A second panblogic¹ theme today is the refusal by CBS, among others, to air an advertisement by the United Church of Christ because it is purportedly in conflict with the intention of some people to pass a Constitutional amendment banning people of the same sex from having and enjoying the benefits of partnership agreements.

Aside: Why is it whenever politicians want to limit somebody’s rights, they claim they are protecting children and/or families? Unless politicians have found another way of doing it, every human being was at some point a child, and every human being is the member of a family. That’s the way it works.

I was drawn specifically to the thinking of John McKay at archy, probably because we are both old enough to remember when CBS was worth watching.

CBS was for years the number one network for broadcast journalism with people like: Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevaried, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, Daniel Schorr, and Walter Cronkite. Most of the news features that you see today were first created on CBS, and some of those represent the best of American television. They have sold out and that fall certainly qualifies as a tragedy based on the heights they once occupied.

[1] Pan-blog-ic (pan bloj ik) adjective – prevalent throughout the blogging community. [I coined the word in the “Words” entry just below.]

Merriam-Webster has a list up of the “Top Ten Words of the Year” and since blog sits on the top of the list, blogtopia [^tm skippy, another marauding marsupial] has exploded with comments. The patron of Friday Cat Blogging found it via Talk Left, the Beeb has an article [Oxford dictionary wonks added the word last year], Steve Gilliard uses it to tee off on heir presumptive to Tom Browkaw, Brian Williams, and so a topic spreads like a panblogic virus.

I have a personal fondness for number ten: defenestration, throwing something [usually a person] out a window. This was a favorite manner of dealing with people who disagreed with your religious views during the Reformation. The forces of the Catholic Queen Mother of France, Catherine de Medici, used defenestration to eliminate approximately 13,000 Huguenots on August 24th, 1572, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

Actually I find the practice a bit troubling. When you’re pitching Protestants out of the fourth floor windows, how can you be sure there aren’t nuns walking by on the street below? Would you called it a miracle if a Protestant’s life was spared from imminent termination by the intervention of the body of a passing Priest whose robes cushioned the descent to the cobblestones. If the Priest died and the Protestant didn’t, would those who ejected the Protestant receive praise for their intent or penance for the result? Troubling questions indeed.

It is similar to the problem of Witch discovery. The concept had merit: good Christians had souls, souls must have weight, ergo Christians with souls must weigh more than Witches who had no souls [having sold them to Satan]. It was well known that heavy objects sank in water, while light objected floated. This leads to the water test: if a person sinks, they have a soul; if they don’t sink, they must be a Witch without a soul. Some scientific method there, but a rather glaring philosophical problem: no one survives the test.

They could, of course, be relying on the counsel of Arnaud-Amaury, Papal legate to the Catholic forces at the siege of Bézier, who had the task of finding approximately 200 heretics in a town of between 10,000 and 20,000 Catholics. When the town fell on 22 July 1209, he supposedly said: “Kill them all! G-d will recognize His own!” [actually being abbé de Cîteaux, and French, he probably said something like “Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens!”]

Edit to correct who Brian Williams replaced. Thanks, Michael.