a different conversation), and so we live in a world where the
stupidignoble are cocksure about their Cause while theintelligentnoble are full of doubt about their Cause.Unfortunately, being unjustly cocksure about something tends to be more attractive than being justly doubtful about something, and so it seems to me that basically any Cause is guaranteed to attract ignoble people near the top.
I definitely worded that poorly, and you haven't written anything here I strongly disagree with.
But I think there's a steelman here that's at least worth some sympathy (albeit not agreement) in the bigger scandals. At least the little people caught up in these scandals really do seem to think the problem is just "one bad apple" who made "one mistake". Even victims often believe that they're alone! Until word leaks up to more central authorities, nobody is thinking about trading off The Noble Cause versus Justice; they're thinking about trading off The Noble Cause Everywhere And Everywhen versus Punishment After The Fact In Just This One Case. It's not like they can do anything that will cause that kid to be unmolested, right? All they can do is to try to avoid compounding the damage, and as long as they keep an eye on that "one bad apple", there won't be any further damage done! This is also one of the reasons why these sorts of stories end up breaking all at once: when each story goes public, then people who know about another story start to worry that maybe it's not just two bad apples and/or two mistakes, start to see the systemic problems that allowed multiple perps to get away with it and/or allowed one perp to get away with it repeatedly, and finally start to reconsider whether they made the right or wrong call. Then you get a chain reaction and everything finally comes out all at once.
I'm pretty sure this criterion makes the median human being ignoble, if not a supermajority of us. I'm still not exactly disagreeing, but I'd suggest that the world is a better-understood (and in the end a better) place when we think of nobility as a continuum rather than a binary.
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I think it’s just normal human sin. I don’t know the base rate, but as I recall pastors are significantly less likely to abuse children than school teachers.
That list was a weapon in the culture war. There are some progressive (by evangelical standards) people and organizations whose M.O. is to ignore base rates, ignore any exculpatory evidence, and accuse denominations or institutions of being shot through with sexual abuse, then demand checks and balances that subvert the denomination’s polity. The people they want to grant new power over doctrine and practice are consistently from the progressive wing of the denomination, and they always think that the right way to address sexual abuse is by moving the denomination closer to the broader culture.
I don't think base rates are super useful for painting values differences. I'm not familiar with the numbers one way or the other, so you're probably correct about them.
But unless we're talking 10:1, or something like that, it's not indicative of "X is a trait of Y, but not of Z" so much "X is a trait of Y and Z."
Point taken.
“Values differences” is an interesting phrase, and I think the way you used it here suggests some differences in deeper underlying ideas, but I can’t quite get at them yet. I’ll think on it.
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