Bill Donohue sent the following letter to Mr. Jeff Vaughn, Principal, Bellingham High School in Bellingham, Washington about one of his teachers, Teri Grimes:
As president of the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization, it is my responsibility to fight anti-Catholicism in all of its manifestations. An incident happened recently at your school that is among the most vulgar expressions of anti-Catholicism that I have encountered in some time.
Allegedly, Teri Grimes told a “joke” at an awards ceremony that was laced with profanity. That is bad enough, but what caught my eye was her rank anti-Catholic bigotry. “The plane was going down and the teacher says we have to save the children,” Ms. Grimes said. “The attorney says ‘F*** the children’ and the priest says, ‘OOOOH—Do we have time for that?'”
We live in a day and age when comments such as this, if told about other segments of the population, would merit sanctions; an apology would never do. Catholics expect that the same sanctions that would be levied against a teacher who made bigoted remarks against others be applied. To do otherwise would be to counsel discrimination. And that is more than a moral issue—it is a legal matter.
