Why does the Catholic church allow Bill Donohue to speak for them?

This is a real mystery. Donohue is an angry guy with a fax machine who gets donations from affronted Catholics, which is nothing the church can do about, obviously…but he also pretends to be a defender of Catholicism while having no standing with the church and while making the most outrageous claims. You’d think someone in the hierarchy would take a moment to mention to journalists that the crazy ranting guy does not speak for them. I guess maybe the old guard thinks he does a good job representing their views, which makes him even worse.

Donohue is waxing indignant again about church pedophilia scandals. He has returned to his familiar excuse: it isn’t child abuse, it’s evil homosexuality.

The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

If it is inexcusable, why is Bill Donohue making excuses for it?

He is certainly downplaying it. He’s desperately trying to point out that there is a continuum of sexual behavior here, as if that means it wasn’t as bad as everyone thinks it was. Why, it wasn’t always a priest pinning a 9-year-old girl down and penetrating her vaginally with his penis, so it was all OK! All it was was mostly cases of a priest being manually masturbated by 15-year-old boys, so everyone should go home now and not worry about nasty rotten evil priests any more.

He really doesn’t get it. The problem here isn’t what specific sex act was performed, or the exact age of the victims: it is a violation of trust and an abuse of minors from a position of power. I know that kids of that age may think about sex and have desires that they indulge in with their peers…but that simply does not make it acceptable for older men to hide behind their piety in order to manipulate them into gratifying their desires.

Take the case of Lawrence Murphy, the priest who molested 200 deaf boys in his care in Wisconsin. That he was having sex with males does not bother me at all; if he were being defrocked for loving, consensual sexual behavior with a man (or a woman, for that matter), I’d be holding him up as an example of the inhuman insensitivity of the church. But that wasn’t what he was doing: he was bringing bewildered schoolboys into his office, using his authority to order them to strip naked, and fondling their bodies. And then receiving no chastisement from the church, which actually protected him from official action because he was considered a valuable fundraiser.

I’d like to know what Donohue would consider acceptable behavior from a priest. Forceful vaginal penetration is clearly off the table, while a priest doing anything with a boy is going to be condemned as homosexuality…so I guess compelling 13-18 year old girls to give you oral sex is perfectly normal, healthy sexual behavior for a Catholic priest? Well within the boundaries of his vows, I’m sure.

It seems to me that by trying to excuse one part of the range of sexual activities by implying that another set of of coerced sexual activities is worse just means that Donohue is admitting that you can’t trust priests with boys in choir or confirmation classes or Sunday school. Good work, Bill.

By the way, the US court system has now served the pope with papers. The pope knew about the abuse, sheltered it, and even enabled it by defending child-molesting priests.

There are Catholics who reject Donohue’s representation — I just heard from Rev. Robert M. Hoatson, Ph.D., Co-founder and President, Road to Recovery, Inc. and founding member of NSAC (National Survivor Advocates Coalition), a fellow who has been fighting to get the church to distance itself more from the hate advocates like the Catholic League. Good for them!

Bill Donohue will be so happy

I cannot possibly say it any better than NY Magazine:

With the owners of the Empire State Building firm in their decision not to light up for Mother Teresa’s 100th birthday, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum — a former aircraft carrier that served in World War II and the Vietnam War — has stepped up to the plate, because it also has lights that can change color, apparently. “The aircraft carrier museum is illuminated red, white and blue most nights, so the staff will simply replace their red lighting with additional blue and white lights,” the Post reports. And with that, Mother Teresa’s soul can finally be at peace.

Because when I think Mother Teresa, I think engine of death and pain.

Bill Donohue goes gaga

Bill Donohue was looking awfully silly demanding that the Empire State Building celebrate Mother Teresa’s birthday, so I guess he needed a new cause. He found one. The Catholic League is outraged by Lady Gaga’s new video.

Lady Gaga is playing Madonna copy cat, squirming around half-naked with half-naked guys, abusing Catholic symbols–they’re always Catholic symbols–while bleating out “Alejandro” enough times to induce vomit. Dressed occasionally as a nun in a glossy-red habit, the Madonna wannabe flashes the cross, swallows a rosary and manages to get raped by her S&M boyfriends. Hence, she has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, sans the looks and talent of her role model.

Like Madonna, Lady Gaga was raised Catholic and then morphed into something unrecognizable. “So I suppose you could say I’m a quite religious woman that is very confused about religion,” she told Larry King last week.

That she is confused is an understatement. In any event, we hope she finds her way back home. In the meantime, Catholics will settle for her treating us like Muslims.

I’m actually a fan of Lady Gaga (Bill will not be surprised), so I had to zip over to youtube to see this. Here it is. It’s got something for everybody. Just imagine poor Bill Donohue watching it over and over, compelled to document this atrocity, a little bit of saliva drooling from his slack lips, while with one hand he clicks “replay” repeatedly.

Donohue does have a point, I hate to say. I watched the whole thing, with its muscular young men gyrating in jackboots and tight shorts and nothing else, the weird headgear, the sadomasochistic imagery, the black leather uniforms, the flaming homoeroticism, and I was thinking, yeah, all that does remind me of Catholicism. I didn’t think it was Catholic bashing, though. I thought it was a recruiting video.

Bill Donohue always acts like a spoiled little child

It’s hard to believe, but Mother Teresa is getting her own US postage stamp. She was a horrible woman who practiced the Christian ideal of poverty as a virtue by doing her very best to keep as many people poor and miserable as possible — and I hate to see the post office promoting her delusional cult. I sure won’t be buying any of them, but I just know that much of my incoming hate mail will be plastered with them after September.

Having a stamp is not enough for Bill Donohue, however. He is stamping his little foot and demanding that the Empire State Building be lit up in blue and white in honor of the poisonous little promoter of pain and pauperdom on the day of the stamp’s release. Gosh. And next year, when my wife gets me an iPad, a full body massage, and a submarine cruise to visit the squid in their natural habitat for my birthday, I’m going to rage and scream and pound my fists if she doesn’t also get me a fireworks show. She must not really love me enough if she won’t launch skyrockets for me.

Donohue has to spice up his tantrum by making a totally inappropriate comparison, too. He’s not happy that a spokesman for the Empire State Building is stonewalling his demands.

Imagine a spokesman for the Vatican responding to a reporter about an indefensible decision made by a cardinal, and all he offers is, “there is no issue here.” Better yet, imagine him saying, “I’m only telling you what I’ve been directed to say,” and expecting the reporters to simply walk away disappointed.

Right. Like the Vatican would never make excuses and cover up bad decisions by Catholic priests. Did Donohue really want to go there? The first thing that came to my mind was that he seems to be making a comparison between priests raping children and refusing to acknowledge responsibility with a building refusing to switch on its lights according to a color scheme dictated by the Catholic League.

Good work, Bill! Keep reminding us of the sense of entitlement and privilege the Catholic Church has, with nice little fillips that bring up their penchant for child abuse. It’s almost as if he’s an atheist working from inside the establishment to bring it down.

Bill Donohue is an evil little man

Donohue is also an amazing fellow, always able to top himself in serial excuses for the crimes of the church. His latest escapade is to pardon a priestly abuser because his victims were over some magical age.

The head of the influential Catholic League says that the priest who allegedly sexually abused 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin did not engage in pedophilia because ‘the vast majority of the victims [were] post-pubescent.”

Bill Donohue made the argument during a raucous debate on Larry King Live Tuesday night, during which he repeatedly pointed the finger to homosexuality — rather than pedophilia — as the cause of the church’s sex abuse problems.

He’s playing word games, and managed to successfully derail the discussion into a debate over how young the victims have to be for it to count as pedophilia — Donohue is claiming that once a kid is over 12 or 13, he’s fair game. At that age, it’s just homosexuality.

Where to even begin? The problem is not the sex of his victims, it’s that this was a priest abusing his authority, acting as a sexual predator on much, much younger members of his flock — young people who were in his charge, who were dependent on him, and who had been indoctrinated with the belief that they should trust the priest. Donohue is resorting to arguing that because a 13-year-old had pubic hair, he had the full autonomy of an adult and the abuse of the priest was simply a love affair between equals. And that is bullshit.

It’s a mistake to get into an argument about a chronological dividing line at all. The one thing Donohue is really good at, though, is spewing out distractions, and that’s what he has accomplished here — he’s obscuring a clear pattern of abuse with a lot of irrelevant noise.

Is Damian Thompson the British Bill Donohue?

Someone tell him that that is no status to which one should aspire. He’s just written a brief, cranky complaint about Dawkins’ righteous smackdown of the Catholic church. Here’s the totality of it.

Richard Dawkins’s latest attack on the Catholic Church is worthy of a dribbling loony on the top of a bus. He calls the Church “the greatest force for evil in the world”, “an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture” and describes it “dragging its skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp”. (Pimps in skirts – that’s a new one.) And all in The Washington Post.

The peg for this piece? The Pope’s offer to make special arrangements for Anglicans converting to Rome, a matter I would have thought was none of Prof Dawkins’s business. But I’m not going to bother to argue with any of his points, because these are the ravings of a man who appears to have lost all sense of proportion. Seriously: is there something wrong with him?

Why, no, Damian! What’s wrong with you?

Let’s start with the quote-mining. He did not call the church “the greatest force for evil in the world”. He asked a question, “What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world?”, and gave a general answer, “In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders.” I would have thought that the English could comprehend their own language, but apparently that isn’t necessarily true of religion columnists. Quelle surprise!

Second, Dawkins’ characterization of the Catholic church was spot on, and justified by a recital of its flaws: that bizarre belief in transubstantiation, its misogyny, its deadly opposition to contraception in Africa, its homophobia, its history of pederasty. It’s not simply a matter of administrative reshuffling of priests between the Church of England and the Vatican, as Thompson seems to imply, but an attempted merger brought about by enticing the most reactionary of the Anglican priesthood, something that will not correct the sins of the church, but worsen them.

By the way, Dawkins wasn’t the only person to notice the nasty implications of this merger. So did I. It’s even the subject of some humor.

i-a512526a23db6879d3b914fb675af427-vatican_merger.jpeg

So what’s wrong with you, Damian? Are you blind to the obvious?

Piling on Bill Donohue again

It’s cruel, but he is such a tempting target, so full of himself and so, so crazy. It seems The Simpsons tossed out some mild one-liner making fun of communion (“What kind of civilized people eat the body and blood of their savior?”), and Bill Donohue has fired off another angry fax (“mocking the heart of any religion always crosses the line, and mocking the Eucharist does it for Catholics.”)

Too bad, Bill. Silly superstitions will always be a magnet for mockery.

You can see the whole Simpsons episode and Donohue’s full complaint at The Friendly Atheist.

Bill Donohue just keeps on giving

There’s one thing that could make this video funnier.

It would be Bill Donohue waxing apoplectic over that video.

Hallelujah! My prayers are answered!

Comedian Sarah Silverman appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO show on October 9 attacking the Vatican. She began her monologue bemoaning the plight of world hunger, and then found a solution: “What is the Vatican worth, like 500 billion dollars? This is great, sell the Vatican, take a big chunk of the money, build a gorgeous condominium for you and all your friends to live in…and with the money left over, feed the whole f—ing world.”

Speaking of the pope, Silverman continued, “You preach to live humbly, and I totally agree. So, now maybe it’s time for you to move out of your house that is a city. On an ego level alone, you will be the biggest hero in the history of ever. And by the way, any involvement in the Holocaust, bygones….”

Silverman closed by saying, “If you sell the Vatican, and you take that money, and you use it to feed every single human being on the planet, you will get crazy p—y. All the p—y.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responds as follows:

Silverman’s assault on Catholicism is just another example of HBO’s corporate irresponsibility. Time and again, if it’s not Bill Maher thrashing the Catholic Church, it’s one of his guests. There is obviously something pathological going on there: Silverman’s filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.

Here’s a reality check for Silverman: the Catholic Church operates more hospitals and feeds more of the poor than any private institution in the world. It also saved more Jews during the Holocaust than any other institution in the world.

Factcheck time, Bill!

In America, as of 1999, 13% of all hospitals were religious (totaling 18% of all hospital beds); that’s 604 out of 4,573 hospitals. [6] Despite the presence of organized religion in America, the Church has managed to scrape together only a few hospitals. Of these 604 hospitals many are a product of mergers with public, non-sectarian hospitals. Not all of these 604 hospitals are Catholic; many are Baptist, Methodist, Shriner (Masonic), Jewish, etc.

Despite the religious label, these so-called religious hospitals are more public than public hospitals. Religious hospitals get 36% of all their revenue from Medicare; public hospitals get only 27%. In addition to that 36% of public funding they get 12% of their funding from Medicaid. Of the remaining 44% of funding, 31% comes from county appropriations, 30% comes from investments, and only 5% comes from charitable contributions (not necessarily religious). The percentage of Church funding for Church-run hospitals comes to a grand total of 0.0015 percent.

Oh, and Catholics and the Holocaust? It was complicated. The Vatican dragged its feet for years; they could have done so much more.

Bill Donohue is getting anticipatory apoplexy

30 September is going to be International Blasphemy Day, and I suspect Donohue will be turning purple while his head twirls around on his neck. It should be entertaining: he’s already sending out press releases to complain.

BLASPHEMY DAY TARGETS CHRISTIANITY

The Center for Inquiry will launch the first International Blasphemy Day on September 30, the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons that so inflamed Muslims worldwide. Billed as a free speech event designed to oppose such things as a Muslim-sponsored U.N. resolution banning criticism of religion, the day has drawn the support of people like PZ Myers. Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota known for intentionally desecrating a consecrated Host, says the day was established to “mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal”; he wants every day to be Blasphemy Day.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue spoke to this event today:

The Center for Inquiry is factually incorrect to say that “Free speech is the foundation on which other liberties rest.” Freedom of conscience is the first liberty, and it is inextricably linked to freedom of religion. Moreover, the whole concept of inalienable rights presupposes a belief in the Creator. In other words, atheists have the right to mock religion because our Christian Founding Fathers afforded them human rights.

They are all such phonies. The stated purpose of Blasphemy Day has nothing to do with any religion but Islam, yet there is not one scheduled event insulting Muslims. We can only guess why. So who have they chosen to mock? You guessed it–Christians.

Artist Dana Ellyn will wander to Washington, D.C. to show her masterpiece, “Jesus Does His Nails,” a portrait of Jesus polishing a nail jammed into his hand. In Los Angeles, there will be a film about a gay molesting priest and another about a boy who is so angry about being sent to bed that he asks God to kill his parents. Oh, yes, American Atheists will conduct “De-Baptisms” in New Jersey.

Nice to know that even the atheists know that Christians can be counted on to react to their antics like good Christians. Which is why there will be no violence.

Ol’ Bill really doesn’t get it. The purpose of the day is to jeer at religion, not to do his dirty work of attacking just one sectarian slice of the whole pie of absurdity. In the US, we’ll tend to poke fun at Christianity more than Islam because it’s Christianity that’s in our faces every day of the year. Islam also lacks a histrionic spokesman like Donohue to make entertaining facial spasms for us.

I’m hoping there will be no violence, but I can’t say the same for those “good Christians.” I get a lot of threats from those people, inflamed by affronted polemicists like Donohue, and I can also count on the Catholic League to pine for opportunities to turn Muslims loose on atheists.