Tag Bill Donohue

Cooches Are Filthy and Disgusting. Who Knew?

The BillDo is up in arms again. This time, he’s unhappy about a piece that aired on The Daily Show a few days ago about the right’s War on Women, contrasting it to the War on Christmas™. And specifically at a bit where Jon Stewart suggested that, to prevent unwanted government intrusion into their sex life, women could protect their vaginas by placing mangers in front of them:

Vagina manger

It’s hard to tell what exactly it is about that image that has given poor Billy the vapors. He’s called it “obscene” and “vulgar“, “Stewart not only made a vulgar attack on Christians, he objectified women“; an “unprecedented assault on Christian sensibilities“, “anti-Christian and grossly misogynist“, even “What Jon Stewart did ranks with the most vulgar expression of hate speech ever aired on television“; “so indefensible—putting a nativity scene ornament in between the legs of a naked woman—that no one save the maliciously sick would even try to defend it“.

So he’s clearly in a tizzy, but doesn’t say exactly what the problem is, or why this comedy bit should warrant such over-his-usual-over-the-top rhetoric, which means that I need to guess.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been working on a theory of morals, studying what people find to be moral or immoral. This is from a psychological standpoint, not a philosophical or ethical one. That is, he’s not interested so much about figuring out what’s right or wrong, as much as he is in finding out how people think about right and wrong.

One of his categories is “sanctity/degradation”, which concerns purity and contamination: an action is immoral if it contaminates the purity of the person or community. Thus, for instance, I’m guessing that most people would object if someone brought a dog turd in a clear Ziploc bag onto a subway train, because (in people’s minds, at least) dog turds are filthy and disgusting, and the subway car and its passengers would be in a sense contaminated by its presence.

As far as I can make out, this is the explanation that best fits BillDo’s reaction: he feels that manger scenes are pure and holy, and photoshopping one in proximity to a set of ladyparts contaminates it with, I don’t know, cooter cooties or something. Which leads inexorably to the conclusion that Bill thinks vaginas are filthy. I wonder how Mrs. Catholic League feels about that. Or maybe Bill feels this way because he’s gay. Dunno.

At any rate, this seems like his personal hangup. And maybe, until such time as he can get over it, and realize that a vagina is no more dirty than any other body part, especially once it’s been thoroughly washed, ideally by a willing showermate, that he should just fuck off.

(Psychological analysis brought to you by the Institute for Advanced Psychological Research and Bajingo Jokes.)

Catholic Church 99 44/100% Pure

BillDo has a post in which he plays down the Catholic priesthood’s image problem:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the findings of the 2011 Annual Report on priestly sexual abuse that was released by the bishops’ conference; the survey was done by a Georgetown institute:

The headlines should read, “Abuse Problem Near Zero Among Priests,” but that is not what is being reported.

According to the 2011 Official Catholic Directory, there are 40,271 priests in the U.S. The report says there were 23 credible accusations of the sexual abuse of a minor made against priests for incidences last year. Of that number, 9 were deemed credible by law enforcement. Which means that 99.98% of priests nationwide had no such accusation made against them last year. Nowhere is this being reported.

If that’s his standard of purity, then I’m sure Bill would have no problem drinking a glass of 99.98% water and only 0.02% urine, right?

The thing is that very few men in general are child abusers. The question (or one question) is, does the Catholic clergy contain more child abusers than the population at large?

I wasn’t able to quickly find child-abuse statistics for the United States, but I did find the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics for violent crime in 2010, which shows an aggregate of 27.8 forcible rapes per 100,000 victims. The FBI defines “forcible rape” as:

The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Rapes by force and attempts or assaults to rape, regardless of the age of the victim, are included. Statutory offenses (no force used—victim under age of consent) are excluded.

So the numbers are not directly comparable: the report Donohue is quoting concerns itself only with sexual abuse of minors, while the FBI’s number covers all rape. The FBI’s 2010 number excludes sexual abuse of males, while BillDo emphasizes that in the report he’s quoting, “almost all the offenses involve homosexuality“. And BillDo calculates the rate per offender while the FBI counts the rate per victim, which means that BillDo’s number tends to undercount priests who abused multiple victims, compared to what the FBI counts.

Having said that, BillDo’s figure of 9 credible accusations and 40,271 priests works out to 22.3 per 100,000, compared to the FBI’s 27.8 per 100,000. So the number of pedophile priests seems to be in the same ballpark as the number of rapists in the US as a whole. That seems pretty bad, especially for a group that presents itself as the guardians of morality.

BillDo also ignores, as usual, that the Catholic church’s problem is not so much one of having rapists in its ranks — any large organization is bound to have some — but of covering up its members’ crimes. The abuse itself can be blamed on individual priests, sure. But the coverup is a problem for the organization.

BillDo Didn’t Like the Reason Rally

The Reason Rally, billed as the largest gathering of atheists and similar heathens on the National Mall in history, was this Saturday. Naturally, BillDo got his panties in a twist, fell on his faiting couch, clutched his pearls, summoned his smelling salts, and generally carried on as he usually does.

He couldn’t complain that Christians are being singled out for persecution (where “persecution” means not being allowed to hit gays over the head) given that Taslima Nasrin devoted her time to criticizing Islam, and Greta Christina called out the Dalai Lama on Buddhist BS. So he had to settle for complaining about how “atheists always attack us more than any other religious group”.

But he also didn’t like Richard Dawkins:

The big draw was Englishman Richard Dawkins. He implored the crowd to “ridicule and show contempt” for people of faith. “Mock them, ridicule them in public,” he bellowed. Especially Catholics. Dawkins not only mocked the Eucharist, he advised the crowd to ask Catholics, “Do you really believe…that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ?”

Actually, that’s a fair question: does Bill actually believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, that it turns into the body of Christ? If no, would he please come out and say so publicly?

And if yes… WTF? I mean, seriously, WTF? Here we are, in the 21st century; we have the Internet and DNA sequencing and space probes and lasers and telemedicine and drought-resistant crops and wonders beyond measure, and he’s still holding on to primitive superstitions about bread magically turning into meat? ‘Da hell?

I’m sorry, but if you’re a grown-up and still believe in magic, you don’t get to complain when people point out how ridiculous that is. If you can’t grow up and join the 21st century, then at least try for the 20th.

FFRF Ad in NYT

The Freedom From Religion Foundation ran a full-page ad in the New York Times today. The ad takes the form of an open letter to Catholics, urging them to “quit the Roman Catholic Church”.

Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers? When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church’s antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.

Right on cue, BillDo is offended.

The ad blames the Catholic Church for promoting “acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, overpopulation, social evils and deaths.” It says the bishops are “launching a ruthless political Inquisition” against women. It talks about “preying priests” and corruption “going all the way to the top.” In an appeal to Catholic women, it opines, “Apparently, you’re like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go.”

Bill doesn’t rebut any of these charges. Presumably he doesn’t disagree with them; he just thinks it’s impolite for the FFRF to point out these problems.

And then, just to prove what a class act he is, there’s this:

FFRF is led by a husband and wife team, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker. Fortunately for Gaylor, her mother did not follow through on the advice she gave women in her book, Abortion Is a Blessing.

Oh, Billy! Will your furious tantrums never cease to make me giddy with schadenfreude?

Oh, the Irony!

In a post railing against the organization Catholics for Choice, BillDo writes:

Here’s another irony: there really is no organization called Catholics for Choice. It has no members, and is in fact nothing more than a well-funded letterhead, sponsored by the establishment.

I’ve been keeping a distracted eye on the Catholic League for years, and for all intents and purposes, it’s just Billy and his Electrified Rage-Powered Press Release Machine. So he might not be the best person to complain about one-man operations that look like large organizations.

This press release was written and approved by Americans for Transparency in Douchebaggery. For immediate release. All rights reserved. And your mother dresses you funny.

Fact-Checking the BillDo

Bill Donohue is in fine form this morning. As I read his apoplectic hissy fit over the fact that New York City will now mandate sex education, I can practically see the flecks of spittle flying out from the monitor and feel the floor shake as he stamps his feet:

We’ve had de facto sex-education in New York City for decades—that’s how long we’ve been shelling out condoms to students. And what has it gotten us? Moreover, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, literally tens of millions of condoms have been promiscuously distributed all over the city to anyone who wants them. And yet the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket.

There is a sex-education program that could work, and it is one that is similar to the approach being used to discuss smoking. We don’t tell kids not to smoke and then instruct them on the proper way to inhale. No, we show them horrifying pictures of a smoker’s lungs. We tell them of the physical pain they are likely to endure by smoking. We tell them how it will shorten their life expectancy.

So… sex is like smoking? He wants kids to grow up and ideally never have sex ever? I have a mental image of a chaste couple getting married, and when they are finally allowed by their church to have sex, on their wedding night, all they can think of is the pictures of diseased cocks and pussies they got shown in their BillDo-style sex ed class.

There was something else I meant to mention. What was it?… Oh, right! “the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket“.

You know what’s cool about the Internet? You can look shit up. In the US, which is where New York is, we have an institution called the Centers for Disease Control, part of whose job it is to keep track of incidences of diseases, including STDs. Here’s a form that’ll show you data about STDs by disease, year, age, and other criteria. Here’s another that lists fewer criteria, but has data for more years.

So in the second one, if we look up New York, grouping by disease and by year, we get:

(Click to see the whole thing. All rates are per 100,000 people.)

The thing I get from that is that gonorrhea is at a 20-year low, syphilis is a quarter of what it was in 1990, and the only one that’s on the rise is chlamydia, about which the CDC writes in its 2009 trends report:

Continuing increases in chlamydia diagnoses likely reflect expanded screening efforts, and not necessarily a true increase in disease burden; this means that more people are protecting their health by getting tested and being linked to treatment. This is critical, since chlamydia is one of the most widespread STDs in the United States.

Now, unfortunately all of these stats are for New York State, not just New York City. But I think if STDs in NYC were “skyrocket”ing as BillDo says, we’d know about it.

No, I think a simpler and far more plausible explanation is that, as usual, Donohue is pulling stuff out of his — or someone’s — ass. But what can you expect from someone whose job it is to pontificate about offenses to a magic man and his fluffers?

Update, 12:26: Clarify what the numbers in the graph mean.

I Agree With Bill Donohue

On Friday, BillDo wrote

The Catholic League would like to go further: it’s time to shut down the faith-based program altogether.

and my head went asplodey.

Okay, so we have different reasons for thinking that the faith-based program set up by George W. Bush should be shut down. I think it’s because the government shouldn’t be involved in promoting religion — either promoting one religion over another, or favoring religion over non-religion, or vice-versa — whereas Bill… well, here’s what he has to say:

When Sen. Obama was running for president three years ago, he pledged support for faith-based programs provided they were emptied of any faith component: he opposed the right of faith-based programs to maintain their integrity by hiring only people of their faith.

In 2009, the Obama administration balked: it said it would decide on a case-by-case basis whether a funding request from a faith-based program was acceptable. In 2010, many members of this program pushed to pare back religious liberty provisions that were extant.

When faith is gutted from faith-based programs—when Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Jews can’t hire their own—we are left with a carcass. […] The goal, obviously, is to convert these religious entities into full-blown secular organizations. It would be better not to let them hijack these programs in the name of assisting them, thus it makes sense to shut them down.

In other words, not only does he want Catholic charitable organizations to get federal assistance, he also wants them to be able to discriminate in hiring. Because hey, what’s the point in running a soup kitchen if the actual soup is ladled by a Protestant or a Jew, right?

That’s the problem I have with religious charities: they’re easily abused to be a tool for proselytizing: offer someone a free meal, but only after they listen to a sermon, or a lecture on the virtues of $RELIGION. In other words, advertising, just like when a business hands out sun visors with its logo on them at the county fair, or when the guy who’s selling time-shares offers to take you out for lunch so he can convince you to buy what he’s selling.

Obviously, the government has an interest in promoting the good done by religious organizations, but too often it seems that the organizations themselves see the good not as a goal in itself, but as a means toward a different end, often proselytizing. Recall that last year, Catholic Charities ceased its operations when it was told that it had to either stop discriminating against gay couples or stop accepting government money.

But if they can’t bring themselves to do good because it’s good, screw them. We don’t need to pump government money into churches’ advertising budgets.

“Religious Liberty”

BillDo is upset over the upcoming vote on legalizing gay marriage in New York state:

The New York State legislature is one vote away from passing a gay marriage bill. What is holding it up is pressure from Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others: they want to insulate religious institutions from state encroachment. That they have to fight for their First Amendment rights shows how threatening gay-marriage legislation really is.

The threats to religious liberty are not hypothetical. …

Well, thanks for clarifying that opposition to marriage equality comes from religious quarters. This confirms what I and others have been saying for a while.

But wait, what’s this? Threats to first-amendment rights? And non-hypothetical ones? As a properly sensitive liberal guy, I’m certainly all for protecting everyone’s freedom, to the extent required by the first amendment and the Kumbaya Act of 1993. So do tell, Bill: what exactly are these real, non-hypothetical threats?

The threats to religious liberty are not hypothetical. A New Mexico photographer who refused to photograph a gay couple’s commitment ceremony was forced to pay the couple’s attorney’s fees; Christians in New Jersey who objected to allowing a gay union ceremony in their privately owned facility have had their tax-exempt status stripped; a psychologist from Georgia was fired after she declined to counsel a lesbian about her relationship. And so on.

In other words, there are real concerns that if gay marriage passes in New York, religious liberty will be jeopardized.

First of all, there’s nothing in there about marriage. All of the above can already happen; extending marriage rights to gay couples wouldn’t change anything.

For another, I fail to see words like “church”, “synagogue” or “mosque” in those examples, so it’s not clear which religious rights are being trampled.

But most importantly, what I see is three examples of people being bigots and getting slapped for it.

In other words, the “religious freedom” BillDo is crusading for is the right to hang a “no faggots” sign on the door of one’s business. Because hey, that’s what Jesus would want.

Here’s a hint, Billy-boy: if you’re beating someone over the head with a stick, and someone takes away your stick, your rights aren’t being trampled, and you don’t get to play the victim.

Fact-Checking the BillDo

Recently, BillDo farted the following onto the intertubes:

Moreover, Jenkins wrote that “Out of 100,000 priests active in the U.S. in this half-century, a cadre of just 149 individuals—one priest out of every 750—accounted for over a quarter of all allegations of clergy abuse.” In other words, almost all priests have never had anything to do with sexual molestation.

(italics in the original).

Just for comparison, the Wikipedia page for Crime in Detroit, Michigan, says that the murder rate there was 40.1 per 100,000 people in 2009.

Assuming that each murder was committed by a different person, this means that about one Detroiter out of every 2500 accounted for all of the murder in 2009. In other words, almost all Detroiters are not murderers.

So by BillDo’s reasoning, Detroit does not have a murder problem. Good to know. Presumably if I gave him a glass of water with only one part of arsenic in 750, he’d drink it.

Irony O’ the Day

BillDo, complaining about Catholics for Equality, a group of gay Catholics who support the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

Archbishop Broglio’s response pulled no punches. He wondered how Catholics for Equality got the authority to identify itself as a Catholic entity, maintaining “it cannot be legitimately recognized as Catholic.”

He’s right. While any group can slap the label Catholic on itself, bona fide Catholics are under no obligation to acknowledge it. And by bona fide, I simply mean Catholics not in open rebellion against the teachings of the Magisterium.

So a guy who heads a group with “Catholic” in its name but with no official connection to the Catholic church, who spends his time on talk shows speaking on behalf of the Catholic church, is complaining about a group with “Catholic” in its name speaking on behalf of… um, speaking on behalf of its members, as far as I can tell from BillDo’s release.

Is it just me, or are many conservatives so utterly lacking in introspection that they can’t recognize when they’re being hypocrites? Or do these champions of absolute morality hold to the absolute rule that “it’s not wrong when I do it”?

I hereby proclaim today to be Everybody Make Fun of Bill Donohue Day.