Pope John Paul II.
Ummm . . . Did I miss something?
Luckily Michael Cook at Tech Central Station comes to the rescue against some really stupid people.
But there is something absurdly medieval about making the Pope a scapegoat, as if the clouds would break and the sun shine if we thrust enough pins through a JP2 voodoo doll. Pinning such blame for the tragedy of African AIDS on one man is one of those ideas that is, in the words of George Orwell, "so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them."
Two doubtful ideas run through all these criticisms. The first is basically this: African Catholics are so devout that if they have sex outside of marriage, dally with prostitutes or take a third wife, they will
piously refrain from using condoms because the Great White Father told them not to. Ms. Toynbee darkly invokes the Vatican's deeper power... its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees."
But she can't have it both ways: these benighted dark-skinned Catholics can't be both too goody-two-shoes to use condoms and too wicked to
resist temptation. Journalist Brendan O'Neill -- who describes himself as an ex-Catholic who has jettisoned Catholic teaching on sexual morality -- sums up this patronising argument in the on-line journal Spiked: "The only reason you could believe the fantastically simplistic idea
that Vatican edict = AIDS in Africa is if you consider Africans to be little more than automatons... who do as they are told" (8).
I'm on a little vacation and interview trip to South Bend, and then the GS Summer Vacation in New York, so posting will continue to be sparse over the next few weeks.
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