Poor Paddy K. He wants to formally leave the Catholic church, so he followed the official procedures…and what does he get? A long letter from a priest telling him how wonderful the church is.

Maybe he needs to send the priest this video of Bill Donohue reiterating his claim that the problem is the infiltration of the church by the homosexual agenda. The low point for me was when the really terrible interviewer, Rick Sanchez, asks whether the problem with the church isn’t priestly celibacy, and Donohue smugly takes this as a vindication of his point, somehow. I don’t get it. He sure seems positive that he’s got a logical point connecting celibacy with gayness, though.

Anyway, it’s hard to question one’s desire to leave the church when one sees the kind of vermin defending it.

By the way, a while back I tried to follow the official Lutheran church’s procedure for being formally stricken from the rolls, and wrote to the only church I was ever a member of, way back in my childhood. They have no record of me, not even a baptismal record. I felt a little miffed that I was forgotten, but I got over it — I guess this just means I was never really a Christian, which is fine with me. I can set that brief youthful embarrassment aside and pretend it never happened.

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.