The inevitable "The Radicals Made Him Do It" post

I saw a similar article in Beliefnet, but this one in the Times is just too much to pass up. Conservatives may claim the big problem is "liberal bias" in the media (I've got a good post on that coming up), but the real real problem from corpratist media is not simply their corpratist bias, but their bad writing...

The students got radical so we had to clamp down... If Joseph Ratzinger were named Li Peng or Hu Jintao American conservatives would not be cheering. But just change the terms of reference; it's the same thought-patterns.

Other notes:

• "Gingerbready?"
  
• "This was the family of a poor policeman in a Bavarian village, with extremely gifted children," said Professor Obermair. The church was their ticket to social, intellectual, and even cultural advancement." The term resentment comes to mind here. The implication- make of it what you will, but the implication is definitely there that the Ratzinger children socially castrated themselves for social advancement. Their price for "social, intellectual, and even cultural advancment" was not being able to have romantic relationships, to experience sexual union, to have a life partner. Nobody should have to make that trade, and no god should demand it. It is clear from unconciously self-referential writings on sex that Ratzinger's natural discomfort over his life choice plays out as resentment directed against his fellow human beings:
  
  

  In a book-length interview published in 1985 titled "The Ratzinger Report," he used a rigorously argued line of reasoning to support a doctrinal position that reverberates outside the church. He condemned abortion, contraception, homosexual relations, sex without marriage, "radical feminism" and transsexuality. The wrongness of those ideas all arise from the separation of sexuality from motherhood and marriage, he said. That leads to procreation without sexuality and "biological manipulation" of births that "uncouples man from nature," he said. People then become just another product in the world.
  
  "It logically follows from the consequences of a sexuality which is no longer linked to motherhood and to procreation," he said, "that every form of sexuality is equivalent and therefore of equal worth." It is only logical, then, that self-gratification becomes the point of sex. And it follows that all forms of sex - including homosexual - become equal and considered "rights."
  

  
  
  Ratzinger has in his own life separated fatherhood from sexuality and procreation, albeit from the other end. He has uncoupled himself from nature, and this stance is one way to resolve his own cognitive dissonance. No matter how old, unless he's on hormones or what-not, he's still going to be a sexual being.
  
  
  

It might, judging from the snippets here, be fun to have a dinner time conversation with Ratzinger, in particular to inform him that his take on "relativsm" is all wet, except for the fact that this guy's power has real effects in the world, not all of them good.