A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
HOW LOW WE HAVE FALLEN
Has it really come to this? One of the two major political parties has now anointed, as its leading candidate for its nomination for the Presidency of the United States, a failed politician obsessed by a troubled teenage boy's sexual fixations on homosexuality, bestiality, and masturbation. Surely this will be the end of the Republican Party as an even notionally serious national political organization. The nation's Catholic Bishops, a shameful cabal of child molesters and enablers of child molestation, have found in Rick Santorum the perfect embodiment of their ideal altar boy. How I long for the good old days, when evangelical Protestants had the good sense to view the Catholic Church as a sinister agent bent upon destroying America's hard-won independence from foreign entanglements. Perhaps I have lived too long.
The first several paragraphs of Spinoza's preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise remain timely and relevant. Though, the distinction between his Pantheistic alternative to fear-mongering theocracies, and contemporary 'Atheism', is unclear to me.
ReplyDeleteYou know I admire you and usually I think you're well-reasoned and balanced even though you're on the left and I'm on the right. But I think your comments on Catholics/Catholicism are off the mark. The idea that US Catholics (or bishops, or the church itself)is a sinister agent bent on destroying our independence (presumably by allegiance to the Pope above the state) is not just old fashioned, it's the kind of smudgy rubric one might have found in the Ellis Island era in certain neighborhoods in the vicinity of Brooklyn (so to speak), where all one had to do was mention the word "papist" and let the listener fill in the related slurs. Unbecoming. Xenophobic even, like saying Jews were the Jesus-killers. It sounds true only if you don't really know. I don't think you can trot that dog in the show. Similarly, "child abuse enablers" is half a truth; you can't make that failure in organizational policy sound like a policy without stretching the actuality to the breaking point. The church does not exist for the purpose of defiling young boys. Clerical members of the church abused their positions of trust and were treated with kid gloves, that is true enough. But I don't see how you can condemn the whole church for that sort of thing on one hand (though they do bear responsibility for coverups) without also acknowledging that the perpetrators of abuse were homosexual predators, meantime failing to criticize the homosexual ethics involved. If you can paint a whole religious group with that brush, you can also paint the whole sexual orientation with that brush, and I don't think you want to go there.
ReplyDeleteHaving said all that, I do agree that Santorum is more than a little weird, but not exactly in the same sense you think so. Having sexual hangups and angst and screwy fascinations is fairly common depending on how one was raised and the peculiarities and random fortunes of one's early sexual awareness, but that's not weird in itself (unless you want to bash altar boys -- again, don't go there). What's weird is wearing it on your sleeve, yammering about it on camera and running for president, all at the same time.
Santorum's draw is the anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage constituency. Somebody's going to ask him about Iranian nukes or something deep about the economy one day, and he'll go the way of the Perry/Cain/Bachman train. Exit stage right. Unless he shuts up about his attitude to zippers and the Pill, and starts focusing on It's the Economy, Stupid, he's headed for the trap door.
sarcasm, high arka?
ReplyDeleteI've upgraded my browser to stop losing so many comments. For now, here's what I posted earlier today:
ReplyDeletehttp://higharka.blogspot.com/2012/02/stealing-from-sarandon-part-1.html