The cover story reveals how popular it is to bash Christianity these days, especially Catholicism. But it also tells us that even when Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with some hot-button issue, it gets dumped on nonetheless. Unfortunately, unprovoked attacks on Christianity are not confined to bigoted college students.
The Weekly Standard is a cogent journal of conservative thought. We were surprised to learn, then, that one of its writers, Duncan Currie, would seek to legitimate a Christian-bashing episode of “South Park” simply because it showed the hypocrisy of Comedy Central. We are pleased, however, that the magazine published Bill Donohue’s response.
Donohue accused Currie of seeking to justify an episode of the cartoon that depicted “Jesus defecating on the president and the American flag on the grounds that South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were angry at Comedy Central for not airing a depiction of Muhammad.”
What angered Donohue was Currie’s remark saying that the president of the Catholic League “missed the point entirely: It wasn’t Jesus being mocked, it was Comedy Central.” It would be more accurate to say that as a way of demonstrating the double standard at Comedy Central, the creators of the cartoon decided to mock Jesus.
In his letter, Donohue drew a parallel with the University of Oregon incident, offering a description of the offending Insurgent issue. He concluded by saying, “Although it is entirely legitimate to highlight hypocrisy over the Danish cartoons, attempts to do so by gratuitously trashing Christianity, as Stone, Parker, and the student newspaper editors do, are plainly unjustified.”
One more thing: Why did Stone, Parker and the Insurgent editors choose to bash Catholicism to make their point and not some other group? We think we know why, and they know it as well.
