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Compiled by "Smart Mouth" columnist Amelia Robinson, Seen and Overheard is fueled by juicy tidbits, oddball tales and strange sightings.
Home > Blogs > Seen and Overheard > Archives > 2011 > April > 14 > Entry
Huffington Post column about Dayton nun being bounced from plane stirs controversy
Here’s why you should read carefully.
A headline on a satirical Huffington Post column written by Jalees Rehman, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, raised eye brows last week.
It seems many people were struck by the headline “Catholic Nun Forcibly Removed From Plane for Wearing ‘Muslim Garb’ and thought the fictional story about Sister Cora-Ann, a Catholic nun from the Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Dayton, was true.
Rehman spun a web about a nun in a burqa being bounced from an airplane.
He uses popular fictional characters as witnesses to the sister’s virtual ousting - Elizabeth Bennet ( Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”), Damien Thorn (The Omen), Frodo Baggins (J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings”) and Blanche Devereaux (Golden Girls) among others.
The column was posted on the Huffington Post’s comedy site, but many thought it was true.
“There was a huge response to the article and many took it to be a news report without realizing it was satire,” Rehman said via email. “I am not sure if they did not read the article and just passed on the headline by Twitter or whether they read it and were so intent on seeing the prejudice that they skipped over the satire bit or whether it is too close to reality.”
Rehman had cardiology training in Indianapolis at Indiana University. He said he’s never been to Dayton, but several of his colleagues either moved to Dayton or had previously lived here.
“From what my colleagues/ friends have told me, (Dayton) is a classic American city - conservative American Midwestern values paired with a lot of ethnic diversity, broad range of socioeconomic disparity, a lot of opportunities to engage in the arts and culture, thus in many ways similar to Indianapolis, of which I have fond memories. That is why I chose Dayton,” he said.
Click here to read the column.
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