Catholic League president Bill Donohue explains why the Freedom from Religion Foundation is opposed to the decision by the U.S. Postal Service to issue a Mother Teresa stamp later this year:
Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-president, with her husband Dan Barker, of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and she is leading the atheist crusade against the Mother Teresa stamp. She reasons that the Post Office should not honor a religious figure. The Post Office replies that Mother Teresa was selected because of her humanitarian work.
When asked about a previous stamp honoring Malcolm X, a leader of the Nation of Islam, Gaylor said, “Malcolm X was not primarily known for being a religious figure.” She is correct. But she sounds like a white racist when she dresses down Rev. Martin Luther King: she said he “just happened to be a minister.” Really? We’d like to hear her explain that to African Americans at a Sunday service. Perhaps she can get the NAACP to recast King as a secular orator, and not as a black clergyman, during Black History Month (which starts on Monday).
What is really driving Gaylor’s hatred of Mother Teresa, besides her virulent anti-Catholicism, is the saintly nun’s opposition to abortion. She accuses the Albanian nun of making an “anti-abortion rant” during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. As a matter of fact, the “rant” amounted to her saying that “abortion was the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.”
To understand why abortion hits a nerve with Gaylor, consider this. Her mother, Annie Nicol Gaylor, founded the Freedom from Religion Foundation in 1978. And just two years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion-on-demand, she released a book titled, Abortion Is a Blessing. This is not the kind of book that someone who is reluctantly pro-choice writes: it could only be written by someone who sees abortion as a positive good. Looks like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
