Everyone on DK knows the acronym IOKIYAR. Of course, any group possesses this meta-hypocrisy to an extent, not just anti-choice terrorists, gun nuts, Tea Party thugs & racists, but yes, even progressives, liberals, or environmentalists (although generally, I think that our side is better at recognizing double standards that way).
This SNLC, however, doesn't look into this issue with respect to standard DK fodder, but rather standard 3CM fodder, namely the current Opera Theatre of Saint Louis production of Dialogues of the Carmelites, a 1956 opera by Francis Poulenc. The story is very loosely based on an actual group of Carmelite nuns in Compiegne, France, whose order was dissolved in the wake of the French Revolution. Later, during the Reign of Terror, 16 of those nuns were arrested on highly trumped-up charges of illegal assembly and disloyalty to the state, and publicly guillotined on July 17, 1794.
Even without any historical context, that act is disgusting. One scholar on these nuns, William Bush, likewise has that attitude. However, it turns out that his POV is extremely biased by the relevant variation of IOKIYAR. More below the flip…..
Bush (born 1929; not sure if he's still around) has written about the Compiegne nuns extensively, in various articles and also a book, To Quell the Terror (where I want any of you who are reading this and have Amazon accounts to do me a favor on the Amazon listing, to be explained at the end). From the little I’ve found about Bush, he’s quite devoutly religious, though I’m not sure that he is specifically Catholic. That aside, in one of Bush's articles about these nuns, this is the IOKIYAR-like passage that I mean:
"Whatever might be the sins of the monarchy or the failings of certain religious orders, both were venerable institutions, publicly committed before God and man to the maintenance of Christian ideals. However much a king might flaunt Christian teaching, and however severe he might be toward a zealous prelate who would dare correct him, he recognized that in the end he would be judged by Jesus Christ."
Citation: William Bush, "The Historical Parisian Martyrdom: July 17, 1794". Renascence, 48(1), pp. 61-82 (July 1995)
You can see the various layers of IOKIYAR-ness there, with more than a tinge of religious fanaticism. The whole article is like that, as are the passages in his book that I've seen.
Basically, at the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, Bush is clearly saying that as long as you claim to be acting in the name of God and "Christian ideals", then you can pretty much do anything you want, however "un-Christian" those acts turn out to be. We’ve seen that attitude much too often with “Christians” in this country, or in Africa, the Lord’s Resistance Army. The same attitude is all too prevalent with Muslim extremists as well, using again an example from Africa, Boko Haram. It's the same problem with any group of religious fanatics who claim to act with respect to their own abstract worlds, inflicting tremendous harm on the real world (and the only world we've got).
So now I get to the small favor that I'm now about to ask of anyone who actually reads this SNLC, with respect to the Amazon review of Bush's book. Most of the reviews (much too many) are favorable to the book. But rather than focus on those, what I want you to do is to find the two reviews by Cheryl Mason and Ronald T. Shuman. You’ll notice that they’re <50% in terms of "helpful" votes. This is clearly a sign that those reviews got troll-rated. So my request is that you vote "Yes" on the helpfulness of those two reviews, to boost their stats. (If you want to up-rate the "A Customer" review as a bonus, please feel free.)
This is, of course, a pretty futile gesture, given the millions of reviews on Amazon, and the relatively modest audience for this book (392.207 rating on Amazon at this time). (Why else would 3CM go on about this in Loser’s Club?) But this is something that bugs me, and at least this is my attempt to right the balance, a tiny bit. Make of that what you will.
BTW, if you want to get a sense of the finale of the opera:
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week……