Variations on the theme.

When I was but a lad in journalism, one word was spit with even more virulent bite than the obscenities that typically announced a serious typo on the front page.

It was a polysyllabic epithet referring to a place far away filled with people we knew little about. The tongue-twister was 'afghanistanism'. It was commonly used to mock pipe-puffing editorial writers wringing their hands about goings-on well beyond a newspaper's circulation area. Places like, oh, Afghanistan.

It could also be used to criticize reporters more intent on writing about the grand sweep of history than the hard work of digging up the news in front of their noses.

Sadly, the term has fallen into disuse. Yet its spirit returned this spring when Afghanistan's Taleban government blew to bits two 1,500-year-old Buddhist statues carved out of a cliff northwest of the capital, Kabul. Like almost all such iconoclastic behaviour, the statue smashing was as senseless as it was determined. When artillery rounds and tank shelling couldn't bring down the 53-metre-high Buddhas, they were uprooted with landmines and dynamite. The ensuing uproar was almost as overpowering as the explosions that brought down the icons.

One Canadian cabinet minister decried the destruction as a "crime against humanity", a dangerous venture into hyperbole for a Liberal MP. If demolition of stone statues is a Nuremberg-level crime, after all, what might be said about Health Minister Allan Rock's fist-pumping support for abortion?

UN officials immediately plumped for new international laws to prosecute "crimes against culture". The demand must have left Heritage Minister Sheila Copps wondering how her wrists would look in handcuffs - or shrieking at the Canada Council to shred all paperwork on grants it has approved for 30 years.

Yet with all the ki-yiing about the rocky horror occurring in distant Afghanistan, neither political pooh-bahs nor media blah-blahs noted the parallel between Taleban attacks on "infidel shrines" and the long, slow, grinding attacks of Western opinion mongers on the very foundations of faith.

How facile it is to decry deeds done in the distance while ignoring variations on the theme here at home!

Oh. Right. North American anti-faith fundamentalists don't turn their gun turrets on churches and fire live ammo. They don't have to. Yet. Their three chief weapons for years have been the smirk, the sneer and high-pressure, multi-level politicking to force faith into further isolation from the public square. Packing such trusty firepower in the holster, who needs howitzers?

Across my desk, for example, there recently drifted a glossy press kit from something called Catholics for a Free Choice. The group, based in Washington, D.C., is ferociously lobbying UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to strip the Vatican of its permanent observer status.

What's compelling about the group's so-called See Change campaign is not the arguments justifying it, but the motivation at work. "The Vatican does a lot of good work at the UN. However, when it comes to women's rights, gay rights, reproductive rights and preventing the spread of AIDS, the Vatican falls back on religious dogma to oppose even the most basic proposals," says a covering letter.

Leaving aside the howler of criticizing the Vatican for relying on religious dogma, it's fascinating to note where the objections arise to the Holy See's UN status. The four areas identified are those where the Church has been foursquare and formidable on the world stage throughout the 1990s.

At numerous UN conferences, the Church has been Gibraltar against the trendy tide. For refusing to yield, it must now be pulled down, or at least pulled out of a world body which it has participated in since 1951. So say Catholics for a Free Choice, anyway.

And how different what the group says from the words used by the Taleban's foreign minister to justify destroying the ancient Buddhist statues? Judge for yourself. "The statues are left over from our ancestors as a wrong heritage," Wakil Adman Muttawakil explained. "They clash with our beliefs."

Afghanistanism demands that when such a clash occurs in, oh, say Afghanistan, we must all wring our hands and cry stone tears. When it happens here, nary a discouraging word is heard.

Peter Stockland is editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette. His column appears five times a year.