Saturday, February 19, 2005
Flip Flopping through the Conservative Blogosphere
Bill Cork criticizes Joan Chittister and Joe Feuerherd for being angry. Yet he published this headline on 9 Feb: "Lack of anger is a sin." The day before that it was: "Where's the rage, Catholic men?" Bill used to have a reasonable blog and good commentary. Though I didn't always agree with his point of view, I counted him as one of the good guys, willing to give as good as he got. On Ash Wednesday, he decides to pull his comment boxes for Lent, only to change his mind restore them the next day. Other progressive bloggers note he has begun deleting comments, regardless of content. I think I was one of the first to be erased, hammering away for a few days on some peripheral aspect of The Scandal over which we were locking horns.
I'm fine with bloggers running their sites how they see fit, comments or not. The Blue Whales of Blogdom don't include comment boxes. People still come to read what they have to say. We all know that for us small fry, comment boxes jack up our hit counts a good bit over what they'd be if people just came read the same boring ol' essays. I know that in my surfing, I prefer making comments, and it's the rare blog site I visit often that doesn't have boxes.
Nathan seems to have gotten under some rather thin skin with his Index Blogorum Prohibitorum. I'm sure he got some people angry, otherwise he wouldn't have generated the outcry he did.
One commenter on Bill's Joan & Joe thread wrote, "This is just another example of liberals appealing to the bishop's conference when it suits their point." One might say a few folks appeal to anger only when it suits their point. Somebody outside the club gets ticked off, then we're back to the ideal virtue of Quiet Catholic Piety. Anger can be a constructive tool, or it can eat away at a person. A Christian owes it to herself or himself and to others to cultivate ways to move beyond anger and strive for respect, at minimum.
People may be pee-oh'ed at what I write. Fine. Send me some reasonable replies, and we'll discuss things. But I'd be careful about treading too close to the hypocrisy of criticizing anger in others while it is cultivated in one's own heart.
