{"id":110,"date":"2008-05-09T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/bill-donohue-over-the-line-the.html"},"modified":"2008-05-09T11:00:26","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T11:00:26","slug":"bill-donohue-over-the-line-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/bill-donohue-over-the-line-the.html","title":{"rendered":"Bill Donohue: Over the line, the “Hitler card” chapter"},"content":{"rendered":"

While John McCain is arguing that Barack Obama is a friend of Hamas (I guess Hamas has signed on to McCain’s political team to give him advice?), and while Hillary continues to play the race card to bolster her campaign, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is invoking Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies<\/a> by putting a swastika on Obama. Really. Not just any swastika. Responding to yesterday’s rejoinder<\/a> from Obama’s Catholic advisory council–whom Donohue had blasted as Catholic dissidents in the vein of Jermiah Wright–the Catholic League head ignored the advisory council’s statement and instead focused in on abortion and Obama’s record. (Full statement is here<\/a>.) But here’s the kicker:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is so nice to know that Obama thinks abortion \u2018presents a profound moral challenge.\u2019 Is infanticide another \u2018profound moral challenge\u2019? To wit: When he was in the Illinois state senate he led the fight to deny health care to babies born alive who survived an abortion. That, my friends, is not a moral challenge\u2014it\u2019s a Hitlerian decision.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I haven’t seen all the campaign coverage, but this would seem to represent a new low. And it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the campaign. I also wonder about the Catholic League itself. GOP advisor Deal Hudson, an FOB (Bill Donohue, that is) and guest blogger here, also responded on Donohue’s behalf with a post at InsideCatholic<\/a>, saying their response was “surprisingly aggressive for a group of Catholics who support a candidate who defends infanticide.” (Apart from the infanticide card, why would baby killers surprise anyone by being aggressive? Are there “nice” baby killers? But I digress.)
\nTo me, the interesting revelation was Deal’s acknowledgment that the Catholic League and pro-lifers are openly engaged in a “partisan” battle for votes. The Obama advisors took Donohue to task for trying to divide Catholics for political gain. Donohue isn’t supposed to do that as he is techincally a non-profit. But now that mask may have slipped as well.
\n“Partisanship is no crime, just as attempting to win voters to your side is not either. The Obama Catholics are scowling at pro-life Catholics for the very activity they have embraced — publicly supporting a political candidate.”
\nActually, partisanship is not licit if you are a 501c3 like the Catholic League. And I think the Obama Catholics were scowling because Deal & Donohue et al are calling their faith into question, not their political ideas and loyalties. In any case, it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. With Donohue’s $343,000 salary and some $20 million in annual income on the line, this could be an expensive campaign for the Catholic League.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While John McCain is arguing that Barack Obama is a friend of Hamas (I guess Hamas has signed on to McCain’s political team to give him advice?), and while Hillary continues to play the race card to bolster her campaign, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is invoking Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies by putting a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBill Donohue: Over the line, the "Hitler card" chapter - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/bill-donohue-over-the-line-the.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bill Donohue: Over the line, the "Hitler card" chapter - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}