Steve Benen at Maddow Blog:
It’s amazing what tribalism can do to public perceptions.
Indeed. Case in point: just have a look at what the lock-arms, tribalistic reaction to the recent U.N. report is doing to the perceptions of one centrist Catholic journalist after another these days--to the folks who claim to offer us "balanced" and "objective" analysis of Catholic news, which describes rather than prescribes.
Same old stupidity, same old meanness, same old parochial insularity, same old casual, callous reading out of the Catholic circle of the huge percentage of fellow Catholics who question the teachings of which these centrist arbiters of the Catholic conversation have made a shibboleth.
A great deal of it driven by unacknowledged presuppositions about gender and sexual orientation . . . .
This is why I have said for some time now that, if something has really changed under Pope Francis, I simply can't see it, when these same old, same old voices parse and determine Catholic meaning for me. Because they certainly aren't new in any way.
The wine may be new. But the wineskins are very shopworn and dried out.
Same old stupidity, same old meanness, same old parochial insularity, same old casual, callous reading out of the Catholic circle of the huge percentage of fellow Catholics who question the teachings of which these centrist arbiters of the Catholic conversation have made a shibboleth.
Same old defensive tribalism that does absolutely nothing to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Catholic in the early 21st century . . . . .