Category: Controversies

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.

This Veteran’s Day, it’s worth remembering the sacrifices that veterans have made, in America and in other free nations. It is also worth remembering that many groups on the Left, and not a few Democrats, are terrorist collaborators who are trying to undermine those sacrifices.
Before you click away in exasperation, let me explain what I mean. “Collaboration” is from the Latin cum + labore, literally “to work with.” Left-wing groups don’t have face-to-face strategy sessions with al Qaeda, nor do they share information and tactics. They do not carry out terrorist attacks themselves. But Western left-wing activists and the terrorist networks function as complimentary halves of the same whole.
Al Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq is simple and coherent: wreak enough mayhem and kill enough U.S. servicemen to convince the American public that the Iraq War is “unwinnable.” Then they will move, in conjunction with their Baathist allies, to convert the country into a vast terrorist training camp from which they can ship jihadi thugs into the moderate Gulf states, Israel, Europe, and the U.S.
The Left doesn’t agitate for the overall strategic goal of creating a new Taliban-like Islamofascist state (though I note that according to their own noninterventionist principles, if such a state became reality, they could do nothing other than wring their hands.) However, their proximate goal is the same as al Qaeda’s: get the U.S. out of Iraq, and humiliate the Bush Administration so thoroughly that no future American government will consider a similar foreign venture.
Consider two groups that get a decent amount of press coverage: Code Pink and Veterans for Peace. The former group has protested regularly outside of Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, carrying messages like “You were maimed for a lie.” Walter Reed is where servicemen go to recuperate after being wounded in Iraq. On Nov. 17, they are promoting something called “NOT YOUR SOLDIER: National Student Day of Action.” “We demand for our schools and communities to be military-free zones,” their Web site screeches. The next day, they are participating in “National Stand Down Day,” where they will block the entrances of military recruiting stations.
It goes without saying that Code Pink claims to “support the troops.”
Catholic Light readers may recall my confrontation with two members of Veterans for Peace last May. One of the men, Marcus Eriksen, told me that the display they were setting up — a thousand white crosses next to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial — was non-political, and contrary to my concerns, it did not use the names of the dead as if their families gave their endorsement.
Marcus was lying to my face. As this Web site demonstrates, their display does include photos and names of the fallen (something I didn’t know until I read about it in a news account). Furthermore, Veterans For Peace supports the non-political idea of impeaching President Bush. They have a prominent link to thoroughly non-political funnyman Michael Moore’s Web site. Another link is to a group that helps people escape their military service. A huge graphical banner promotes “BEFORE YOU ENLIST!,” aimed at discouraging young people from joining the military.
As Marcus said, this is how they “support the troops.”
If al Qaeda could run a negative advertising campaign in the U.S., it would probably try to undermine our country’s leaders, discourage people from signing up for military service, encourage the belief that the Iraq War is futile, and downplay the idea of defeating terrorism by building a more just order in the Middle East. Lucky for them, they don’t have to run an advertising campaign. The Left is making al Qaeda’s points for them every day, through activist groups and through the mainstream media.
As I have said repeatedly here on CL, if you believe the Iraq War to be unjust, that’s your right. It would also be, as far as I understand, your Christian duty to attempt to stop it. But to do so in such a way that encourages this country’s enemies is worse than irresponsible, it is reprehensible. And I don’t see too many Democrats standing up to denounce that.

A tornado in Indiana killed 22 residents of a mobile home community yesterday. It’s safe to say that given a choice, most people wouldn’t live in a mobile home, and so the residents lived there because of economic circumstances. My grandparents used to live in a mobile home due to the high cost of living in southern California, and it was quite nice, but probably not what they might have wanted.
The only way to prevent these tragedies, therefore, is to work for an ever-growing economy to make mobile homes obsolete. In economically advanced societies, houses don’t have thatched roofs or walls made of bundled sticks; people also don’t live in caves or mud huts. Those materials and structures are undesirable and often dangerous, so they aren’t used anymore.
The more economically productive the lower segments of society are, the more wealth they can create and hang onto — including the wealth in the homes where they live. Creating wealth isn’t seen as a social-justice issue, but it can frequently mean the difference between life and death.

The following Lifesite story (through FreeDominion) has me fuming, particularly the following paragraphs:
DIOCESE UNABLE TO INTERVENE UNDER CANON LAW
The diocese says it is unable to act on the matter of Katelyn’s expulsion. Rev. Charles S. McDermott, S.T.D. Chancellor and Vicar Episcopal for Theological Affairs for the Diocese of Sacramento, explained to LifeSiteNews.com that the school is run by an order of nuns popularly known as the Loretto Sisters. Rev. McDermott described the order as “A religious institute in the church which is of pontifical right,” explaining that “they are subject in their internal affairs directly to the Holy See and not to the local bishop.”
In the matter of the pro-abortion teacher the bishop exercised special powers reserved to him in canon (church) law permitting him to intervene in cases of faith and morals, explained the diocesan Chancellor.
Rev. McDermott did however provide key information shedding light on the disagreement between the family and the school. He told LifeSiteNews.com that “The mother approached Loretto high school about it quite quietly, as far as I understand, and asked them to respond to the situation.” The school failed to act, and the matter was “eventually” brought to the attention of Bishop Weigand.
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This is incorrect in my opinion. Because the case concerns the common good, the girl can and should appeal through the local tribunal, which is more than competent to hear the case. She can also appeal to Rome. That being said, even if she wins, if she were my daughter, I wouldn’t send her back to that school. Rather, I would demand a tuition refund, financial compensation for additional damages, and an apology.

You may have heard about the Duggar Family, the Arkansas couple who have 16 kids, ages 1 to 17. Although they are Evangelicals, they abandoned birth control after four years of marriage, embracing the idea that children are gifts from God and accepting as many children as God might give them.
The Duggars inspire mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, if they say that it’s God’s plan for them to procreate 16 people, who am I to say that it isn’t? Truly, they live lives of heroic sacrifice. On the other hand, nowhere does it say in Scripture that we are called to have as many children as possible. Apparently, after child #10, a doctor advised Michelle the wife that she probably shouldn’t have any more kids, which could be a serious enough reason to refrain from having any more. Also, their children’s names all begin with the letter J. But the Duggars are not living on public support, as the husband makes a good living in real estate, and their hearts seem completely focused on God.
But to Mark Morford, a lunatic columnist in San Francisco, the Duggars are a threat to all that is right and good:

Let us be clear: I don’t care what sort of God you believe in, it’s a safe bet that hysterical breeding does not top her list of desirables. God does not want more children per acre than there are ants or mice or garter snakes or repressed pedophilic priests. We already have three billion humans on the planet who subsist on less than two dollars a day. Every other child in the world (one billion of them) lives in abject poverty. We are burning through the planet’s resources faster than a Republican can eat an endangered caribou stew. Note to Michelle Duggar: If God wanted you to have a massive pile of children, she’d have given your uterus a hydraulic pump and a revolving door. Stop it now.

You gotta read the entire diseased essay. Morford’s columns are light-years beyond parody. He manages to pack all of the Left’s hatreds into a comparatively small space, screeching against chastity, marriage, Christianity, Wal Mart, etc. And where did the “repressed pedophilic priests” come from? If someone is pedophilic, wouldn’t it be good for them to be repressed?
Assuming he’s not truly insane, Morford does say a couple of things worth commenting upon. First, overpopulation, even if you believe in it, is a local problem. Arkansas is not overpopulated. It has 20 people per square kilometer, well below the density for the entire U.S., meaning that there are 33 states with higher densities. New Jersey’s population is 2,110% more dense, and somehow most of them manage to eat and clothe themselves, except perhaps in Newark. Even if Arkansas were “overpopulated,” it’s unlikely that one couple having 16 children is going to make much difference.
Second, Morford suspects that maybe in the long run, it’s people who have more kids who will inherit the earth, because his buddies on the Left aren’t producing many “funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring.” Those who are in love with sterility and death will eventually die out, like dinosaurs. Quite perceptive.