Posted on 05/16/2008 6:51:30 PM PDT by Balt
Either the folks over at Reuters are incredibly stupid or ... actually, I don't think there's another option. First, the headline:
Pope restates gay marriage ban after California vote.
By Philip Pullella
I didn't know the Catholic Church had a "gay marriage ban," did you? I know that "gay marriage" is an oxymoron, given that the Holy Mystery of Matrimony can only be received by a man and a woman; but that's not a ban; it's just reality. The Holy Father couldn't "allow" gay marriage anymore than he could allow the sky to be green and the grass to be purple. He has no authority over the laws of nature. And that's just the headline. What about the story itself?
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, speaking a day after a California court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, firmly restated on Friday the Roman Catholic Church's position that only unions between a man and a woman are moral.
Oh, really? Is that what he said? I don't think so. What he probably said was that only a union between a man and a woman can exist as a true marriage; but whether a marriage is "moral" would depend on the subjective exercise of the marital rights by the two parties in the marriage, in that they would act morally or immorally in a variety of different ways: tenderness vs. abuse, openness to life vs. contraception, kindness vs. cruelty, etc. Then there's that peculiar line, "...speaking a day after a California court ruled..." The presumption, I suppose, is that the Pope made his remark because of the ruling of the court. But how would Mr. Pullella know this without being able to read minds? Is the Holy Father forbidden to speak to the Catholic Faithful about Catholic sacraments unless occasioned by some current event on the mind of the journalist? Oh, but wait! There's more:
Benedict made no mention of the California decision in his speech to family groups from throughout Europe, but stressed the Church's position several times.
Translation: "The Pope may not have mentioned a court ruling that made news here half a world away, but -- gosh darn and damnit -- he should have, because that would have made for an even better story! But, since he didn't, let's pretend he did, because, after all, you all out there are so stupid that, if I make the connection, you'll believe it for sure."
Now, this kind of psudo-journalism is nothing new, and we've explored it numerous times on this blog; but this particular story is a shining example of a brand of cut-and-paste journalism that is the result of laziness on the part of journos who find it much more convenient to look for their stories sitting at their computers rather than pounding the pavement like real journalists used to do -- back in the last century.
Basically, what this story consists of is five -- count 'em, five -- unrelated news items spliced together in alternating stanzas so as to give the impression that they are somehow connected, thus creating the appearance of a new story. It's what a journo does when he needs to get some sort of story out there, but also has a reservation for lunch which he doesn't want to miss; so he does some slicing and dicing, exherting about as much effort as it took for him to tie his shoes that morning.
Allow me to illustrate. Here's the rest of the story, as it was released by Reuters, with the various separate and distinct news items differentiated in different colors (keep in mind that what you're seeing here is exactly what Reuters released -- I have not re-organized any of it):
"The union of love, based on matrimony between a man and a woman, which makes up the family, represents a good for all society that can not be substituted by, confused with, or compared to other types of unions," he said. The pope also spoke of the inalienable rights of the traditional family, "founded on matrimony between a man and a woman, to be the natural cradle of human life".
On Thursday, the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriages in a major victory for gay rights advocates that will allow homosexual couples to marry in the most populous U.S. state.
Last year, Italy's powerful Catholic Church successfully campaigned against a law proposed by the previous centre-left government that would have given more rights to gay and unmarried couples.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is not sinful but homosexual acts are, and is opposed to gays being allowed to adopt children.
The California court found laws limiting marriage to heterosexual couples are at odds with rights guaranteed by the state's constitution.
U.S. President George W. Bush, who is opposed to gay marriage, prayed "for the family" with the pope at the White House last month during the pontiff's visit there.
Last year, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, made headlines with comments that critics said equated homosexuality with incest and pedophilia. After he made the comments -- which Bagnasco said were misunderstood -- graffiti reading "Shame" and "Watch Out Bagnasco" appeared on the door of the cathedral in northern Genoa, where Bagnasco is archbishop. The pope, who backed Bagnasco, will visit Genoa his weekend.
Opponents of gay marriage in the United States vowed to contest the ruling with a state-wide ballot measure for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.
Take the various colors and join them together and you can read five different stories very logically. In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if our low-effort Attakis, Mr. Pullella, didn't simply log into his company's news bite database, typed the words "gay marraige" into the search window, pulled some paragraphs at random from the first five stories that popped up, mixed 'em up, then called it a day.
There is, of course, a more sinister explaination for this weird story, but it's based on the presumption that Mr. Pullella has a brain. But let's try it anyway just for fun. Let's assume he's got gray matter and there's a purpose here (other than filling a 300 word assignment). With regard to religion, Reuters works from the hypothosis that God does not exist, or, if he does, he must be treated as something of which Reuters has no direct experience (which I don't doubt). Stories about God and his "supporters" must be treated "objectively" (meaning from the outside looking in). This means eschewing the vocabulary of religion; since, to use their words would violate journalistic objectivity. So, if we can't use the vocabulary of believers to talk about religious things, we need to use someone else's. And who are the high priests in the journo's universe? Politicians! This is how we come up with odd sounding sentences such as, "The pope, who backed Bagnasco, will visit Genoa his weekend." When was the last time you heard of the Holy Father "backing" a Cardinal Archbishop? It's a political term artificially applied to a clearly non-political relationship.
This use of a political lexicon to describe religious realities is, of course, meant to serve Reuter's agenda of projecting religion as "nothing special," by applying to it the same rules of engagement they apply to everything else, the goal being to "de-mystify" the mysterion and, hopefully, shock religious believers into scrutinizing their own faith the way Reuters would scrutinize a political theory. They, of course, would call it "putting it into context." Theoretically, any context will do, so long as it's a context which is purely secular in nature, since, to do otherwise, would violate "objectivity." The only problem is that the selection of a context -- any context -- is, by nature, an act of bias.
They don't see it that way because, to them, we are the great unwashed; we are incapable of correctly understanding the world around us. That's why it's vitally important that we, the little people, not have direct access to the raw data of the day's events; we might draw the wrong conclusions and end up thinking incorrectly about them, resulting in horrible misunderstandings, such as the notion that there might be a God. This was, in fact, the essence of Dan Rather's comment, back when he got caught making up a story to try and sway an election, when he said that the reason the "blogosphere" was so dangerous was because it has "no filter", and it's facts are "not in context" -- his words, not mine -- meaning, of course, not passed through his filter and not in his context.
What Reuters, Dan Rather and the rest of the drive-by media fail to grasp is that we, the great un-washed, have washed up behind our ears and no longer need their guidance. We can take the raw data and decide for ourselves what context it should be seen in, if any. We can draw our own conclusions, and no longer need the day's events to boiled down to their least common denominator, then re-organzied into convenient bite-sized pieces easy to swallow. But what they really don't understand is that they, themselves, created the blogosphere by failing to recognize that we, the miserable masses, were fed up having our news passed through anyone's filter but our own!
All liberalism can be neatly summed up with the phrase: "You poor, poor thing. Here, me help you." It has no facility to deal with people who neither need nor want it's help.
I thought all Reuters employees were (mental) five-year-olds.
Of course not. There is no reason to "ban" something which is a logical impossibility. There is no such thing as "gay marriage", so one might as well "ban" unicorns.
The Mother Church has better things to do than to chase down the perverted chimeras of the decadent Western Left.
The Church’s opposition to anything the culture favors has always been referred to as a “ban.”
Reporters, in most cases, have no other word in their vocabulary. And anyone without faith is going to presume that the Church’s position would change, if the old men who run it as a racket would only see reason.
Thus, Pope Paul’s restatement of the Church’s teaching on contraception in 1968 was always referred to as “continuing the Church’s ban on contraception,” or “refusing to lift the Church’s ban on birth control.” The Church also refuses to lift its “bans” on marriage for priests, the ordination of women, abortion, and bank robbery.
A “ban,” of course, is often provisional, temporary, arbitrary, or even criminal, such as a ban on free speech, free assembly, publishing of newspapers or books. Habitually calling the Church’s opposition to anything a “ban” automatically calls the legitimacy and permanence of the “ban” into question.
Homosexuals need to keep in mind, however, that the good news of the gospel is not about how God despises same-sex sexual relationships. In fact, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 indicates that certain members of that church had been slaves to such relationships but had been cleansed in Jesus' name. So these former homosexuals had evidently repented and accepted God's grace to straighten their lives out.
John 3:16
Revelation 3:20
OMG!!! The Church banned back robbery!? Don't go anywhere -- I gotta return this bag of cash quick!
That, I believe is the point. One would think (falsely in this case) that the one tool a writer would have would be a vocabulary. The sad part is that he writes in english, the language with the largest vocabulary in history.
This does remind me of the composer John Cage. He has a composition that has some long section of silence. Or watching the singers on American Idol tryouts that can't sing. Or going on a surfing vacation to Colorado. Or gay marriage.
The dinosaur media is so clueless as to expect the Pope to comment on every event/idea that the libs hold sacred.
Don’t worry! I heard from a friend in Rome that the ban will probably be lifted next year. After all, the Pope lifted the ban on the Old Mass.
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