Pick your picture

William Kilpatrick laments the fact that pictures which don't fit the narrative of "standard narrative about peaceful Muslims seeking a better life" are never shown in the media. Excerpt:

The clinching argument for many was the image of a drowned Syrian child which went viral. There should, of course, be no doubt about what to do if you spot a drowning boy in the water or if a hungry person shows up at the door. But the photo tells us absolutely nothing about what sort of immigration policies governments should adopt. It could be argued that if European immigration policy was less liberal and its welfare allowances less generous, fewer people would risk their lives to get there.

And what about the images we don’t see—images of the European victims of ill-considered immigration programs? Right now I’m looking at a photo of an 87-year-old Dutch man lying in a hospital bed, his face beaten black and blue. He and his 86-year-old wife, both of them Holocaust survivors, were attacked in their apartment by two men of Moroccan descent who threw them on the floor, kicked them repeatedly, and shouted: “Dirty Jews—from now on your property is ours.” The husband and wife, who had been living independently, are now confined to wheelchairs at a rehabilitation center.

Leaders in the Catholic Church have got to wake up to the nature of Islam as not just a religion, but as a totalitarian political system. As W. K. ends his article:

One wonders what it will take to remind the Catholic Church of its own centuries-long struggle with Islam. The modern Church was quick to understand the totalitarian nature of communism. Catholic clergy, academics, and journalists were, on the whole, much more astute about the communist menace than their secular counterparts. Yet they have been painfully slow in awakening to the dangers inherent in Islam. Let’s hope that will soon change.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Muslim Beheads Coptic Christians in New Jersey

More news for the This is your brain on Islam file. At least he shot them before cutting their heads off. Allah is merciful, right?



Just for the sake of any low information types out there, New Jersey is one of the 50 states which make up the country called the United States of America. So Jihad followed these Egyptian Copts to our shores.

Northern Public Radio?

Nice.

Regionalism may be the last remaining prejudice that is “politically correct.” It’s perfectly acceptable to attack someone for being a Southerner. In describing the Senate hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, for example, NPR titled its report “Sotomayor Grilled by Southern-Fried GOP.” The piece goes on to inform readers that “only one of the seven states represented by Republicans [on the Judiciary Committee] is a state that fought for Mr. Lincoln in the Civil War.” Not satisfied to leave their bigotry there, the package goes on to discuss certain senators’ “rich accents” that have “soft and expressive inflections of the South, even as they provided the toughest questioning.”

Teddy Bear Messages

Found this CL piece by Kiera McCaffrey from a little over a year ago. The whole thing is spot-on and useful reading, but the paragraph which caught my eye describes the performance art equivalent to what I've termed the "Kevlar Sentence" which JohnMcG should receive credit for identifying. Viz:

Another group, Healing Alliance (formerly known as Linkup), turned to Jeffrey Anderson to educate them about effective lobbying techniques. Those gathered at the 2003 annual meeting of the victims' support group were instructed by the lawyer-turned-showman that teddy bears are the key to influencing elected officials. He told them that, should an advocate call on a legislator who is not in his office, the advocate only needs to leave one of the stuffed toys with a staffer in order to turn a missed opportunity into a successful appeal: "You tell them it represents the innocence of a child—the innocence that's been stolen—and I guarantee they'll remember you."

So that's what the prosecutor needed to bring to court to nail Michael Jackson. Teddy Bears!

Maybe as the funding, popularity and relevance of these bigoted groups continues to dwindle they could begin the ceremonial nocturnal burning of kerosene-soaked teddy bears in priests' yards so it's guaranteed that Catholics "remember" them.

Austria, blasphemy, Catholicism, gay, orgy, Schoenborn, Vienna

Those are the tags from Rod Dreher's latest bit of Catholic news reporting. Mr. Dreher is known in some circles to be a "religion writer", although I think his official title is Senior Content Provider.

Anyway, in the thread someone called who knew wisely comments: "Those who can't do, do shock value, those who should be shocked don't want to appear prudish." Another commenter, Alicia, ironically states the following:

Good post about "those who can't do, do shock value." I like that. My way of putting it is the artist is stuck in the anal phase - he has the desire to cover everything with his own excrement, and actually thinks other people will be just as fascinated by his excrement as he.

Hey! I like that, too. Well.... I'm sure Alicia's intention is to describe the homosexual artist responsible for the stupid weirdness in the cathedral, but I think her word "artist" can be replaced with "journalist" and the wisdom will still apply. As the old joke says, "If the Foo shits, wear it."

But you know here's some silver lining. I just realized that Rod's Catholicism tag can be used to summarize what he's been reporting on vis-a-vis the Catholic Church. Read those headlines — pretty fair and balanced, huh?

In other Catholic news, Pope Benedict is visiting America for the first time. But that's a whole 2 weeks away.

Update: I did just notice that Rod had put up a post about Pope Benedict's visit, but he didn't tag it with his usual "Catholicism" tag. So to be fair, OK, but is it a little fishy that he doesn't use the tag on the good and neutral news on which he uses the Pope Benedict tag, but reserves it for bad news? After all, he does acknowledge that the Pope indeed is Catholic, using the tired cliché.

"Big Latex Tent" Proposal for the Vatican

In November of last year, Mark Shea commented on blogger David Kuo ("Very Encouraging Editorial") saying that he "seems like the real deal" as a Christian who is "starting to look at putting discipleship to Jesus, rather than power, first." Mark ends by saying he's "going to keep an eye on this Kuo guy".

Well, I know Mark is busy, blogging, working on books, films, etc. So I'm taking up some of the slack in terms of keeping an eye on the "Kuo guy". A month or so ago he wrote the following on his blog:

Yesterday ubermodel Giselle Bundchen spoke out against the Catholic church's condom ban during Rio's Fashion Week. That isn't terribly surprising. I'm with her and we both may be with an increasing number of people inside the Vatican who are questioning the policy - possibly even the Pope. I find it horrifying that condoms that can save lives throughout the world are spiritually banned. [italics mine]

(I removed Kuo's link to the 26-year-old model's home page. A Google image search of her last name will yield a page of near occasions of sin for most red-blooded males and that's with the safe-search option on.)

I'll opt to not pick on the tender age of Ms. Bundchen. St. Catherine of Siena, a model of sanctity, wasn't much older when she famously advised Gregory XI on moving back to the old 'hood.

But in regards to the advisory content of this other model, we should recall what we learned from Sesame Street years ago, i.e., "one of these things is not like the other." This wasn't prudential advice regarding the proper Papal residence, this is a matter of moral doctrine and the church's teaching on human sexuality. Someone who sells her body for big bucks to big business wouldn't be the first person I'd ask to comment on the topic, even though like many models, her mouth seems to be disproportionately big. No doubt she is a big commentator on moral theology among the runway crowd.

But we must go back to Mr. Kuo, who has often been characterized as a Christian conservative involved in politics who is both more Christian and more conservative than many others like, say, the Bush administration for whom he used to work. Last fall he was all over talk radio and 60 minutes expressing sadness that the White House seemed to have jettisoned the whole Faith-based Initiative thingy, which was his specialty, shortly after 9/11. (Does everyone here remember 9/11? I thought you might. Yeah, that 9/11.)

This obviously doesn't stop him from asking the Pope to jettison Catholic teaching in favor of what one might term the Gospel of the Almighty Condom. (Hey, that can be entry number one in the Pauli lexicon!) I'm not sure he doesn't realize how much he is wasting his time or whether the whole thing is his method of climbing aboard the "It's-all-the-Catholic-Churches-fault" bandwagon, and he doesn't expect the Church to change. Assuming he is sincere, sure, the Vatican has said "We'll take a look at the issue," but it's the same Vatican that issued this document highlighting the "condom failure" among other matters both moral and practical. So bloggers and super-models shouldn't hold their breath for a big change on the teaching.

But let's look at this practically. Africa has this horrible AIDS problem, spread by irresponsible multiple-partner sex which is condemned by the Catholic Church, and we're supposed to believe that if the Vatican changes it's teaching that guys will start wrapping it up? I. Don't. Think. So.

"I find it horrifying that condoms that can save lives throughout the world are spiritually banned." I've been out of the blogging loop as of late, so I don't know if Mr. Kuo has been taken to task on this by his Catholic or once-Catholic friends in the blogosphere already. I would place the J-Walker in the camp of conservatives that criticize other conservatives more often than they do liberals. That's OK, but I think because of this, they should undergo the same level of scrutiny when they stray from what is Christian or conservative, or in this case, even what is sensible.

UPDATE: I started writing this post almost a month ago. More recently, Mr. Kuo has demonstrated that he has his own brand of the last acceptable prejudice:

At a time when the Christian church faces extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary peril, it appears the pope has decided to fiddle in matters of minutia.

Why is it necessary to slap protestant denominations across the face? Why is it necessary to belittle their churches and their history and their love for Christ?

This feels like the equivalent of President Bush commuting v. pardoning Scooter Libby....

I wonder; is the "fiddle" comment supposed to evoke images of the Emperor Nero? Unclear. But this is a good clarification of his view of the Catholic Church, if nothing else. The Pope is obviously supposed to supply "bread and circuses" (and condoms) and not mess around with, you know, all this "theology junk" that no one really cares about.

Thinker or stinker?

Maybe Kathleen or Diane will remember Damon "the Thinker" Linker's short lived blog for his Theocons book. I'll never forget my disappointment when I realized that he took it down. The kitchen gets hot, what can I say. And I was so ready to, ummm, obsess-o-stalk him. (spelling?) Well, check out a good exposé of his obscenely bad reasoning here by Lowell Brown. It turns out that the Thinker is branching out and attacking Mormons now, but only the Republican ones, which the Thinker readily admits. Here's a snippet from Lowell B:

So Linker admits that his is a partisan attack, but justifies it because he is on the side of the angels (only figuratively speaking, of course), also known as left-wing Democrats. One problem with his response is that every objection to a Mormon President that he raised in his article, based on the tenets and practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and especially his objection to the Mormon belief that the President of the LDS Church is a prophet, would apply equally to a devout Mormon of the political left. If the Church President could prophesy as arbitrarily as Mr. Linker seems to believe, he could just as easily reveal a prophecy calling for the institution of a socialist welfare state as he could one opposing gay marriage. Or perhaps Mr. Linker's point is that liberal Democratic Mormons don't really in their hearts of hearts believe in all that silly religious stuff, and therefore won't muck up our laws with it. That would certainly be an offensive affront to Senator Reid. Nonetheless, that very possibly is what Mr. Linker thinks, because his response in The New Republic echoes the theme that underlies his career as a political pundit.

Where's Chavez when you need him? He could tell us which sulfurous compound this reasoning smelled like. And how 'bout that black t-shirt? Dude, that's so dark and ominous.... Why don't you lighten it up a little with this one? I love how Brown, who calls himself "the Hedgehog" wraps it up:

Linker is clearly a polemicist more than a thinker, which helps explain his rather embarrassing reasoning. One glaring example: As Ralph notes, Linker's basis for justifying the attack on Romney is that religious conservatives "bring . . . their faith with them into the public square." Excuse me, but like just about every Mormon candidate for public office I have ever known, Mitt Romney never mentions his faith in public; others do that for him, and unceasingly. The irony in Linker's fuzzy thinking is delicious, but it doesn't make his argument any less silly.