Catholic League president Bill Donohue responds to yesterday’s article by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd:
New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, like most Americans, and like most people throughout the history of the world, thinks marriage should be reserved for the only two people capable of rendering a family, namely a man and a woman. In Maureen Dowd’s world, all these people are wrong. It was telling that she wrote her screed on Father’s Day, a day which victimizes innocent children who have two mothers or two fathers.
Dowd singles out Dolan for opposing gay marriage. She needs to talk to some non-white people for a change. She should go to Harlem and talk to blacks leaving church on Sunday about the glory of two men marrying. Then she could visit churchgoers in a Latino neighborhood. Then she could have lunch in Chinatown and speak to the people. Finally, she could visit an Orthodox Jewish community (after all, it was Jews, not Catholics, who first crafted strictures against homosexuality).
Dowd says it is hypocritical for the Church to accept homosexual priests while finding fault with homosexuality. Is it also hypocritical to accept heterosexual priests while finding fault with those who are sexually active? Celibacy cuts equally for straights and gays.
Dowd says the recent report on the causes of the sexual abuse scandal was “put out” by Dolan and the bishops, and that it advanced a “blame Woodstock” explanation. She is twice wrong: (a) the report was the work of social scientists from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and (b) the timeline of the problem—mid-1960s to mid-1980s—was exactly the period of the sexual revolution, so to cite it was important. Evidently, Dowd never took Intro to Soc.
Finally, Dowd finds fault with the John Jay study for not listing homosexuality as a cause. Her complaint is accurate, which makes unintelligible her reference to “pedophile priests.” In fact, the abusive priests were mostly homosexual, though she should be careful not to stereotype.
