His Eminence Chooses a New Spokeswoman, and National Catholic Reporter Chooses to Censor My Comments about This

For those who may not yet have seen this news: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced yesterday that His Eminence Timothy "Dirty Freddie" Dolan will have a new spokeswoman. David Gibson summarizes the story at National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal.

Her name? Kim Daniels. Her résumé? She was a paid adviser to Sarah Palin during Palin's 2008 presidential campaign, and she has worked for the hard-right Catholic Thomas More Law Center, which is in the thick of the attempt to attack the Obama administration by attacking the healthcare policies of this administration.

As I said yesterday in a comment responding to the NCR story, which NCR has now chosen to delete (after nearly 30 people hit the like button to support it),* if we have been in any doubt that the bishops of the U.S. Catholic church are in total captivity to the GOP and its super-rich handlers, we need remain in doubt no longer. NCR then chose to delete a second comment I made agreeing with a poster "From the Heartland," who had said I had spoken a mouthful with my first comment, and that she/he agreed with me.

Curiously enough, NCR did not choose to delete a comment in response to me by one "Manolo Lefkowitz, Jr.," who logged in yesterday to create an account that he/she then closed after accusing me of being part of a "gay lobby" as I comment at NCR.

I wonder what it says about the National Catholic Reporter that they'd choose to censor my comments in this thread while keeping "Manolo Lefkowitz's" comment. And I wonder whether this Catholic newspaper imagines it's serving the Catholic church in the U.S. well by exercising such censorship.

And, it goes without saying, I wonder about the coincidence of this act of censorship by NCR and my Bilgrimage posting the day before NCR censored me about the downright filthiness of His Eminence's Dirty Freddie parable about his gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

For what it's worth, here's the email I just sent to Pam Cohen and Tom Fox at NCR after I saw that NCR had deleted my comment:

Dear Pam Cohen, 

I'm sending this email to you as NCR's web editor. 

I had recently subscribed to NCR as an expression of support for your paper.  

After you chose to remove my comment yesterday regarding the USCCB choice to hire Ms. Daniels' as a new spokesperson, I'd like to cancel my subscription, please. I hadn't yet sent my payment, and won't send it now, but I'd appreciate it if NCR would let me know what I owe the paper for the several issues I received after I subscribed.  

Thank you for sending that information. 

I find it deeply troubling that you'd choose to censor that comment (which was "liked" by some 30 other commenters) and a subsequent one of mine in the same thread, while permitting a comment by one Manolo Lefkowitz, Jr., to stand in the same thread, when it's clear that this user created a one-time account with Disqus solely to issue a gay slur about me in response to my comment about Ms. Daniels. 

What your choices here say about NCR's real values is downright shocking. 

Thanks for sending me a notice about how much I owe NCR for the issues I've received since I've subscribed.

Let me repeat a point in conclusion: I think it's not at all an accident that NCR has chosen to censor my comments about the new USCCB spokeswoman a day after I responded to His Eminence's "Dirty Freddie" analysis of his LGBT brothers and sisters here on my Bilgrimage blog, and after that commentary has now been read by about 400 360 readers.

* Because the comment was deleted, I don't recall the precise number of likes, and could well be wrong. The figure I seem to recall is 27. The number of like and dislike votes disappears when a comment is deleted.

For a follow-up to this posting, please see here.