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
