Hmmm... Maybe Gays Are the New Jews After All

Okay, so, the other day Rick Santorum made some controversial remarks blaming the priest pedophilia scandal on the general libertine nature of our culture, and thought it no suprise that the locus of the American side of the scandal was in Boston, a capital for liberal thought.

A bit over-the-top, a bit Limbaugh-when-he's-trying-to-fill-time-ish, but whatever. Argue against him and all that if you like.

But how does one get from that statement -- which, admittedly, might be criticized for being somewhat irresponsible and kneejerkedly partisan -- to claiming Santorum is blaming the Jews?

Well, you have to check out the Huffington Post for answers.

Oh, wait, no you don't; I can just post the salient bits here.

Rick Santorum believes that the scandal of child molestation by priests isn't actually the priests' fault, but the culture's. And when he talks about "the culture," it sure sounds like he's blaming the Jews.

In his article for the website Catholic Online, Santorum writes:

"It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

So priests aren't really responsible for their own aberrant behavior; they're victims too.

But look more closely at the environment Santorum is blaming: liberals, the media, and academics. Hmm. Starts to sound like code for something else, doesn't it?

...

So we return to the media and the non-Catholic universities, both chock full of the people ostensibly behind all this moral relativity: Jews. Because I'm sure it's not all those other churchgoing types that Santorum blames for Boston's "sick" culture.

What Santorum is really saying then—using all-too-familiar code words— is that the Catholic Church child molestation scandal is really the Jews' fault.

Uhhhh, okay.

Liberals should keep this sort of irresponsibility in mind the next time they complain about Rove making the quite-defensible statement that liberals' commitment to the war on terror (not the "response" to terror) was tepid and half-hearted at best.

Was Santorum wrong to blame the priest scandal on "the culture"? Well, maybe, a bit; conservatives are pretty keen on blaming the actual perpetrators of crimes rather than "society" or "culture," and the deviation from that basic belief does seem a bit politically convenient.

But to read into that an indictment of the Jews? Give me a break.

There's an awful lot of monkey-see, monkey-do on the left. We say the media is biased to the left; they begin claiming it's biased to the right.

We criticize Durbin for his plainly anti-military rhetoric; they decide that Karl Rove's remarks about liberals not being quite enthusiastic about terror deserves equal condemnation.

And now-- we point out that the "progressive" left is now infected with an awful lot of nasty anti-semitism; they have to respond by finding some Super Secret Double-Plus-Good Encrypted anti-semitic "code words" in Santorum's remarks.

PS, there really aren't too many Jews in Boston. Of course there are plenty, but it's just not the case that Boston has that strong Jewish influence to its city culture that, say, New York so plainly does.

No one ever said they were happy to be in Boston so they could finally get a good bagel with lox. No one.

Thanks to the Mighty Allah, who calls you all to jihad through biting photoshopping.

posted by Ace at 01:43 PM

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