Yesterday, while listening to the BBC news the story about the Supreme Court abortion decision striking down the Texas attempt to ban abortions, the news reader put it into terms of "religious belief verses liberty". That was during a straight news report, not commentary. The BBC then went on to talk about allegedly religious people who yell at women who go into clinics, taking their license plate numbers so they can identify them. But then, considering how they had chosen to frame the issue, they talked about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered by an anti-abortion fanatic as he ushered at his Reformed Lutheran church. Ok, among other things that sequence of reporting should have informed whoever wrote the copy that the "religion vs. liberty" framing was contradicted within their very reporting and so there was something rather wrong with that use of the issues involved. And I do think that the use of the issue by people at the BBC is important to consider because so much of current allegedly liberal culture is formed by such uses of issues to push agendas, most of them devolving, eventually, into hostility to religion.
By chance, looking for another audio-drama to post this weekend, I listened to the radio play "Stevie" by Hugh Whitmore, also originally produced at the BBC. I'd seen the movie made of it when it first came out, not especially because I was much interested in the poetry of Stevie Smith but, of course, because it featured the great Glenda Jackson in a chance to see her not play some cleaned up version of Queen Elizabeth I. I had remembered the anti-Christian diatribe contained in the film which is also contained in the radio-play full of absurd pathologized characterization of Christianity. So many literary works, especially those from Britain, seem to contain some kind of similar obligatory anti-Christian or anti-Religious or, more typically, anti-Catholic screed. I guess it fills in for what used to be casual racism or anti-semitism in earlier periods. Apparently Stevie Smith felt the need to include some of it in her literary output, which makes Whitmore's inclusion of it somewhat more understandable. But it certainly shouldn't stand as a meritorious feature of her thought anymore than if it had been an anti-Jewish rant. Increasingly, I think that the actual nature of Christianity being what it is, that anti-Jewish ranting has to be considered an attack on Christianity and, in that the central figure of Christianity was a Jew whose teachings are absolutely saturated with Jewish law and prophesy that you can't consider an attack on Christianity without addressing that fact. There would be worse things than for Christians to conclude that an attack on Judaism was an attack on Jesus and Christianity.
The casual anti-religiosity of such British institutions as the BBC, its upper-middlebrow popular culture is really just an extension of its past casual anti-semetic and anti-Catholic traditions. Why those shouldn't be seen as being as wrong and stupid as any other form of bigotry is something I intend to keep addressing. And I will continue to go into the motives of those who both practice them and those who don't have a problem with it.
The movie "Spotlight" got a lot of play as did the really admirable journalism of the Boston Globe Spotlight team of investigative reporters. Though I long suspected that the real reason that story has gotten the enormous coverage it has was due to the opportunity it gave people to attack Catholicism and the Catholic Church, indiscriminately targeting the totally innocent no less than those entirely guilty of the crimes and the cover up and, worst of all, those instances when people in the hierarchy allowed sex criminals to continue to victimize people. That issue is one which was certainly deserving of being exposed, as are those in it who are guilty. But you have to wonder how it got legs that so many, even far bigger stories don't. I think it is clear that it was the opportunity to attack religion that gave it the push to send it into orbit.
This past week the Boston Globe Spotlight team has been publishing an even bigger scandal with far more victims damaged and dead and a far more widespread pattern of official negligence and abuse. Only, in this case, it is state governments, the psychiatric industry and various other, secular institutions and institutions and professions that have victimized individuals and destroyed lives and families. And its something that has been happening in just about every state, with every town and huge numbers of families being harmed to a huge cost in pain and in money. Have you heard it mentioned even once?
I am planning on going over this Boston Globe investigation as I get the chance to digest the coverage, it is a huge amount of information to go through, absorb and do justice to. I don't expect that it's going to get much mention in the media, I suspect this scandal won't get the legs that other one was given.
Hate Update: Stupy, if you were to try to list all of the things that never occurred to you before there wouldn't be enough room in the visible universe for the paper it would take. Not to mention the time it would take to deal with your propensity to lie about things would take longer than the total accumulated past. You've bored me past the point of caring.
The new scandal involves "us," not people who are "not us." So who cares?
ReplyDeleteEven though it involves government and people we are supposed to trust and people we rely on to protect the vulnerable and not exploit them or subject them to further harm, and even though it involves government we actually pay for, v. an international church to which we may have no connection at all (you pretty much had to attend a Catholic church to be abused by a priest).
Besides, it involves "crazy people," and we don't like to acknowledge such people have any humanity at all. In fact, the scandal of the Catholic church was denying people (children) their humanity. When government does it, we applaud ("immigrants," "terrorists," "predators," etc.).
So, yeah, one has legs; the other barely crawls.