It's Advent, and one of the annual routines of the season has appeared: the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights' president William Donohue is out in public, generating embarrassment for the Faith by his complaints over trivialities.
The League's press releases for the past 30 days show a lot of activity. Some of is spot-on right, but some of it's just wrongheaded:
November 9: Some dolt in Wal-Mart's customer service department sent out his personal insulting opinions to a Christian customer. CL demanded that the company "[withdraw] its insane statement regarding the origins of Christmas", and called for a boycott.
My take: Wal-Mart, for all its faults, is a company that knows its middle-American customer base, and anybody who actually thinks that the guy's statement was really Wal-Mart's statement is deluded. This looks like a case of rash accusation by Donohue.
November 22: Mr. Donohue takes a public college in Florida to task for allegedly banning Christmas music from a December concert. The media story that triggered his complaint was in error, and Donohue had to apologize.
My take: Here there are two mistakes: (1) acting on a media report without confirming it, and (2) failing to indicate in his own press release that his complaint was based on a media report and not on any information directly reported to CL. Mistake #1 is an injustice to the college, and mistake #2 is an injustice to the Catholic faithful who support him and join in his publicity campaigns.
December 1: This time Donohue takes on Lands' End for avoiding the word "Christmas" in its catalog. Once he got a statement from customer-service defending it, he took to the warpath.
My take: Are we starting to see a pattern here? Take a little grievance against some company's P.C. approach in its advertising, and complain to customer service. Sometimes you'll get back a stupid or even offensive reply from a low-level staffer, and if you're a publicity hound, you can take that as a golden opportunity to raise holy heck about it. In the end, the top level of the company will issue a statement disavowing the foolishness of the temp who wrote the offensive reply, and you can declare victory.
Now, if you were to ask me (and I know you didn't, but bear with me) the sensible, constructive thing to do would be to take these grievances straight to the top level of the organization and give the company the chance to set things right.
Seven of Donohue's 20 press releases from 11/9 to 12/9 were about these overblown complaints. That's over one-third, a performance bad enough to hurt his credibility the other two-thirds of the time. Checking his facts and going to the top to solve problems means he'd have less face time on Hannity's show, but I think the image of the Church is not improved by a would-be defender's misplaced complaints and accusations.
