DON VINCENZO writes:

The Washington Post epitomizes what is so utterly reprehensible of many major dailies in their coverage of news events. For example, recently this other “paper of record” held an orgy of sycophantic coverage of the death of former Mayor Marion Barry, “Washington’s Mayor for life.” The fact that this very flawed man, caught on tape smoking crack cocaine, who went to prison for six months, and was a persistent tax evader who should have been in prison once again, is now the focus of The Post’s unbridled adulation, tells you something about this daily. But if The Post’s quotidian reporting is awful, then their reporting of its Style Section is egregious. Case in point: the National Museum of Women in the Arts (how many know that such an entity exists?) exhibit of “Picturing Mary, the Madonna as Woman, Mother and Idea.”

Described as “the most ambitious exhibition mounted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts,” it includes a very impressive collection of more than 60 works, many from very well known painters of religious themes. Organized by Msgr. Timothy Verdon, Director of the Museo dell’Opera of the Duomo (Cathedral) in Florence, the works of Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Botticelli and others are on display here, which is no small achievement. To attempt to balance the male-dominated exhibit, several women artists, especially the work of the 17th century-painter, Orsola Maddelena Caccia, a nun, are also highlighted.

All goes well in this article by Philip Kennicott until the party line begins to enter: in reference to Caravaggio, the reporter writes, “This relatively early work was one of the artist’s first substantial forays into religion imagery, but it is as deliciously homoerotic as any of his profane works.” But lest we forget the feminists: “Powerful feminist thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir, have argued that Mary is one of the church’s most powerful weapons in a war against women’s dignity and empowerment.” Enough.

It is known that The Washington Post is hemorrhaging red ink, as are many other newspapers throughout the country. It is my hope that they receive the Lord’s blessing to continue down that path until they no longer exist.

— Comments —

Buck writes:

How can any of us honestly and consistently express ourselves without bias, or ignore the bias that we see in others? Philip Kennicott is actively homosexual. He can’t stop thinking as a homosexual and he probably can’t stop looking for same-sex interest or stop projecting it onto others. Depending on whatever position he enjoys, he’s probably a feminist or sympathetic to feminist orthodoxy. Kennicott is titilated by the sight of a half-naked “boy’s almost naked backside” and he admits it. He also imagines that the man in the painting is also arroused as in his “deliciously homoerotic” fantasy. The fact that the boy is a literal angel, and that the Holy Mary and the baby Jesus are there, is “daringly marginal to the real drama of the scene.” He circles widely around his desires as best he can, but he can’t escape them. He’s the pervert that he imagines in that scene.