philosoraptor42

It's an odd contrast with Bill Donohue loudly proclaiming his nonsense, while Pat Robertson quietly gurgles his agreement:

Pat Robertson: Well he's nothing if it isn't a fighter and it's a pleasure to have Dr. William Donohue with us from the Catholic League. And he's written this very very interesting book called 'Secular Sabotage'. Bill, it's nice to have you here. Tell us what got you going on this book.

("Well Pat, I say this sort of crap all over the media and people actually seem to listen to me. So I figured that if I stir up even half the amount of interest I worked up for that Da Vinci Code movie, I might rake some real money out of it.")

Bill Donohue: Well thank you very much and thank you for all the good work you've done over the years in fighting to keep our Judeo-Christian heritage. What got me going is 16 years of doing this job here. [The job of promoting movies, books and television shows by complaining about them.] Looking at the whole culture and how it attacks Christianity. I decided to put it together. [In other words, conspiracy theories sell well.] And what I've done, I've got over 600 different end-notes, citations. This is not an essay, I've got the evidence here.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Pat Robertson and Bill Donohue are both slapping each other on the back for each other's good work. While Pat Robertson probably doesn't have an awful lot of support for the Roman Catholic Church, being an evangelical protestant himself, I can see how he'd forget all that for the purpose of supporting a fellow gay-basher. I'm more surprised by Donohue though. For all the horrible things he's said in the past, I never thought he'd sink so low as to congratulate Pat Robertson for all his good work.

Still, let's get back to what we've all come to expect from Bill. During the interview, the question of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church came up when Robertson asked if "all these scandals in the Catholic Church [were] part of this secular agenda to undermine to undermine the moral fabric of the church." Donohue replied that indeed they were [the section begins around the 3:45 mark in the video above]:

There's no question that within the Catholic Church you have a you a left element ... I regard them as termites sitting within, trying to eat away the fabric of the Catholic Church. So they lie about it in the Catholic Church, they say "oh, we had a pedophilia problem." It's been a homosexual problem all along. It's not my opinion, it's the actual data from the John Jay Criminal Justice System College [sic] here in New York City which looked at the data. I'm not saying homosexuality causes predatory behavior; I'm saying that most of the priests who have been predators have been homosexuals.

Yet strangely, the very same data that Bill references seems to point towards the complete opposite conclusion:

A preliminary report commissioned by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to investigate the clergy sex abuse scandal has found no evidence that gay priests are more likely than heterosexual clergy to molest children, the lead authors of the study said Tuesday.

The full report by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice won't be completed until the end of next year. But the authors said their evidence to date found no data indicating that homosexuality was a predictor of abuse.

"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith of John Jay College, in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and the increased likelihood of subsequent abuse from the data that we have right now."

Hmmm, must have been missed out of his many citations....

(Via RightWIngWatch)

Cross posted to Atheism