Last spring, the Catholic League wrote to David Lawrence, publisher of the Miami Herald, asking him not to accept any more anti-Catholic ads from the Eternal Gospel SDA Church. In response, Lawrence pledged not to allow the identical ad again. To the league’s dismay, his paper ran the very same bigoted ad on February 28.
The ad is one of those dumb apocalyptic statements about “Earth’s Final Warning.” Its message is that we’re all doomed because Catholics have succeeded in enforcing a “National Sunday Law.” To which we say, if you want to work on Sunday and observe Saturday as the Sabbath, do it. Just lay off our religion.
We wrote to Lawrence asking for an explanation and he responded by saying that he was unaware that the ad had run again. He referred us to someone else at the paper and the result of the discussion was positive: the spokesman was sincere and pledged to bring our concerns to a staff meeting that deals with the newspaper’s ad policy. We fully expect, then, that our “final warning” was heeded.
