least common denominator

This isn’t the post I thought I was going to write.

I thought I was going to write about Pope Francis’ tone deafness with respect to his January 5th general address and its comments about pets versus children. But when I dug deeper, it turned out that the entire situation was little more than manufactured outrage and upset.

It’s understandable why this might have happened. The media did, after all, do a very good job of putting sound bites into their ledes:

Pope Francis has criticized couples who choose to have pets instead of children as selfish, arguing that their decision to forgo parenthood leads to a loss of “humanity” and is a detriment to civilization. [CNN]

In a move likely to raise the hackles of millions of cats, dogs and their human cohabitees [sic], Pope Francis has suggested that couples who prefer pets to children are selfish. [The Guardian]

Pope Francis said that people who adopt pets instead of children were exhibiting a “form of selfishness” as he presided over his first general audience of the new year. [NBC]

Pope Francis criticized individuals who opt for having pets instead of children, saying that a “denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us.” [USA Today]

Based on these four sentences, it seems clear that the leader of the world’s Catholics was stating that couples who don’t have children are selfish to the point of possibly not even being human. The ledes do vaguely suggest that he may only have been talking about voluntarily childfree couples instead of involuntarily childless couples, but it’s not clear enough to be certain. The only thing that was relatively certain was that the comment was, as The Guardian noted, bound to upset a lot of people.

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