By Bill Donohue
This article was originally published at Newsmax.com on October 5, 2013.
In the course of just one week, I had my speech squashed on three different occasions by the cultural elites. Though I’ve been slapped by the censorial hand of liberals many times before, never have I experienced it so forcefully within such a short period of time.
On September 27, I held a press conference outside the Edward Tyler Nahem gallery in midtown Manhattan to protest an exhibit by Andres Serrano featuring “Piss Christ,” the infamous photo of a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine. After addressing the media, I sought to see the exhibit but was stopped in the building’s lobby by gallery officials. I was the only person denied. My offense? They objected to the content of my remarks to the media.
Last month we learned that beginning on October 17, FX will air “American Horror Story: Asylum.” The entire series depicts a habit-wearing promiscuous nun who beats inmates in a home for the criminally insane; for good measure, a doctor tortures his patients in this evil Catholic institution.
I decided to write a full-page ad critical of the series, seeking to place it in The Hollywood Reporter. We were led to believe that everything was fine, including our credit card info, but then we learned via an email on October 1 that the ad had been rejected. Lynne Segall, the publisher, nixed it saying the ad’s message “was not appropriate.”
The next day, October 2, we contacted Variety. Once again, everything from the initial exchange to our credit card info was deemed just fine. But then we learned via an email that the ad had been rejected because of its “mudslinging” title (“FX Trashes Nuns”). I refused to amend it (Variety has run many stories with the word “trashes” in its title), thus there will be no ad.
None of this would matter so much if it were not for the myth that liberals are tolerant, and conservatives are intolerant. Wherever liberals dominate — in the artistic community, Hollywood, the media, education, publishing — there is no shortage of attempts to muzzle the speech of conservatives. They are the masters of intolerance.
Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill is a former Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and served for two decades on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues.
