The thing about biases is that they sometimes tend to emerge in the unlikeliest of places. Univision's Jorge Ramos is no exception, laying bare his strident anti-Catholicism in his most recent column.
Ramos dropped this nugget into an otherwise innocuous story for Reforma (Mexico City) about how Spain now talks about everything post-Franco, and of president Mariano Rajoy's apparent unwillingness to debate in advance of next Sunday's upcoming election:
Upon entering the church, the first thing parishioners see is a lottery stand (with tickets on sale) for the Christmas grand prize. The conversation continues there. If prayers to heaven aren't met there is always- with a bit of luck and a lottery ticket- a second chance. Church and state in full complicity to deceive the gullible.
According to the Pew Research Center, close to 80% of Hispanics have some sort of religious affiliation, 55% of which are Catholic. With the flick of a single flippant sentence, Jorge Ramos revealed his contempt for the beliefs of vast swaths of the audience for which he purports to speak at Univision. Ramos' hagiographer at the New Yorker summed it up thusly:
Ramos’s problem with authority began, in Mexico, with priests. The Benedictine fathers who taught him at school, he said, were reactionary sadists. “They hit us with shoes. They were pulling us from the hair,” he told me, demonstrating with a twisting temple-area hair grab. He is anticlerical to this day.
Is The Voice Of Hispanic America so damaged by priestly discipline that he cannot resist even the slightst urge to take a swipe at all persons of faith? Seriously, all that was missing was a molestation reference.
It would behoove those among his Univision audience who adhere to a faith to know of a core bias so deep and prevalent that it seeps into coverage of other issues, such as life, marriage, healthcare and family. At a minimum, they should remember that he views them as "gullible" when sitting through his special brand of advocacy journalism.
On the other hand, his constant advocacy of government intervention in every crisis (such as his strident calls for gun control) suggests that Ramos is not actually godless- it's just that he prays to a different god: the god of state. Gullible, indeed.
