More bigotry from the New York Times

Nicholas Kristof has written blasphemous and historically inaccurate pieces for his mack Hell’s Bible.  He now turns attention to the situation of a Catholic woman religious who, as a hospital administrator in Arizona, approved the killing of unborn child through direct abortion.  In Hell’s Bible…

Note what is not written.  The word "abortion" isn’t used but once.  The word "child" is not used.  He drags in, absolutely gratuitously, pedophila.

Op-Ed Columnist
Sister Margaret’s Choice
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 26, 2010

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.

But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life. [Let’s turn this around: approved the killing of the helpless and innocent.] Doctors describe her as saintly.

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy. [Let’s make another bigoted statement such as, "At some time or other a Latino – even more than one – has stolen hub caps from a car.  Latinos are all thieves."  Kristof is a bigot.  Look at the way his mind works.] I hope that a public outcry can rectify this travesty.

Sister Margaret was a senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. A 27-year-old mother of four arrived late last year, in her third month of pregnancy. According to local news reports and accounts from the hospital and some of its staff members, the mother suffered from a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension. That created a high probability that the strain of continuing pregnancy would kill her.

“In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy,” [The word for this is "abortion".] the hospital said in a statement. “This decision was made after consultation with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee.” [Anyone left out?]

Sister Margaret was a member of that committee. She declined to discuss the episode with me, but the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmstead, ruled that Sister Margaret was “automatically excommunicated” because she assented to an abortion. [Note that it is not Bp. Olmstead who issued the excommunication.  The bishop gave his opinion that she incurred an automatic excommunication.]

“The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” the bishop’s communication office elaborated in a statement.

Let us just note that the Roman Catholic hierarchy [again the generalization] suspended priests who abused children and in some cases defrocked them but did not normally excommunicate them, so they remained able to take the sacrament. [Kristof used the word "obtuse".  He is perhaps being obtuse now.  Does he know what excommunication is?  I think not.]

Since the excommunication, Sister Margaret has left her post as vice president and is no longer listed as one of the hospital executives on its Web site. The hospital told me that she had resigned “at the bishop’s request” but is still working elsewhere at the hospital.

I heard about Sister Margaret from an acquaintance who is a doctor at the hospital. After what happened to Sister Margaret, he doesn’t dare be named, but he sent an e-mail to his friends lamenting the excommunication of “a saintly nun”:

“She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago,” he said in the e-mail message. “The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated.”  [GOOD!  It should!  But not for the reasons this person is suggesting.]

“True Christians, [!] like Sister Margaret, understand that real life ["real life"] is full of difficult moral decisions [because priests or bishops don’t know this, of course] and pray [now he is an expert on prayer] that they make the right decision in the context of Christ’s teachings. Only a group of [get this] detached, pampered men in gilded robes on a balcony high above the rest of us could deny these dilemmas.” [Bigot.]

[… Let’s cut to the final stupid bit of religious hate speech…]

When a hierarchy of mostly aging men pounce on and excommunicate a revered nun who was merely trying to save a mother’s life, the church seems to me almost as out of touch as it was in the cruel and debauched days of the Borgias in the Renaissance.

This is an exercise in being clever so that readers of the New York Time can congratulate themselves and reassure themselves that they are superior beings.

I’ll keep the combox off for this.