when a fiery demagogue reaches a new low
For those of you who don’t know Bill Donohue, he’s basically a living ball of pure hatred and it’s his job is to be incensed every time someone says anything negative about him, the Vatican, or brings up the very thorny and very real issue of pedophile priests being protected from their crimes by the institution they serve. He’s also a living, breathing George Liquor impression, worried about commies almost two decades after they became a joke in the nations of the former USSR, and Marxists almost four decades after they became neo-conservative activists and devoted themselves to the causes of the political right. So as you can probably guess, when he was given a guest column, he used it to foam at the mouth with a stunning display of hatred and paranoia.
Considering that Bill is getting up there in age, getting so worked up is probably not good for his heart. In fact, prolonged stress can shave years off your life. But he’s still at it, taking every possible opportunity to make his paranoid fantasies and indignation heard. To give you an idea of what a Bill Donohue rant sounds like, try to imagine an apoplectic banshee howling into the wind. And just to make it more accurate, think of the banshee as a cross between Rush Limbaugh and a toddler having a temper tantrum. Or Glenn Beck. Either way, you’ll get a very similar result. But I digress a little here. What I really wanted to note was the way Bill truly outdid his own rabid demagoguery in the above mentioned column with the following quote…
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.
Holy FSM on a pasta box! Did he perchance want to walk by a college campus and spit in someone’s face as well, just to put the icing on the cake? Or maybe crash a secularist meeting with his wife and have her praise his virility as lewdly as possible in public? Oh, wait a second… That’s right. Our paragon of morals and values is divorced, so ladies, if you’re in the market for a 61 year old with no control over his emotions and most likely to see you as nothing more than a method of boosting the population of people like him, he’s available. And at this point, it’s hard to know how to best mock his inane ramblings because he does a pretty good job of it with no help from me, or anyone else. That quote is just such a perfect combination of cheap, false piety, paranoia and vicious hatred, you want to slide it into a holster and use it like a bludgeon for future debates.
Look, it’s one thing to defend people who have to bear the brunt of real hate speech. But to offend people who you loathe simply because they’re not like you because you can, because you want to, and because you want to use your religion as an excuse to do that? That’s pathetically low and disgustingly exploitative of your faith in the kind of base, earthly way that pretty much every high brow message of the Bible warns you not to do. Then, just to top his already ridiculous antics, Bill wants to boil down the entire idea of how a civilization will proceed in its social development to breeding, in the most offensive method possible. So is that all it is? Pump out an extra couple of babies, the GOP needs all the votes it can get? Does he not realize that he’s using his fans as nothing more than human canon fodder in a bandwagon fallacy?
Maybe, one day, Bill will realize that when someone calls you hateful, offensive and exploitative, you don’t jump up and proceed to spew out the most hateful, offensive and exploitative thing you can. Frankly, it’s amazing to me why there are people who want to be defended by someone with the ability to make them look worse with pretty much every attempt to advance their interests in the press. It has to take an impressive level of denial or a total lack of self-awareness to use Bill Donohue as your face to the outside world.
[ illustration of a dark soul by Neil Blevins ]
“What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity.”
Well, I didn’t know that is what motivated me. Nice to be told.
Though, I thought what motivated me was a desire for freedom of expression, respect for my neighbors and fellow citizens, as well as my own moral compass that says, “No, that’s just wrong,” when I see people like Bill continually smothering the rights of homosexuals, secularist, and any other person practicing a non-Christian faith.
Indeed, if the man sees his own flock as mere baby machines, where do we stand? His piece is more than clear about that, but moral anarchists? The man is very disturbing.
By the way, what does FSM stand for? Just curious.
“Well, I didn’t know that is what motivated me. Nice to be told.”
That’s the job of any rabid demagogue. They tell you what motivates you and why you’re the lowest scum of the Earth for it, and it’s for this talent that they get the big bucks they do.
“By the way, what does FSM stand for?”
You mean to tell you that you haven’t been touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Tsk, tsk, tsk…
“You mean to tell you that you haven’t been touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?”
Thank you. I’ve been touched! :)
I read about Bill’s “breeding” hypothesis over at PZ’s blog. PZ said that Bill has two children and that PZ has outbred him. That got a good chuckle out of me, but now I wonder, why only two kids for Bill? I work with a Catholic that has 14! Shouldn’t Bill be against all forms of birth control since he’s such an outspoken Catholic?
I imagine that his wife was on it throughout her “breeding years” and simply told the clueless and hapless Bill that it was “the will of God”.
… religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits…
Y’know, I’ve seen rabbits go at it. They seem to do it the same way every time.
Last I heard, that position was theologically incorrect.