Catholic League president Bill Donohue takes on those who are blaming churches for five recent gay suicides:

On his CNN show last night, Larry King opened a segment with Wanda Sykes, Kathy Griffin, Tim Gunn, Lance Bass and others on five recent suicides committed by young gay men. Throughout the hour, the guests blamed the suicides on religion, Christianity receiving the bulk of the blame. No one was more explicit than Kathy Griffin. Saying, “we really want people to connect the dots,” she confidently asserted “that’s why I believe there’s a connection between Prop 8, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, and now the string of teen suicides.” She added that “a lot of the so-called religious leaders play into it.”

These people need a reality check. First, in most of the suicides it is far from clear that anti-gay bullying was the cause. Though it appears that Seth Walsh hung himself after being bullied, the reason the police did not press criminal charges is because the boys never “expected an outcome such as this.” According to several reports, the Rutgers student who jumped off a bridge was non-plussed after he learned that his gay tryst was surreptitiously taped by his roommate and shown online; not long before he killed himself, he even wrote on a gay chat site that his roommate was “a pretty decent” guy. Reportedly, Asher Brown’s family says their boy was “picked on because of his size, his religion [he was a Buddhist who recently converted to Christianity] and because he did not wear designer clothes and shoes.” Raymond Chase’s brother told ABC News that his suicide “was not brought on by bullying.” In the case of Indiana’s Billy Lucas, both the coroner and the school district said there “is no evidence bullying led up to the suicide.”

All of these deaths are tragic, but it is factually wrong to say that all were the result of anti-gay bullying. Worse, it is libelous to suggest that because Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) is opposed to homosexuality that somehow it should be held responsible for whatever bullying did go on. Indeed, to suggest culpability is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to stifle religious speech.

For the past two weekends, the website of Time magazine has featured articles on the absence of women clergy in the Catholic Church. Commenting on this is Catholic League president Bill Donohue:

It is one thing for Time to be intoxicated with the fiction of women priests, quite another for it to enlist on an agenda. Many religions reserve the clergy for men, though Time has no interest in berating them on this subject. Just Roman Catholicism.

Last week, Dawn Reiss wrote on the website of Time about an old woman, Alta Jacko, who thinks she is a priest. Reiss even referred to her as “an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church,” knowing full well that the 81-year-old lady was no more a priest than I am Cardinal Donohue.

Yesterday, Tim Padgett wrote about yet another elderly gal who thinks she is a priest, saying that there are now “more than 100 other women who claim to be Catholic priests in the U.S. and abroad.” He did not say whether the senior citizens had seen Elvis lately.

They can dress up and play make-believe all they want, but at the end of the day, the octogenarians are neither priests nor Catholics: they’ve been excommunicated for their stunts. But not all is lost as they are now available to join the mainline Protestant denominations. They would make splendid ministers, though apparently no one has called.

Contact Time’s managing editor: jim_frederick@timeinc.com

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the way American elites view politics and religion:

In today’s New York Times, there are several related articles on the subject of politics and religion. All feature the way white New York politicians stumped for themselves or others from African-American churches yesterday. What happened at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church was stunning: the pastor, Rev. Clinton M. Miller, literally asked those in the pews to vote for gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo. Neither the reporters nor the editorial board of the Times registered any objections.

Yesterday, CNN reported on the Red Mass that took place on Sunday at Washington, D.C.’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle; it is an annual service for lawyers. There were no endorsements from Archbishop Donald Wuerl, nor was the pulpit extended to any politician or office seeker, but it was attended by several Roman Catholic Supreme Court Justices. Yet this was enough for CNN’s Belief Blog to say that the Red Mass “has drawn criticism for what some see as an unhealthy mix of politics, law and religion.” The some, obviously, include the CNN reporter, and, of course, Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The split reaction of these cultural elites is driven by two forces: politics and race. The elites get upset at even the slightest intersection of conservative politics and religion, and they are particularly incensed when white clergy members are involved. But when the black clergy push for liberal candidates—offering the pulpit and instructing the congregants whom to vote for—that’s quite okay.

It would be great to see how the elites would react if a black minister were to endorse a white conservative, or if a white priest were to endorse a black liberal. Surely it would confuse them. That they don’t see their own duplicity in such matters is revealing.

The Loveland Museum in Loveland, Colorado is hosting an exhibit that features a piece by a Stanford University professor, Enrique Chagoya, called “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals,” that depicts a man performing oral sex on Jesus. It is part of an exhibit, “The Legend of Bud Shark and his Incredible Ink,” that is scheduled to run through November 28.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responds as follows:

On July 1, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter signed legislation establishing Colorado Creative Industries, a division of the Office of Economic Development and International Trade. A week later, Colorado Creative Industries announced grants to various organizations and government agencies, among them being the Loveland Museum; it received $8,500 (click here for article).

The Catholic League has thousands of members in Colorado. Accordingly, we are writing to Governor Ritter and the Colorado state legislature asking them to justify the use of tax-supported dollars to fund anti-Christian hate speech. We know there are no dollars to fund religious programs with public monies. We just want to know how anti-religious programs can be funded with public monies.

Contact Evan Dreyer of the press office for the governor: evan.dreyer@state.co.us

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a news story about a former priest who molested a male listed as John Doe:

On September 28, the Chicago Tribune reported that “former Chicago priest and convicted sex offender Daniel McCormick sexually abused him [Doe] while he was a grammar school student.” We then learn that the student was really a middle-school student, in the eighth grade, when the abuse began. The abuse reportedly continued for five years. According to the lawsuit, “McCormack inappropriately sexually touched, hugged, rubbed and/or abused Doe.”

It’s time to ask some tough questions. Why did this young man not object earlier? Why did he allow the “abuse” to continue until he was 18? The use of the quotes is deliberate: the charge against the former priest is not rape, but rubbing. While still objectionable, there is a glacial difference between being rubbed and raped.

Here’s what we know. We know that this case, like most of them, was the work of a homosexual, not a pedophile. And like most of the cases of priestly sexual misconduct, there was no rape involved. Inappropriate touching is morally wrong, and the offenders should be punished, but the time has come to object to all those pundits who like to say that the scandal is all about child rape. Most of the cases did not involve children—they were post-pubescent males—and most weren’t raped.

Why does this matter? Because those looking to sue the Catholic Church for being inappropriately rubbed decades ago are not exactly the poster boys for the victims of child rape. And because those who hate the Church continue to use the term child rape as a way of discrediting the Church. They lie about this being a pedophilia problem and they lie about the nature of the misconduct. That’s reason enough to call them on it.