XPost: alt.fan.sean-hannity, talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.democrats   
   From: bksherman@bleeding-rectums.cnn.com   
      
   Pedo Biden.   
      
   Pedo protector Kamala.   
      
   Column: California needs to take another look at its Catholic   
   Church sexual abuse cases   
      
   California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has gained a reputation for   
   going after anyone or anything that he feels threatens our   
   Golden State. He’s filed 35 lawsuits just against the Trump   
   administration. He’s prosecuted landlords who gouged renters   
   after the devastating Tubbs fire last year. He has stood with   
   “Dreamers” and against gun manufacturers.   
      
   So far, however, Becerra’s office has stayed mum on one of   
   California’s biggest criminal outrages: sex abuse in the   
   Catholic Church.   
      
   This decades-long scandal flared up again last month with the   
   release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report. It detailed how 300   
   priests molested at least 1,000 children and groomed them for   
   abuse over the last 70 years. But the equally horrific crime,   
   Pennsylvania Atty. Gen. Josh Shapiro correctly argued, was that   
   church hierarchy and law enforcement officials largely ignored   
   victims and let offenders continue their depravities.   
      
   That was the case in California, too. Many of the still-alive   
   monsignors, bishops and cardinals involved in California’s part   
   of the pedophile priest problem have never faced appropriate   
   consequences for their inaction. In New Jersey and New York, the   
   attorneys general have launched new investigations. Becerra   
   should do the same here.   
      
   I’ve covered the scandal in the Diocese of Orange since 2003,   
   and even then it was evident to me that this wasn’t just a   
   problem of a few bad padres.   
      
   The cover-up involved political players. In 1981, a Benicia   
   police officer found Jerome Henson, a Dominican priest, with a   
   13-year-old boy’s legs around his shoulders late at night.   
   Officials with the Diocese of Sacramento transferred Henson   
   within days to the Diocese of Reno, then to the Orange diocese.   
   There, Henson worked under Tom Fuentes in the communications   
   office, where the two helped to keep parishioners unaware of the   
   predators within their pews. Fuentes went on to become the   
   architect of the modern-day Republican Party in Orange County.   
      
   Many of the still-alive monsignors, bishops and cardinals   
   involved in California’s part of the pedophile priest problem   
   have never faced prosecution.   
      
   The cover-up involved police. In 1984, Oliver O’Grady, an Irish   
   priest working in Stockton, admitted to local detectives that he   
   had molested children. But when lieutenants of Roger Mahony, who   
   was then bishop of the Diocese of Stockton, promised to put   
   O’Grady into therapy and keep him away from children, the   
   detectives halted their investigation. O’Grady went on to   
   assault dozens of children across the Central Valley before he   
   was finally convicted in 1993. By then, Mahony was a cardinal   
   for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where he presided over more   
   pedophile priests.   
      
   The cover-up involved district attorneys. In 1975, church   
   officials in Orange County told prosecutors that Eleuterio Ramos   
   had molested a boy; the district attorney’s office suggested   
   psychological care instead of prison. Ramos became the most   
   prolific pedophile priest in Orange County history, admitting to   
   a victim last decade that he assaulted at least 25 boys.   
      
   Our sainted Sen. Kamala Harris, who trumpets her prosecution of   
   Backpage.com as evidence that she’s tough on sex crimes, is also   
   among those tarred in my mind. In 2005, while she was San   
   Francisco’s district attorney, Harris rebuffed a public-records   
   request by SF Weekly to release personnel files from the   
   Archdiocese of San Francisco. (Her predecessor had planned to   
   make them public after prosecuting criminal priests, but the   
   California Supreme Court stopped those cases when it declared   
   unconstitutional a 2002 law that lifted the criminal statute of   
   limitations.) Similar archives in Boston had exposed the scope   
   of the scandal there. “We’re not interested in selling out our   
   victims to look good in the paper,” Harris told SF Weekly in a   
   statement — this, even though many of those victims pleaded with   
   her to release the documents.   
      
   And she never prosecuted any pedophile priest.   
      
   Even Gov. Jerry Brown sinned. He twice vetoed bills that would   
   have extended the statute of limitations for victims to bring   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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