{"id":3644,"date":"2006-03-29T00:06:21","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T00:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/heh-3.html"},"modified":"2006-03-29T00:06:21","modified_gmt":"2006-03-29T00:06:21","slug":"heh-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/heh-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Heh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mollie at Get Religion goes ballistic on that WaPo story on the reax to the female altar serrver ban being lifted in Arlington.<\/a><\/p>\n

And she’s right. I linked the piece without much comment, but I was, like some of you, really stunned that the reporter was trolling blogs for reactions – of sort-of anonymous commenters on a blog – not even the blogger! It struck me as incredibly lazy reporting.<\/p>\n

(Not that this is the first time it’s happened. I can’t remember exactly what the subject was, but last December I found an article in a paper somewhere that had been essentially lifted from one of my blog posts – I was attributed, and there were quotes around, well, my quotes, but I’d never been contacted by the reporter at all. It was odd.)<\/p>\n

But Mollie goes after the entire article, as well, as being unbalanced and, let us say, lacking depth:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Well, I guess if the unbiased diocesan official rebuts a negative claim from a one-named blog commenter then we\u2019ve provided all the balance we need. But we also throw in a patronizing comment about those poor people who are slow to accept change. Because we all know that they\u2019re just fearful sexists who don\u2019t like any progress or equality between the sexes. To drive the point home, the reporters quote a few more parents and female acolytes who praise progress and equality between the sexes in the church.<\/p>\n

Wow and wow. I have absolutely no doubt that it was easy to find any number of parents who were elated that Suzie got to help out at the altar. I would imagine that most everyone I know \u2014 outside of my congregation and larger church body \u2014 would think this was a non-issue. They would say that it\u2019s not even debatable whether churches should let girls serve as acolytes and lay readers. But didn\u2019t Caryle Murphy and Michelle Boorstein have any curiosity why the Arlington diocese made this change or why the altar servers used to be exclusively male? There are serious Roman Catholic arguments for a male-only acolyte corps. They should have been mentioned and treated respectfully.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mollie at Get Religion goes ballistic on that WaPo story on the reax to the female altar serrver ban being lifted in Arlington. And she’s right. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}