Reflections of a stormy petrel

For me, personally, the final evidence of the guilt of British criminal Hanratty, of anarchist Nicola Sacco. and of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg - however different the circumstances - have been a personal shock. They are the undeniable proof that people can lie even in the face of death and eternity, that claims of innocence from the scaffold are no more reliable than from any other point. The case of Sacco's fellow-accused Bartolomeo Vanzetti seems even darker: he was probably himself innocent, but he knew that Sacco was guilty as Hell, and he deliberately died with a lie on his lips, for the sake of his imagined revolution. (And to add a further taste of futility to his false sacrifice, the historical fact is that the only party who benefited from his and Sacco's executions were the Communists, who had organized all the protests against their executions, and who were sworn enemies of Vanzetti's Anarchists and would have murdered him a good deal more nastily if he had ever fallen into their hands.) But perhaps the most significant of these is the lie of Hanratty, because that had nothing of the ideological justifications of Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs. Hanratty was not fighting for any "cause", however bad: he was a rapist and murderer with no ulterior motives. And he declared his innocence right to the point of death with a passionate intensity that deceived generations of activists including myself.

A MORON
...i wish the Church would go die in a fire =)

FPB
As a member of said Church, thank you very much for your kind intentions. I am actually quite grateful: you are yet one more demonstration that anti-Catholicism of the most poisonous variety is the group hatred of choice of our time. Vicious little haters like you need to be encouraged to speak their mind freely and without hypocrisy, so that our people realize that being nice to your likes will buy them exactly nothing. Catholics need to wake up to the way people like you really feel about them ("die in a fire" - and please let us have no garbage about the distinction between the Church and the members; the members are the Church), and the more your self-indulgent hatred is vented in public, the sooner we will all realize that there is nothing to expect from you but hatred. Too many of my fellow Church members have not yet awakened to reality, and only a constant barrage of this kind of thing will remove the stars from their eyes when it comes to your kind. Keep it up: they must realize that they have no friends in people like you, and the more you open your mouth (or whichever anatomical part you use for self-expresssion), the more they shall be waking up.

A MORON
I didn't read your rant, but if you want to argue, I don't think the correct place to do it is on someone else's LJ. =)

FPB
Happy now?