5 Feet of Fury

Dear Catholic Insight: you’re welcome

Yesterday Catholic Insight — a magazine that faces its own HRC appeal, one I’ve covered here many times — posted a story about Christian Horizons and their HRC case.

I didn’t post it here. Why?

Because the story included a sentence that began:

The OHRC’s Jewish adjudicator, Michael Gottheil…

I immediately rebuked Catholic Insight via email:

You know I’m on your side, right?

But I have to ask: Why the gratuitous adjective “Jewish” in this important article?

Surely you realize how many Jewish Canadians, like Ezra Levant, have taken up your cause, and that of Christian Horizons.

Surely the HRC’s overweening ‘liberal fascism’ — which embraces anti-Christianity in general and anti-Catholicism in particular — is really what is at work there.

I would dearly love to post your announcement that Christian Horizon is appealing that HRC decision, but neither I nor my thousands of readers care about who is Jewish and who isn’t over at the HRC.

Frankly, it would do the cause we all embrace more harm than good for me to expose that strange sentence to a wider audience.

I hope your staff writers will reconsider that unwise choice of words.

I realize this sounds rather hypocritical coming from a supporter of free speech, but I do not wish to censor Catholic Insight. I merely wish to offer a suggestion. It goes without saying that you are free to publish what you will; however, this friend of your cause wishes to point out the possibility that you are inviting greater approbation and unnecessary condemnation.

I hope you will accept this minor rebuke in the spirit with which it is intended.

I see Catholic Insight has changed the wording of their article to describe Gottheil as an “anti-Christian atheist” — but not before a far left blogger picked up on the original “Jewish” wording.

What an embarrassment.

Shame on Catholic Insight for its foolish and wrongheaded choice of words. Your print magazine may be an unread intramural journal, but be advised that the internet is a very different beast. 

If you resent the success of people like Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn in getting pubicity and support for their respective HRC cases, don’t blame the secular mainstream media for ignoring you out of bigotry — and look at your own bigotry as part of the problem.