Click here for a brief summary of the show
Highs: Despite it being a complete rip-off from The Price Is Right, we loved loved loved the new game Higher/Lower and look forward to hearing it again in the future. And we'll give Lino and Father Rob brownie points for daring to bring up the HHS Mandate again. That being said...
Lows: Once again, Lino and Father Rob laid a big fat egg when talking about the religious liberty issue. We don't disagree with Lino's assertion that the Church relies too much on press statements and not enough on getting their position out on TV and radio, but to imply that the mainstream media is ready, willing, and able to grant as much face time to the Church as it is the President of the United States shows just how naive he is about the media's priorities and workings. We could see (and have seen) Church leaders reach out to local media outlets on the topic, but getting the media to listen on a national level is much more difficult than Lino made it out to be. And getting the public interested in the topic isn't simple, either. One caller mentioned that the sexual abuse crisis has lessened the public's willingness to listen to the Church's point-of-view, and all Lino could do is shrug his shoulders and agree... and then go right back to pushing for the Church to make its voice heard in the mainstream media. Hey, Lino... care to give us a few pointers on how to make a skeptical public actually listen to the Church? Instead of just telling us what we already know, give us an idea of how to deal with it.
And by the way, if Lino and Father Rob had bothered to actually read some of the statements that the Cardinal Dolan and the USCCB have put out, they'd know that the Obama Administration isn't budging an inch from their current position, so stoking this issue in the media is pretty much a pointless exercise right now. The best way to go about getting the mandate rescinded is to get rid of it either legislatively or have the courts declare it unconstitutional, and those processes need time to play out. And that's why there's nothing in the media about it right now.
Kathleen (the last caller who got mysteriously cut off) absolutely nailed it when she questioned Lino's willingness to regularly bring up the topic, or at least bring somebody on who actually knows something about the topic. A little more research into what exactly is going on with the issue right now would've made for a much more informative segment. Instead, we got Father Rob dredging up a press statement from two weeks ago and telling Lino, "Hey, maybe we can have a little fun with this!" Pathetic.
Our take: This show would've gotten a pretty decent grade if Abbot and Costello hadn't gone off on their whole misinformed religious liberty rant without offering any constructive ways to solve the problem. We'll give them credit for trying, but the amount of effort they put in to reading up on the topic was akin to using Wikipedia as the only source for writing a term paper.
Grade: D+
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