Culture Vultures: Vandals in the Churchyard

...Laura has found out since the resident gays on "Frasier" decided to target her TV show, moral traditionalism is now by definition a form of"hate speech": These days, a devotion to the Bible is the love that dare not speak its name...

...I f I sound a little bewildered, it's because I've spent the last couple of months watching George Dubya Bush try to shake off the "anti-Catholic bigot" tag he's been saddled with ever since he spoke at Bob Jones University and was perceived by the media as having failed to distance himself sufficiently from some anti-Catholic sentiments expressed by Bob Jones III or Bob Jones IV or whichever the hell Bob it was in 1978 or 1955 or whenever...

...week out for months on end and decided that maybe the series of religious desecrations merited a short 700 word piece on page B1, which duly ran on March 22...

...But south of the border the last month or two suggests that a kind of hierarchy applies: These days a devotion to the Bible is the love that dare not speak its name...

...clusions in a public statement, a practice he apparently intends to continue...

...Sounds like a "hate crime" to me...

...That's one reason, incidentally, why the most anti-religious society of all-the Soviet Union--has now degenerated into a gangster state...

...As Paul wrote in his Second Epistle to Timothy, "In the last days perilous times shall come...

...Dubya's failure to distance himself from Bob Jones IX was forgotten in the wake of the Pope's failure to distance himself from Pius XII...

...A bit of filler space...

...The stained glass windows are covered with steel mesh, because thugs, in the absence of anything worth stealing, like to smash them--just for a lark...

...All the news that's fit to print" says the Times, but the people who decide what news is fit in the major papers have little or no religious sensibility...

...For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers...

...Unlike Dubya, Mister Maverick was not called on to distance himself from himself...

...Or that, in Quebec, the Church is doing such a great job of oppressing women that the province now has the highest abortion rate in the Western world-- which, if nothing else, suggests that those ski-masked feminists might have more usefully thrown their condoms and contraceptive pills at their own kind...

...It's being stormed by a gang in ski-masks while worshippers are at prayer...

...Menstrual fetishists are a fine symbol of our present-tense culture...

...Tums out the press has in mind one of those Catholic Republican governors who's prochoice...

...The same night, a wooden image of Christ is torn down from the cross and broken into pieces at St...

...Francis of Assisi-St...

...Gregory's Roman Catholic Church...

...On International Women's Day, I happened to be in Montreal, where a feminist collective decided to mark the occasion by sacking the Marie-Reine-du-Monde cathedral, the city's Roman Catholic basilica...

...If the judges then release the total package--as they generally have in previous independent counsel investigations- the time for full evaluation will finally have arrived...

...Attorney General Janet Reno asked Starr to investigate...

...Ray also said--concluding another matter Reno gave Starr later in 1996--that there was "no substantial and credible evidence" that former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum lied to Congress regarding his discussions with Mrs...

...Al Sharpton...

...Of course, Dubya had no inkling what it was that Bob VI or Bob VII was supposed to have said-he's a uniter not a diviner--unlike A1 Gore, Bill Bradley, and Senator-designate Rodham vis-a-vis the Rev...

...On the accelerating anti-Christian hatred in Western society (which is really a form of societal self-hatred), we have been silent and accepting for too long...

...by Terry Eastland Ray of Hope Filegate and the indictments that never came...

...Later that day, browsing through the "Adults Only" classifieds on page C8 and trying to choose between "Ally (massages & services by gorgeous & playful women)" and "Aux Bonnes Mains (new ladies, warm hands)," I happened to notice a short, unsigned report at the foot of the opposite page, underneath a picture of a hockeyplaying robot named for Canada's late viceroy Lord Stanley (of Stanley Cup fame): "Seven charged after attack on cathedral" it said...

...In the Attack of the Tampon Commandos and the massive media shrug which followed, the secular future of the Western world can be glimpsed in all its narcissistic nullity...

...Never mind that all major religions are anti-abortion...

...There's a burning cross outside the cathedral...

...To his credit, Alan Allnutt, the editor of the Gazette, subsequently conceded that his paper had blown the story, though he attempted to cover himself by claiming a kind of even-handed indifference: He reckoned that most of the feminists trashing the cathedral were, as francophone Quebeckers, probably Catholic by origin and that, therefore, he'd have paid just as little attention ira synagogue had been turned over by Jewish feminists...

...After a statue of Saint Pius X (Pontiffin the years before the Great War) was decapitated and smashed at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Canarsie in January, a sign was found amidst the rubble calling John Paul II "Satan who deceives the earth...

...n March Robert W. Ray, the independent counsel who succeeded Kenneth Starr last October, filed with the pertinent court a report on his office's probe of the FBI files matter, also known as "Filegate...

...When John McCain called the religious right the "forces of evil," the press assumed everyone around the country would say, "Sounds reasonable to me...

...This kind of thing is becoming routine...

...The early Apostles wouldn't have been surprised...

...Well, maybe...

...Chesterton said that people who no longer believe in God will believe in anything...

...This first report concems a matter that came to light in 1996: that during the first year of the administration the White House director of security, Craig Livingstone, and his aide, Anthony Marceca, improperly obtained hundreds of FBI background files, including those of officials of previous Republican administrations...

...As for Montreal's hate-crimes law, police spokeswoman Constable Sylvie Latour said it cannot be used against people who "in good faith" attempt "to establish by argument an opinion on a religious subject...

...But underlying all these various stages is the same massive uninterest in religion per se...

...A couple of American tourists are trying to stop them from smashing the tabernacle and the vestry...

...2. Being anti-Catholic isn't news unless you're Republican...

...Francis, it was the second assault on their church in little more than two months: In January, the statues of both Francis and Our Lady of Fatima were decapitated...

...Most of the recent Brooklyn church attacks were buried in the New York Times somewhere round page B6 in the Metro News Briefs...

...We celebrate the time of the month because we're barely capable of remembering anything before that...

...But nonetheless he was still required to distance himself...

...According to the New York Times, Ray will also file a report on '~ elgate" in early summer and then one on Whitewater in late summer...

...It seems Catholics don't mind being offended as long as it's by their own kind, But anyway, after a few weeks of being re-cast as the Rev...

...The court's jurisdictional grant was narrow: Marceca was the only person it named and the charge was to look into whether he had lied to investigators...

...The media, happy to hop on Jesse Jackson's and Bill Glinton's bandwagon and be taken for a ride about an entirely mythical spate of black church burnings a couple of years back, are largely indifferent to the actual, real assaults on churches which occur every day...

...A dozen Catholic churches have been desecrated in Brooklyn in the last six monthsthough, in a belated attempt at ecumenicalism, in the last week of March an Episcopal church was targeted, too...

...By "opinion," she means that the CollectifAutonome Feministe believes that the Catholic Church oppresses women by being anti-abortion...

...But neither Livingstone, whom no one at the White House would admit to actually having hired, nor Marceca, who had a history of fringe political activity, were the sort usually entrusted with White House security matters...

...A form of godliness" is a good way of putting it: You elevate your "pleasures" and their attendant paraphernalia--condoms, abortion clinics--into a new creed of "tolerance" and "diversity" that eventually supplants traditional morality...

...If"Club Strip (Nancy, Marilyn & Caroline + adult toys)" had only taken out a bigger ad, maybe the sacking of a Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of downtown wouldn't have made it into the paper at all...

...It wasn't on page r, or page 2, 3, 4--- I ploughed my way through to the end of the news section and, figuring I must have missed it, worked my way back to the front...

...Insofar as most of us give any thought to the concept of a "secular" society, we assume it means the right of your neighbor to worship at the church of his choice and the right of you and your buddy Chip to bunk offand play a couple of rounds of golf on Sunday morning...

...to repair the damage with Catholics, he'd have to appoint a running mate who appealed to Catholics...

...It is not necessary to be an Anglican or Catholic, Jew or Muslim to weep for a world so spiritually stunted that, instead of marveling at the ageless splendor of these shrines, looks at them as just something else to trash...

...They are not unlocked now...

...Nothing there either...

...You mean someone who's prolife...

...On the matter of AIDS and homophobia, the gay crowd have a good slogan: "Silence = acceptance...

...4- Being anti-Semitic isn't news if you're black...

...Even in a comparatively civilized country, according to the Church of England's insurers, at least twelve of its churches are badly vandalized every day...

...No news is good news, and God news is no news at all...

...O ne typical March weekend in Brooklyn: Vandals smash the face and arms of a marble shrine to Our Lady of Fatima at St...

...Still, to give the Times its due, at least it covered the story in the news section...

...Might the Clintons, who had proven themselves untrustworthy in other contexts and whose White House had compiled an enemies list, have been up to something, well, Nixonian...

...But after you've raised a generation or two in a spiritual vacuum, you begin to realize it doesn't stop there...

...But even he would never have expected to see a cathedral trashed by people who believe in...condoms...

...They're barricaded...

...Until a quarter-century ago, one of the particular pleasures of the English countryside was strolling along a rural footpath and spying a small twelfth-century church rearing up from the fields and copses...

...The Clinto-Jacksonian fictional church burnings (orchestrated by Newt and the Republican Congress, naturally) were about racial hatred, whereas these attacks demonstrate only anti-religious hatred, and who cares about that...

...Bush's "anti-Catholic" stand was believed to have offended enough Catholics to cost him the Michigan primary...

...But hate crimes against religion can proceed with impunity...

...Each report will remain under seal for three months, during which time those named will be able to make comments in an appendix...

...Hold the front page...

...Most anything of value has been removed...

...By contrast, in Montreal, the International Women's Day groups protesting in Phillips Square, from where the tampon commandos launched their assault, are not being required to "distance" themselves from the anti-Catholic bigotry of their more robust sisters...

...But so what...

...Guy Molinari, among others, attacked the poor fellow, who began receiving death threats...

...Clin54 May 2o o o " The American Spectator...

...For parishioners at St...

...By "argument," she means the sanitary napkins and condoms...

...As the Pope recognized, the Church has done bad things...

...The group sprayed anti-religious slogans on the walls, smeared paintings with soiled sanitary napkins, hurled used condoms at terrified worshippers- all to protest the Church's position on abortion...

...You'd have thought from reading the papers that the media were, as the old saying goes, more Catholic than the Pope...

...barked the editor...

...In filing his first report, Ray usefully has provided its conTERRY EASTLAND is publisher of TAS and TAS Online, where a version of this article first appeared...

...On second thoughts, hold page C 9. Unless, of course, Octopussy Live Private Erotic Shows calls in a display ad...

...Now it's true that, if devout Catholics in ski-masks had stormed an abortion clinic and attempted to confiscate, say, the scissors which are used to puncture the baby's skull in so-called "partial birth abortions," the Montreal Gazette would have given the story more play...

...But even nonbelievers have to acknowledge that Western liberal society is built on Judeo-Christian foundations: Try throwing sanitary napkins in Jeddah or Tehran and see where it gets you...

...5. Being black won't help you if you're anti-gay: A black minister in New York put up a billboard quoting Leviticus and his, ah, unhelpful strictures on homosexuality...

...Thus Dubya and his doomed attempts to distance himself from Bob Jones V. 3- Being anti-Catholic is only news until someone starts being anti-Semitic: The minute the Pope issued what was misleadingly presented as his "apology," the press decided it was insufficiently contrite in respect to Jews...

...Page C 9. Back of the classified section...

...Well, no...

...They were unlocked, so that anybody who happened upon them and wished to seek God's grace within would be able to do so...

...It had all been "an honest bureaucratic snafu...

...Don't jump to conclusions...

...Naturally I picked up the Montreal Gazette to see what the local paper had to say on the subject...

...The White House said the files (which can contain disparaging material) were never used and had not been retrieved for partisan political reasons...

...But eventually some Times editor noticed that Metro had been running the same church vandalization News Brief week in, MARK Sxm~,~ is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...But everyone knew that the question bounced to Starr was whether there had been a politically motivated conspiracy involving senior White House officials and/or the Clintons to violate the Privacy Act...

...Thus, some assessment is possible now...

...x. Being anti-Protestant is okay...

...He was surprised to discover, via Caller ID, that several of these death threats came from City Hall...

...Heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God...

...Ray concludes: "There was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved" in seeking the files...

...Blaise Church...

...Ian Dubya Paisley, Bush was soon dropping notes to cardinals regretting that at Bob U he'd failed to take the 52 May 2o o o " The American Spectator opportunity to distance himself from whichever Bob itwas had said whatever it was he'd said...

...Indeed, as poor old Dr...

...n ' The Gazette s offices are a mere sto e s throw--or, in this case, a sanitary napkin's throw--from the church, but passersby weren't in any danger of being crushed in the stampede of reporters...

...I started on the "B" section...

...Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof...

...Just because the Pope has to distance himself from His Holiness Plus XII is no reason for Gore, Bradley, and Rodham to distance themselves from His Supreme Majesty the Rev...

...Doubtless the Collectif Autonome Feministe would wish to distinguish itself from grunting, moronic Brits and Brooklyn gangs, but, on the barThe American Spectator _9 May 2 o o o 53 ren plains of their hearts, in their inability even to comprehend the spiritual impulse, they're exactly the same...