Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments today on Fox News Network host Bill O’Reilly:
“On last night’s show, O’Reilly told two guests that ‘I can’t lead this crusade.’ He was referring to the incident at the University of Oregon where a campus newspaper, theInsurgent, posted graphics of a naked Jesus with an erection kissing another aroused naked man.
“O’Reilly needlessly humbles himself when he says he can’t lead this crusade. Of course he can’t: it is not his fault that he has no constituency, no institutional base. So how could someone who represents no one lead this crusade?
“The Catholic League learned of this incident when some students sent us a copy of the offending newspaper. We quickly had hundreds of color copies made by a local printer. Copies, along with a two-page letter I wrote, were then sent on April 26 to the approximately 90 members of the Oregon legislature, the governor, the state’s three Catholic bishops, the president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, and the chancellor of the Oregon University System. This is not a job for a guy like O’Reilly—it requires the resources of an organization.
“The graphic that O’Reilly held up on TV came from worldnetdaily.com—we e-mailed them the photo and they properly blocked out the genital area. Unlike O’Reilly, we credited the Internet site in our news release of April 27.
“What O’Reilly did not mention was that progress has been made: State Senator Doug Whitsett is introducing legislation to deal with matters like this in the future. But O’Reilly can be forgiven for not mentioning this on his show, and that’s because we didn’t post this letter on our website. Ergo, there was no way he could have stolen this aspect of the story.”
