Beware the Peccadilloes

Both the Catholic Church and the Republican Party suddenly are being devoured by their peccadilloes.

Newly visible in this dawning age of full and perfect knowledge, small peccadillos mate and form larger peccadilloes. Peccadilloes love publicity. The more they get, the larger they grow. The larger they grow, the more they get. So long as peccadilloes continue to get publicity, they can stay alive and grow for a long time.

For some holy fathers, fiddling with children, which was once a mere peccadillo, is now turning out to have been a violation of the law, both God's and man's. Oh, dear. So they cope by calling these reports of their abuse "gossip", attempting to demonize the complainers.

Nonny, nonny.

For the Republican Party, recent peccadilloes include using donor dollars to pay for visits by their young turks to a pricey pseudo-lesbian bondage nightclub. One of those very arty places. Then the Florida Republican Party discovered that 1.3 million dollars of charges to the American Express card of a staffer have been reimbursed. Strange, slushy charges.

Republican donors may think, "Am I just feeding a peccadillo?" and send their money instead to Glen Beck's favorite gold hedge fund or to the Veterans of the Spanish-American War. Good Catholics perhaps will give directly to worthy causes, not funneling their gifts through the Church.

Donor dollars dwindle for those beset by peccadilloes.