Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald:
A vote on elevating Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald to the top post of Chief Justice is scheduled for next week. How ironic it is that a man who has shown a strong animus against the Catholic Church will be voted on during Holy Week.
One of the most despicable aspects of McDonald’s nomination is the incredible media bias that he has benefited from. A Lexis-Nexis search of articles that were published over the last month about his anti-Catholicism turned up 29 articles, 19 of which were AP stories. And most of them were perfunctory: they did not go into any detail about what he did in 2011.
In 2011, when McDonald was a state senator, he introduced a bill that would have allowed an unprecedented power grab: the government would take over the administrative and fiscal decisions of the Catholic Church in Connecticut, and lay Catholics would be authorized to run the internal affairs of their parish, throwing the pastor overboard. Jodi Rell, the governor at the time, accurately called this coup “blatantly unconstitutional, insensitive, and inappropriate.”
The media, for the most part, are allowing McDonald to get away with his anti-Catholic behavior while hyping his alleged victim status as a gay man. There were 48 stories, 27 by AP, stating that some of his opposition is anti-gay. Yet the best anyone could do was to say that there were some anonymous comments.
There is not one person or group identified in all of these stories who has said anything anti-gay about him. This is why House Republican leader Themis Klarides recently said, “There is not one person who has mentioned Andrew McDonald’s sexuality except Democrats.”
This explains why the best the New York Times could do to help him was to say that “his supporters have suggested that at least some of the opposition has been motivated by Justice McDonald’s sexual orientation….”
His “supporters have suggested.” This is their best shot? This is evidence of nothing, absolutely nothing. Conversely, there is hard evidence of McDonald’s contempt for separation of church and state, though the media downplay it considerably. Not surprisingly, the Times never mentioned this in its sympathetic story on him.
Opposing a person for a judgeship because he is gay is wrong. It is equally wrong to lowball a person’s anti-Catholic bigotry.
McDonald is no victim—he is a victimizer.
