Is This True?

In his obituary of William F. Buckley, Slate’s Timothy Noah wrote the following:

“Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley’s twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protege, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn’t willing to sacrifice National Review‘s identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.”

Think about this for a second. When I attacked the National Review for both parading its Catholicism and simultaneously endorsing non-negotiable moral issues, the combox clackers denounced me for falsely imputing a Catholic connection. Remember, torture in an intrinsically evil act. And not only has the National Review, as a corporate entity, embraced torture on consequentialist grounds but its online editor, Kathyrn Jean Lopez, has used opposition to torture as a factor in deciding who is “one of us”. Talk about formal cooperation in evil. And for an outfit with even the slightest whiff of a Catholic connection, this is a major scandal. Sounds like grounds for denying communion to me, if we want to be fully consistent here.