UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Michael Sean Winters on Aug. 30, 2012 Distinctly Catholic
Nothing quite like being attacked by Bill Donohue to make a liberal Catholic’s day. Donohue is to informed discourse what Hurricane Isaac is to the Louisiana coast, all blustery and destructive wind. Yesterday, Mr. Donohue issued this press release attacking my post about the arrest of Archbishop-elect Salvatore Cordileone for driving while under the influence.
The key paragraphs are these:
Winters, like a lot of embittered Catholic “progressives,” is obsessed with homosexuality. That is why he was unable to write one paragraph in his screed against Cordileone without mentioning this subject. The context? Winters wants the bishop to “think with greater compassion about the complicated lives we all lead today.” He also wants the bishop to show an “approriate [sic] humility and humanness.” All of this is code for “shut up and leave the culture to us.”
Gay blog sites have also picked up on this theme. Why? San Francisco is a city where men [read: gays] are free to walk around naked in the street in front of women and children. They can even walk into McDonalds totally nude and park themselves next to Ronald McDonald, provided, the law says, they place a towel on their seat (hygiene matters). Next month homosexuals will whip each other in the street and have sex in public at the Folsom Street Fair. This is the city that Cordileone will soon inherit.
First, I do not think any fair reading of my many blog posts would reveal an “obsession” with the issue of homosexuality. Certainly, I have never written a paragraph like that second one quoted above which is dripping with the kind of explicit detail that leads one to wonder if the author’s interest in the topic is not properly termed prurient. I was certainly unaware of the laws about entering McDonald’s naked, or the goings-on at the Folsom Street Fair, but Mr. Donohue seems unnaturally fascinated by them. I wish he had kept his fascination to himself: I will never enter a McDonald’s with the same blissfully simple desire for a Big Mac again without being disturbed by the image he so painstakingly paints.
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