Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is a longtime Obama-hater, and that hate comes through yet again by omitting the context of a recent remark by President Obama in a speech in Ireland.
Jeffrey writes in a June 20 CNS article:
Likening religious schools to segregation--a racist system that forced blacks to attend different schools and use different facilities than whites in the American South--President Barack Obama told a town hall meeting for youth in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Monday that there should not be Catholic and Protestant schools because such schools cause division.
"Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity--symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others--these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it," said Obama. "If towns remain divided--if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs--if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.
[...]
Obama is now insisting on enforcing an Obamacare regulation that would force Catholic individuals, business owners and institutions to provide health care plans that cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. The Catholic bishops of the United States have unanimously ddeclared this regulation an "unjust and illegal mandate" that violates the constitutionally guaranteed right to free exercise of religion.
But Obamacare has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama's remarks, and Jeffrey refuses to report why Obama would say them.
Michael McGough of the Los Angeles Times describes the context that Jeffrey can't be bothered to tell his readers:
Northern Ireland is not the United States. Even in my childhood, when Catholic kids were encouraged to attend Catholic schools and there was an arguably Protestant ethos in many public schools, Catholics and Protestants weren't as isolated from (or as distrustful of) one another in this country as they continue to be in Northern Ireland.
Today, thanks to Vatican II and the relentless asssimilation of Catholics, it’s common for Catholics to attend public schools (where teachers no longer recite from the Protestant King James Bible). But it is also common for Protestants, Jews and others to attend Catholic schools. And a lot of children, Catholic and non-Catholic, will attend both public and Catholic schools over the course of their education.
Society in Northern Ireland is much more stratified, and the role of religiously defined schools more problematic. You can be perfectly comfortable with the role of Catholic schools in the American context and worry about their contribution to estrangement between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Jeffrey also seems to have forgotten that there's a lengthy history of animus and violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, resulting in the deaths of thousands.
But then, Jeffrey is too busy trying to stoke anti-Obama sentiment among right-wing Catholics to tell his readers the truth.
