Author Archives: Paul Steven Stone

THE RESURRECTION OF 11-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Somewhere long ago he was once a child. 

His world was a child’s world where adults towered over the landscape in a wondrous sort of mute majesty and rarely slowed down to listen to children.

Somewhere long ago he was a blueprint of the man he might one day become. A youthful creature brimming with untested strengths and unexplored depths. But he was also small, needful and, most of all, vulnerable. He had to trust that the giants in his world would provide for his needs. That they would nourish and care for him, and keep him safe from harm.

Somewhere long ago he was once a child. And as a child he saw the world through an innocent’s eyes. So, when an adult in that world, a parish priest, rose up like a menacing shadow to darken his life, he could only fall back on his limited experience to understand what was happening. 

And there was no understanding. 

There was only a child lost in confusion and fear. A child deeply hurt and frightened. A child surrounded by people but engulfed by a sense of isolation. A child who felt guilty rather than victimized, as if by questioning the actions of a priest—a man as close to God as any mortal could come—he himself had done something wrong. 

Somewhere long ago he was once a child and used a child’s logic to order his world. Thus, when he learned he could no longer trust adults to keep him safe, he did what he must to survive. He created boxes in his mind. Boxes to hold those things that frightened or angered or confused him. Boxes he could keep hidden. Hidden from the world, hidden from the priests, even hidden from himself. 

In one box he placed his anger at his parents for not protecting him. In another he placed the memory of the innocence that had been taken from him. In yet another box, he placed his fear of intimacy, having seen what happens when you allow someone to come too close. 

And in the largest box of all he placed himself, an eleven- year-old boy frozen in time. It was the only safe harbor the child would know. 

Many years later the boy had grown into a man, and the boxes which had been buried in the darkness of his memory began to fall apart like broken dresser drawers. They would spill out their hazardous contents at the oddest moments. When he found himself standing outside a church. When he noticed how vulnerable his children seemed while asleep. When people who thought they knew him, told him how lucky he was to have the gifts he’d been given. Or whenever he felt threatened or frightened, like a little child hiding in a grownup’s body.

For many years those leaking boxes and their toxic seepage dominated the man’s life. They undermined his most intimate relationships, they kept him running from job to job, they sent him searching for relief in alcohol, drugs and an endless succession of mindless distractions. Worst of all, they unleashed on those he loved the pent-up fury of a rage that had been burning for most of his life. 

Sitting there on the TV screen, somewhere on the other side of the continent, he talks to a reporter about his painful past and why, after all these years, he is finally confronting his demons and opening up his boxes. He is one of a number of men who are forcing the Catholic Church to face up to a pattern of almost bestial behavior by some of its priests. Forcing the church to acknowledge it had condoned crimes any civilized society would condemn as savage and depraved. 

He is one of many such men who, like the lost boys of Neverland, never lived out their boyhoods but instead placed themselves, frozen in time, in their own inner boxes. And now the boxes are being open. The victims are telling their stories. 

The healing has begun.

And the church, perhaps, is being dragged from its own peculiar set of closed and darkly hidden boxes.

But as he sits there at his kitchen table holding his five-year -old daughter in an unconscious protective embrace, I see more on the TV screen than the angry victim, the outraged reformer and the loving father. 

I see the man whose blueprint—once tragically unrealized—was now coming to life. Resurrected after all those lost years. Hopefully to blossom, even with all the discovery and pain that still lay ahead.

For that blueprint, too, had been hidden inside a box. 

Waiting for years in darkness. 

Waiting to be uncovered and brought back to life.

Waiting for an eleven-year-old boy to whisper it was now safe to come out and play.



From “How To Train A Rock” by Paul Steven Stone, ©2009 Paul Steven Stone. It is somewhat sad and amazing to realize I had first written this essay in 2002 and yet today so much still remains to be uncovered, and the Catholic Church is still being dragged unwilliongly to a place of acceptance and grudging reform. It has been many years since public reporting on the church’s shameless culture of complicity and elitism. A culture that allowed hundreds of priests to prey like vampires upon thousands of helpless children across the vast expanse of decades and continents. 

AMERICA’S TREASONOUS 155 

(the Republican Congressmen and Senators who joined in Trump’s Attempted Coup)

Just two of the Treasonous 155

With all this talk about the January 6th rioters and plotters, little has been said so far about the intricate clockworks of the January 6th plot. 

Those clockworks—the inside plan, so to speak—involved Republican members of the House and Senate voting to reject the electoral votes from the various states. There were one of two possible reasons for the delay, both in service to the Trump plan to overturn the election of 2020. 

REASON ONE: to allow time for the rioters to totally disrupt the proceedings, so that the Vice President could illegally and unconstitutionally declare his inability to proceed with the count and then—critically important—throw the election back to the House of Representatives, where Republican states held a two state majority and could thus deliver the election to Donald Trump.

REASON TWO: to again allow time for the rioters to create a disturbance so frightening and distracting as to provide a cover for Vice President Pence to substitute slates of bogus Republican electors and then—illegally and unconstitutionally—declare Donald J. Trump outright winner of the 2020 presidential election.

As will go down in history, Vice President Pence refused to go along with the conspiracy to overthrow the elected government of The United States and all Trump’s coup plotting went for naught, notwithstanding the deaths, injuries and trauma suffered by Capital Police officers.

As the January 6th Committee pursues answers about what happened on January 6th, it has yet to focus on the elephant in the room—the 147 representatives and 8 senators who, central to the coup plan, refused to certify validly elected state electors.

Nobody can answer, without more investigation, whether all 155 members of Congress were parties to the coup plan, or merely pawns in the hands of the plotters. Some were clearly insiders who participated in planning sessions at the White House and the Willard Hotel. But how many and which ones specifically remains to be clarified. 

But whether they participated as insiders or dupes, each and every one were participants and vital to the aims of the plotters. Wittingly or not, they engaged in the insurrection and by the dictates of Section 3 of the 14thAmendment to the Constitution, they should be barred from ever holding office in any state as well as the Congress of the United States.

Yes, they were either dupes or criminals in the plot to attack Congress and overthrow its legally elected government.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out most of them received their law degrees from Trump University.

14th Amendment, Section 3:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same…

SUPREME COURT RULES LIFE BEGINS WITH ‘FIRST TINGLE’

The Gang of Six

Washington, D.C.—The Supreme Court, ratcheting up its attack on women’s rights and liberal ideology, today announced its newest doctrine on the sanctity of human life. Declaring that human life no longer begins at the moment of conception, as has been promulgated for decades by the court, the Catholic Church and right-wing paramilitary groups, but rather at the moment of ‘inspiration’ or, in other words, ‘the first tingle.” With its eye cocked on preventing such unwanted and illegal sexual stimulation, the court declared war on a long litany of movies, social activities, books, cocktails and even popular entertainers it considers unduly stimulating to humankind’s baser instincts. In essence, the court was reasserting its god-sanctified authority over the political left and anyone else who would question the court’s right to define morality and appropriate sexual behavior for all Americans.

“We’ve taken the act of creation—truly an act of God—to its primal stage, the exact moment the idea of fornication first rises in the mind of a man or a woman,” said Justice Samuel Alioto, the court’s spokesperson on matters of rectitude and moral sincerity, as the court released a 135 -page-long list of films, books and popular songs it considered “life-creating trash.” Under threat of punishments reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition, Justice Alioto and other Justice members comprising the Gang of Six decreed these prurient materials officially listed “Off Limits” for millions of Americans of all genders and religious persuasions, because, as Justice Clarence Thomas later clarified, “they invariably lead to genital stimulation, which is a clear sign that an individual has been divinely inspired to create life.”

Some of the more surprising entries on the court’s list include Anne of Green Gables, Lassie Come Home, I Love Lucy and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. When specifically questioned why Anne of Green Gables was banned and Portnoy’s Complaint was not, Justice Thomas reminded his interviewer that redheaded women were often regarded as objects of desire for their hair color alone, while masturbation or self-abuse was considered by the majority of the court to be the last acceptable “spilling of the Lord’s seed.” 

When asked how the court could possibly enforce such a wide-ranging ban on what were previously thought to be acceptable forms of interaction and mental stimulation, Justice Kavanaugh spoke up, promising there would be a tattletale in every bar, in every dance rave, in every singles bar and every whorehouse in the country. 

“The idea of installing security cameras in every American’s bedroom is still under discussion,” interjected Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the newest member of the Supreme Court and, as its only female member, official mascot to the Gang of Six.

Within minutes of the court’s announcement, half a dozen politicians vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, including ex-President Trump, hailed the court’s newest doctrine for its potential to create tens of thousands of new jobs, as well as tweaking the liberal establishment where it hurt the most, below the belt.

Florida governor and presidential wannabe, Ron “Don’t Say Gay” DeSantis, questioned, “Why can’t President Biden come up with a jobs bill even half as creative as this?” 

Adding with an impish smile, “Or should I say pro-creative!”

FIVE REASONS NOT TO VOTE REPUBLICAN

If you live in Texas, these are some of the Republicans you should NOT vote for.
  1. THEY LIE: The lies did not begin with Trump, they merely achieved a new level of acceptability and viability under the shadow and impetus of the Republican’s Liar-in-Chief.
  2.  THEY CARE ABOUT GUNS MORE THAN CHILDREN’S LIVES. If you need me to flesh this one out, you have not been following the news. How many more mass shootings will it take—how many more children’s lives must be sacrificed—before Republicans see that allowing guns in the wrong hands—or obstructing laws that prevent free access to guns— is tacitly abetting and supporting these horrendous attacks? The Uvalde shooter obtained his two AK-15’s legally under Federal and Texas state laws.
  3. THEY TRIED TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The evidence has already emerged, and it is heartbreakingly clear, that January 6th was not a spontaneous protest of enraged Americans, but a conspiracy of Republican leaders in the White House and Congress to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States and replace him with the man who actually lost the 2020 election. The plan, had Vice President Pence not refused to participate, would have substituted separate slates of Trump electors for those electors actually won by Joe Biden. Any way you measure it, it was a failed coup. 
  4. THEIR VISION IS FIXED FIRMLY ON THE PAST. If left to their own devices, Republicans would turn back the clock to when women could not make decisions about their own bodies, blacks could not protest their subservient place in American life without fearing for their lives, and middle-class Americans would peacefully accept that their rights, livelihoods and comforts were determined by the noblesse oblige of the upper, ruling class. 
  5. THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER’S REPUBLICAN PARTY. Today’s Republican party, with notable exceptions, is not the political party your father once voted for. That was a party of financial vigilance, extreme patriotism and a dedication to law and order. By cloaking themselves in the American flag and a distorted view of the American Constitution, today’s Republicans pervert the very principles they once espoused. For these Republicans, Law and Order matters up until the moment Capital police officers stand in their way. Patriotism matters up until the moment a disgraced ex-president sends them to attack the seat of their government. And any pretense of financial vigilance went out the window with Trump’s tax bill, which mostly benefitted the wealthy and ignored those most needy in our American enterprise.  

There are countless reasons why you should not vote Republican in the next election, or any following election, until this nest of liars, sycophants and lawbreakers is broken up and true Republicans return to take back their party. 

One only hopes our democracy can survive until that time.

ME AND THE BOYS

The Supremes

Me and the boys were sitting around the Supreme Court the other day talking about you girls. Of course, when I say “the boys,” I also include our group’s honorary member, Amy Coney Barrett, who may not share our gender, but is every bit as fanatical, hard-assed and, yes, manly when it comes to stamping out abortion and a woman’s right to choose.

In fact, it was Amy who declared a woman may have a right to choose her shoes and gloves, even if they don’t match, but not the right to decline carrying a fetus for nine months. That right is reserved for the father of the fetus, whose rights also include choosing not to wear a condom. 

Yes, we know that Roe V. Wade was established precedent and law of the land for over 50 years, but what the hay, it’s never too late to put women in their place. Or back in their place, as the case may be.

Also never too late to forget all the lies we told Senators during our confirmation hearings. If you go back and view the videos of those hearings, you will observe me and the boys crossing our fingers when certain questions were asked. 

But don’t think we had an easy time making this decision. A few of the girls in the court, especially that Bronx spitfire Sonia, tried to get us sidetracked. They argued that the men who deposited their seed in these criminal women should also be imprisoned, too. Either that or have their balls cut off.

You can bet me and the boys had our legs crossed during most of her argument.

I know some of you might say a woman should have the right to abort her child in cases of incest and rape. “Not our problem,” Justice Thomas said at our meeting, “we already have laws covering rape and incest, and unless women are the ones committing rape or incest, I don’t see any need for us to get involved.”

Some of you may have forgotten that Judge Thomas, a.k.a. Long Dong Silver, was always quick with a judicial bon mot.