Euthanizing gay dogs for Jesus

This is one of those things that sat in an open browser tab for a week, on my computer. For the most part, it is a petty little nothing; the remaining sliver, though, nagged at me. Those of you who know the name Bill Donohue know that he is chief mouthpiece of something called The Catholic League, a group that prides itself on challenging "anti-Catholicism." His apparent relationship with the church hierarchy is, inexplicably, tight. As a man, he is a poison. In the media, through press releases, even through tweets, he exists to hurl bile at all those that challenge the church, or seek to reform it, or dare to condemn it, and at some point he decided that the entire world was but a subsidiary of the church, and that the code of the church would govern all, or at least his own extraordinarily narrow view of it would, and damn the rest of the Catholics, the people who sit in the pews on Sundays, and damn the objectors, and damn everybody else besides. The gays, the birth control users, the insufficiently kowtowing government and their health insurance schemes, Hollywood, the Jews, and everything else: There are few social issues of any sort that Bill Donohue, bishop-authorized defender of the Catholic faith, does not point a crusty finger at, and condemn. There is no forgiveness involved, nor any defense of the poor or the sick. He may, however, dismiss you as a whore.

He is the happy Inquisitor. There is not a speck of God in any of it, or Jesus; he could just as easily be rising to the defense of a brewing company or a shipping magnate as a church. Catholicism begins and ends, in Bill Donohue's mind, with Bill Donohue. He is the Church; the Church is him. And while Bill Donohue is not one of the reasons I drifted from my old church, he has played a large role in me coming to despise it.

Donohue works outside the Catholic hierarchy, but is not isolated from it. He has far greater support among and access to the bishops than you or I have, or ever would. He has defended the church vigorously through the long, slow, and still ongoing slog of pedophilia and other claims of sexual assault against the church, and the church has been conspicuously silent about Donohue using the Catholic name to launch a long string of mean invective and vicious crusades on every other subject he might wish.

A far fuller story, below the fold.