When asked by the New York Daily News about Britney Spears’s latest photo shoot, which depicts racy scenes with a priest in the confessional, Catholic League president Bill Donohue had this to say: “This is all the puzzle pieces coming together. This girl is crashing. She’s not even allowed to bring up her own kids because she’s not responsible enough. Now we see she can’t even entertain.”
Every Halloween, the ghouls come out of the woodwork. But these ghouls are not supernatural. Rather, they are those who take a fun children’s holiday and turn it into a chance to bash the Catholic clergy.
A number of costume stores are carrying two particularly odious getups. Made by Spirit Halloween, a division of Spencer Gifts, the “Happy Priest” outfit makes the person who wears it look like a priest with a visible erection, and the “Thank You Father Nun” disguise depicts a pregnant religious woman. What you won’t see in stores, however, are offensive costumes depicting rabbis or imams in vulgar positions. Apparently, Spencer Gifts prefers to attack only Catholic leaders. (The company did not respond to a letter from the Catholic League asking about this.)
Haunted houses are another venue for those who wish to mock the Church to have their fun. According to the Chicago Sun Times, visitors to Evil Intentions in Bolingbrook, Illinois will see “skeletons dressed as priests and nuns—crucified upside down.” This is because, according to the attraction’s owner, “We try to attack everything…We attack the whole religious aspect of things.” Yet no mention is made of any other faiths being maligned at Evil Intentions. Even more disturbing is that the house treats visitors to “dead babies strung up on barbed wire.” This sort of sickness is unfathomable.
Moreover, the Chicago Tribune has reported that another Illinois haunted house has recently gotten in on the act. Dungeon of Doom in Grayslake had one cast member dressed “as a priest with a large, bloody cross ‘burned’ on his forehead.”
While it can be frustrating for parents taking their kids out for some Halloween fun to be confronted with such sights, they should remember that speaking up about it can truly effect change. As a store owner in Vails Gate, New York told the Times Herald Recordwhen asked about why he sells the costumes described above, “If I’d gotten a complaint, I would have thought it over.”
Update, 10-31-07: The Times Herald-Record has reported that the manager of The Party Store in Vails Gate, New York (quoted above) has removed the offensive costumes from his aisles. He is to be commended for listening to the concerns of Catholic shoppers.
James Watson, the Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, resigned from his position as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after an uproar over remarks he made questioning the intelligence of blacks. It is not only recently that Watson has made such comments—in 2000, he told an audience at the University of California at Berkeley that African Americans are genetically prone to laziness, obesity, and have more active sex drives than whites. Furthermore, Esquire’s January edition of this year quoted Watson as condoning anti-Semitic remarks because “some anti-Semitism is justified.”
What is interesting is that those who have been crying foul over Watson’s recent remark don’t seem too upset over the scientist’s position on infanticide. He has long held that only an infant more than three days old should be considered a “person,” and suggested handicapped children should be killed at birth.
It sounds like in today’s society, offending blacks is cause for termination, but advocating the murder of babies won’t even raise any eyebrows. We’re glad that Watson is no longer at the helm of Cold Spring Harbor, but we think his exit should have been called for a long time ago.
We noticed with interest that “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” bleeped a comment by Halle Berry that its in-house censors didn’t like. According to today’s New York Post, on October 19 Berry pointed to photos of herself using a computer program that distorts images. Upon seeing a picture of herself with a big nose, she exclaimed, “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin.” The last part was bleeped.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. So the next time Jay makes an offensive crack about priests, we look for equal treatment. But we won’t hold our breath as those who write his monologues get paid to offend. Catholics, that is.
The Catholic League commends Martha Irvine and Robert Tanner of the Associated Press (AP) for their 3,272 word article “Sexual misconduct plagues US schools.” AP reporters studied disciplinary records of teachers in every state and the District of Columbia and “found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct.” This thorough investigation reveals how deep the problem of sex abuse in public schools truly runs.
We regret, however, that the writers didn’t take the teachers unions to task for failing to do more to make sure offending teachers never return to the classroom. Though certainly some offenders are punished, many teachers who are suspected of serious offenses are protected by union rules, and merely moved to another classroom. This practice is so common it is called “passing the trash.” In New York City, for instance, it is virtually impossible to fire a teacher because of molestation. In some cases, teachers are assigned to sit in empty classrooms (collecting paychecks), in the wake of serious charges.
We do appreciate why the teachers unions feel strongly that the rights of accused teachers must be remembered along with the accusations of students. We agree, and add that the same consideration should be shown to anyone under suspicion of a crime, including Catholic priests. It is all too often that people legitimately concerned about sexual abuse of children wish to toss out clerics at the slightest suggestion of offense, whether the accusation has merit or not.
As we noted in a recent news release, on October 9 ABC’s “Boston Legal” featured a Catholic nun in full habit uttering a sexual innuendo having nothing to do with the storyline at hand. We branded the show’s creator, David E. Kelley, “Tinseltown’s Ace Bigot.” Kelley has a long-standing animus toward Catholicism.
On October 16, Kelley was at it again. That night’s “Boston Legal” episode featured a Mexican father who wanted to take his son back to Mexico so that the boy could participate in bullfighting. The same nun from the previous episode translated the father’s testimony:
“Bullfighting is a tradition in my country. I would have done it if I had the gift. To climb in, see that big bull stallion. To have that big bull charge me, just me and that stallion bull. One time, me and a big horny bull. Oh, oh … !” She became increasingly excited as she spoke.
We’re not holding our breath waiting for “Boston Legal” to feature such a gratuitous scene with an imam or a rabbi. When it comes to ridiculing religion, Kelley’s sexually charged brand of “humor” only seems to cut one way.
“My Sweet Jesus,” another life-sized chocolate sculpture of a naked crucified Jesus by artist Cosimo Cavallaro, will be displayed in a New York gallery on West 22nd Street from October 27 through November 24. Unlike last spring, when we launched a boycott against Manhattan’s posh Roger Smith Hotel (the boycott was dropped when the hotel cancelled the exhibition of an identical Cavallaro statue, “My Sweet Lord”), the Catholic League will not protest this showing.
When the Roger Smith Hotel originally planned to host “My Sweet Lord,” the work was set to be unveiled on April 1, Palm Sunday, and run through Easter Sunday. In addition, the midtown hotel’s gallery is located on street level, easily visible through windows to the public. Any child strolling with his parents through the popular area could have been subjected to the piece. And comments by the artist certainly didn’t help matters—he previously invited the public to come inside and take a bite of Jesus.
Since “My Sweet Jesus” isn’t going to be displayed on the ground floor of an established hotel in midtown, and since Halloween is more appropriate for Cavallaro’s crafts than Easter, our central objections are not applicable this time around. The Catholic League doesn’t approve of the piece, but this upcoming display won’t be as public, nor will it be an ostentatious assault on Christian sensibilities during Holy Week.
On Monday October 22 at 7:30 pm, The King’s College will host a debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens. The subject will be “Is Christianity the Problem.”
The debate will be held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 64th Street and Central Park West, in New York City. For more information, visit The King’s College website at http://www.tkc.edu/advancement/media/newsrelease.asp?id=55.
“Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” a new film about Queen Elizabeth opens today in theaters. There is nothing new, however, about the way British Catholics are depicted compared to their Protestant counterparts.
According to the New York Times, the portrayal of the “Catholic-led holy war” waged by Spain’s King Philip II against Elizabeth, “with its ominous monks and Latin chants, reeks of ‘The Da Vinci Code.’” And the National Catholic Register’s critic reports that the flick shows that “everything bad, evil and corrupt in the world ultimately is the bitter fruit of…Catholicism.” In contrast, Protestantism represents “conscience, religious freedom, and of course heroic resistance to Catholic oppression.”
Such bigotry against Catholicism is rather old-fashioned. The notion that Catholics are conspiratorial, socially backward and not to be trusted by their enlightened, Protestant neighbors was abandoned long ago by many across the pond. It is far from dead, however. Even now, in the twenty-first century, neither a Catholic nor anyone married to a Catholic may hold the throne in the United Kingdom. This is one of the lingering effects of Elizabeth’s reign.
Bill Donohue had this to say about a recent case of discrimination in Long Island, New York:
“The Catholic League is pleased to announce that it has been contacted by the office of the New York State Division of Human Rights regarding the controversy over the public display of religious objects at Country Pointe at Coram in Medford. We are encouraging owners of condominiums who have a grievance to lodge a formal complaint with the Division of Human Rights. The community’s homeowner’s association is entitled to establish any legal strictures it wants, but it has no right to violate religious liberty. Whether it has or not is not certain. What is certain is that this confrontation could have been avoided altogether had respect for diversity been operative.”