11 Jul A plague on all their holier-than-thou houses

Screenshot: coincidental tweets.

Contrarian has fully recovered from the fleeting (and uncharacteristic) sympathy we felt for Prime Minister Harper over the Case of the (Allegedly) Missing Host. We hereby revert to our customary stance: a plague on all their holier-than-thou houses.

Let’s review: A  Catholic vicar general complained that the Prime Minister has committed not just sin but scandal by failing to consume the host during holy communion at Romeo LeBlanc’s funeral. When the press dutifully reported this, PM spokesman Dimitri Soudas (he of the misattributed Ignatieff non-quote) insisted Harper had indeed consumed the host, whereupon more protectors of the faith piled on to condemn the Prime Minister, a non-member of the One True Church, for partaking of the Eucharist in the first place.

Harper, who takes care to conceal his Evangelical Christian beliefs (except when writing memos to Preston Manning recommending US-style religious wedge polities), seemed caught in a double bind: Damned if he didn’t; damned if he did.

So how does he wriggle out of this sanctimonious trap?

With even greater sanctimony, of course, directed at… the media. Reporting this loony-toon debate was “a low moment in journalism,” he said. Oh yeah. A bunch of antediluvian Christianists get into a doctrinal dog fight, and it’s all the media’s fault. In the land of theocrats, the only remedy for excessive sanctimony is even greater sanctimony.