The Devil if I know

"I'm not sure whether I knew it was a crime or not,” said St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson, who is part of a lawsuit accusing more than 100 priests and church employees of sex abuse. “I understand today it's a crime.”

Oh.  OK then.

Nancy Gordeuk

Then there's Nancy Gordeuk,  the founder of TNT Academy, a nontraditional high school where students can follow nontraditional paths to a diploma.  Recently, at her school's graduation exercises, she messed up the order of speakers and had to call the audience back to hear the valedictorian speak.  You know how that was going to go; the crowd was excited to share in the moment with their graduates, and suddenly they're told to sit back down, and things got confused and some people got up again to leave.

"Look who's leaving! All the black people," she said, in what turned out to be her last official act at the school, which fired her several days later.  But before they let her go, she said, "My side is I’m not a racist, I didn’t know black people was a racist term, I didn’t say the n-word or anything like that, because that’s not in my vocabulary!” she said, arguing that it was merely an observation. “I made a statement, it wasn’t a racist remark.”

Some observations don't need to be made, in case she didn't know that. Here's another one, from the email she sent to the parents of her students:  “The devil was in the house and came out from my mouth. I deeply apologize for my racist comment and hope that forgiveness is in your hearts.”

So she admits racism and drags the devil into all this, and she went on, asking her school community to move forward and forget all this unpleasantness.

Travis Gordeuk

And then her son Travis got on Facebook and backed his mother with these well-chosen words: "If anyone has something to say about my mom and how she ran her graduation—come say it to my face," he wrote. "Yall [n--gas] aren’t talkin about [s--t] so if u got somthing [sic] to say come see me face to face."

And he included their home address, for those wishing to see him face to face.

Meanwhile, a Boston jury rejected the notion proffered by the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev defense team that the Boston Bomber was influenced by his radical older brother.  Surely, no one of 20 years has their own mind, and is always willing to do as their older sibling suggests/demands/orders.  Ask any older brother.

We look to clergypeople to uplift us all and provide the moral underpinnings of society, and here we have one whose defense is that he did not know it was illegal to have sex with children.

We look to educators to teach our young and lift them from the morass of stupidity and ill-preparedness that awaits the uneducated, and here was a school principal laying out her prejudice for all to see, and blaming Satan, who is down in hell preparing for the arrival of a young man who killed and maimed out of hatred, and was defended by lawyers who blame his older brother.

No one wants to accept responsibility for their actions and harmful behavior? Are we just going to say "the hell with it"?