Bill Donohue thinks that Mike Huckabee's Christmas greeting ad contains a subliminal message.
Catholic League president Bill Donahue said Huckabee went beyond wishing people a joyous holiday. Donahue said he was especially disturbed by the cross-like image created by a white bookcase in the background of the ad, saying he believed it was a subliminal message."What he's trying to say to the evangelicals in western Iowa (is): I'm the real thing," Donahue said Tuesday on Fox News Channel's "Fox and Friends. "You know what, sell yourself on your issues, not on what your religion is."
Huckabee said the bookshelf is just a bookshelf and shrugged off the controversy: "I will confess this: If you play the spot backwards it says, 'Paul is dead. Paul is dead.'"
This is sad: a formerly constructive Catholic organization is now headed by a man who treats even the shape of a cross as something insidious. Heaven only knows what Donohue thought when he heard Huckabee actually mention the name of Christ!
This sort of nonsense makes me sorry I ever supported the League. Now it seems to fear evangelicals rather than seek common cause with them.
Also, notice the AP's spin:
Huckabee is courting evangelical voters and other religious conservatives in his bid to win the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3. In Texas for a fundraiser, he said the ad was a harmless holiday greeting even though it excludes other religions."If we are so politically correct in this country that a person can't say enough of the nonsense with the political attack ads could we pause for a few days and say Merry Christmas to each other then we're really, really in trouble as a country," Huckabee said.
Apparently for the AP, merely expressing one's own religion in public without mentioning others is considered as offensive -- as "excluding".
That's another sign of the misguided thinking that drives religion out of common culture and into the private sphere. It must not stand.
