On March 5, the New York Times pulled a cartoon by Ted Rall that mocks widows of the 9-11 terror attack for being greedy. The cartoon was fed to the website of the New York Times by Universal Press Syndicate and was taken down when widows complained. Christine Mohan, the newspaper’s spokeswoman, said the “subject matter was inappropriate.”
Yet on March 6, the Times features a cartoon by Glenn McCoy on its website that mocks Catholic priests for being sinners. The Universal Press Syndicate cartoon shows a woman in the confessional saying to the priest, “You Go First”; this is an obvious reference to news reports on priest pedophilia. Moreover, on March 5, the same day the Rall cartoon was pulled, the Times posted a cartoon by DeOre of Universal Press Syndicate that also mocked sinful priests in the confessional. And on January 20, the Times published in its newspaper a particularly vicious cartoon by Don Wright of Tribune Media Service that depicted the Catholic Church as being against abortion but accepting of pedophilia.
We sent the following news release to all major media outlets across the country alerting them to the inconsistencies in the “newspaper of record”:
“This provides a good window into the mind of the New York Times and what we see isn’t pretty. It’s okay to malign the nearly 50,000 priests in the United States because some are pedophiles but it is not okay to malign widows of the 9-11 horror because some are alleged to be greedy. In our estimation, both subject matters are in appropriate.
“The reason for the disparate treatment is not hard to discern. The New York Timesdoesn’t want to offend women but doesn’t mind offending priests. Why? It’s a matter of political instincts. For the Times, women’s rights are inextricably tied to abortion rights. Indeed, it has never found an abortion it hasn’t approved of but has yet to find a Church teaching on sexual ethics it has approved of. It’s really not that hard to figure out. Just read the New York Times on a daily basis.”
