Sincerely,
The Left

Mr. Hitchens disgraced himself at the funeral of Mother Teresa by mouthing unsubstantiated slurs against the Catholic nun while Hindu Indians honored her in the same manner as they had their own modern saintly hero Mohandas Gandhi. The Mother and the Mahatma had both championed the poorest of the poor and dedicated their lives to bringing some dignity to the oppressed in a non-violent fashion. I dare say that it is no accident that there are no atheists who have distinguished themselves in such work and that no atheist will ever be honored as these two religious heroes were.

Mr. Hitchens is a drunken slob lacking in both brains and manners. He is the quintessential “stupid atheist” who fails to see that the only person whose behavior he needs to criticize is his own. We have seen his like come and go before but only as the death tolls mounted. A minimum of 100 million people were eliminated in the name of the Communist World Revolution making the 37 million killed by the Nazis pall by comparison.

What the execrable Mr. Hitchens was doing in the Union Club was much more like a Beer House Putsch by Herr Hitler than a reasoned discourse on the dangers of religion. All monsters start as embryos and end in catastrophe. However, Mr. Hitchens will likely drink himself to death before he can do much harm and his epitaph will be a cautionary tale about alcoholic excess and the psychoses it engenders. And when he lies sputtering and dying in his impotent inebriate rage, it is likely that the only ones who will deign to care for him will be Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity who have been taught to turn the other cheek.

Art Sippo MD

Fr. Rutler was correct: Hitchens was vulgar — the transcript certainly bears that out. In better times, Hitchens’ discourse would have earned him a slap in the mouth. Rutler gave Hitchens what comes closest to a figurative slap in this era of verboten corporal punishment and all the fallout therefrom. How did Hitchens react? Did he put forth an eloquent defense of his vulgarity, reasoning that emphasis greater on the penis and lesser on the soul was proportionate in the absence of a Great God? Not in the least: He whines (albeit quick-wittedly and eloquently) that it was Fr. Rutler’s brief commentary that sank the event to the depths of the vulgar; he accuses Fr. Rutler of the cardinal sin of the modern age. That Ahmadinejad would congruently accuse Lee Bollinger of same sin is irony most arch.