Bowing to pressure from SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), Catholic activists, lawyers, psychologists and feminists, the Ford Motor Company has withdrawn a Super Bowl ad for a new Lincoln truck, the Mark LT.  The ad shows a clergyman (dressed to look like either a Catholic or an Episcopalian priest) who finds the keys to the truck in the collection plate; a little girl put them there as a prank.  The happy cleric, who thinks the truck is his, is dismayed when the girl and her father show up to claim the keys.  The ad ends by showing the cleric approaching a church marquee; he then puts the letters L and T on the opposite sides of the word US, thus spelling LUST.

Catholic League president William Donohue criticized the protesters today:

“When asked yesterday by the Chicago Tribune what I thought of the ad (it could be seen on the Internet), I had a one-word response—asinine.  When asked what I had to say about the protesters, I said it was ‘absurd’ to charge that the ad ‘trivializes and exploits the sex scandal.’  Indeed, it is worse than absurd—it reveals a deep-seated bias against Catholic priests that is very disturbing.

“Lincoln had the ad consumer tested and found there were no problems.  That’s because the men and women who vetted the ad were not looking at it through tainted lenses.  Unfortunately, the protesters are so consumed by the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church that they can no longer see straight.  Indeed, their obsession has now reached pathological proportions.

“To assign predator status to a priest in an ad like this suggests that the complainants think of priests as child molesters.  Moreover, when SNAP issues a press release charging that the ad trivializes the ‘child molestation crisis,’ it is twice wrong: a) the ad doesn’t come close to implying priestly sexual molestation and, b) more than 80 percent of the real-life victims in the sex scandal have been postpubescent males (not little girls).

“SNAP has done some fine work, but its credibility is undermined when it chooses to see the world exclusively through the lens of victims.”

Here is what Catholic League president William Donohue had to say today about University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill:

“Ward Churchill is infamous for his remark that those who died in the World Trade Center bombing were ‘little Eichmans’ who deserved it.  Indeed, last year he said in an interview that his suggestion that ‘it may be that more 9/11s are necessary’ is ‘a no-brainer.’  Unfortunately, what is not being reported are his remarkable statements on Christians and Jews.

“Churchill accuses Christian colonists of committing ‘genocide’ against the American Indians that resulted in the loss of ‘100 million indigenous people’; he says that this ‘holocaust’ was ‘unparalleled in recorded history.’  This claim is astounding given that historians estimate there were anywhere between one and ten million Indians living in the present territory of the United States at the time of the European arrival.  Moreover, according to political scientist Guenter Lewy, as many as 90 percent of the deaths were the direct result of disease: the Indians had no immunity from contagious diseases like smallpox.  But this will not do for Churchill, and that is because he wants to ‘get the Christians.’

“Churchill also wants to ‘get the Jews,’ which is why he is so bent on trivializing the Holocaust.  For example, he charges that Jewish writers are engaged in a conspiracy to suppress evidence of other historical examples of genocide; he calls them ‘Holocaust exclusivists.’  As for Israeli Jews, he says they are guilty of committing ‘genocide’ against the Arabs.  And by equating Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the European treatment of Indians, he not only twice distorts history, he downplays what happened to Jews under Hitler.

“Some faculty are defending him on free speech grounds.  But higher education does not exist so that all ideas can be exchanged freely—that can be done in a bar.  It’s purpose is the pursuit of truth.  Ergo, Ward Churchill should be fired not because his ideas are offensive, but because he is incompetent.  This is a classic case of academic malpractice.”