News aggravators

Priests' hole, from Historic UK.

I can't believe RedAlert Politics hasn't done the latest SCANDAL about the Muslim Obama adminstration being determined to make all the Christians generally stomp on the Cross and spit on the sacred image of Reverend Gantry I mean Senator Sanctorum I mean.... But credit where credit is due, congratulations to them for resisting it. As for the rest of the rightwing noise machine...

This is the one about how President Obama plans to arrest Catholic priests for breaking the law during the government shutdown by serving Mass to our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, which started apparently on Thursday, with an urgent screech from the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA (yes, they have their own Catholic archbishop, presumably there to make sure none of the MEN AND WOMEN THAT DEFEND OUR FREEDOMS get any help paying for family planning):

With the government shutdown, many GS and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer.  During the shutdown, it is illegal for them to minister on base and they risk being arrested if they attempt to do so. 

This was technically true—it turns out the armed forces have been gradually privatizing the chaplain service, and there's especially a shortage of service-member Catholic chaplains, so a majority of the Catholic chaplains are actually contract workers (kind of like Edward Snowden for the NSA), and as such subject to furlough in case of a government shutdown (or the coming default when the Republican Party attempts to lower our credit limit below the amount we actually owe). So that it really would be illegal for those priests to perform services if they were furloughed. Which they had not been, but it could conceivably happen.

English martyrs, via Fr Ray Blake.

But it wouldn't, and if it did, they wouldn't be arrested, because are you kidding? Even if the president were the crazed atheist Muslim tyrant these people say he was, he wouldn't want everybody to know, and such a move would not have the right "optics". As they say.

That did not, however, stop Beck, and Breitbart, and National Review (never too proud, in the spirit of old Mr. Buckley, to lie in what they imagine is the service of the Church), and Daily Caller and FreeRepublic (both rather late) from trumpeting it all over the web that we were on the verge of going back to the days of Elizabeth I and the faithful fathers being dragged from their duties in chains to certain martyrdom or something like it.

Meanwhile Reuters had the story a couple of hours after the Daily Caller and Freeper stories that virtually all 400,000 furloughed DOD workers would be recalled to work. Which would include the contract chaplains. Have any of them recalled their stories yet? Not a one. And it continues to circulate from loony bin to loony bin across the web, even as we're struggling with our boots here.

Comments from the Daily Caller. As I always want to say, Tucker, does your mother know what kind of people you've been hanging out with?.

While we're on the subject, a comment I left (on the news aggravation site Sulia, to which I have become somewhat addicted, though for some reason it seems unable to keep its promise to put up these posts), on a Townhall story (unexplained title: "Hey, Nancy boys") working (or twerking) the theme of our Republican martyrs constantly being thrown to the lions:

Just amazing. Does "Nancy boys" mean fans of Pelosi? It is very very offensive to fans of Pelosi, gay men, and generally decent people. But it's Sunday morning, so forgiveness is appropriate. The first-century Christian community did indeed rebel against the imperial Roman government and its state religion requiring everyone to participate in pagan rituals and acknowledge the emperor as a god. They didn't resist with armed militias or schemes to bend government to their will by gerrymandering jurisdictions, though: they followed their commandments by turning the other cheek and dying for their beliefs. Unfortunately all too soon, within a couple of centuries, they had become a state religion in their own turn, with the emperor working as an enforcer to police orthodoxy and stomp out heresy. http://en.wikipedia.or...reaching its first really huge climax with Charlemagne's murder of 4500 Arian heretic prisoners in 782. http://en.wikipedia.or... What conservative Christians have been doing in the US since the 1970s is more akin to what the Greek bishops around Constantine were doing at the beginning of the fourth century as they took over (a nice description here: http://query.nytimes.c...)