By Bill Donohue
This article was originally published by CNSNews.com June 17, 2016.
The man responsible for the Orlando killings, we’re told, was a devout Muslim who attended a mosque several times a week, brought a prayer rug to work, pledged his allegiance to ISIS, cheered the 9/11 massacre, traveled to Saudi Arabia, and was raised by his Taliban-loving father. Yet, despite all this reported evidence, Christians are being blamed for the killings.
There is no greater proof of why the Catholic League exists than this: Christians, especially Catholics, are typically held responsible for the sins of others, and this is doubly true when sexuality is implicated. Most troubling is the fact that the anti-Christian hate mongers are not just dopey bloggers—they are academics, lawyers, activists, and writers.
When it comes to Christian haters, few can top Jonathan Katz, a homosexual activist and University of Buffalo professor. Now he is deflecting attention from the role that ISIS played in the Muslim murders: he says the real culprits are Christians. In fact, he refers to the ISIS connection as merely the “ISIS thing,” as if the Islamic State were only tangentially related to the killings.
“The ISIS thing is a distraction,” Katz says, arguing that we should instead be “looking at the long legacy of anti-gay violence in this country that has itself been stoked and promoted by the Christian right.” The central problem, he says, is not to be found in “the Middle East,” but at home where the “homophobia problem” exists.
Katz has a history of bashing Christians for not embracing the gay agenda. In 2010, he objected to my criticism of a taxpayer-funded Smithsonian exhibition that featured a vile video of ants crawling all over the crucifix. For simply exercising my First Amendment right to free speech, Katz called me an“American Taliban.” I reminded him that the Taliban puts gays in human shredders.
Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern is another homosexual activist who refuses to blame Islamists for what happened, opting to point the finger at Christians instead. The title of his screed tells it all, “How Conservative Christian Activists Spent Decades Fomenting Anti-Gay Hate in Orlando.”
To make his point, Stern blames the Catholic League for cultivating gay hatred. How did we do this? By allegedly joining a boycott of Disney in 1996. He says we were angry about a Disney employment policy on gays. Stern is wrong. We didn’t join any such effort. In 1995, I led a boycott of Disney because of its role in promoting an anti-Catholic movie, “Priest” (at that time Disney owned Miramax, the film’s distributor).
Just as with Katz, Stern paints me as anti-gay for fighting anti-Catholicism. Moreover, he believes I laid the groundwork for Omar Mateen’s killing spree. Why I haven’t been arrested he does not say.
Katz, Stern, and others (Sally Kohn and the ACLU) are so driven by their hatred of Christianity that there is virtually nothing that Muslim barbarians can do that cannot be deconstructed to exculpate them and implicate Christians.
Adding to the crazy talk, and proving my point better than I could ever do, is Ben Brenkert. Like many other homosexual seminarians who never made it—he spent 10 years training to become a Jesuit priest—he has a score to settle with the Catholic Church.
Brenkert’s article in the Daily Beast on the Orlando killings says absolutely nothing about Muslims, Islam, or ISIS, but it has plenty to say about the pope, and, of course, sex.
Pope Francis decried the killings but didn’t single out homosexuals. For Brenkert, this signifies “the Church’s lack of care of the whole gay person, including the identification of the gay victims when it matters most: in their martyrdom.” For me, at least, this really is breaking news—I had no idea that the victims gave themselves up for a noble cause.
Following Katz and Stern, Brenkert exploits the Orlando killings to advance his sexual politics. He is not interested in pressing the authorities to do a better job screening for prospective terrorists; rather, he seizes this opportunity to register a complaint with the Catholic Church. His whining is hard to beat. “Sexually active gay men who are Roman Catholic cannot receive Holy Communion at Mass,” he says.
This is true. The same is true of sexually active single heterosexual men and women, as well as adulterers. But even if everyone could receive Communion, no matter the nature of the sin or the degree of contriteness, it strains credulity to assume that this has anything to do with the behavior of a Muslim maniac.
The purpose of this outburst of Christian bashing in the wake of the Orlando tragedy is to silence Christian dissent on matters sexual. Narcissistic to the bone, these gay activists will always give Islam a pass, and will always bash Christians. The issue for them is sex, not violence.
Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of six books and many articles.
