Last year, there was a manufactured wingnut freak-out over a piece of art at the Smithsonian called Fire In My Belly by David Wojnarowicz. It was obviously manufactured because, as we all know, wingnuts don’t really do culture. No one had actually complained about the exhibit before some rube reporter decided to lose her marbles over it, which prompted actual congressmen [Boehner and Cantor] to do one of their little “stick it to the liberals” dances that go over so well with their hick base, threatening to cut funding from the Smithsonian. Anyway, they all said the exhibit was “anti-Christian,” which it actually wasn’t, but one would have to watch the piece to actually understand that, and again, wingnuts don’t do culture. So the Smithsonian caved, because liberals, sadly and pathetically, do that sometimes.
Having been pulled from an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, a film which features ants crawling on a crucifix and a man stitching his mouth together will go on display as part of a larger homosexual exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
The nation’s second largest art museum, CNSNews.com reported last week, will feature A Fire In My Belly, a film by David Wojnarowicz, a homosexual producer who unsurprisingly died of AIDS, within an exhibit titled “Hide and Seek.”
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Part of the larger “Hide and Seek” exhibit, which landed just before Christmas last year at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, A Fire in My Belly, critics note, is an amateurish attempt to say something, but about the only message it imparts is that its homosexual creator was a disturbed and tortured soul for whom a viewer should feel pity.
As CNS described the film, “[t]he four-minute version of the video shown in the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery shows, among other images, ants crawling over the image of Jesus on a crucifix, two halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together, the bloody mouth of a man being sewn shut, a hand dropping coins, a man undressing, a man’s genitals, a bowl of blood, and mummified humans.”
Uh, I’ve seen the piece. One has to be incredibly stupid, if they actually know the context in which the piece was created, not to understand it. It’s art, and again, I know that culture is HARD FOR WINGNUTS, but it’s not difficult to interpret.
Isn’t this wingnut writer oh-so-pissy, though?
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League says he’s not protesting this time around, though:
Bill Donohue, of the Catholic League For Religious and Civil Rights, says his organization will not campaign against the museum’s showing the offensive film. “We can’t be like in a dog and pony show every time they show the stupid video,” he told the New York Daily News.
But Donohue did attack museum director Arnold Lehman, who had defended the anti-Christian film by telling the Daily News, “For a city that prides itself on diversity and creativity, there couldn’t be a better exhibition.” Replied Donohue, “For Arnold Lehman, there is no such thing as anti-Catholic art. Catholics who disagree are apparently too stupid to appreciate the complexities of these masterpieces.”
Haha, NOT a dog and pony show? I thought that was basically the point of the Catholic League’s existence.
Anyway, so to sum up, I just had to report the exact same story I was reporting last year about this time, because wingnuts.
Oh, this is must-see teevee right here! One of my favorite things about being where we are on LGBT equality — with all the momentum moving in our direction and more than half of the country supporting marriage equality — is watching the spokesbigots for the various religious organizations go completely unhinged in public. This is going to happen more and more, so stock up on popcorn. I’ll let Joe set it up for you:
ZOMG! In less than five minutes, Catholic League mental case Bill Donohue hits on every viciously anti-gay lie in the religious right’s arsenal. Polygamy, procreation, incest, and even some wild sh*t about prongs and sockets. SRSLY. Huge huge kudos to the show’s host for firing back at every bit of Donahue’s batsh*ttery.
So funny!
My favorite part is when the very Catholic Bill Donohue suggests strengthening laws to keep child molesters away from children. That would require some really expensive architectural renovations in many Catholic churches around the world.
Bill Donohue Has Become America’s Chief Apologist For Catholic Priest Sexual Misconduct, Says TWO
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Truth Wins Out today condemned The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue after he tried to scapegoat gay men for Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandals in a full-page New York Times ad. Donohue’s full-throated defense and attempt to blame others highlights Donohue’s role as chief apologist for the unthinkable crimes committed against young people at the hands of trusted clergy in the Catholic Church.
In the New York Times ad titled Straight Talk About The Catholic Church, Donohue attempted to distract Americans from problems with the Catholic Church’s poor handling of many abuse cases by saying that “the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.” Interestingly, Donohue never tried to explain why there isn’t an avalanche of multi-million dollar sexual abuse lawsuits in LGBT neighborhoods, churches, and community centers – as there are in Catholic dioceses.
“Bill Donohue’s blame game is a disgraceful attempt to deflect criticism from the Catholic Church’s poor handling of many sexual abuse cases against minors,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “He ought to be ashamed of himself for serving as an apologist for gross misdeeds in the Catholic Church. Instead of showing humility, Donohue is trying to humiliate and bully abuse victims and look for scapegoats.”
Aside from attacking the LGBT community, The Catholic League’s ad pointed fingers at the Orthodox Jewish Community and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). Indeed, Donohue had the nerve to write in the ad that SNAP was “a professional victims’ group” that “are dogmatic in their convictions; their hatred of the Catholic Church palpable.”
“It takes real courage to come forward and share testimony about sexual abuse,” said TWO’s Besen. “Bill Donohue’s attack on these survivors is mean-spirited, cruel and shows a genuine lack of compassion. Once again, Bill Donohue is placing church politics above the harm suffered by real people at the hands of Catholic priests.”
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that fights anti-LGBT religious extremism. TWO specializes in turning information into action by organizing, advocating and fighting for LGBT equality.
Because, of course, as we all know, Santa is the reason for the season. Cue the world’s dumbest man:
A politically correct West Village YMCA has fired Ol’ St. Nick in favor of Frosty.
Kids who once thrilled at sitting on Santa’s lap at the 14th Street McBurney YMCA’s wildly popular annual holiday luncheon will now suffer the icy embrace of a talking snowman and his sidekick, an anonymous penguin, at today’s event.
[...]
“Christmas is not about Jack Frost; it’s not about snowmen,” fumed Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. “We’re not talking about some secular organization that has no religious roots. If they can’t celebrate Christmas, then they should check out. What a bunch of cowards.”
Noted: The conservative Catholic who defends child rapists on a regular basis is upset that kids won’t get to sit on an old stranger’s lap at the Y this year.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a December 3 statement by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) on the video that was pulled from the Smithsonian last week:
AAMD calls it “extremely regrettable” that the Smithsonian pulled the vile video. Nowhere does it even imply that Christians might rightly be offended by the sight of large ants crawling all over Jesus on the Cross. As such, AAMD has made the case for withdrawing all public support for the arts. If this is what they call art—never mind the pornographic images of gay men—and if this is how they treat Christians, then let them find private sources for their work.
AAMD is also guilty of rank hypocrisy. In 2006, it released a report on sacred objects, maintaining that “art museums should strive to accord equal treatment and respect to all religions in the interpretation of religious works of art.” Does AAMD not regard a crucifix as a “sacred object”? Christians would love to know. Or is their interest in “sacred objects” limited to those found in “indigenous societies,” as their policy seems to indicate?
In a large survey of museum-going households released in April, it was found that they are significantly better educated and affluent than the U.S. population; they are also overwhelmingly white. The time has come, then, to stop funding the leisure of rich white people: all public monies for the arts should cease. Quite frankly, to make the working class pay for the leisure of the rich amounts to class discrimination. In the spirit of social justice, a better case could be made to fund professional wrestling—it’s what the working class enjoy.
First of all, Billiam, crucifixes are really only a sacred symbol to Catholics; Protestants tend to find them morbid. [They are.] Second, Wilhelmina, OF COURSE museum goers are better educated than the rest of the population. That’s why none of your hick followers had brought this to your attention until the exhibit had been up for over a month! But it’s been shown that encouraging and funding a wide range of artistic endeavors is GOOD for the people, as it encourages them to run away from the instinct/temptation, promoted by intellectual lightweights like yourself, to be as stupid as humanly possible from cradle to grave. But of course, that’s kind of a moot point, since the Smithsonian exhibit in question is privately funded, no matter how much you lie and say otherwise.
Note to Smithsonian: Do not, under any circumstances, put Frosty the Snowman anywhere in the Portrait Gallery, because Bill’s little head will explode.
Says more about him than it does about gay artists, I think.
Christopher Knight at the LA Times wrote a piece which pointed out that the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue’s characterization of David Wojnarowicz’s work “Fire In My Belly” [part of the Smithsonian Hide/Seek exhibit of work depicting gay love until it was removed due to the caterwaulering of the Thomas Kinkade Prints As Fine Art set] as “anti-Christian” was completely incorrect. I would add that it’s asinine and reveals that Donohue either never watched the video installation in the first place, or he is stupid. There are no other choices.
“It is a sad commentary on gays that they cannot display gay art that is not homoerotic. But then again, if your sole identity is your sexuality, it makes sense. No matter, don’t ask the public, most of whom are Christians, to fund your pornography.”
Uh. First of all, as Knight points out, the exhibit is privately funded, so stuff it on that point, Donohue.
But secondly, much of the art in the exhibit has nothing to do with homoeroticism, much less anything resembling pornography. Knight posted pictures of quite a few of the pieces, so click over to see them. Here are a couple of shots that, presumably, make Bill Donohue’s bits tingle, due to how homoerotically gay they are:
What can be said about this week that doesn’t involve either Christine O’Donnell or Lady Gaga? Very little, so let’s not try.
Lady Gaga went to the VMAs with soldiers discharged under DADT; then she carried it further by calling on her “Little Monsters” to call their Senators, so they did; then she taught everybody a civics lesson, explaining to an uninformed American public what a “filibuster” is; and then she talked directly to the Senate via a recorded video, and encouraged people to continue calling their Senators.
Music this week comes from Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, for two reasons: A. Sharon is awesome. If you like neo-soul/blues/whatever, and ladies with big voices, you will like Sharon. B. I’m going to see her live this weekend, and I’m giddy with anticipation. The songs we’ll start with are “How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?” and “Tell Me.” The first one has shown up in a Late Friday Random Ten before, and I try not to repeat things, but I don’t care, because I make the rules. So let’s listen to these two amazing songs, and then we’ll hit shuffle on the second one and see what the iTunes [which crashed this week, which caused me to have about three panic attacks as I rebuilt the library] does. More videos after the jump.
Um, Bill, weren’t there a hell of a lot of Catholics complicit in Hitlers crimes? And isn’t it stretching the truth beyond recognition to call Hitler an “atheist”?
The pope cited Hitler today, asking everyone to “reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century.” Immediately, the British Humanist Association got its back up, accusing the pope of “a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.”
The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.
Why should atheists today apologize for the crimes of others? At one level, it makes no sense: apologies should only be given by the guilty. But on the other hand, since the fanatically anti-Catholic secularists in Britain, and elsewhere, demand that the pope—who is entirely innocent of any misconduct—apologize for the sins of others, let the atheists take some of their own medicine and start apologizing for all the crimes committed in their name. It might prove alembic.
Honestly, no sane person would claim that it was the “atheism” of Hitler, Stalin and Mao that drove them to their crimes against humanity.
Sounds to me like somebody’s pissed off that his Church has such a soiled name around the world these days, for so many reasons. A lot of it is the child rape problem, which isn’t going to go away.
Oh well, this has been another edition of Words With Bill Donohue.
UPDATE: I wasn’t going to go to the trouble of fact checking this crap, but Joe Jervis did, so here you go:
As Donohue knows, Hitler was in fact a Catholic JUST LIKE BILL DONOHUE and sang in the choir at the Benedictine monastery he attended as a child.
Hitler publicly denounced atheism as inherently communist. “For eight months we have been waging a heroic battle against the Communist threat to our Volk, the decomposition of our culture, the subversion of our art, and the poisoning of our public morality. We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion. We owe Providence humble gratitude for not allowing us to lose our battle against the misery of unemployment and for the salvation of the German peasant.”
The Catholic Hitler also denounced secular education. “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.”
Joe also adds this picture of Bill Donohue’s Pope, for everybody’s viewing:
According to Bill Donohue, gay sex is not abusive if it happens between a priest and an altar boy who’s almost a man anyway:
If a 17-year old guy has sex with an older guy for twenty years, and continues to have sex with him at the age of 38—while he is married with children—is there anyone who would believe his claim that he was sexually abused?
Bill says no. BUT! To clarify: Bill Donohue is completely not gay!
Let me be very clear about this: if some guy tried to kiss me when I was 17, I would have flattened him. I most certainly would not go on a retreat with the so-called abuser
Gotcha.
unless, of course, I liked it.
In which case, Bill Donohue woulda said “BRING IT, Father Bonerpants.” I can’t outdo the self-parody here, so I’m out.
From what I can tell, we’re dealing with a story of a Chilean priest who had a twenty year long affair with a guy, which started when the guy was 17 and under the priest’s authority. Donohue also (accidentally, of course) omits the fact that there are three other accusers for this priest.
So, to sum up, Bill Donohue is basically saying that the teenage boy probably liked it, because if Bill Donohue were gay, which he is super not, it would have been super hot, so quit yer cryin’.
Angry butt-rape apologist Bill Donohue wants you to know that a former abuse victim totally loved it and kept coming back for more so this means that the whole priesty-popey-rapey thing is totally overblown.
Q.E.D. Case closed. In your face. Suck it.
Heh. “Priesty-Popey-Rapey.” Filing that one way for later use.
Whether it’ groping by priests or greed on Wall Street — institutions that don’t change in the face of crisis and public indignation will eventually become irrelevant. If history has shown one truism, it is that nothing is too big to fail.
It seems the disintegration of the church is happening faster than I had imagined. Consider the following stories in the past two days:
A German man who says a priest sexually abused him as an altar boy is demanding an apology from Pope Benedict XVI and compensation “even if the church goes bankrupt.”
Wilfried Fesselmann said then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is ultimately to blame for allowing the priest to continue in his pastoral duties.
“It is an insolence that the Catholic Church was only busy with covering-up and moving the priest around for years instead of dismissing him,” Fesselmann said in an interview this week with The Associated Press.
Fesselmann claims a chaplain, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, forced him to sleep with him and practice oral sex when he was an 11-year-old boy in the western city of Essen.
The priest, convicted of tying up and abusing two young boys in a California church rectory, wanted to leave the ministry. But in 1985, four years after the priest and his bishop first asked that he be defrocked, the future Pope Benedict XVI, then a top Vatican official, signed a letter saying that the case needed more time and that “the good of the Universal Church” had to be considered in the final decision, according to church documents released through lawsuits.
What is important to consider is that these are not isolated incidents. The unrelenting faucet of facts keeps dripping and shows no signs of slowing. The more people speak out – the more other victims are emboldened to do so.
The Papacy of Benedict XVI is essentially over. He has lost his moral authority and the trust of Catholics and others worldwide. Each day he remains, the Pope strains the credibility of the Catholic Church and exacerbates the public relations nightmare. If Pope Benedict XVI loves his church, he will step down.
This is the type of disaster that can happen when hard-headed social conservatives run a church. They are so unwilling to compromise, change their ways or accept reality – that they continue to repeat the same devastating mistakes – even as they go through contortions to play the victim or blame others for their own personal failures.
Not even finger pointing at innocent gay people will work this time. The Pope is left swimming on his own in the middle of the ocean without a life-vest. As the sordid and tawdry headlines continue unabated, this most uninspiring pontiff is headed towards inglorious infamy.
Last year, there was a manufactured wingnut freak-out over a piece of art at the Smithsonian called Fire In My Belly by David Wojnarowicz. It was obviously manufactured because, as we all know, wingnuts don’t really do culture. No one had actually complained about the exhibit before some rube reporter decided to lose her marbles over it, which prompted actual congressmen [Boehner and Cantor] to do one of their little “stick it to the liberals” dances that go over so well with their hick base, threatening to cut funding from the Smithsonian. Anyway, they all said the exhibit was “anti-Christian,” which it actually wasn’t, but one would have to watch the piece to actually understand that, and again, wingnuts don’t do culture. So the Smithsonian caved, because liberals, sadly and pathetically, do that sometimes.
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Truth Wins Out today condemned The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue after he tried to scapegoat gay men for Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandals in a full-page New York Times ad. Donohue’s full-throated defense and attempt to blame others highlights Donohue’s role as chief apologist for the unthinkable crimes committed against young people at the hands of trusted clergy in the Catholic Church.
