Reply #15: First the facts, then the analysis. Cultivate a habit of getting details right. Why not?

[struggle4progress]

It's a political website. We want to organize to win certain political fights. For correct analysis of a political situation, one needs an accurate overview of the situation. Slogans aren't useful unless they really represent realities. Inaccurate preconceptions can be quite harmful. If you want to learn from history, get the historical picture accurately in mind; if you want to learn from the present, get contemporary events accurately in mind

The world isn't constructed from our simplistic abstractions -- our simplistic abstractions are a merely a way for us to try to construct usable charts of the world: merely plastering legends There be dragons here across Terra Incognita helps no one avoid real shoals and sandbars; one wants abstractions built with careful and double-checked scrutiny

The Catholic Church is a huge institution. It obviously has its share of unsavory characters and various people whose views I rather strongly dislike. It also happens to contain a number of people I admire. The first anti-homophobic sermon I ever heard preached I heard in a Catholic church, and it had a mixed reception. Latin American Liberation Theology seems to me an enduring tradition for reading and understanding certain features of the Old and New Testaments: it is a Catholic product, born of long dialogue between Latin American Christians and their Marxist neighbors

Of course, if you look at the Church, you will find a highly imperfect institution with many unattractive blemishes and flaws. Over two millennia, it has had its share of ugly actors and unpleasant power struggles. It does not seem to me unique in that regard. One can learn from the history, but only if one can get the history right. It is, nevertheless, tiresome to see the constant knee-jerk misrepresentations: Catholics called paedophiles, the Pope called a Nazi, and so on. The "more popular than Jesus" Lennon comment has been much remembered in the last few days on DU -- but the controversy was almost entirely driven by rightwing Southern fundamentalists in the US, and the Vatican made it clear forty odd years ago that it considered the matter closed: this has not prevented media from repeatedly trying to portray the issue as a Beatles-Vatican spat, but few seem interested in getting the details right, and amid the inaccurate anti-Vatican snark of the last few days here, I suspect I am the only one who bothered to dig up the Roman Observer article to see what it actually said. There's a vicious rightwing Italian Catholic website, well-known for promoting anti-semitism and homophobia, that several times this year has attempted to add credibility to their views by "quoting" various churchmen: in the most recent case, many at DU jumped on the bandwagon, though the man "quoted" says he never even spoke to the web-publisher's reporters and disavows the views they attribute to him

What's wrong with making a careful effort to get the facts right? All of us can, with hardly any effort, find people we dislike and say unpleasant things about them: it's cheap and easy. If we want to build lasting coalitions for social justice, something more than that is required