Thursday, May 24, 2012

Anderson's Law- or the Cardinal Bernard Law

Mark Shea, over at Patheos, brings up the idea of a new form of Godwin's law covering the Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal of 1956-1986. Turns out Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia already proposed this way back in 2007. A rather ironical movement is building off of Mr. Shea's page to rename it after Cardinal Bernard Law- not only because of the pun, but because of the fact that the Cardinal has been so deeply implicated in the scandal.
Anderson's law is as follows:
“As a debate involving the Catholic Church (either a discussion about the Church specifically, or a discussion in which the Church is taking a position) grows longer, the probability of someone mentioning the sex scandal approaches one.”

Jay also has a corollary (which I suppose can be called “Anderson’s Corollary”):
“Once such reference to the Scandal is made, whoever mentioned the Scandal has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.”

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