The Capitol Fax blog is the one to check for liberal mainstream reaction to a Democrat’s speech. In its editor’s absence his intern staff who covered Veep Biden’s speech against domestic violence in Peoria pronounced it straight from the shoulder in terms like these—
“Our view: charming, chatty, chivalrous. Visiting VP all of the above.”
In case you wondered what he said: He declared “more must be done to end domestic violence.” Oh.
“The audience was moved”: Capitol Fax.
I guess you hadda be there.
The other day an exorcised female critic highly displeased with my critique of the Cardinal said by criticizing him I… “inflicted wounds on the body of Christ.” That’s a reference to the theological dogma that the Catholic Church is the mystical body of Christ—a dogma I was taught from grade school on…and which I still espouse by the way.
But, my God, I haven’t heard that expression in 73 years.
The first time I heard it was in the 3rd grade at Saint Juliana on the far northwest side. Sister Bonita Ruemellan OSF was encouraging us after daily catechism recital to express some thoughts about Catholicism.
“Just tell the class the first thing you think about our Church,” she invited. She was young and liked to experiment with free-association.
It was 1936. We were all eight years old. We were all stuck for comments. Then Glenn Ramsey raised his hand, was recognized and stood up.
He said, “S’tir!”—that’s the way we deferentially said “Sister!”
“What, Glenn?”
“I live right next to the rectory on Oconto and last night I saw Fr. [name of the pastor] come home late and he fell down several times trying to get up the steps and I think he was drunk.”
And Glenn Ramsey sat down.
Long silence.
Then Sister Bonita said: “That’s inflicting wounds on the body of Christ.”
He stood up again and said, “S’tir! What is? Who is? Fr. [name of the pastor] coming home drunk?”
She replied: “No, you just did.”
The colloquy stopped and we opened our arithmetic books.
But I thought about it all day long.
So at 6 p.m. as I was having supper with my Dad and Mom I brought it up. I asked: Who inflicted wounds on the body of Christ? Our pastor or Glenn Ramsey?
“Glenn Ramsey,” said my mother. “Now eat your spinach.”
My father grumbled: “My God, kid, what kind of stuff do they talk about in that school? We should have sent you to Ebinger.”
New Liberal Dogma: Shaddup!
When I was young, liberals were all for talking. As a young AP apprentice in Minnesota I was ordered to travel with Hubert Humphrey who was running for his second term and he never shut up. He kept saying to me “Why don’t you write that the Republicans don’t want to debate me? They don’t you know. My opponent, Val Bjornson, is just like quicksilver. You can write that. You know how you can’t pin down quicksilver? You try to get it pinned down and it squishes away? That’s what that sonuvabitch does.”
In those days we always prettied up what politicians said and he knew it. But the point was he wanted more expression.
That was then. Now liberalism has taken another tack. Increasingly liberals are worried about people getting the “wrong ideas”—meaning ideas that aren’t theirs. The other day the main editorial in the Sun-Times warned people what television news channel not to watch. It was, of course, Fox. The Sun-Times in all seriousness said editorially that the first thing you should do is watch CNN. Then once you digest CNN’s news flow you can go over to Fox if you choose. But the paper wasn’t exactly crazy about its readers doing that.
That’s the first time in 72 years of newspaper reading that I saw a paper tell its readers where to go to get ideas. Of course CNN is way down in the ratings and Fox is way up which has something to do I think with the urgent way Tom McInerney wrote the editorial. Colonel McCormick wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t be caught dead having his paper mentioning The Chicago Daily Times, The Chicago Daily News or The Chicago Daily Sun. Or the Chicago Daily American or the Sunday Herald-Examiner. McCormick who was called by some of his unkind critics a fascist would never, ever ask readers not to ignore the competition. He just pushed his own brand.
That’s because in those days McCormick’s brand, The Tribune was tops in circulation…so it would be folly, stupid for him to say don’t read the Daily News (which was published by another colonel, a deadly enemy of McCormick’s—Frank Knox).
But like the Sun-Times editorial, these days liberals seem to want to ban divergent thought. Obama lectured the Supreme Court for ruling that corporations can add to the expression pool. He feared, he said, there’d be an overbalance…a flood…of information that would poison the national political jury pool… and he shook his finger at the Court admonishingly.
Since liberals started losing elections…beginning in 1952 when they lost the presidency to Eisenhower…liberals have been saying that the way to get political reform is to cut down on the amount of money going to the parties to express ideas. When I was at Quaker Oats we budgeted hundreds of millions for all types or breakfast cereals—Oatmeal, Puffed Wheat, Puffed Rice, Cap’n Crunch. We even had two cereals warring with each other with cartoon characters trying to get attention. One guy wore a propeller on his helmet, an outer space alien who said to the kids “get your Mom to buy Me! It’sQuisp the delightful cereal from Outer Space!” The opponent would be a guy with a coal miner’s cap (with a flash light on his cap) saying: “No, I tell you! Get your Mom to buy ME—Quake! The cereal from inner earth!”
Not so these days. The trend is against diversity. Liberals are worried about the detrimental effect of conservative talk radio so they are harboring a plan either via the FCC or with Congress, to reinstall the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.” When you have someone like Rush Limbaugh airing conservative views you would have to…absolutely HAVE TO…,force the broadcasting station or network to make time available for a liberal broadcaster or guest—even if he or she’s not popular. The government would force broadcasters to do this.
Then there’s been the move to give tougher penalties to what they call hate speech. You punch a guy in the nose in a bar—that’s assault. You punch another guy in the nose in another bar and if you discover he’s a homosexual, ka-CHING that goes to another category with much, much tougher penalties. Canada has government regulations that can be stretched to penalize a Christian minister from excoriating homosexuality even if he only uses the quotations from the Apostle Paul. That hasn’t come here yet—but it may.
Cracking down on free speech are favorite tactics of the Left. You read here yesterday that the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago wrote to all members of an advisory board of a Catholic group which is not affiliated in any way with the archdiocese… urging them to use their influence to silence me in my personal correspondence. That means everything I may write as a private citizen.
He means what I write here on my own blog where I publish stuff on my own. Ban it? Shut me down? I say: Try it. Hey in 2010 are we reenacting Elijah Lovejoy? Not me. I’m a lover not a martyr.
Did I write attacks on his and my Church on this blog? Nope. I’m in love with the Church. Did I write attacks on…say the Jews? Nope I’m interested in the historical developmental cadence from the Jewish Bible and faith to my own. I criticized not his action,, not his faculties, not his primacy as archbishop…but because I thought he should not have committed Catholicism in so many words, with no qualifiers, to support ObamaCare if the Hyde language were included.
He also said I criticized him and the Pope under the rubric of hate speech. Nope. But I did talk about The Lavender Priesthood. Scroll down this blog and you’ll see it.
By the way, on April 7 the archdiocese will honor Fr. Michael Pfleger for his work for “social justice.” Pfleger has lavished praise on The Nation of Islam’s maximum leader Louis Farrakhan…and had him speak several times at Catholic Mass…Farrakhan, who has called Judaism a “gutter religion.” Pfleger wants handguns confiscated and has no great concern about legal niceties. He shouted at a crowd gathered in front of a legally constituted gun shop last year…calling to the owner “come out like the rat you are or we’ll DRAG YOU OUT!” He also mentioned the phrase “snuff you out.” Even Jesse Jackson got scared at that one.
Pfleger is the guy the archdiocese thinks merits a social justice award.
Encouragement for one brand of talk and silencing the rights of others heedless of the 1st amendment is increasingly the trademark of the Left. The Far Left.
*: Good Friday. “Only when someone values love more highly than life, that is only where someone is ready to put life second to love, for the sake of love, can love be stronger and more than death. If it is to be more than death it must first be more than mere life. Jesus’ total love for men, which leads Him to the cross, is perfected in total stepping-over to the Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this is at the same time total `being held by him.’” –Pope Benedict XVI.
Sir --
ReplyDeleteYou wrote:
“I live right next to the rectory on Oconto and last night I saw Fr. [name of the pastor] come home late and he fell down several times trying to get up the steps and I think he was drunk.”
And Glenn Ramsey sat down.
Long silence.
Then Sister Bonita said: “That’s inflicting wounds on the body of Christ.”
He stood up again and said, “S’tir! What is? Who is? Fr. [name of the pastor] coming home drunk?”
She replied: “No, you just did.”
The colloquy stopped and we opened our arithmetic books.
But I thought about it all day long.
So at 6 p.m. as I was having supper with my Dad and Mom I brought it up. I asked: Who inflicted wounds on the body of Christ? Our pastor or Glenn Ramsey?
“Glenn Ramsey,” said my mother. “Now eat your spinach.”
Might that not be a parable about the clerical sex abuse scandal? It certainly describes the attitude that allowed that grievous wound to fester as long as it did.
Have a blessed Easter.