On last night’s “Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” the host made the following joke about the new Confession application:
“Well, the Catholic Church has come out with a new app for the iPhone. This is real. You can confess right on the phone. How perfect is that? You can now cheat and atone for your sins all on the same device. Perfect for Bret Favre. Fantastic. You know what the name of the app is? I’m not making it up. It’s called ‘Priest in Your Pocket.’ Really. Is that the best name they could come up with?”
Catholic League president Bill Donohue commented as follows:
When the app was released, we knew it would be fodder for comedians and pundits, but we decided to say nothing unless the remarks were insulting or totally misleading. That is why we said nothing about a joke made by George Lopez about the app, nor did we comment on Maureen Dowd’s piece on the same subject. In fact, we never commented on Leno’s app joke made a few days ago. That’s because none of these quips were disrespectful. But last night’s monologue by Leno is a different story.
The worst part of Leno’s commentary was not that he deliberately misled the public—there is no such thing as Confession on the phone (the app is designed to help Catholics prepare for Confession)—it was his below the belt shot at priests: The name of the app is called, “Confession: A Roman Catholic app.” It is not called “Priest in Your Pocket.”
Why does this matter? Because Leno has an obsession with priests—he habitually portrays all of them as sexual predators. If you have any doubt about the man’s pathological condition, click here to read about some of his previous remarks (we list more than 30 of them). There is no late-night host who even comes close to matching Leno’s bigoted record.
Contact the executive producer: Debbie.vickers@nbc.com
