Sunday, September 2, 2012

Aberrant, Insane


Writing in his typically forceful and elegant manner, Conrad Black reflects on the savagery of the attacks on Paul Ryan and his religious faith, focusing on those from Maureen Dowd of the NY Times.

"Ryan is a traditional Roman Catholic, but to imply that he is morally on a plane with the tiny minority of Catholic clergy guilty of sex offenses, or that he is indulgent of rape, is so scandalous it must be considered aberrant.

"Indeed, if it were not the case that what is needed is a de-escalation of these wild accusations and smears, I would describe it as insane. It has been a notorious fact for many years that Maureen Dowd was irrationally partisan, and that somewhere in her feminism there was a revulsion against traditional Catholicism that was very searing. Further speculation in such matters would be inappropriate, and anything so heartfelt must be respected, at least in its privacy, if not necessarily in where it ramifies in public-policy advocacy. But for a prominent columnist of the New York Times, a newspaper whose rabid antagonism to the Roman Catholic Church is notorious and caused it at the height of the sex-abuse scandal virtually to offer a free tour of Manhattan capped by dinner at a five-star restaurant to anyone who could remember being looked at raffishly by a member of the Catholic novitiate in Patagonia in the Thirties, to utter such maniacal slurs at a vice-presidential candidate who is a moderate and decent man demonstrates more strikingly than any previous evidence how severely riven philosophically America has become."

(To save time for numerologists, that's a 98 word final sentence).

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/315380/anti-catholicism-left-conrad-black?pg=1

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