Sheryl McCarthy, columnist for the Long Island daily, Newsday, has an article in today’s newspaper that provides a classic example of anti-Catholic bigotry. Catholic League president William Donohue offered the following remarks today:
“The Catholic League is mailing a copy of Sheryl McCarthy’s article in today’s Newsday to every bishop in the nation and to all 235 Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. With regard to the latter group, we are asking the English department chairs to distribute copies of McCarthy’s column to professors of journalism. Catholic students need to know how anti-Catholic bigotry has been mainstreamed and no one offers a better example than Sheryl McCarthy’s piece of October 24.
“McCarthy has some cute ideas about Halloween costumes this year. Her list of characters include Martha Stewart, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Kenneth Lay, Lizzie Grubman, Michael Bloomberg and Johnnie Cochran. There is one entry that is not a character: it is a group.
“‘A Catholic priest’s costume would also be a crowd pleaser this year,’ McCarthy says, ‘replete with clerical collar and a lascivious grin.’ Notice she wants a bin Laden and a Hussein costume but not a Muslim one. That’s because McCarthy has learned that it is wrong to generalize from the individual to the collective. Except for priests. They deserve it—all 46,000 of them. Never mind that a whopping two-thirds of one percent of priests have had to step aside awaiting an investigation of charges against them, McCarthy says it’s time to stick it to them all.
“But she is sensitive to others: ‘Some characters would be in bad taste for Halloween costumes. There should be no suicide bombers with dynamite strapped to their waists, and no Beltway snipers carrying rifles and cell phones.’ What is not in bad taste, however, is to mock priests as perverts, even though 99 and a third percent of them are not even being questioned about sexual misconduct. What McCarthy has done is classic bigotry, plain and simple. She owes priests an apology.”
