Religion
In reply to the discussion: Institutions, Like Individuals, Must Earn Respect Through Actions [View all]Igel
(36,566 posts)Consider the Democratic Party.
I look back at its history, and see that it was not the African-American friendly party we think of it now, but was a strong supporter of Jim Crow and minority-voter disenfranchisement laws.
As for the RC, I pay attention to times. It would be one thing to air all the DP's dirty laundry today, without bothering to say when one of its prominent senators founded his local KKK chapter, or name Democrats who actively worked to disenfranchise and violate the rights of the descendants of slaves. You read the child abuse chronicles, and the dates are left out. One thing that means is you don't see the shortfall in recent cases--instead, you hear about new cases where some poor kid was abused when he was 12 and is now bringing charges or would like to, but the priest is 70 years old or dead and the victim is in his 50s. So even when people are judging it by its "present," it's a decades old "present". And even then, it's judged by accusations, not by anything close to "due process." (We have a mixed recent history with due process. When it's somebody we don't like, the claim is the evidence and trial, and all that's needed is the verdict. If we like the person, sometimes we insist on due process, things like checking out the claim and seeing if there's any evidence--and if there's not, saying, "Sorry, no evidence, no proof, no conviction, no guilty verdict." No, the universe isn't fair--but if we always side with the self-professed victim, then life's not fair to the innocent wrongly accused.)
Anyway, that time lag between when the victim was victimized and when we hear the allegation often means the events happened about the same time as the reformed KKK chapter founder was really important in Congress. So we have to decide if we want to pretend that the past is really the present or just go by recent actions?
Organizations change, even as they remain true to some core values even as societies around them change and resent the continuity, unless they properly repent and do penance; they also sometimes do change their core values, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse; but even worse, sometimes not every member is the best representative of that organization.
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