Jan 6, 2018 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers across the United States:

The Providence (R.I.) Journal

Approximately 1.8 million adolescents in the United States have been victims of sexual assault. That number is too large to fathom; a statistic. But it is 1.8 million stories, tragedies and injustices; 1.8 million children we failed to protect.

The horror of child abuse was in the public’s mind again with news of the death of Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, who for years protected priests who molested children from facing charges. Few tears have been wept for the disgraced cardinal. Indeed, cries of rage rang out because the Vatican provided him with the standard – i.e., full and honorable – funeral of a cardinal.

To many ears, that was the sound of the church saying, we don’t care. We don’t care that Cardinal Law effectively helped those wearing a clerical collar to rape or molest children. But the church, of course, performs burial rites for saints and for sinners, for those who succeeded in positions of high responsibility and for those who failed their flock miserably. In the church’s view, God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, is best suited to judge the deceased’s eternal fate.

We must look honestly at the dangers children face in our society. We owe it to children in our lives to give them skills to understand dangerous situations and report crimes, and know they will be taken seriously. And we must continue to prosecute those crimes.

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch

In its 13-plus years, Facebook has become the modern exemplar of unbridled growth with an unimaginably popular – and powerful- product, used regularly by one-quarter of the world’s population.

Twitter, at 11-years-old, is smaller, but also has immense power to influence users. Now the implications of that power are becoming clearer, and 2018 should be the year when Facebook and Twitter turn their considerable strengths- innovation, psychological savvy and tech brilliance – to limiting the harm wrought by their creations.

In the past year, we’ve learned that Facebook and Twitter were tools used by political ideologues, both left and right, to spread false and inflammatory claims during the 2016 U.S. election cycle. Americans need to become smarter about evaluating what they see on Facebook and Twitter. From now on, no one should graduate from an American high school without a social-studies class dealing with the effects and dangers of social media.

But sorting through garbage shouldn’t fall entirely to consumers. The geniuses who created the social-media juggernaut and have deployed every possible trick to entice users should take responsibility for its abuse.

The Capital Times, Madison, Wis.

Barely two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, at the start of the dizzying, disorienting and deeply disturbing year of 2017, Congressman Mark Pocan mentioned the “I” word on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. When the Wisconsin Democrat was recounting some of the first examples of the intersection of personal greed and political abuse that has come to define Trump’s tenure, he warned that members of Congress should be “keeping every option open to try to get this administration to function like any other administration in the past – Democrat or Republican.”

“Clearly,” the congressman concluded, “one of those remedies is the power of impeachment.”

Pocan now seems prescient, as the constitutional crisis that Trump threatens to create makes the power of impeachment an ever more essential option.

For now, Democrats would be wise to take Pocan’s counsel and keep the impeachment option at the ready. Indeed, one of the best ways to defend the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is for House Democrats to make it clear that their response to the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller would be an absolute and unequivocal demand for the impeachment of Donald Trump.