The following is Bill Donohue’s letter to ABC personality Barbara Walters:

It seems you have a problem with the Catholic Church.  On the September 22 episode of “The View,” you read a selection from the Catholic Catechism on homosexuality that you found disagreeable.  To be precise, you wondered aloud what the Church meant by saying homosexuality was an “objective disorder.”  To the approval of your co-hosts, you further added that celibacy was “unnatural” or “supposedly” so.  Moreover, co-hosts Meredith Vieira, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar piled on by speaking in the most disparaging way about the Catholic Church’s teachings on women, celibacy and homosexuality.  As the executive producer of this show, you watched approvingly.

 

You have crossed the line.  You and your friends wouldn’t dare read selections from the Torah or the Koran and then castigate Jews and Muslims.  Nor would you ridicule the sexual practices of Orthodox Jews or Muslims during Ramadan.  That’s because anti-Catholicism finds a ready audience in this country today, and it is because of people like you that the bigots are so fat.  You feed them well, Ms. Walters.

 

Sadly, you are no stranger to this issue.  On the July 20 episode of “Good Morning America,” you dipped into America’s ugly history of anti-Catholicism by trying to establish a nexus between John Roberts’ Roman Catholicism and his ability to render an independent judgment from the bench.  After noting his religion, you asked, “Do you think it might affect him as a Supreme Court Justice?”  Yet when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was being considered for the high court, you never once cited her Jewishness as a possible impediment to clear thinking.  No, it took a Roman Catholic to make you nervous.

We urge our members to contact her by phone at 212-456-7050; fax her at 212-456-0951; write her at “The View,” 320 W. 66th St., Bsmt Level, NY, NY 10023; or provide feedback at http://www.abc.go.com/daytime/theview/mail/walters.html.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email