1 Boring Old Man

America’s secular saboteurs
Washington Post
By Bill Donohue
President, Catholic League
10/20/2009

^{There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; elements in the Democratic party demonstrate an animus against Catholicism; and secular-minded malcontents within Catholicism and Protestantism seek to sabotage their religion from the inside.}

^{Yesterday’s radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today’s radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them.}

^{If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it. When Jesse Jackson led students at Stanford University in the late 1980s screaming, "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture’s Got to Go," it was a way of undermining this nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. When Yale University returned $20 million to Lee Bass in the 1990s because the faculty objected to its being used to expand its Western civilization curriculum – they wanted multiculturalism – it showed the power of radical secularists.}

^{Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, "Thou Shalt Not." But they continue with their death-style anyway. Secular saboteurs have often seized the arts to make a statement. That’s why the blasphemous often tracks the obscene: if the goal is to put an artistic dagger into the heart of culture, then it makes sense to use all the ammo available by attacking the sacred. And they are certainly masters of that art. From scatological artistic exhibitions to the latest obscene installation, the charlatans have succeeded in politicizing the arts and denigrating Christianity.}

^{There was a time when Hollywood made reverential movies about Christianity. But those days are long gone. Now they just insult. And when someone finally makes a film that makes Christians proud, he is run out of town. Were it not for Mel Gibson, there would have been no "Passion of the Christ." But for every Harvey Weinstein who likes to bash Catholics, there is always someone else waiting in the wings to do the same. The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State harbor an agenda to smash the last vestiges of Christianity in America. Lying about their real motives, they say their fidelity is to the Constitution. But there is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions the censorship of religious speech. From banning nativity scenes to punishing little kids for painting a picture of Jesus, the zealots give Fidel a good run for his money.}

^{Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge. Indeed, practicing Catholics are no longer welcome in leadership roles in the Party: the contempt that pro-life Catholics experience is palpable. The fact that Catholics for Choice, a notoriously anti-Catholic front group funded by the Ford Foundation, has a close relationship with the Democrats says it all. 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.}

^{The only way secular saboteurs can be stopped is by an alliance of religious conservatives across faith lines. The good news is that this is already happening. In the fight over gay marriage, the scorecard is 30-0: traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, along with a big contribution from the Latino and African American communities, have succeeded in throwing a roadblock at this crazy idea. The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.}

^{Bill Donohue is President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He is author of the new book "Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America," published by FaithWords.}

Except for the cuteness at the end about Christians out-screwing the secularists and therefore winning in the end, this piece is grounds for a good dose of antipsychotic medication. But it’s not. It’s a guest editorial in a National newspaper. I can only hope is was put there to be fair to the ill among us, rather than to be taken seriously.

It puts a window into the power of the feelings evoked in a particular segment of Americans. My daughter went to Integrated Public Schools in the South until college. Somewhere along the way, she discovered  that that was seen in her northern universities as an unusual thing. Instead of being a graduate student teacher in her own field, she taught "Multiculturalism," in part because of her background. So when I read, "multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom," I feel defensive. I don’t think she was there to do anything remotely like that and I wonder where Bill Donahue gets that idea. It’s hard for me to see my daughter as a "secular saboteur." She seems like a nice person who enjoys helping people in her professional role as a Child Psychologist. My point is Donahue’s attribution of motive.

But this one really got me, "Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity." I don’t know if he’s talking about gay sex here, or sexual perverse sex, but I expect he would make no distinction between the two. He actually states that the sexual motivation is something that has something to do with him. Gay people are having gay sex because they hate Donahue Christianity. Gay sex bothers Bill Donahue’s Christianity, therefore Gay people are motivated by a "pathological hatred of Christianity," rather than the usual  sexual drive, the same drive that has religious conservatives breeding "like rabbits." Remarkable thinking.

But I think there’s a point here beyond the fact that whoever Bill Donanhue is, he is a self-righteous, hate filled, lunatic who uses his own pathological feelings to assess the motives of others = is paranoid and dangerous. The point is that the central premise of this kind of Christian is that the phenomena in the world they don’t approve of are there specifically to attack them – to destroy Christianity. That is a piece of the history of Christianity, even if it has nothing to do with its Gospel ["Good News"]. The Jews in Jesus’ time were under the domination of their own clergy and the Roman conquerors. The early Christians in Rome were persecuted and operated underground – literally underground if you visit the extensive Catacombs outside of the city. Martyrdom is a major piece of Christian history and particularly the Catholic cosmology. And Hollywood has made much of the persecution of the early Christians by the "Libertine" Romans and others along the way.

^{Yesterday’s radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today’s radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them. If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it.}

I actually think that, in a way, Bill Donahue is right. We are at war with him. We’re not fighting against Western Culture, or Catholicism, or even Christianity. Nor are we fighting for sin. We’re fighting allowing his insanity, paranoid insanity, to rule our lives. We’re fighting the place of the Church as the arbiter of morality. They lost that fight a very long time ago, in Western Culture and in the founding of our country. They had their centuries in the sun after the Romans, but those days are over for all time. Part of the reason they lost their place was that the only thing they could come up with was to persecute or kill people – burn them at the stake, slaughter them in holy wars, assassinate them at their church or clinic, becoming the persecutors themselves. Bill is preaching craziness. And his hated Multiculturalism is little more than the lesson taught to me in a church as a small child:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red  and yellow, Black and White,
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.