Administrators at Stanford University have not disciplined band leaders for last week’s bigoted outburst against the Irish and Catholics. Last weekend, before the game with Notre Dame and during half-time, Stanford’s band parodied the Irish famine and staged a mock confrontation between a Catholic cardinal and the devil; the Irish were labeled “stinking drunks.”
William Donohue voiced the league’s concerns:
“It was only right that Stanford’s athletic director, Ted Leland, apologized for the outrageous behavior of his band. But it is not enough, not when everyone knows that if Native Americans had been parodied as drunks, the university would have taken a much more censorial approach. And just imagine what the reaction would have been had the band performed a mock debate between an Indian witch doctor and an evil spirit.
“The Catholic League does not desire to have the culprits forced into one of those mind-control sensitivity training seminars that are popular with the multiculturalists at Stanford. But it does demand that sanctions be taken against the offending students. At the very least, the students who partook in this bigoted exercise should be required to make a public apology to the Irish, Catholics and Notre Dame. Not to make this a precondition for continuing with the band would be to give the green light to bigotry.”
