Things I Hate #48: Bill Donohue

I’m what people like to euphemistically call a lapsed Catholic. That means that my parents made me go to a bunch of boring ceremonies, roughly once a week, as a kid, and that, as is the case for most people, they proved utterly irrelevant to my adult life. It wasn’t until years later, after I realized the whole system is bullshit, that my mom told me it was because the public schools in our area sucked and she wanted me to fit in. So at least there was a reason.

I guess I led off with that as a way of hedging my bets re: eternal damnation. Just kidding! When you die, the chemical reactions that kept other things from eating you stop, and you decay into a puddle of organic sludge.

What I’m really talking about is this article, forwarded to me by Mazur. In it Bill Donohue, notorious dipshit and president of The Catholic League, takes time out from his busy schedule of defending child rapists and threatening Bill Maher with assault to bitch about how a lot of people don’t like him much.

It’s sort of hard to follow, frankly, but I think his central thesis is that blacks, Jews, gays, atheists, the liberal media, the ACLU, and Hollywood are quite literally carrying us all to hell in a hand basket. Why the Post would publish it, I don’t know, but whatever; I love the Bill of Rights and will defend to the death Bill Donohue’s right to publicly wipe his ass with six hundred years of social progress. Except that apparently we don’t agree on that either. Fuck free speech, Bull – oops, I mean Bill – Donohue says, I live in a bubble and it would be much more convenient if I didn’t have to deal with anything else. Rather than learning to live in peace with people who disagree with me, I will argue that they shouldn’t exist.

Which is just one good bowl of hash away from being a suicide bomber.

Secularists within Catholicism and Protestantism are so out of control that it makes one wonder how any serious-minded person would ever accuse these religions of being oppressive. Insubordination of the most flagrant kind is routinely tolerated in a way that would never be countenanced at the New York Times, yet the bad rap always goes to Christians. We’re not talking about those pushing for moderate reforms: we’re talking about termites eating away from within.

Asshats like Donohue would have you believe that atheists, agnostics, and people who just don’t take religion that seriously – all of us who live in the real world, in other words – are flushing the whole of society down the toilet. Sorry, Bill. You don’t get to decide what is and is not culture. Why is that hard to understand? Culture is, by definition, “the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior” – in other words, it’s whatever people are doing. You can disagree with anything and anyone you like, but to claim they’re interfering with culture just betrays the ignorance that forms the cornerstone of your entire outlook on life. Society is what it is, and we won’t let you and your friends on the lunatic fringe drag the whole spectrum down with you.

Back to hedging my bets. On balance, since World War Two, the Catholic Church has probably done more good than harm in the world. They’re full of shit, but their hearts are in the right place. And brainless, spineless, dickless, holier-than-thou douchebags like Bill Donohue are a perversion of all of that. The Catholic League can catho-lick my balls.

Fuck you, Bill Donohue.