It’s Like He Can Read My Very Soul!

In which I reply to a griping email that managed to synthesize into one letter the bizarre mind-reading of countless letters like it that I receive whenever I suggest that Catholics would be better employed getting their teaching on social justice from the Church rather than Glenn Beck or The View.

Now here’s a funny thing:

When I answer people who get all their social teaching from The View (as I do here), the applause from right side of the aisle is deafening (as you can see from the combox after the piece). Indeed, the only complaint I get there is from the guy whose letter I quoted in full. He complained that I was tearing down a “straw man” (which can only mean that his own letter was a straw man, a fact I will happily endorse). For, of course, I didn’t invent the simplistic narrative of Evil Church vs. Brave Progressive Laity. He did. I’m only guilty of straw man argumentation when I make crap up, not when my opponent does.

But the funny thing is: the next day, when I quote a letter from the Glenn Beck side of the aisle which reasons, in part, that I am a failing liberal TV priest who is wrong to make fun of Beck’s Nazi obsessions, and which backs this up by appeals to the Anschluss and caps it all with rebukes of my non-existent enthusiasm for the welfare state, gay marriage, Government Motors, and judicial usurpation… shazam! I am *again* accused of a straw man argument.

Um, I didn’t make the argument. My reader did–like many other readers who imagine they can read my mind and inform me that I am a huge Obama supporter whenever I criticize those who anoint Glenn Beck their preferred teacher on social justice over the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

So it appears that people who regurgitate talking point from the The View and from Glenn Beck have something in common: they both insist that when you quote them saying something dumb it’s your fault for quoting their dumb argument, not their fault for making it. How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity.