Entry 7:

Dear Erroll,

You might not be aware of something we in the know call "The Fray." You haven't lived till you've checked that out. That's the place where thoughtful, intelligent readers with a sincere desire for idea exchange get drowned out by a moron pack the size of the Reagan deficit. You have to tiptoe through the morass of self-important brain feces the creators of which clearly believe to be genius (see especially the one purporting to "out" me as a hypocrite for writing for National Review and the all too predictable what-about-black-slave-owners/my-family-didn't-get-here-til-after-the-Civil-War time-wasters), but there are always a few entries that make this all worthwhile. I think you'll particularly like the one who read your entry launching the reparations discussion to mean that you're a racist honky. Scroll down to the very bottom, if you want to both see what reasonable people are thinking and feel like you dodged a genetic bullet.

On to religion, the hottest topic of the new millennium (think that's official: I saw it on a priest's collar). Today, the Vatican issued a dictum declaring that individuals can attain full salvation from earthly sin only through the spiritual grace of the Catholic Church and that other faiths--including Protestant Christian ones--have defects that place their followers in a "gravely deficient situation" in seeking salvation. Ooooooh! You're gonna burn in hell, you devil Baptist! Jesus ain't enuf--you gotta sniff incense and kneel on those hard wooden thingies. The goal, we're told, is to combat the "so-called theology of religious pluralism," which suggests that Catholics are on a par in God's eyes with, say, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus.

I wonder if these guys know about the guy here in D.C. who, rain, shine, or need to pee, is outside the Vatican Embassy. He holds up one of two or three signs, all of which says things like "The Catholic Church is a pedophile factory." I'm guessing he believes himself, or someone he loves, to have been sexually abused by a priest. Wonder if he'd stop if he knew that the pedophile factory was his only hope of salvation and that the billions of other people who believe differently will be joining him in hell?

Yours in damnation,
Deb