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Because Mormonism is in the news again, due to a Rick Perry supporter calling it a "cult," I thought it was high time to re-run the following column.
If I were a Hobbit, right about now I would be wondering just how the heck I wound up at the center of this Washington intraparty political fight, personally. What (I would ponder in my metaphorical Hobbit hole) had I done to any of these folks to deserve being dragged into this fracas?
Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, lived in the fifth century A.D., and he came to Ireland as a proselytizer for Christianity. That is about the sum total of the known, verifiable facts about Patrick. The rest is myth. Since such mythologizing began only a few hundred years after his death (which happened on March 17, by the way), these myths of Patrick are much more widely known than the thin shreds of his real history (which are limited to two surviving letters written by Patrick in Latin). Besides, it's much more fun to sit around telling these tales over a pint of Guinness than to dig up actual facts. Even if the tales are pure blarney.
[Program Note: I know I just did one of these "re-run" columns last Thursday, and that it is probably way too soon to do another. Sometimes, I re-run columns because I have a dentist's appointment or have to get the car fixed or whatnot, but in both recent cases I am re-running the original column because I think the point made needs making once again. In other words, that the original column is relevant to a contemporary discussion. This week, Republican Representative Pete King is holding hearings in the House of Representatives on Islam and American Muslims. King has, in the past, not only made some rather disparaging comments about Muslims, but has also been on record supporting a terrorist group (the I.R.A.), so he brings a (shall we say) unique perspective to the table. But while we'll have to wait until Thursday to see just what gets said in these hearings, I thought it was pertinent to remind everyone that congressional hearings on religion have indeed happened before in this country. Granted, the situation is not exactly the same, but I feel the following is still instructive. I wrote this column right after Mitt Romney gave a speech on the campaign trail about his religion, for context.]
While technically true ("job growth" is not the same thing as the unemployment rate), but that last sentence could also have been written as: "the unemployment rate fell at the fastest rate in over fifty years -- since 1958, to be exact." Both are true, and yet they tell very different stories -- "a grim nine percent" versus "fell at the fastest rate in over fifty years."
Phelps knows how to manipulate all of these categories, as he's been at his hatemongering for quite a while now, which has involved previous legal disputes. He has his own church, for instance, which cloaks (as far as he's concerned) everything he says as "religious speech." To back this up, he also knows that "political speech" is protected speech as well. Phelps himself used to be a lawyer (he has been disbarred) who took on civil rights cases, so he knows the legal landscape.
I'm going to (mostly) resist the urge to take advantage of this column's volume number in order to write a really gross column. Numerically, and inventory-wise, a "gross" is (of course) one dozen dozen. Twelve squared.
The media, quite obviously, has lost any capacity it once may have had for self-examination, to say nothing of its sense of irony. Every so often, this is proven beyond doubt by a single story. This, sadly, is one of those times.
There's a mini-tizzy in the media world today after a new poll was released which stated that eighteen percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim. "Golly gee! How could they think that?" is the overwhelming tone of most of this media tizziness. Only one article I've seen (so far), though, correctly points the finger where it belongs: at the media themselves.
President Barack Obama, in a White House Ramadan address last Friday, expressed his thoughts on the "Ground Zero mosque" debate, and in doing so not only got it exactly right, but also managed to change the debate in a considerable way which few have noticed yet. Because in his comments Friday (and in his off-the-cuff comment the next day), the president refocused the debate from the notion of "should be allowed" to the question of "should." In doing so, Obama elevated the level of the debate for both him and the project's detractors.