Bill Donohue Is A Disgrace

Nice shit-eating grin.

Recently I wrote a post on the absurdity of Guardian writer Andrew Brown’s reprehensible defense of the Catholic Church in light of the most recent revelations of child abuse. His argument that Catholic priests are no more likely than adults in other professions to rape children is tasteless and irrelevant, especially since it has been documented that Church officials in various parishes and archdioceses actively covered up the abuses.

Until the other day, Brown’s recycled defense of the Church’s child abusers was the worst opinion piece I’ve read about any of the Church’s scandals. But enter Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and loudmouth windbag extraordinaire. For CNN.com, Donohue writes,

Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.

Though this is starting to change, any discussion of employee sexual abuse that took place 30 and 40 years ago must acknowledge this reality. Thus it hardly comes as a surprise that Cardinal Sean Brady in Ireland did not summon the authorities about a case involving a priest in the 1970s. What is surprising is why some are now indicting him, acting as if his response was the exception to the rule.

Selective indignation at the Catholic Church is not confined to Brady. Why, for example, are the psychologists and psychiatrists who pledged to “fix” abusers treated so lightly? After all, employers from the corporate world to the Catholic Church were told over and over again that therapy works and to give the offender a second chance.

Where to begin? First off, Donohue is confusing sexual abuse with sexual harassment. It is true that employers often treat sexual harassment as an internal matter. Sexist jokes and unwanted physical advances—when reported—are generally met with disciplinary action, as they should be. The police are not usually called because although lewd jokes or even an awkward grope are tasteless, the victim generally does not notify the police. Suspension or termination may be enough to remedy the problem. Sexual abuse is an entirely different story. The children under the care of pedophile priests were not merely subjected to harassment; they were sexually assaulted. No one I know of, with the exception of Bill Donohue and KBR, would regard rape in the workplace as “an internal matter.” Victims are entitled to press charges, and they should in order to shed light on the sexual perverts who lurk in our places of business and elsewhere.

Bill Donohue thinks differently. If priests, or lawyers, or physicians, or indeed, even kindergarten teachers are believed to be raping children, Donohue says that their supervisors should handle it as “an internal matter,” as he says is the custom. And handle it that way they did. The former Cardinal of Boston, Bernard Law, handled it by simply shuffling accused child-fuckers from parish to parish where they kept abusing children. I guess this is what Donohue means we he says we should “give the offender a second chance.”

Donohue has made it his sole purpose in life to defend the Catholic Church against all enemies, real and imagined, no matter how corrupt, immoral, disgraceful, and discriminatory the institution behaves. Indeed, whenever a set of allegations arises accusing Catholic officials of child abuse, Donohue steps into the breach not to condemn the abuse, but to decry the “hysterical” reactions that inevitably follow, as if the level of indignation at the Church is unwarranted.

Amazingly, Donohue is not a fringe figure. He can occasionally be seen on the various cable news networks whining about perceived public insults to Catholicism, a hilariously ironic development given the ubiquitous and omnipotent presence the Church once enjoyed in the Western world. Clearly, much progress had been made if Catholicism’s defenders have been relegated to complaining about potshots at the Church which they can do absolutely nothing about. Still, Donohue is a minor nuisance despite his overall irrelevance as a cultural “warrior.” Thankfully, the sixty-two year old Donohue and those who think just like him constitute a literally dying breed. And for this endangered species, extinction can’t come fast enough.

- Max