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Catholic League’s Bill Donohue Cries out for Attention

Submitted by Josh Glasstetter on November 28, 2011 - 12:28pm

Last Friday, PFAW Foundation president Michael Keegan invited Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn to a public debate on arts censorship and religious liberty in light of the controversy over a new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The invitation still stands, and we look forward to a productive and substantive conversation with Bishop DiMarzio.

In the meantime though, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue – who fancies himself a spokesperson for the church and, for that matter, all Catholic Americans – has issued us a self-serving challenge to debate him instead. In another century, a guy like Donohue might have challenged us to a duel. With his typical arrogance, Donohue writes (PDF):
Please be advised that I am in a win-win situation and you are in a lose-lose. If you say yes, you will lose the debate. If you say no, I will tell the entire world. I expect an answer by December 9, three weeks from today.
In fact, debating Donohue would be the lose-lose. Donohue is a press hound of the worst sort who feeds off contrived controversies. He has also demonstrated an utter inability to carry on a civil conversation with those who don’t agree with his distorted world view. Instead he engages in personal attacks and intellectually dishonest diatribes. It would be a mistake to provide any more oxygen to Donohue’s one-man outrage machine. So we won’t.
 
If anyone needs a reminder of Bill Donohue’s views, here are just a few of his “greatest hits”:
  • “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It‘s not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it… Hollywood likes anal sex... I like families. I like children. They like abortions.” – link
  • “It’s unfortunate that we have [progressive Catholics], I regard them as termites.” – link
  • “Why did this young man not object earlier? Why did he allow the ‘abuse’ to continue until he was 18? The use of the quotes is deliberate: the charge against the former priest is not rape, but rubbing. While still objectionable, there is a glacial difference between being rubbed and raped.” – link
  • “There is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it Mr. Foley? Second, why didn’t you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn’t allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?” – link
  • “Gays were all of a sudden worrying if people would start aborting kids when they found out the DNA suggested the kid might be gay or God forbid, we'd run out of little gay kids, so all of a sudden, they became pro-life.” – link
  • “Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style.” – link
  • “What about the gook jokes? I want to know, why don't you have a sense of humor about gook jokes?” – link

 

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Religious Right Abandons Brooklyn Museum Protests – Anti-Da Vinci Code Group and Pro-Censorship Artist Carry on the Fight

Submitted by Miranda Blue on November 21, 2011 - 4:12pm

Last year, when the Smithsonian hosted “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” a groundbreaking exhibit exploring gay and lesbian themes in American art, the Religious Right unified in protest. Inspired by a CNSNews story titled “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts,” and egged on by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, the campaign against the exhibit quickly gained the support of soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Within a day they succeeded in pressuring the Smithsonian to remove the most controversial work from the exhibit, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly.

Last week, the exhibit opened at the Brooklyn Museum, famously the site of the Giuliani-fueled controversy over the 1999 “Sensation” show. Within days, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn sent a letter to the museum protesting the exhibit, and a small coalition of GOP elected officials followed up with a letter accusing the museum of “Christian-bashing.” New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser also weighed in, calling the Wojnarwicz work “a revolting piece of slime.”

However, the museum hasn’t budged in its support for the show, and the Right’s efforts to censor the work have mostly fizzled. Donohue himself has decided it’s not worth expending too much effort –instead simply issuing a statement reiterating his disgust with the exhibit and accusing Wojnarowicz of bringing about his own death from AIDS.

Left to fill the vacuum so far have been a far-right Catholic group inspired by a Brazilian fascist movement and an artist who was previously known for painting a heroic George W. Bush on horseback holding Osama bin Laden’s severed head.

On Sunday,America Needs Fatima, a campaign of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), held a protest in front of the museum. TFP is a spin-off of a Brazilian movement that has been called “neo-fascist.” TFP’s foundational text is a treatise by founder Plinio Correa de Oliveira, which argues that the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Communism have in their turn undone a natural order that must be restored. While the main American branch of TFP mostly focuses on anti-gay propaganda [pdf], America Needs Fatima is dedicated to organizing “anti-blasphemy” campaigns against targets like The Da Vinci Code, editorial cartoons and Madonna’s planned performance at the 2012 Super Bowl.

The other notable protest against the Brooklyn Museum has been that of Staten Island artist Scott LoBaido, who was thrown out of the museum after showing up with a painting of the museum’s director sitting on a toilet filled with green muck. LoBaido has been protesting art that he sees as blasphemous since at least 1999, when he was arrested for throwing horse manure at the Brooklyn Museum to protest the “Sensation” exhibit. His own work is not always negative, though. Along with his year-long project painting flags on rooftops across America, LoBaido has created fawning, heroic portraits of Ronald Reagan and of George W. Bush brandishing the head of Osama bin Laden.

 

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Republicans Advocate Censorship Of New York Exhibit

Submitted by Brian Tashman on November 15, 2011 - 12:36pm

On Friday, the Brooklyn Museum will begin hosting “Hide/Seek,” an exhibit about the experience of gays and lesbians in American art that provoked a firestorm of criticism from the Religious Right when it opened at the National Portrait Gallery last year. The New York museum has decided to include in its show A Fire in My Belly, the compilation of video work by the late artist David Wojnarowicz that was ultimately removed from the National Portrait Gallery show. Now, in what feels like a replay of last year’s drama at the Smithsonian, Republican politicians in New York are attacking the Brooklyn Museum for hosting “Hide/Seek” and Wojnarowicz’s work and demanding that it censor the exhibit.

The film A Fire In My Belly, a compilation of surrealist film footage exploring the suffering of people with HIV/AIDS, which was pulled from the National Portrait Gallery following complaints from Republican and Religious Right figures. While the Brooklyn Museum is defending itself from censorship proponents, Republican politicians are beginning to make threats against the museum. Republican state senator Andrew Lanza introduced legislation to have the government withdraw “all public funding of the museum”:

“It is outrageous for an institution that accepts funding from city, state and federal governments to display content that is so blatantly disrespectful and offensive to Christians during the holiday season,” said Senator Andrew Lanza. “Taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for hatred and ignorance.”

Senator Lanza believes that the actions of the Museum are analogous to a hate crime. He is calling for all public funding of the museum to be withdrawn.

Rep. Michael Grimm, Councilman James Oddo, Councilman Vincent Ignizio, Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, Assemblyman Lou Tobacco and Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro signed onto a letter condemning the exhibit:

In 1999, the Museum presented the shock art exhibit “Sensation,” which featured a painting of the Blessed Mother Mary surrounded by pornographic images and covered in elephant dung. This week, the Museum is opening another controversial exhibit, “Hide/Seek,” which will include a film featuring ants crawling over the image of Jesus on a crucifix – just in time for the Christmas season. This is not art, this is Christian-bashing. This is an outrageous use of taxpayer money by the nation’s second-largest art museum, and an obvious attempt to offend Christians on the eve of one of the holiest times of the Christian faith. … As I’m sure you’re aware, this sacrilegious film was pulled from an exhibit at the Smithsonian last year after House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor objected to the use of taxpayer dollars to show a film patently offensive to Christians. I respectfully request that you do the same.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who led the charge to censor the Smithsonian exhibit, condemned the New York exhibit in a statement. “The fact is that the artist who made the vile video died of self-inflicted wounds: he died of AIDS,” Donohue writes. “The homosexual, David Wojnarowicz, hated the Catholic Church (had he lived by its teachings, he would not have self-destructed.”

For Arnold Lehman, there is no such thing as anti-Catholic art. Catholics who disagree are apparently too stupid to appreciate the complexities of these masterpieces. For example, in 1999 Lehman said it was not anti-Catholic for an artist to smear elephant dung and pornographic pictures on a portrait of Our Blessed Mother (he loved the “Sensation” exhibition). Now he says that a video featuring large ants crawling all over Jesus on the Cross is actually a statement about “human suffering and death.” Guess us stupid Catholics missed that one, too.

…

The fact is that the artist who made the vile video died of self-inflicted wounds: he died of AIDS. The homosexual, David Wojnarowicz, hated the Catholic Church (had he lived by its teachings, he would not have self-destructed). He once referred to Cardinal John O’Connor as a “fat cannibal,” and labeled the Catholic Church a “house of walking swastikas.” Sounds like the words of a bigot. But perhaps I’m too stupid not to understand that they were really meant to endear the artist to the Catholic community.

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Rick Perry Grovels To Bill Donohue, Rejects Robert Jeffress' Anti-Catholicism

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on October 14, 2011 - 9:37am

So when Robert Jeffress is running around telling anyone who will listen that Mormonism is a cult, Rick Perry just kind of shrugs his shoulders and says he is not going to tell Jeffress what he can and can't say.

But when Jeffress says that the Catholic faith is a counterfeit "Babylonian mystery religion" that represents "the genius of Satan" and ends up angering the Catholic League's resident squeaky wheel/blowhard Bill Donohue, well then Perry just can't apologize fast enough, as Dononhe reports that Perry called him personally last night to distance himself from Jeffress' anti-Catholicism:

Last night, I discussed the flap over Rev. Robert Jeffress with Chris Matthews on “Hardball." While I made it clear that the anti-Catholic comments made by Jeffress must be roundly condemned, I also stated that I was not blaming Gov. Rick Perry for what the pastor said. One of the reasons I said this was because I was assured by my friend, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, that Perry would never countenance any scurrilous remarks about the Catholic Church.

When I got home, I received a phone call from Gov. Perry. Catholic activist Deal Hudson, who has a history of forging good relationships between Catholics and evangelicals, intervened in this matter and arranged for the phone call. Perry and I spoke candidly about the Jeffress incident, and about religion, in general. He spoke sincerely: nothing that Jeffress said about Catholicism represents his views.

I very much appreciate Gov. Perry’s interest in getting this issue behind him in a responsible manner. He succeeded. Case closed.

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Bill Donohue Condemns Jeffress As A "Poster Boy For Hatred"

Submitted by Brian Tashman on October 12, 2011 - 9:40am

Last week we posted audio of Robert Jeffress, the prominent Rick Perry endorser who introduced the candidate at the Values Voter Summit, condemning the Roman Catholic faith as a “counterfeit religion” that represents “the genius of Satan” in a sermon last year. Jeffress linked the Catholic Church to a Satanic “Babylonian mystery religion” that worshiped a fish god and warned that Catholics will “miss eternal life” because of their religion’s supposed paganism:

Catholicism isn’t the only religion that has encountered hostility from Jeffress: he is best known for calling Mormonism a cult that is “from the pit of Hell.” He has argued that Hindus, Muslims and Jews are also destined for Hell.

Today, right-wing Catholic activist Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights released a statement slamming Jeffress for having “demonized” the Catholic faith. In 2008, Donohue called on John McCain to renounce one of his endorsers, John Hagee, who has a history of anti-Catholic rhetoric and once said that God sent Hitler to be a “hunter” of Jews. While McCain ultimately rejected Hagee’s endorsement, Perry has so far refused to disavow Jeffress:

Last Friday, Rev. Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor who introduced Gov. Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit, spoke derisively about the Mormon faith of Mitt Romney, making the case that “Mormonism is a cult.” Two days later, he chided Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism as “false religions.”

Last year, Rev. Jeffress said the Roman Catholic Church was the outgrowth of a “corruption” called the “Babylonian mystery.” He continued, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue offered these remarks today:

Where did they find this guy? When theological differences are demonized by the faithful of any religion—never mind by a clergyman—it makes a mockery of their own religion. Rev. Jeffress is a poster boy for hatred, not Christianity.

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Donohue Likens LGBT Rights Movement To Apartheid, Denies Ever Leading Pressure Campaigns

Submitted by Brian Tashman on August 26, 2011 - 4:31pm

The Catholic League has rallied to the defense of their anti-gay allies the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family as a reaction to a campaign by LGBT rights and women’s rights advocates to have corporations drop out of the Charity Give Back Group, which sponsors the FRC and Focus. The Charity Give Back Group (formerly known as the Christian Values Network) allows customers to shop in a virtual mall and direct proceeds to CGBG affiliated groups, which led to complaints as a number of the CGBG’s charities are actually anti-choice and anti-gay political groups.

Yesterday, Bill Donohue joined Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, on his radio program Washington Watch. “Radical proponents of gay marriage have taken the culture war to the marketplace,” Donohue said in a statement on the CGBG controversy, charging them with declaring “economic war against any organization that embraces the Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage.” He told activists: “If these extremists get their way, they will silence the Christian voice. Which is why the bullies must be defeated.”

Of course, it is ironic for the Catholic League to accuse “extremists” of trying to “silence” the voices of their opponents, seeing as that Donohue led the successful push for the Smithsonian to censor their exhibit on LGBT-themed art.

But the irony doesn’t end there.

During his interview with Perkins, Donohue denied that Religious Right organizations like the Catholic League or the Family Research Council lead similar pressure campaigns, saying “our side doesn’t do likewise,” continuing, “I don’t want people to say, ‘oh well you know Catholics and Protestants and Christians in general when we don’t get our way we try to do the same thing through retaliation,’ we do not.” He asserted, “we’re not asking companies, corporations to take sides in the culture war…we’re not asking for reprisal against those people with whom we disagree, we just leave the marketplace to itself.”

Donohue also warned Perkins that just as South Africa’s white minority held power for decades under the racist Apartheid system, supporters of gay rights can do the same in America:

If people don’t realize what we’re up against here, they may be a minority but you know it was a minority of people in South Africa who took away the rights of Black people. You can be a well-organized minority in this country here such as those on the left, gay and straight alike, and have a tremendous amount of influence if you have this lust and appetite for power.

While we already know that the Family Research Council backed pressure campaigns against companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds, the Catholic League under Donohue has led countless boycotts and pressure campaigns.

Here are some of the companies and programs that Donohue launched what he would call “retaliation” and “reprisal” campaigns against: Disney; 20th Century Fox; Wal-Mart; ‘The Golden Compass;’ Miller; Showtime, and CBS, which it promised to face the “biggest boycott in history” if CBS hired Howard Stern.

So remember, when LGBT rights and women’s rights advocates ask companies to drop out of a service that directs money to right-wing political organizations, it’s “economic war,” but when Religious Right groups lead boycotts and pressure campaigns against companies, they are simply standing up for their values.

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Donohue: Catholic Reporters Are Anti-Catholic

Submitted by Brian Tashman on March 17, 2011 - 11:17am

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League consistently goes out of his way to defend priests accused and convicted of sex abuse or covering it up, claiming that journalists have an anti-Catholic bias. According to Donohue, the crimes aren’t the alleged child abuse or the cover-ups, but the publications of journalists who are investigating the issue.

Today, Donohue released a classically-rambunctious statement criticizing the National Catholic Reporter, an independent Catholic newspaper, and Catholic journalists Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews. Just last year the National Catholic Reporter won an award for “general excellence” from the Catholic Press Association. But in Donohue’s world, Catholics are anti-Catholic if they don’t want to cover up charges of abuse, and even exacerbate the sex abuse crisis:

Without getting into the gutter with those whose prurient interests make ordinary voyeurs appear normal, it will not be repeated here exactly what was said.

Among the most offensive chroniclers is psychologist Mary Gail Frawley O'Dea: her anger, which is so over the top as to require professional treatment, wrote a piece in the National Catholic Reporter that is impossible to top. Last month, the Philadelphia Daily News went tabloid with its "made for Hustler" contribution. Maureen Dowd's affection for lurid accounts was on display yesterday in the New York Times, and it so impressed the increasingly unhinged Christopher Matthews that he read a selection from it last night on the air.

We know what's going on: get Catholics so riled up that they will demand the Church adopt the liberal agenda on sexuality. They just don't get it: it was the detour from orthodoxy that allowed the abuse scandal to take hold in the first place.

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Donohue: Everyone in the History of the World has Hated Gay People

Submitted by Brian Tashman on February 25, 2011 - 11:04am

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that a group of openly gay soccer fans requested that the European Championships soccer matches set up separate seating for gay and lesbian attendees out of fear of anti-gay violence in Poland. Catholic League president Bill Donohue unsurprisingly took offense to the way the reporter cited “the teachings” of the Catholic Church as a reason for anti-gay views that are commonplace in Poland, and derided the “gay-crazy and anti-Catholic” media for pointing out the church’s attitude towards gays. “If being opposed to homosexuality makes one phobic, then almost the entire world (throughout all of history) suffers the same malady,” Donohue claims, “How about adultery and incest—is opposition to them also phobic?”

Donohue, no stranger to consistently promoting anti-gay bigotry himself, said in a statement:

Some homosexual Polish soccer fans are demanding that a separate seating section be created at the 2012 European Soccer Championship in Poland; they claim that gays and lesbians might otherwise be subjected to harassment and violence. Their plea would be of no interest to the Catholic League save for a comment made by the AP reporter who wrote the story from Warsaw.

The following is a direct quote from the news story: "Homophobia also remains deeply embedded in Poland because of the legacy of communism which treated homosexuality as a taboo and the teachings of the church in the predominantly Roman Catholic country."

Let's follow the logic. Every world religion is either opposed to homosexuality or takes no position on it; not one finds it acceptable. So if being opposed to homosexuality makes one phobic, then almost the entire world (throughout all of history) suffers the same malady. Not only that, we are to believe that the problem in this case is not delirious homosexuals taking up the cause of segregation, it's the Catholic Church's teachings on sexual ethics.

How about adultery and incest—is opposition to them also phobic? That such ideological nonsense can appear in a sports article in a prominent media outlet shows just how far standards have fallen in journalism. It also shows how gay-crazy and anti-Catholic many in the media have become.

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Donohue: God Doesn't Look Out For Progressive Religions

Submitted by Brian Tashman on February 16, 2011 - 1:50pm

Bill Donohue purports to defend religious Americans from anti-Christian and particularly anti-Catholic prejudice, but appears to find no problem with smearing others from Jews and gays and lesbians to victims of child molestation with his own bigoted and inflammatory remarks. The head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights also relishes another target: people of faith who disagree with his ultraconservative ideology, who he says are “no more Christian than the man in the moon.” Like other Religious Right groups and leaders, Donohue has a long history of criticizing and vilifying progressive Christians, especially progressive Catholics, even though his organization claims to defend the rights of Catholics “to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.”

Today, the self-proclaimed adversary of “anti-Christian hate speech” released a statement saying that God doesn’t care about mainline Protestant churches.

Donohue called a recent study showing a decline in attendance rates at mainline Protestant denominations as proof that God is only “looking out for those religions that don’t treat Scripture as if it were a post-modern text to be deconstructed by left-wing ideologues.” According to Donohue:

With the exception of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and to some extent the American Baptist Churches, all the other churches with declining membership hold liberal views on abortion and gay rights. Moreover, the smallest decline among the Baptist churches was registered by the most conservative among them, the Southern Baptist Convention (down .42). By sharp contrast, all the religions that experienced a growth in membership are pro-life and pro-marriage (normatively understood).

In other words, those religions whose teachings on abortion and marriage approximate the views of the New York Times and NPR are in free fall. Looks like God is truly looking out for those religions that don't treat Scripture as if it were a post-modern text to be deconstructed by left-wing ideologues.

Following Donohue’s logic, since the Roman Catholic Church grew by just 0.57% and the Mormon LDS Church attendance rate increased by 1.42%, does that mean that God is looking out for Mormons more than Catholics?

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Donohue Defends Museum Censorship, Blames “Gay Activists” and “Bathhouses” for Artist’s Death

Submitted by Brian Tashman on January 26, 2011 - 1:32pm

Last month, Catholic League president Bill Donohue’s ugly attack on the Smithsonian’s Hide/Seek exhibit led to the censoring of a work by late artist David Wojnarowicz after Republican leaders joined in his demand that the Smithsonian pull Wojnarowicz’s film. The Smithsonian’s decision to censor the exhibit received widespread scrutiny and criticism. In yesterday’s New York Times Michael Kimmelman wrote about the European reaction and a British museum that is now screening the censored film. “So the Smithsonian’s surrender at least had the virtue of reminding everyone on both sides of the Atlantic of his work,” writes Kimmelman, “the voices of those who died from AIDS mostly died with them, but Wojnarowicz’s, deep and distinct, returned in recordings played at the Tate.”

But Donohue, who pays himself handily to find almost anything and everything offensive, was not taking any more criticism of his censorship-advocacy.

In a statement released today, Donohue defended his campaign for censoring the Smithsonian and blamed the LGBT community for killing Wojnarowicz, who died as a result of AIDS. Never a fan of civility, Donohue attacks Kimmelman for branding “the artist a hero who fought bigotry” and said that if Wojnarowicz “followed the teachings of the Catholic Church on sexuality, he would be alive today.” Donohue instead says “gay activists” had “killed the artist,” saying:

The man who made the vile video died of AIDS. Had he followed the teachings of the Catholic Church on sexuality, he would be alive today. Instead, he blamed the Church. That's why he liked to make videos showing Jesus' head exploding, and that's why he called John Cardinal O'Connor—whose archdiocese spent more money fighting AIDS than any other private source—a "fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas." Yet Kimmelman brands the artist a hero who fought bigotry!

It was not the Catholic Church that killed the artist, David Wojnarowicz: it was gay activists, many of whom are in the artistic community. They were the ones who demanded that the bathhouses be kept open, even as their brothers were dying left and right. To exploit this tragedy any longer is sick. Catholicism is the answer, not the problem.

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