Bill Donohue comments on the latest attack on the Duggar family:
Sarah Palin, and her daughter Bristol, have rightly slammed the mainstream media for bashing the Duggars as hypocrites while continuing to laud Lena Dunham, the celebrity who sexually molested her own sister. But it’s not just the secular media that are guilty of rank duplicity—it’s hit the Catholic media.
On the front page of the National Catholic Reporter, a newspaper and website which opposes every Catholic Church teaching on sexuality [click here], there is an article by David Clohessy, the director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). He condemns the Duggars because “no one told the police” about Josh Duggar’s sexual molestation of his sisters.
In the 1990s, David Clohessy knew about the crimes committed by a sexual molester but never called the cops. The abuser was his brother Kevin, then a priest.
It gets worse. In his article today, David Clohessy slams Bishop Robert Finn, who previously led the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, for not reporting a disturbed priest who downloaded crotch-shot pictures of fully-clothed girls (there was one non-pornographic photo of a naked girl) to his computer. Yet the founder of SNAP, Barbara Blaine, who works closely with Clohessy, wrote to the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners in 2009 pleading with the panel to go easy on Dr. Steve Taylor: he is a former SNAP shrink who was sent to prison for downloading child pornography to his computer.
Child sexual abuse of any kind is abhorrent and must be unequivocally condemned. There are phonies on the right and phonies on the left, and all of them deserve to be rebuked. That some are also shameless is beyond question. Don’t these people have mirrors in their house?
