This post is courtesy of Ron Gold.
Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, has been extra busy lately. In the last few days, he’s thrown his ire–or, as Hemant put it, thrown a “shit fit”–at The Simpsons and comedian Sarah Silverman for alleged anti-Catholic bigotry.
But Donohue has really topped himself with a column titled “America’s secular saboteurs,” which was published in The Washington Post’s “On Faith” section. His argument is that secular liberals want to destroy American culture, and starts by claiming:
There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; elements in the Democratic party demonstrate an animus against Catholicism; and secular-minded malcontents within Catholicism and Protestantism seek to sabotage their religion from the inside.
Yesterday’s radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today’s radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them.
If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it.
Just because some people have different values than you, Mr. Donohue, it doesn’t mean they want to cause “societal destruction.” With beliefs like those, it’s hard to believe that Donohue is the president of a major organization; to me, he more closely resembles the physical embodiment of Catholic paranoia.
And then the insights in Donohue’s conclusion get even more bizarre:
The only way secular saboteurs can be stopped is by an alliance of religious conservatives across faith lines. The good news is that this is already happening. In the fight over gay marriage, the scorecard is 30-0: traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, along with a big contribution from the Latino and African American communities, have succeeded in throwing a roadblock at this crazy idea.
The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.
Read that last paragraph again. Yes, he really did just say secular saboteurs are “too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids.”
Remember, Donohue is the guy who gets offended by practically everything, but then spews out highly offensive garbage like this.
I feel it might even be irresponsible for The Washington Post to publish this. It’s unfair to all the sane Catholics. Though in their defense, they did publish a counterpoint.
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