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Responding to Steinfels
My sources, I should say, were usually first-hand interviews with the people involved, and copies of official documents. I'd have loved to read his version of the "other side" in the Salvation Army case -- the fact that the court ruled against the employees is a function of the loophole in the 1956 civil rights law for religious groups, and Bush's use of an executive order to extend the right to discriminate to government-funded faith-based outfits. It had nothing to do with an alternative rendering of the facts of the case. As for the bit about crisis pregnancy centers, all one has to do is look at the recent Waxman report on CPCs for confirmation of my reporting on them: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1080
Something else I learned recently shed some light on where Steinfels is coming from. I was looking up a reference about Bob Jones University and Catholicism for another piece, and I came across an old Steinfels column arguing that Bob Jones's anti-Catholicism is nothing compared to the anti-Catholicism on the left:
"Yes, anti-Catholic animus rooted in the theological polemics of the 16th-century Reformation still exists in the United States. But the anti-Catholic animus rooted in the political polemics of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the cultural polemics of 19th-century American nativism have long since taken over all the traditional themes: The church is an authoritarian monolith; its doctrines are hopelessly premodern; its rites are colorful but mindless; its sexual standards are unnatural, repressive and hypocritical; its congregations are anti-Semitic and racist; its priests are harsh and predatory; its grip on the minds of believers is numbing.
These themes still ring in some fundamentalist pulpits. But they are far more apt to be interjected into the more adult sitcoms and late-night comedy, and to be reflected in films, editorials, art, fiction and memoirs considered enlightened and liberating."
If one believes that it's anti-Catholic to argue that the Vatican's sexual standards are "unnatural, repressive and hypocritical," then clearly Christian nationalist social policies wouldn't appear very threatening at all.
Responding to Steinfels | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden)
Responding to Steinfels | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden)
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