"Sadly, there is also a market for Jew-bashing cards. Millions of people hate gays. Ditto for Muslims. White racists abound. But there are no cards, thank God, that attack these groups. Just Catholics."
"If a group of white anti-black bigots dressed up as Al Jolson and mocked African Americans, no one would excuse them...."
"For starters, would [the Brooklyn Museum of Art] include a photograph of Jewish slave masters sodomizing their obsequious black slaves?"
In an interview for this story, Donohue is energetic, engaging, and unapologetic about his aggressive personal style. "We're not located in Kansas City," he says (a dig at the liberal National Catholic Reporter, which is headquartered there). "New York is a rough town. The people I debate are smart, quick, and tough. I'm not some pious little bluenose, backwoods kid."
Invoking the image of sodomite Jewish slave masters is, in Donohue's view, fair play. "Why is that an invidious comparison?" he says. "Why isn't it analogous? I want a level playing field."
The Catholic League was formed in 1973 and turned over to Donohue's leadership 20 years later. Donohue's genius was to change the terms of the discussion, to present the Catholic League not as a socially conservative group but as the champion of an abused religious sect in a relentlessly bigoted environment. Everywhere the Catholic League looks -- art museum, multiplex, TV set -- an abyss of nearly Elizabethan Catholic bashing gazes back; the league fights back with press releases, letter writing campaigns, boycott threats, and an annual "Index of Anti-Catholicism."
This strategy invites a good deal of media mockery of the "wait 'til the Catholic League gets a load of this" variety. "When any other group complains, they're against discrimination," Donohue says. "When Bill Donohue leads a protest, it's censorship. He's against free speech." This charge clearly rankles Donohue, who insists -- against considerable evidence -- that he opposes governmental decency policing. "I don't want the government to be the agent of resolution," Donohue says. "I'd rather see somebody bashing my religion than see the government exercising censorship."
This last claim should not be taken at face value. Donohue's opposition to government intervention is such that when WNEW's Opie and Anthony radio show staged a live sex act in St. Patrick's Cathedral this August, Donohue's first action was to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that WNEW's license be revoked. The Catholic League has in the past filed FCC protests against a San Diego radio station and a WB Network quiz show; in 1998 Donohue went after the FCC itself, when a subscriber to the commission's e-mail digest posted "a joke that poked fun at nuns." As is often the case, government intervention is in the eye of the beholder.
But these were minor dustups compared to this year's revelations that Boston's Archdiocese housed a de facto pederasty ring that was protected by the church hierarchy. Suddenly the Catholic League was in an odd position. While the rest of the country was talking about child-abusing priests and their accomplices in the bishopric, the Catholic League was still denouncing harmless chestnuts about high-strung nuns and wacky confessional mixups.
"When this happened in Boston, I thought carefully, do I want to get involved in this thing?" says Donohue, who acknowledges having waited out the early stages of the controversy. "The reason we talk more about it now is that this thing blew up. And I wanted to have a voice of somebody who loves the church, who hates the abuse that's going on in the church, and will oppose the efforts of the left and the right -- especially the left -- to impose an agenda."
Donohue decisively inserted himself into the debate in March, briefly becoming a ubiquitous presence on talk shows and managing partly to direct the battle back toward a familiar enemy: Catholic liberals. He has become one of the major proponents of the thesis that the root of the problem was excessive tolerance for gays in the priesthood.
This, however, doesn't address a main cause of public outrage: not just that child abuse occurred but that a self-interested church hierarchy was willing to act as an accomplice. In April a widely publicized Vatican meeting of U.S. cardinals produced a lawyerly and mealy-mouthed set of proposals; at a June meeting, America's bishops, who had already emerged as the villains in the public mind, produced "zero tolerance" guidelines that made no mention of their own responsibility. It doesn't take a Catholic basher to be struck by the fact that a church uniquely confident in its opposition to stem cell research, condom use, and war in Iraq is somehow unable to take a strong stand against raping children.
Despite promises that he would not "defend the indefensible" or "carry water for the church," Donohue inevitably has had to speak carefully about Church pusillanimity and promise that real reform is on the way. Damage control is an uncomfortable job for him. In his element, Bill Donohue is a happy warrior, not an apologist. Witness a telling exchange with James Carville on CNN's Crossfire:
Donohue: "Most of the damage was done in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The cultural and sexual revolution that this country went through in the '60s, '70s, and early '80s had negative consequences all over. I'm not excusing it. I'm giving you...."
Carville: "I know. But I lived through the cultural revolution. And I didn't fondle no Boy Scout."
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