Don’t look for sophistication in The Washington Post’s coverage of the Catholic lawsuits against ObamaCare. Religion columnist Lisa Miller began on Saturday: “Mommy and daddy are fighting, and the anguished children don’t know where to turn.”
“A small group of very conservative bishops has hijacked the church, or at least the public voice of the church,” Miller complained. “The bishops are playing the role of the authoritarian father. In case after case, their message to the faithful is ‘Do it because I say so.’” Mommy, naturally, is represented as the people who support Obama or favor ongoing "dialogue" with Obama:
A much larger group of more moderate bishops has stayed mostly silent, fearful that to take a stand against the brethren would be to lay bare intramural fissures. They play the role of the silent and frustrated mother.
How does Miller know this? Did she undertake a poll of the Catholic bishops? As Brent Bozell explained in Saturday’s Post, every bishop is on record opposing the HHS mandate forcing the funding of contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures. Miller just presses ahead, assuming the majority is always with her and the other secular liberals who don’t believe in some afterlife where they might have to face some authoritarian minority named God:
Only one brave bishop has so far explained his refusal to sign on with the authoritarian minority. Like a parent who prefers to work on marital disagreements in private, rather than expose the kids to disharmony and force them to choose sides, Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, Calif., told America magazine Tuesday that he wanted the bishops to do more consensus building.
The conservative fathers — whose motto is “Do what I say” — grew ever more enraged at the doubters and ever more punitive. They directed their ire at any and all rule-breakers: pro-choice Catholics who wanted to take Communion; nuns; Girl Scouts; and, finally, the president. The moderate mothers, meanwhile, continue to try to soothe their children into complacence.
But this dynamic is untenable, as any good family therapist will tell you. The real solution is, as Blaire suggests, for mommy and daddy to talk to each other and work it out. Or the kids will find a happier home someplace else.
It's not only silly, but just factually incorrect to take dogmatic liberal "Catholics" who wholeheartedly support abortion -- even for babies unintentionally born alive -- and favor every item of the homosexual revolution, and label them the "moderates" or the "doubters." Miller cannot comprehend that it can seem "authoritarian" to force taxpayers to support Planned Parenthood abortion mills and "authoritarian" to pressure people to shut up instead of speaking out against homosexuality. That's the agenda of the authoritarians at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
Miller just assumes the Catholic "kids" hate to see "Mommy" and "Daddy" fight in the newspapers -- as if that isn't exactly what Miller is all about creating and stoking. She wants the liberals to fight harder, not make peace. Ultimately, she wants liberal Catholics to either fight or walk away:
In the middle, of course, are the kids, who love their parents and want them to get along — and hate, no matter where they stand on issues of sexual morality and religious liberty — to see their relatives in the headlines day after day. Some, like Hilary Mantel, the British author of “Wolf Hall” and, more lately, “Bring Up the Bodies,” simply leave the family and refuse to come back. “Nowadays,” she told the Telegraph, “the church is not an institution for respectable people.”
That is exactly the bed in which Lisa Miller lies. She wouldn't imagine quoting someone saying "the mosque is not an institution for respectable people." The Washington Post probably wouldn't even let that sentence see the printing press. Only one religion in America -- the Christian one -- is marred by "authoritarians."
