Can we avoid using the Orlando Shooting to go after America's racist past?

So the news is all abuzz now, trying desperately to salvage narratives and advance agendas with the Orlando shooting, including reminding us that the news is wrong about this being the worst mass shooting in history.  It turns out that the prize belongs to - America!  Americans killed 250 Indians at Wounded Knee, or so the memes are saying.

For what it's worth, that was not the only massacre of Indians. There were many others.  And it wasn't the only massacre in general.  Indians would massacre other Indians with help from, and in alliance with, Americans and Europeans.  And Americans were massacred by Indians.  One of the biggest body counts of European immigrants being killed by Indians numbered around 350 at Jamestown.  I'm sure you're familiar with that attack since it's no doubt repeated on a daily basis.

So there you have it.  People have been killing each other for centuries.  This isn't something new.  It's worth noting, however, that each period of killing had certain characteristics which we are always happy to study, such as racism, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, Christian zealotry, McCarthyism, and on and on.  What might make this rash of killings so different is a sudden lack of desire to study the direct causes, and try desperately to look to anything other than the obvious.

Seeing the priorities of our new society

The results are in, and it doesn't look good for our post-Christian society.  It turns out that the coverage of the Great Gorilla Catastrophe of 2016 received six times the coverage from media outlets as the beheading of Coptic Christians did a year ago.  That's still not the amount of coverage that Donald Trump or the Ferguson riots received, but it's good to know where the media's priorities are.

Have I mentioned that I believe anyone who gets their understanding of the world from the news media is, well, not intelligent?  In fact, I no longer say we have a news media.  We have a propaganda ministry, and its job is to mold opinion, advance agendas, suppress truth and even launch the occasional assault on someone's reputation or livelihood if they get in the way.

If nothing else, that's why I reacted the way I did to the whole Simcha Fisher kerfuffle last week.  As Catholics, we shouldn't - once again - get swept up in the latest trends and fads, especially when we can easily see the wrong, if not evil, in them.  The growing 'mob mentality', as commenter fedhill called it, that we see developing in our nation is bothersome at best.  The idea that a growing number of Americans think this country and its freedoms aren't big enough for me and those I don't consider awesome is simply putting a down payment on dumb, and the likely eradication of freedom and liberty for future generations. 

The only thing worse than that is when Catholics, who see the glaring problems in these trends, then turn around and indulge in them just the same.  Once in a while it would be nice for us Catholics not to become the subject of future Catholic apologies.  

Why Hate Crimes are for fools and future tyrants

Really.  Remember when the idea of Hate Crimes was open for debate, and a heated one at that?  Remember when the idea was considered a dangerous step by some very sane, thoughtful individuals who saw danger in the idea that the reason you kill somebody based upon subjective labels could indicate whether your crime was worse than killing someone else, all things equal?

This came back to me as I find out, just strolling through the Internet, that a historic Orthodox Christian Church in New York City was burned to the ground on Orthodox Easter Sunday.  You'll forgive me for not mentioning it earlier.  I didn't hear about it.  I didn't see anything about it.  I did notice something on the news about fires in NYC, but when I checked, it looked like commuter fires or something similar.

Anyway, the story I found in the NYT went out of its way to point out that there was no suspicion.  Think on that.  Imagine if a Synagogue was burned to the ground.  Or a Black church.  Or a Mosque.  What do you want to bet that the theory would almost universally be 'hate crime', with overwhelming evidence needed to convince us otherwise.  With no more information than we have, we would have assumed hate crime where in this case there is none.

None, at least, according to the NYT.  Over at the New York Post, it looks like some are noticing that there were three other churches that burned on that same Sunday.  That is prompting some to go radical and think, you know, that there could be a connection.  I'm not saying they were the result of hate crimes or deliberate attacks.  I'm saying that, if this had been certain other locations burned, you can bet the media headlines would start with hate crime and only retreat if overwhelming evidence suggested otherwise.

It reminds me of a string of church fires here in north central Ohio a few years back.  Most were Catholic.  One was the Catholic church in my childhood hometown.  They happened within a few weeks of each other.  Our local news mentioned each one, but with no connection.  The national media didn't cover it at all.  I still don't know anything about the cases, since nobody is bothering with them.

So you see, that is a problem with Hate Crimes.  They are based on subjective labels, and they are subjectively applied based upon the proprieties or fancies - or dare I say, prejudices - of the moment.  They are also a way of starting down that path that says 'these people are, in the end, a little more important than those people over there.'  And that can be seen in the lack of coverage or concern given to what, if it was a story about fires across a string of Mosques or Synagogues or Gay Bars, would warrant enough attention to overtake the media obsession with Donald Trump.

In answer to the Washington Post

In answer to your thoughtful question, it might be because, at this point, the Oregon Ranchers have said they want to resolve the issue peacefully, they haven't killed anyone, cops or innocents or otherwise, and they haven't destroyed property, burned buildings and cars, assaulted innocent bystanders, or killed other people because their lives don't matter.  That's why.

If they start doing these things, we can revisit the terminology and be prepared to up the stakes by labeling them thugs, at least if they begin destroying things or start saying they want the Feds dead.  And if they begin randomly killing innocent people in the name of their cause, why not?  Let's do what we never do with that religion we're not allowed to criticize and actually call them terrorists.

Newsweek embarrasses thinking people

The latest media bigoted assault on Christianity has made quite a stir.  Not because it's the usual 'Christianity is a stupid and evil lie' meme that we get every Easter and Christmas.  But because the propaganda hit piece, by Kurt Eichenwald, is so wonderfully bad.  On so many levels.  I don't have time to unpack the dumb.  It's just the sort of thing post-modern skeptics and secularists seem to love: factually wrong but with lots of hate and anger against improperly understood religions that they hate to begin with.  

The best example (and it was hard to narrow it down), was his treatment of the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Like Bart Erhman knows, every Bible published mentions that the earliest manuscripts don't contain this.  It's no big deal.  Nobody believes the Bible was typed by God on a cloud and dropped into our laps in the King's English.  And that's just informed Protestants.  Catholics and Orthodox by definition wouldn't see it that way.  Apparently that's one of a million things about the subject that Kurt Eichenwald is ignorant of. 

Anyway, Eichenwald says this: "John didn't write it.  Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages.  It does not appear in any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John." 

Did you read that?  Bwa ha ha ha!  Define early manuscript there Kurt old buddy, old pal.  Especially since the story if found in manuscripts as early as the 5th to 6th century.  For that matter, define Middle Ages.  And what of it not being in the other three?  How many passages in one Gospel aren't in the others?  I mean, this is embarrassing, and anyone except for the usual group of atheists and other anti-Christians who leap up to defend it, should run as far from this as possible. 

But enough of me.  Here is an absolutely devastating rebuttal to the errors, falsehoods, stupidity, bigotry, arrogance, hypocrisy, and unintentional hilarity of this latest contribution to that publication that used to be known as credible.