Catholic League president William Donohue wrote the following news release in response to columnist Robert Scheer’s latest piece:
“In today’s article, Los Angeles Times op-ed page writer Robert Scheer manages to mangle the facts and distort the truth about both the Catholic Church and homosexuals. He does so because he is full of hate.
“He dubs the Catholic Church ‘one of the most sexually repressed institutions in human history’ that is responsible for a ‘horrific drumbeat of child molestation revelations’ led by a new pope who is ‘a longtime leader of vicious church attacks on ‘evil’ gays’; Pope Benedict XVI is also accused of scapegoating the media. Scheer is wrong on all counts.
“It is not the Catholic Church’s emphasis on sexual reticence that gave us the scandal, it was morally delinquent priests who jettisoned the Church’s teachings on sexuality. The ‘drumbeat of child molestation revelations’ is pure myth: 81 percent of the victims were male—the majority being postpubescent—and 100 percent of the victimizers were male, thus making this a homosexual scandal (not a pedophilia scandal). But don’t look for Scheer to mention this: He will protect gays at all costs and he will slander the Catholic Church at any expense.
“The pope never called gays ‘evil’ and Scheer knows it. What the pope said when he was a cardinal is that homosexual behavior is ‘intrinsically evil,’ thus reiterating Church teaching. So what? This is hardly a unique position: None of the world’s religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam (as well as the Eastern religions)—accepts homosexuality. And who is Scheer, a non-Catholic, to stick his nose into internal religious matters anyway?
“Not only has the pope not scapegoated the media, but as recently as Good Friday he drew attention to the ‘filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely’ to God. Now if only the Los Angeles Times would rid itself of its own rot.”
