Suffer The Little Children

On the same day the Archdiocese of New York announced that Monsignor Eugene Clark had resigned after being caught having an affair with an adult woman instead of a little boy, Mayor Bloomberg was meeting with Orthodox Jewish leaders to assure them that a herpes-ridden rabbi wouldn't be prevented from infecting dozens more infant boys with a disease that will follow them the rest of their lives.

Last February, as you'll recall, the Health Dept. was investigating Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer. A child had recently died after being infected with herpes during an ancient circumcision rite in which the rabbi sucked the blood from the tiny wounded penis. Several other boys, it turns out, had also been infected.

City Council moved to ban Rabbi Fischer from performing the ritual, but this raised a ruckus in the Orthodox community, whose leaders claimed that such a ban would "set a bad precedent."

A bad precedent for what, exactly? There had been no move to prevent the ritual from taking place-just to keep this one diseased man from performing it.

Not to worry, though. The Mayor, desperate for the Orthodox vote this election year, assured the rabbis that nothing like that would happen-and to hell with all those kids, anyway.