Scott Tucker
And yet another quote: Scott Tucker at Truthdig on (mainstream) journalism as a form of priestcraft for states whose spectacles demand devoted servants--not to mention golden calves, incense, and human sacrifices burnt on sacrificial pyres:
The whole point of the professional journalistic creed is to form a closed circle of gatekeepers. An outer circle of journalists thereby gains "access" to an inner circle of career politicians. Even that political club contains onion-like layers of class consciousness, measured quite precisely by millions and even billions of dollars. When the ruling class wants war, the majority of journalists vote for war. This is one reason why a Viennese Jew, Karl Kraus, once waged his own war against journalists, and took pains to write in the early 20th century: "How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."
Yes. And to my way of thinking, these observations fit together neatly with what the folks I've quoted in my previous two postings today (here and here) say about the necessity of opening the closed circles of power-brokering gatekeepers to all, and about envisaging the world that ought to be as a world in which every single life deserves redemption.
As I said yesterday in commenting on Joseph Bottum's essay about same-sex marriage at Commonweal, no matter how valuable this essay is as an indicator of the shift in thinking of some (heterosexual) Catholics of the political and religious right in the U.S. re: the inclusion of LGBTI people in church and society, it falls grievously short of the mark Commonweal recently set for itself when it wrote, vis-a-vis the discussion of gay lives in the Catholic church,
It is now time to listen to and learn from those the church has long silenced or ignored.
How on earth is it possible to listen to gay and lesbian voices in the dialogues of leading Catholic journals like Commonweal when those voices aren't there? When the people these journals continue to invite to parse the definition of gay human beings are not openly gay people?
When the circle of gatekeepers remains resolutely closed and resolutely at the service of the inner circles of power in church and society that the gatekeepers resolutely serve? We have a long, long way to go in the Catholic tradition towards meaningful catholicity in how our leading institutions treat the voices--and lives--of gay human beings.