The Minuteman, linking to this post by Emma at Notes on the Atrocities, completely had me going with this Gen. Boykin post. (The only hint of a wink I noticed was the lack of a link, which then drew my attention to the name of the newspaper that supposedly carried the story: Toledo’s journal is the Blade, not the Bugle.)
It’s hard to tell who is being satirized here: Gen. Boykin, or his critics, such as the undersigned, who are prepared to believe that he might have said such things.
Of course, the belief that Hindus are idolators is in fact widespread among the hard-core born-agains — as it would have been among the early Christians or the Hebrew prophets — so it’s not actually impossible that Gen. Boykin believes it, too. The belief that Catholicism isn’t really Christianity, a staple of early sectarian Protestantism, is rarer in this country now than it was a generation ago, but it’s not extinct, as the Bob Jones flaplet during the 2000 campaign reminds us.
(And no, that sort of anti-Catholic bigotry is not at all parallel to the assertion that major elements of the institutional Roman Catholic Church, in the US and elsewhere, and including some senior officials of the Curia, have been engaged in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy to cover up widespread pedophilia and ephebephilia among the clergy. That’s an assertion about an institution — an assertion whose truth or falsity should be judged by evidence — and not an insult to the religious beliefs of the Catholic faithful.)
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