Blogworthies V

Because The Blog from the Core simply can't cover everything.

Noteworthy entries @ The Curt Jester, Right Wing News, JunkYardBlog, Sed Contra, extreme Catholic, Discriminations, Lex Communis, GetReligion, Dyspeptic Mutterings, Tim Blair, Hoystory.com, and Off the Record.

Our Lady of the Perpetually Okay Church @ The Curt Jester:

Hi I am Father/Mother Feelgood of the Our Lady of the Perpetually Okay Church parish and I would like to invite you to our exciting and relevant faith community. We are a Roman Catholic parish, but don't worry about that old fuddy-duddy in Rome; he doesn't run this parish. We are welcoming community to those who have been hurt or forced to abide by rules in other churches. The Catechism here is our consciences and that is what we follow. Now unlike Protestant churches who don't follow Rome we kind of like some of the exterior practices of the Roman Catholic church, though our understanding of these practices and sacraments is slightly different.

Our church does not have a separation between the sanctuary and the congregation. Our church is one large sanctuary so everybody can gather around each other and support each other in our collective okayness.

Here is an example of our teaching....

9/11 Family Members With Axes To Grind @ Right Wing News:

As a general rule of thumb, you should start to get VERY suspicious when the mainstream media runs "anecdotal stories". I say that because you can find a handful of people who believe JUST ABOUT ANYTHING. That means it's very easy to decide what sort of story you want write, get a few juicy quotes, and then imply that the people you spoke to represent a majority.

If you want to see a perfect example of how this is done, just look at the "Bush is exploiting 9/11 stories" that the media is playing right now. 9/11 was not only the defining event of the last 4 years, it was one of defining events of the last hundred years. It has been talked about, analyzed, studied, & debated every single day since it happened and it has had a profound effect on America. Yet, Bush runs an ad with a very minimal amount of footage in it from 9/11 & we hear hysterical cries of "exploitation, exploitation"!

But you see, we're hearing that story because that is the story the media wants to tell you. They could have just as easily done anecdotal stories that said "family members of 9/11 victims like Bush ads" or "family members of 9/11 victims have no strong opinion about Bush ads," but that doesn't fit their agenda. ...

The Corrosive Effects of the Gay Left's Coup @ JunkYardBlog:

I've taken some heat for describing the actions of San Francicso Mayor Gavin Newsom and others forcing gay marriage on the public against its will and against the law as a "coup." I stand by the description; in fact, I seem to have understated the true scope of the courts' role in undermining the normal, traditional understanding of the family via same-sex rulings over the past few years. In short, the coup has been underway for nearly a decade, and is succeeding largely by staying under the public's radar. Mayor Newsom may have done us all a favor by unwittingly exposing the radical left's court strategy to the light of day.

Some will argue that allowing gay marriage will not harm their own marriage, or that of any straight man-woman marriage, and in a very narrow sense they do have a point: If two men marry each other, it has no effect on my own marriage at all. But we aren't really talking about just the mere fact of two men marrying each other. Sanctioning that marriage and a redefinition of marriage in general will affect the legal system, which will in turn affect every institution that comes into contact with the institution of marriage in any way. Divorce and custody law will have to adjust to the new reality. The welfare state, adoption systems, the juvenile justice system, and all religious institutions that provide charitable services or employ any number of people or opine in any way about any aspect of gay issues or marriage issues — all of these will either adjust on their own or, more likely, will be forced to adjust by court decisions.

I may sound to some like I'm paranoid when I worry what gay marriage will do to the church. Even some Christians have criticized me for making too much of gay marriage's threat to the church. But take a look at this case, and see if you can follow the logical thread it lays out....

Laws, Schmaws, Who Needs Em? @ Sed Contra (quotation blockquoted here is italicized in original; quoted ellipses in original):

Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post On Monday, took the media to task for the way it lets its bias creep into its coverage.

But San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders says Newsom's "lawlessness" is "just unbelievable.... Most people in the newsroom, particularly in the Bay Area, believe in gay marriage and aren't overly worried about how it becomes legal." And while Saunders personally supports same-sex marriage, she says, "so many people in the media act like this is a brave, noble act on the part of Gavin Newsom when it is really a political grab."

Radio talk show host Laura Ingraham says Newsom "is being treated as a modern-day Rosa Parks. He's a nice guy and a very eloquent public speaker, but he's also not following the law. When Judge Roy Moore wasn't following the law, people were trashing him. He was just ridiculed in the press.... If you have a politically correct view and violate the law, you're a hero."

And it's not just the media. Thank God N.Y. Attorney General Elliott Spitzer today actually put his duty to the law as Attorney General over his own personal feelings. Spitzer said he believes in same sex marriage but, wonder of wonders, understood that in this society we believe in the rule of law and not in the rule of this or that public official who might have this or that interpretation of law. He stated clearly that same sex marriage in the state of New York under the laws on the books currently are illegal....

The Ordination of homosexual men @ extreme Catholic:

I don't believe that homosexual men should be ordained. I believe that the record we have the harm caused by some homosexual men is too great. It isn't a matter of a few bad apples: the priesthood has evolved to be seen in the culture as an occupation for gay men as much as hairdresser and ballet dancer.

I am not appealing to stereotypes but to common sense, that if the priesthood overrepresents the number of homosexual men in the general population by a factor of 2 or 10, it harms the Church.

The Church needs to uphold all the virtures associated with human sexuality: virginity, chastity, celibacy, fidelity — all according to each person's state in life. I don't desire marriage and the priesthood to be caught in the crossfire of a cultural war over homosexuality — just be faithful to the Gospel....

Rites And Rights @ Discriminations:

Several days ago reader Fred Ray (He Who Reads Everything) sent several links to some all too familiar (if no less depressing for that) sites where liberal academics attempt to discover how many different ways there are to say, as a contributor to an October 2003 conference at Stanford on “Colorblind Racism?” put it, that the principle of colorblind non-discrimination “conveniently masks color-coded privileges.”

Entirely typical was Stanford law professor Michelle Alexander’s announcement that

I am against colorblindness. I am against even the goal of colorblindness. It saddens me that the best we can hope for is a society that is blind and indifferent to our tremendous diversity. I am concerned that the continued pursuit of the colorblind ideal will yield damaging consequences for civil rights law, and will make our society less willing to care about people of different races.

What struck me in reading the papers from the Stanford conference and several others that Fred sent is how far (downhill, in my view) liberalism and the left have come from what they used to represent. For most of their history they based their demands for civil rights, for equality, on the Enlightenment view that all of us deserve equal rights because fundamentally we are all alike. Now the claim is based on our fundamental differences....

What Part of Freedom of Conscience don't you understand? @ Lex Communis (quotation blockquoted here is italicized in original):

You know that nonsense about "separation of Church and State? Forget it. We have an elitist element of society in California hijacking democracy to enforce gay marriages on a dissenting public. Then, the California Supreme Court orders Catholics Charities to offer birth control. At least one Justice saw a problem with the ruling:

Justice Janice Rogers Brown was the lone dissenting judge. Brown wrote that the Legislature's definition of a "religious employer" is too limiting if it excludes faith-based nonprofit groups like Catholic Charities.

"Here we are dealing with an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission," Brown wrote. "The government is not accidentally or incidentally interfering with religious practice; it is doing so willfully by making a judgment about what is or is not a religion."

I support Catholic Charities because I assume that it represents my faith tradition and I feel that my charity should be directed in some measure to groups that can "fly the flag," so to speak. I reckon I'm not the only person with such sentiments. By differentiating itself in this way, Catholic Charities can tap resources that other groups can't tap. But, apparently, I should have been giving my charitable dollars to Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club or whatever group is recognized as morally unobjectionable by the Court....

A foolproof template for primatial correspondence @ GetReligion:

Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal had great fun last week in exposing the boilerplate style in two letters by Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Many paragraphs that first appeared in a letter Griswold wrote to his fellow primates of the Anglican Communion (Aug. 19, 2003) found a new life in his letter to Alexey II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dec. 19, 2003).

It took a blogger to notice this, and so far mainstream coverage amounts to chirping crickets.

In a spirit of servanthood, GetReligion offers the following template to the presiding bishop, which should assure a sufficient pluriformity of dialogical voices. Each relevant paragraph includes three equally true and heartfelt choices:

1. For evangelicals and those Anglican primates with minds formed by evangelical missionaries.
2. For progressives.
3. For career-minded moderates....

The Film. @ Dyspeptic Mutterings:

Until this morning, I wasn't able to put a finger on my emotions upon leaving the screening. It was an odd sensation that was familiar, but I couldn't categorize it.

Until today.

All of the sudden, I remembered that about three years ago, I was driving home from work. I was on the concrete slalom run known as Interstate 696 (Fun Fact: The middle 6 is upside down!) in northern metro Detroit. About two hundred yards ahead of me, some idiot in the far left lane decided she really needed to get to the exit on the extreme right hand side of the road.

So she cut across three lanes of traffic in her effort to do so. An S-10 pickup in her path tried desperately to swerve out of her way.

He failed....

It's All Relative @ Tim Blair:

Is 5.6 percent a low figure, or a high one? Depends. If only 5.6 percent of hamburgers are discovered to contain meat, that’s way low. But if 5.6 percent of teachers are using their students as drug mules in elaborate Asian heroin importing schemes, that’s sort of high.

We’re comparing apples and oranges here. Or junkies and burgers. What if we compare similar or identical figures on the same subject, and from the same source?...

Reporting on abortion @ Hoystory.com:

My senior project at Cal Poly SLO was a content analysis of the Los Angeles Times coverage of the abortion issue. My findings confirmed those of Times reporter David Shaw who also did an extensive report on abortion coverage in the major media.

In short, when covering abortion:

• The media is more likely to quote "pro-choice" advocates first, and more often.
• When a story is on the front page, very often the pro-life quotes are far enough down in the story that they are on the jump — which far fewer people read.
• Newspapers (at that time — 1990) were more likely to use the labels "pro-choice" and "abortion opponents." Using the preferred terminology of those they ideologically supported and an accurate, but more neutral term for those they opposed.

That brief review of abortion coverage was prompted by this article in Saturday's Union-Tribune on the federal government's subpoena of medical records of late-term abortions....

A Moment of Candor @ Off the Record:

At the press conference that followed yesterday's release of the John Jay Report on Sexual Abuse, EWTN's Ray Arroyo asked USCCB President Wilton Gregory whether the fact that the crimes were overwhelmingly homosexual in nature had implications for seminary recruitment and screening, etc....

P.S. See also Blogworthies IV and Blogworthies VI.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 03/06/04 02:13:45 PM
Categorized as Blogworthies.