In Other News

In perhaps the worst red herring maneuver in the history of religious PR, the Catholic Church is publicly wagging its finger at Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi for allegedly engaging in consensual, heterosexual intercourse with a prostitute. The AP reports that the pope has reminded public officials that it is their job to set a good moral example for the people.

And while the Vatican is busy ignoring its own faults, on the home front, Alabama governor Robert Bentley is left to apologize for...well, for telling the truth basically. (That is, after all, the cardinal sin of politics.) Reuters includes the following quote from the governor's incendiary speech delivered this past Monday:

But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have ... and if you're saved and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister...If we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

The governor of course backpedaled in the days that followed, apologizing for expressing this essentially universal Christian conviction in so inappropriate a venue as a church. Shame on him.