A Pilgrim’s Digression

http://www.philly.com/mld…ly/10299287.htm

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled Reporter quits at WHYY Over Message details what ought to be a “learning moment” for all of us liberals.

If you call a Republican to leave a hate-filled message on his voice-mail, don’t do it from work. And if you do it from work, don’t leave your name and work phone number.

Rachel Buchman, a reporter for an NPR station, WHYY, “quit” her job yesterday after it became public that she left a not-very-nice message in the voice-mail of a Conservative activist. The activist, Chris Carmouche of laptoplobbyist.com, heard the following endearing message when he checked his voice mail one day last week.

Hi, my name is Rachel, and my telephone number is… I wanted to tell you that you’re evil, horrible people. You’re awful people. You represent horrible ideas. God hates you and he wants to kill your children. You should all burn in hell. Bye

Carmouche, in turn, sent out a mass email Monday morning to some 150,000 followers of his website, in order “to put some perspective on the term ‘media bias.’ In many cases, we’re finding it to be too soft of a term to describe the journalistic activism and outright hatred that some of the younger journalists are exhibiting these days.”

I can practically feel the compassion and concern for the public welfare emanating from this man, can’t you?

By yesterday afternoon, Buchman quit her job, with apologies for all whom she has so grievously wounded. By making that phone call, she succumbed to a fit of distemper, she said.

Leaving inflammatory voice mail messages for people who are, however marginally, in the public eye may not be the kind of thing I would do. I certainly would not leave my name and phone number in the message. But did Carmouche really have to get this woman fired? Ethically, this is a question of wether the response was proportionate to the offense. Basing my judgement solely on the information presented in the Inquirer article, I don’t think Carmouche’s response was the right thing to do. Vengefulness is not a Christian value, even though some Christians practice it as if it were among the ten commandments.

We don’t know the whole story. Why would Buchman have called him out of the blue anyway? Something must have incited her. Maybe she saw this video of Carmouche, in which he claims that sodomy is “a filthy, obscene practice that has led to over 500,000 American deaths and has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars.” That certainly is a provocative statement. I wonder if Carmouche counts heterosexuals who have died from (or is it while?) committing sodomy among the 500,000 deaths he cites. How does one die from sodomy, anyway? It must be quite painful. As for the billions of dollars sodomy costs taxpayers every year, I wonder which congressman snuck that little rider into the most recent spending bill? I’ll bet it was Barney Frank, that damned homo: “Uh, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to propose an increase for the next fiscal year in sodomy spending. I’ve visited our nation’s schools, and I find too many of our children are merely engaging in vaginal and oral intercourse. I believe the promotion of sodomy among youths could be a definite corrective to the scourge of teen pregnancy plaguing our country.”

It’s so easy to mock these people.

But when I think about what I would do if in a comparable situation to Carmouche’s, I think I would just have deleted the message and forgot it.

What I find absolutely, head-shakingly grotesque is WHYY’s official reason for Buchman’s resignation. “Rachel has decided to move forward with her career and her life,” the NPR station said. She was going nowhere while working for NPR; now she is moving forward again. So long, it’s been good to know ‘ya.

Chalk up one more small victory for the Compassionate Conservatives. Taking back the media, one journalist at a time.