I got a package in the mail today! It was from the Catholic League! It included a personal, signed note from Bill Donohue! It also said “SWAK” and all the ‘i’s were dotted with hearts! (Oh, OK, I made up that last bit. A boy can dream, you know.)
It was their 2008 Report on Anti-Catholicism, a 74-page exercise in institutional paranoia, and I am featured on pages 26-30! Oh, joy! You know what that means: I can expect another uptick in sad letters from nuns and pious little old ladies in Waukegan.
One curious thing about those letters: they are all the same, and they all come in neatly lettered envelopes with printed return addresses in the top left corner, and they all come from Mrs. John Smith or Mrs. George Jones or some variant thereof. I don’t know any of the names of these women, but I do know their husband’s names. It’s very, very weird — it’s the formalism of patriarchy.