There is ONE connection between George and the state:

Apples.

WA is known for it’s apples, but they were introduced to the area by the wife of Ft. Vancouver’s commander (iirc it was COL Barnes before he was sent back east). She lamented that the soldiers didn’t have enough fruit to eat, and sent letters to her friends asking for seeds. Among them were apple seeds from George Washington’s orchard- but by that point The Oregon Country had already been split into the Oregon and Washington territories.

>”On social media like Reddit there are a lot of comments about the Catholic Church which do not distinguish between the parishioners, …. on one hand, and abusive priests on the other hand.”

“We” is assuming you were lumping me in that group while you sit on a high horse making excuses for the second wealthiest religious institution on God’s Green Earth.

You also followed that with “I am in no way minimizing the actions of abusive ministers, priests, or Boy Scout leaders.” And then went on about how there’s no good solution to the problem, when the solution is staring you in the face- you hold the offenders accountable. That seems to have worked with that last group and hasn’t been applied on a meaningful scale to the first two because of the raw magnitude of the institution, and since they won’t hold THEMSELVES accountable it falls upon the state to fill in the gap. There’s policies in place for secular institutions like healthcare and education, so it only seems reasonable to expand those policies to religious institutions.

The fact that it seems no other religious institution has any complaints with this EXCEPT Catholicism really speaks volumes.

The whole region is still a haven for far right activity to this day because of those roots laid back then, but also the influx of Asian and Hispanic people has made those same groups much less discriminatory towards European Catholics as long as they would also act shitty to Catholics from Latin America, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

You can’t NOT be well aware of those signs because YALL WONT SHUT UP ABOUT THEM. Every St. Patrick’s day I have to explain the difference between the way Irish were treated and the way black people are STILL treated, the fact that indentured servitude and slavery are fundamentally different things, and the one sided rivalry between the Freemasons and the Catholic Church.

That said, the reason why we don’t discern between The Church and The Followers is simple: continuing to attend services, perform rituals, and tithe to the church is a form of support- and supporting an organization, tacit or implicit, that has gone out of its way to cover up and excuse rampant sexual abuse of children is inexcusable. You fundamentally cannot compare the prejudices of the past to the behaviors of today.

And despite KNOWING this reputation, KNOWING how this would read, they STILL have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern day where God’s Law is functionally meaningless in the Pacific Northwest.

Catholics are a minority in WA, so unless they wanna fuck off they don’t have enough parishioners or money tied in the state to mean anything.