Spain, Canada and the pope

The power of the capitalist media is truly awesome. So how come many things don’t turn out the way they’re “supposed” to?

Take the issue of same-sex marriage. It is slowly gaining ground in many countries around the world, the result of a struggle for basic equality and democratic rights. More and more people recognize that discrimination based on sexual orientation is cruel, unfair and a throwback to a less enlightened era. The issue is not one of sanctifying the institution of marriage, it is merely of extending equal rights under the law to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

And so, in the space of a few days at the end of June, the legislatures in both Spain and Canada legalized same-sex marriage. In Spain particularly—historically a Catholic country and one where the church campaigned vigorously against the bill—the vote was greeted with elation by the progressive community, gay and straight.

Here’s where the question about the media comes in. Flash back to a few months ago. For days and weeks the giant media corporations that control so much of what we see and hear were focused on the dying of the pope and then the choice of his replacement. We awoke to news of what he had for breakfast. We went to sleep with the whispered sounds of his final words.

Has the death of a cleric ever occupied so much attention in media that pride themselves on being neither parochial nor insular but tuned in to the most important events of the whole world? Obviously, the message was that this was a most extraordinary person, more than the leader of one religion among many, a demigod who helped save the world from unspeakable evil.

Communism, of course. He was the Polish pope who blessed the CIA’s role in bringing Poland into the capitalist camp, so Polish workers could take their place in Europe as highly skilled, low-paid laborers able to produce lots of surplus value for some lucky boss.

But this pope was also a hard-liner on sex—
at least in his public pronouncements. No sex before marriage. No marriage for priests. No women clerics. No birth control or abortion. And—heaven forbid!—no gay/lesbian/bi/trans sex. That would get you to hell on the fast track.

Participating in putting over the great spectacle of the pope’s death were all the usual venal characters who produce television footage and shouting headlines on whatever topics please the mighty corporations that pay their generous salaries.

But did it work? Did it produce a mighty
movement to carry forward this reactionary cleric’s views on social policy? It certainly looked like that was what was happening. On television, the adoring crowds were legion and no one had
a word of criticism.

But now the cameras have moved on and it seems this whole imperialist-orchestrated campaign had little effect. Viz, the vote in Spain and in Canada, where there is also a large Catholic population but one often sympathetic to the underdog because of suffering discrimination themselves.

A final observation: Where does it leave the U.S. in terms of the ruling class’s ambitions to be THE world leaders? Further isolated from all enlightened thinking, whether it be stem cell research or family planning or human evolution or understanding that users of medical marijuana are not criminals.

It is one of those ironies of history—Marx called them contradictions that would be resolved in a burst of forward motion—that the country with the most powerful technological apparatus seems to be at war with the science that made it all possible. Science has shown there is nothing to fear from variations in sexuality. They have existed since the beginning of our species and probably most other species as well.

Fortunately, this seems to be sinking in with
a large part of the population, despite the propaganda barrages by those seeking scapegoats. Can the official institutions in the U.S. afford to remain so far behind the people?