Where is Magic Jesus when you need him?

What a brave man. He rapes a little girl, then threatens to tear up her stuffed animals if she tells her parents.
Can we neuter child predators?

I'm not clear on why it took the mother 4 days to report the assault.

"The girl told her mother of the assaults on Aug. 3; her mother reported the matter to police on Aug. 7."

@3: It's really none of our business why. Perhaps she took the girl to a therapist or pediatrician first. Perhaps the predator is a close friend of the family and the betrayal of trust was so shattering she needed time to wrap her head around it. Perhaps she and her husband initially wanted to take justice into their own hands and beat the rapist to death with baseball bats. Perhaps she curled up in a ball with her daughter and hid under the blankets with her for four days, keeping her safe.

Again, it's none of our business. Four days to process something this awful is reasonable when the threat isn't acute.

well said, @4

Pretty tacky to blame this on Christians. Up here in Vancouver Robert Pickton, our local serial killer who claimed he killed 49 dirt-poor women, recently lost his appeal. He's been in the news a lot, and his religion has never been mentioned, so it's a pretty safe bet that he's atheist or agnostic. So would it be at all constructive to write a headline, "Atheist kills 49 helpless women"? What does him being atheist or agnostic have to do with his crimes? Nothing, just like this guy in Boston being nominally Christian has nothing to do with what he allegedly did.

@6 - Hello, you're clearly new. Dan has explained the reasons behind his "O They Will Know We Are Christians..." posts before. In short, the point is not to "blame this on Christians", but to show a multitude of examples where being a Christian does not make someone any better of a person. Similar to the "Every child deserves a mother and father" posts.

And it is not so much pointing out the hypocrisy of people who call themselves Christians but calling out Christians who represent God (on some level) and Christian churches (on some level)...

who betray the people who have put their trust in God and their church.

And of course to call them on their self-righteous judgement of others. Which is sadly lost on most of them.

so it's a pretty safe bet that he's atheist or agnostic

If he were agnostic/atheist, religious wackos would be screeching about how this proves atheists and agnostics have no moral compass. Shove your safe bets up your ass.

What confuses me is the article says he communicated through sign language at a couple points (he made his plea through a sign language interpreter), but they say he told the seven year old he'd rip up her toys. Did she know sign language? Why do so few reporters know how to write a coherent article?

"Roldan’s MySpace page says he is in a relationship."

Okay. Ewwwwwww?

He's not just disgusting, he's ballsy:

"Roldan was among a group that the girl’s mother invited back to the family’s home. While alone in the kitchen with the child..."

@6 Also, the point is to do the reverse of some of the ultra-right-wing "Christian" mouthpieces. They are used to giving and learning 'moral' lessons by homily or anecdote, something that is common in church services, though learning through anecdote is by no means a Christian-only phenomenon. Anyway, many of these mouthpieces will give a single example of a gay person doing something immoral and then say that it is 'proof' that ALL gay people are immoral, as is supporting the gay lifestyle. Dan likes to do the reverse to highlight the point that when people who call themselves Christian do horrible things, few people generalize Christians as being evil.

@13: I found a picture of his girlfriend.