02/02/2000
Behind Shrub’s letter
Miss Dare: I wonder how many Catholics other than me caught the hidden insult to the Church inherent in the modernists' sudden rush to defend her: If the Jonesians are "bigots" in calling Catholicism a cult, then Catholics are presumed to be equally bigoted should they call Protestantism "heresy". Yet that is the official stance of the Church, to which all Catholics must adhere. Any ecclesiology less inclusive than Baha'i is now bigotry. Also, if the Internal Revenue Service can deprive BJU of tax exemption for its bar on interracial coupling, which treats all races equally, aren’t they morally required to do the same for Rome, whose recruiting policy for upper-level positions most definitely does not treat both sexes alike? The only apparent reason for treating the "sexism" of Rome less severely than the "racism" of Greenville is the number of votes involved, and their relative swingability. (Hmmm … can a writ of mandamus be used to force the government to an embarrassing but logical conclusion?) In such a mudfight as this, both the religious right (i.e., Catholics) and far left (the Bob Jones gang) ought to borrow an insight from the Mohammedans: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Cheers,
St. Paul
(P.S. I do hope your new venture meets with more success than the first, Miss Dare.)
I have some curious ideas about Bob Jones.
While there is some dissent to the notion that Bush shouldn’t have gone to Bob Jones in the first place, almost everyone seems to agree that the university’s opposition to the Papacy is "bigotry". The unstated (and dangerous) assumption on which this agreement rests is that all religion is "bigotry" unless it conforms to the moral relativists' position that no religion is more true than any other (which itself usually springs from a belief that all religion is false). I’m Catholic but think fundamentalists are entitled to their opinion that the Pope is in league with the devil as long as they don’t try to suppress my way of thinking the way the liberals try to suppress theirs.
The people in the Republican Party and the elite at large that despise the "religious right" do not appreciate what the Civil War, a century of poverty, and the commercialization of culture has done to working class white people in the South. They've never lived in the South or with the poor whites who are still the majority there. The end of state-sanctioned racism (rightly) stripped away what little dignity they possessed and exposed them for the "rednecks" and "white trash" that Jay Leno and the rest of the media repeatedly remind them that they are. Like Russian workers in the post-Soviet era, they turn out of despair to alcoholism and beating their wives, children, and dogs.
Ridiculous though the media evangelists and the fundamentalist churches may seem to the rest of us, they showed to poor whites that they cared by reaching out to them, not just in election years but every day of the week. (N.B. Most blacks are Methodists or Baptists because during the slave era only those denominations condescended to proselytize them.) Go to any southern church and you will hear countless stories of hopelessly dysfunctional families that have returned to a normal, alcohol-free, crime-free way of life after being "born again". And notwithstanding Bob Jones’s dating policies, I have witnessed more genuine fellowship among born-again blacks and whites than between the polarized racial grouplets on our irreligious and politically correct Ivy League campuses. Were it not for Pat Robertson et al, poor white America might be in approximately the same stage of cultural and moral disintegration as poor black America. Given that the federal government seems determined in the name of diversity and cheap labor to create a Spanish-speaking replica of the black ghetto and all its problems, we should at least be grateful that someone is tending to the rest of the country.
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