A couple of weeks ago I pounded Mr. Douthat rather heavily, in a short piece titled Et tu, Ross? Aka “Catty Monday”, ridiculing the poor man for sighing over the faded plumage of the Catholic Church in a column he called “Make Catholicism Weird Again”, noting that “recently, all 34 Chilean bishops have offered to resign in response to allegations of long-running and widespread coverups of sexual abuse by priests,” and snickering “is that weird enough for you, Ross?”
Well, last week Ross double-crossed me by writing a singularly cogent column, “#MeToo Comes for the Archbishop”, describing in detail the long-running corruption that was the career of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Let Ross tell it:
“The first time I ever heard the truth about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., finally exposed as a sexual predator years into his retirement, I thought I was listening to a paranoiac rant.
“It was the early 2000s, I was attending some earnest panel on religion, and I was accosted by a type who haunts such events — gaunt, intense, with a litany of esoteric grievances. He was a traditionalist Catholic, a figure from the church’s fringes, and he had a lot to say, as I tried to disentangle from him, about corruption in the Catholic clergy. The scandals in Boston had broken, so some of what he said was familiar, but he kept going, into a rant about Cardinal McCarrick: Did you know he makes seminarians sleep with him? Invites them to his beach house, gets in bed with them …
“At this I gave him the brushoff that you give the monomaniacal and slipped out. That was before I realized that if you wanted the truth about corruption in the Catholic Church, you had to listen to the extreme-seeming types, traditionalists and radicals, because they were the only ones sufficiently alienated from the institution to actually dig into its rot. (This lesson has application well beyond Catholicism.)”
As Ross makes clear, he was part of the coverup. The proclivities of “Uncle Ted”, as he liked his boys to call him, were well known among Catholics in the know, just as showfolk knew about the Roman hands and Russian fingers of “Uncle Harvey”. It was just something you didn’t talk about—though one has to remark that for “good Catholics” to wink at gay lechery in the priesthood is just a wee bit different than showfolk winking at lechery—straight or gay—in show business. But it’s nice to see Mr. Douthat honestly recognizing that the “glorious” Catholic Church of ages past that he so frequently sighs over contained some ghastly secrets, secrets that only this “modern age” has the guts to acknowledge.
But wait, there’s more
You bet there is. Ole Ross is on a rampage. In his most recent column, “The Red Hen and the Resistance”, Ross pretty much applauds the Red Hen for giving White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders the boot:
“I don’t particularly want to live in a world of conservative and liberal restaurants, where I’m frog-marched out of my local artisanal coffee shop because the owner hates my column and doesn’t want his baristas to sully their hands by serving me. But I do want to live in a country where people feel comfortable exercising moral convictions in the way they run their businesses — whether they’re Christian bakers and florists or the Red Hen’s progressive proprietor. I definitely can think of a few public figures I’d like to “86” if they entered my (sadly hypothetical) brewpub. And if I were making a list of Trump administration officials who deserve to feel the sting of public censure, the office of the press secretary is actually a reasonable place to start.”
Ross goes on to warn his new-found brothers on the left not to get carried away on this shunning, which I think is good advice, though I would not have refused service to Sarah or anyone else. Everything about Sarah seems designed to put Acela folks’ teeth on edge, which makes me feel sorry for her, a little, because I’m dumpy too.1 Let the gal eat her goddamn fettuccini Alfredo in peace.
Afterwords
Actually, I’m pretty much to the “right” (sort of) of Ross on this one. I don’t think you should be able to kick people out of your restaurant because you don’t like their politics, or even if you despise them, even though my “position” comes from my belief that it is the “rule of law” (aka “the state”) that creates private property and therefore the law of the state defines the rights an owner can exercise. Since our law very correctly forbids discrimination, with every few exceptions, I believe Sarah should have been served, and I certainly would have served her, even though, like a lot of people, I can’t stand her.2
- If Sarah looked like Hope Hicks or Ivanka, she’d get much better press. ↩︎
- Like a lot of people, I think the whole cake-baking controversy could have been avoided, but since it wasn’t, I think the cake should have been baked. Suppose the cake-baker was regarded as the most fashionable pastry man in town. All the cool people had their wedding cakes baked by him. Shouldn’t people be allowed to have everything “perfect” on their day of days? Suppose it wasn’t a gay couple, but a black man and a white woman, and the cake guy clung to the “old school” brand of evangelical Christianity practiced at Bob Jones University, which held, until 2006, that god commanded the separation of the races? (In the old days, interracial dating was forbidden at Bob Jones U. Ronald Reagan still wanted to give the school non-profit status for federal tax purposes. Eventually, the school paid a million dollars in back taxes rather than discard its discriminatory “theology”. In 2000, George Bush made a campaign visit at the school. The resulting “outrage” eventually forced the school to formally renounce its racist policies.) ↩︎
