Any large group of people will include individuals who are doing harmful or shameful things — by which I mean things outrageous enough to be newsworthy — out of public view. This is true of families, clubs, companies, political parties, nations, and all manner of other institutions, including religious ones. The larger the group, the more inevitable this becomes. For the sake of brevity I’m calling this observation Spitzer’s Law. (I considered calling it Edwards’s Law, but decided I’d rather not deal with that clumsy “s apostrophe s” thing.)

When an outrageously harmful or shameful thing comes to light from within a group we don’t like, there’s a knee-jerk tendency to judge everyone in the group as being equally guilty perpetrators (the Little Lulu Corollary). This is juvenile, because Spitzer’s Law has no exceptions. It applies to every group we all belong to that contains more than, I’d say, 50 people. Probably not even that many.

Of course, when a public figure who has marketed himself as a paragon of virtue is caught being a hypocrite — the Haggerty Scenario — we do all line up to throw rotten tomatoes, don’t we?

There is also a very human tendency to overlook obvious behavioral problems in people we like personally. We’ll squelch our own suspicions that sweet Uncle Ted cheats on Aunt Melba, or that our office friend Sally who gives everyone funny birthday cards is skimming off the books. Up to a point, that’s very normal and understandable.

In fact, I’d say the more terrible the act being perpetrated, the more likely it is that people who are close to the perpetrator will not see it, even if the evidence is all over the place. It’s the old cognitive dissonance thing.

There’s also the truth of the “banality of evil.” The most ordinary, unremarkable people can be capable of the most diabolical atrocities. We expect villains to bear some physical mark of villainy, or at least to be jerks so that we don’t like them. But in the real world, that’s not how it works. Genuine psychopaths often can be downright charming.

So, when an individual is caught doing something criminal or immoral, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything about groups he works for or belongs to. However, how a group responds to the bad behavior, once it’s discovered, speaks volumes.

If people in a leadership position saw what was happening, did they acknowledge the bad behavior and take steps to stop it? Or did they try to cover it up but let it continue?

If the bad behavior becomes public knowledge and the group faces public criticism, does the group forthrightly atone for the harm done, or does it close ranks and make excuses?

By now you probably realize I’m thinking of the widening Catholic clergy scandal. The Church is not exactly covering itself in glory on this one.

It doesn’t shock me that an institution as large as the Catholic church contains some members who are sexual abusers, or alcoholics, or thieves, or sadists, or who just engage in some sort of secret harmless kinkery. This will happen. It’s Spitzer’s Law.

I think it’s often the case that people who are genuinely warped are given to ostentatious displays of religiosity. In fact, I’d say the more flamboyantly or stridently religious someone is, the more likely he/she is hiding something (the Haggerty Scenario, again). And it doesn’t surprise me that people with harmful sexual compulsions would join a religious organization with a repressive attitude toward most sexuality. Moths to a flame, folks. (However, this does not mean that all religious people are warped.)

The sexual exploitation of children is something that so stuns most peoples’ sensibilities that it’s common to react by looking the other way and pretending one didn’t see what one saw. If the perpetrator is someone one knows, it’s a huge thing to process. Someone with no habit of introspection may be unable to process it.

However, most religions encourage moral introspection of some sort — reflection on and confession of one’s misbehavior. Obviously, this often doesn’t “work.” The degree to which it obviously isn’t working, as measured by a religious institution’s handling of its members’ bad behavior, is the degree to which a religious institution relinquishes public moral authority.

So I don’t criticize Catholicism per se because “A small minority has sinned, gravely, against too many,” as the Anchoress wrote yesterday. I criticize church leadership for covering it up and letting it continue. Especially the latter part. If they’d covered it up but made sure the “problem” priests were removed from contact with parishioners, the Church’s behavior would be less heinous. But that’s not what the Church did.

And I say that anyone involved in covering it up, allowing it to continue, and then deflecting public criticism with whiny excuses, has no authority whatsoever to assume public leadership on any moral issue, henceforth. Period.

Individuals will be flawed, but an institution assuming a role of moral leadership over the rest of us must demonstrate it can rise above its own bullshit. Otherwise, it should assume nothing more than humility.

See also: The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s flawed understanding of “morality.”

Update: Cluelessness abounds —

While I cannot excuse the actions of those who abused innocent children or who failed to intervene, I utterly reject the self righteous fury of those who would condemn an entire church for the actions of a few.

Although I’m sure the scandal has brought out the knee-jerk anti-Catholic and anti-religion crowd, most of the criticism I have seen has been leveled at the Church’s continued clumsy and clueless reaction (and it is a reaction, not a response) to the whole issue. And when I say Church, I am not talking about the Church Universal, but just the current, temporal institutional authorities, who have yet to forthrightly own up to their failures in this matter.

A belated congratulations to Michael Stickings and The Reaction, which passed its 5th anniversary a few days ago. Posted today: Twilight of the Godwins by Capt. Fogg.

Kevin Hall of McClatchy Newspapers tells us what Moody’s Investors Service was up to before the meltdown:

Moody’s blue-ribbon board of directors stopped receiving key information from an internal committee that was supposed to keep the board informed of risks to the company, a McClatchy investigation has found.

Instead, the ad hoc risk-management committee suddenly disappeared, precisely at the time when the board and management should have been shifting to higher alert as the financial world began quaking.

As McClatchy reported last year, the credit-rating agency had been handing out Triple-A grades like candy for Wall Street mortgage securities that were backed by pools of home loans that turned out to be junk.

Moody’s, of course, is a financial research group that analyzes the financial soundness of commercial and government entities and hands out credit scores on borrowers. It’s not exactly a watchdog, but you could argue that it’s a means by which the glorious and infallible free market, praised be its name, regulates itself.

Well, so much for that.

Former Moody’s executives told Hall that the Moody’s board of directors were meeting six times a year, although what they actually did is questionable. The adjective “incurious” was attached to them a couple of times. For this industriousness, members were paid salaries of up to $115,000 a year, plus stock. Nice work if you can get it.

A committee charged with the job of warning the company of threats was disbanded in 2007 after a management shakeup, and the board either didn’t notice or didn’t care. The whole business stinks of crony capitalism.

Also,

… the legislation to overhaul financial regulation that’s now moving through Congress aims to empower ratings-agency boards by requiring a direct line of communication between the company officials who police for risks and the boards. It’s not clear whether that would have made any difference at Moody’s.

It wouldn’t have made any difference at Moody’s because the board members, apparently, did not take their responsibilities seriously. It appears people in the company were trying to get their attention and warn them something bad was about to go down, but the board remained oblivious. I’m sure the members all expect to golden parachute into a cushy retirement, no matter whether they succeed or fail, if they haven’t parachuted already.

I’m sure that if you give them enough time and latitude, libertarians will find some reason why Moody’s meltdown was the government’s fault, and that such things can never happens when markets are unregulated. But it seems to me that the financial sector is just plain corrupt, through and through.

No, it’s what happens when you can’t think. One of the newer issues causing wingnut hysteria is a study that alleges Democratic districts got more stimulus money than Republican ones. The study’s author writes,

Controlling for the percentage of the district employed in the construction industry, a proxy for the vulnerability to recession of a district, I find no statistical correlation for all relevant unemployment indicators and the allocation of funds. This suggests that unemployment is not the factor leading the awards. Also, I found no correlation between other economic indicators, such as income, and stimulus funding.

Nate Silver, bless him, finds the correlation:

The district that received the largest amount of stimulus funding in the 4th Quarter of 2009, according to de Rugy’s tally, is California’s 5th Congressional District. Is there anything notable about the 5th Congressional? Well, it is home to the state capital, Sacramento. Let’s keep that in mind.

Next on the list is New York’s 21st Congressional District. The largest city in the 21st is the state capital of New York, Albany.

Third is the 21st Congressional District of Texas. It contains parts of Texas’ state capital, the wonderful city of Austin. (Another district that contains parts of Austin — the 25th — ranks 14th on de Rugy’s list.)

At this point, it ought to be pretty obvious what is going on. The three districts receiving the largest amount of stimulus funds are home to the capitals of the three largest states — New York, California, and Texas. Let’s pause for a moment and make a bold prediction. I’ll bet you that the district that ranks 4th on the list will contain the capital of the 4th largest state, Florida.

Bingo. Up 4th on the list is Florida’s 2nd Congressional, home to Tallahassee.

Fifth is Pennsylvania’s 17th, which hosts the state capital, Harrisburg.

In other words, the stimulus funds went from the federal government to state agencies, which nearly always have main offices near the state capitol buildings, which then distributed the monies throughout the state.

All together now: Duh.

Nate provides a chart showing that the whopping majority of districts hosting state capitals are “D” districts, and this is true even in “R” states such as Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas. As Nate points out, these districts tend to be relatively urban and home to state universities — that’s not always true, of course. But they’re also home to lots of government employees who have college educations. Hence, they are more likely to be “D” voters. It’s becoming more and more apparent that your average “R” can’t critically think his way out of a wet paper bag.

The wingnuts, however, continue to hyperventilate over the “fact” that Democrats districts are getting almost twice as much money on average than Republican districts. Check out the comments at Breitbart’s Big Government site, if you have the stomach for it.

Update: More about the study and the study’s author:

de Rugy wrote her paper for the Mercatus center at George Mason, a libertarian outpost where she is a senior research fellow. She testified about the paper before Congress, she’s an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a director of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a former scholar at AEI, a columnist for Reason, and and a frequent contributor for National Review Online. There are hundreds of people like her in Washington, most of them conservative, living well-compensated lives of pure ideological hackery.

If you are a wingnut, and you can dress yourself and don’t smell too badly, you too can be a senior adjunct fellow scholar columnist and make a dandy living in Washington.