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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35658 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who go to Mass." Would it be fair to call that a Catholic-free zone? I'm pretty sure that many Catholics don't go to Mass, after all. What if you just banned people for agreing with the Pope? I'm pretty sure many Catholics don't do that either.

Banning pro-life speakers regardless of topic would be closer and, well, that is a thing that has happened, is happening, and will likely continue to happen. The usual suspects cry about it, sure, but unless you're specifically reading a pro-life magazine, it's not actually newsworthy and even most of those don't consider it discrimination against Catholics.

I occasionally gripe at left wingers here that try to make silly hypotheticals about right wing policies with actual real world examples of what the costs and benefits would be; in the interests of consistency I'm now doing the same thing to right wingers making silly hypotheticals about left wing ideas(which, to be clear, I see as much stupider than the right wing policies I have defended in the past by reference to real life).

"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who agree with the Pope on [topic]" would be closer. There are a lot of Zionist non-Jews; similarly, on any given topic, you can find a lot of non-Catholics who agree with the Pope on any given topic (exactly who varies by topic).

Now, you could claim that "the central example of a Zionist is a Jewish Zionist," or that "the central example of someone who agrees with the Pope on [topic] is a Catholic person," but in both cases, I'm not sure that's actually the case. I'm pretty confident that the set of "Zionists in the US" has a large majority of non-Jews (mostly Evangelical Christians in the Republican Party).

???? supporting Israel is the position of the Republican Party, very few members of which are Jewish, as well as the position of many evangelical Christian groups. And note the quote in the latter argument:

These trends in American politics may explain the recent statement by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals than to Jews, who are “disproportionately among our critics.” Criticizing Dermer, Israel’s former consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, added that “our embassy in the United States capital has invested most of its energy in the relationship with conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, and a certain type of Jews only.”

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