Here we go again. I make the observation that "watchdog" organizations in general and the PRA in particular tend not to monitor the activities of one particular "repressive, sexist, homophobic organization" organization, namely the Catholic Church, with the same degree of vigilance they apply to "pariah" far right organizations. Your response: go to the PRA website, and I was going to, as I have done on the numerous previous occasions when you have instructed me to do so (with little payoff, I might add) but in this case, its not even necessary because later on you say:
>
> PRA doesn't need to issue a report on the Catholic Right since an excellent
> organizing book already exists:
>
> Steve Askin, A New Rite: Conservative Catholic Organizations and Their
> Allies, (Washington, D.C.: Catholics for Free Choice, 1994).
>
> as well as the excellent academic work:
>
> Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan, Conservative and Traditionalist
> Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism, (Oxford: Oxford University
> Press, 1997).
>
In other words, there's nothing on the site to be had. So why did you send me there?
Incidentally, when I referred to you and your pals, you assumed I meant the PRA but I was in fact referring to "researchers (like yourself) who track the far right". Abe Foxman and Morris Dees, whatever you think of their work, go over a lot of the same ground, for some of the same (good) and some different (devious-in the case of Foxman) reasons. Its also worth pointing out that the fact that there is other work out there hasn't prevented the PRA from issuing reports in the past.
In any case at least Nathan provides an explanation for this double standard for which you (unwittingly it seems) provide direct evidence in your post. Here's the explanation:
(begin)
Because for all its faults, the Catholic Church in the US has been an active extremely loud opponent of anti-immigrant, anti-welfare and anti-affirmative action legislation and initiatives. The Catholic Archbishops and Cardinals out in California were some of the earliest opponents of Prop 187 and 209, coming out against them often long before most politicians and many other "progressive" organizations that often hedged their positions early on.
Opes Dei promotes quite conservative politics in many areas, especially sexual, but they don't promote active hate like a large number of evangelical Protestant groups, the extreme being groups like "God Hates Fags" but only slightly less hatefilled groups.
There is a lot to criticize about the Catholic Church, but to compare them to the far right hate groups strikes me as the kind of hateful anti-Catholicism that varies little in character to the antisemetism, homophobia and racism of those far right groups.
(end)
While I have some sympathy for Nathan's position (a fact he could have recognized before attacking me had he bothered to read some of my previous postings) I have some fundamental disagreements with him and my sense is you do too. At least, however, he has the intellectual honesty to own up to the double standard and address the the question of why it exists.
Look, I know this is gettting really tiresome for us both, and we both have better things to do with our time. The reason I'm bothering to pursue this is that you seem to assume that since I disagree with you on the interpretation of certain facts, I must be guilty of sloppiness, laziness, dishonesty, not to mention the assortment of charges levelled against me by your odious friend Ken. All of my responses to you have been first to defend myself against your charges-namely, to demonstrate that there are reasonable grounds for the positions I am taking, though maybe not enough to satisfy you, and second, to get you to recognize that reasonable people can disagree on certain, but not by any means all, of the tacet assumptions which underlie the work you are doing and that refocussing some of it might be strategically a wise move. Finally, I sense a degree of intellectual snobbery on your part that since I don't publish in peer reviewed journals (not ones that you know about, anyway) my opinions on these matters can simply be dismissed "like a bug on your sleeve" by sending me on a of series wild goose chases on which I am expected to extract your opinions from hordes of documents almost none of which have anything to do with what we are discussing. All you need to do is tell me what you think and then cite your evidence, or tell me where to find it.
To close this out, let me just see whether I can summarize my position (really my intuition) and then we can move on with our lives. I don't think its either ethically defensible or tactically useful to draw a distinction between "respectable" reactionary organizations e.g. the DLC, the mainstream Catholic Church, the Council on Foreign Relations, Yale University advocating wholesale repression, racism, social and economic violence and "pariah" organizations and figures such as Buchanan, the militias and the John Birch Society, who engage in retail versions of the same basic enterprise.
Best, John