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Monday, June 05, 2006
Open the doors and where're all the people?
Kathrine Kersten, a woman who knows a thing or three about repelling people in droves, turns her gorgon gaze to the decline in membership in the Methodist church suggesting that "Methodists' focus on activism may be clearing out pews." (By the way, had I become a believer it likely would have been within the Methodist church since that is my parents' church and the one I was periodically dragged to as a child.)
What makes her think liberals are driving people away? She lists some admirable (tho not to her) stands the church has taken in the last year on gay marriage, the environment, and the Iraq war. Then she shows how the church rolls have shrunk over the last 30-40 years. It doesn't take a statistician to recognize that a trend of 40 years is not caused by actions in the last 12 months. What does this woman do, just cut a bunch of semi-related lines from sources and haphazardly paste them into an article? KK, the whole reason one compiles facts is to present them in support of an argument. If you don't have facts that prove what you claim you shouldn't write the article.
And then she starts her speculating. "Why the sagging Methodist numbers? Perhaps many folks in the pews don't share their leadership's left-wing political agenda." Perhaps, but she doesn't actually talk to any of them so we don't know. "If rank-and-file church members believe their leaders attend too little to these eternal questions, and focus too much on political advocacy, they may look elsewhere for spiritual nourishment." They might, why don't you fucking ask some of them and find out? Until you do shut the hell up.
How about this KK? "If rank-and-file readers believe columnists attend too little to actual truth and reporting, and focus too much on political advocacy, they may look elsewhere for intellectual nourishment." I think I'll go ask someone. Once I get an answer I'll have done a better days work than you've done in your whole sorry tenure at the Strib. You couldn't get something as weak and unsupported as a typical Kersten column into a high school newspaper, why in the world does the Strib keep paying this woman? The reason she's called Minnesota's Worst Writer™ isn't just ideological, it's because she really truly is a painfully inept and dishonest writer.
