Why should the Catholic League condemn the threats against Cook and Myers?

Chris Ray - August 12th, 2008 in Commentary 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

One of the great many great accomplishments to come out of the Center for Inquiry’s 2008 Student Leadership Conference was the collaborative commitment to produce a public response to the Catholic League’s war on the free protest and parody of religion. When Rodrigo Neely and I first cooked up the idea of getting all us CFIers to do something as a unified whole, we decided that the only way to herd the cats in any meaningful way would be to rally ourselves around something that not even atheists could get into a disagreement over. That something was handily provided by a smattering of Catholic terrorists taking a rather vigilante approach to the Inquisitions, with their cues coming from the Catholic League.

For those unfamiliar with the whole ordeal, it goes something like this. You see, in the Catholic tradition, upon ordination, priests are imbued with the magical ability to summon Jesus at will and to transmogrify your ordinary baked goods into the literal flesh and blood of the zombified Messiah. Despite the doctrinal importance of the Eucharist to Catholics, when the Catholic League (a fiercely inquisitorial non-Church-affiliated public advocacy organization led by professional victim Bill Donohue) caught wind of UCF student Webster Cook’s decision to steal a magic Jesus cracker from a Catholic Church service, Donohue was filled with the spirit of forgiveness and Christian love and humbly tolerated the fully legal protest. Just kidding, Donohue called it worse than hate speech and organized a mass email campaign to UCF president John Hitt demanding Cook be expelled.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, accomplished science blogger and UMinn life sciences professor PZ Myers picks up on the story, appropriately regards it as ridiculous, and proceeds to desecrate his own Eucharist cracker. Sure enough the Inquisitors catch wind of Myers’s activities and another mass harassment campaign begins, this time against the University of Minnesota, where Myers works.

Publicly attacking people who disagree with your pet cosmologies is legal. What aren’t legal, however, are the death threats that started arriving in the inboxes of Myers, Webster Cook, and even Cook’s family. So, Rodrigo and I decided that our rallying banner would be free speech, our bugle call would be good citizenship. We drafted letters to UCF and to UMinn, but most of our efforts were on a letter to the Catholic League itself, calling on Bill Donohue to publicly condemn the threats of violence against the Catholic League’s targets. This letter was picked up by Myers’s blog, and CFI student group leaders everywhere have already sent their letters off to the League.

But why should the League even bother? There’s currently no evidence that the threats actually came from a League employee, or even from a League subscriber. Wouldn’t it just make them look responsible if they come out and condemn these threats?

Firstly, it is in the League’s own best interest to condemn these threats. Right now, casual induction links the League to the wackos responsible for these crimes: the Catholic League, which has tens of thousands of members, puts out a fatwa on Myers and Cook, and days later the threats start rolling in. If the League is really serious about defending its faith tradition, the burden is on them to elevate the discourse above this childishness. The language of the threats (some of which can be read on Myers’s blog) clearly demonstrate that the motivation is religious offense. The League and the offenders in question appear both in the same camp, then, as they are both driven by their religious zealotry. If the League wants to be taken seriously, and if it wants a real conversation about how societies should treat religious protest, then they need to make it clear that their tactics will not include even a tacit endorsement of physical intimidation.

Secondly, it is simply good citizenship to distance yourselves from those who fly the same banner you do while making mischief. After 9/11, dozens of Muslim groups in the West openly and repeatedly condemned the numerous atrocities carried out in the name of the religious faith they themselves follow. Was it because the hijackers worked for peaceful Muslim groups in the West? Was it because these groups caused 9/11? Of course not. It was because any person who respect their own ideology will fight not just against its detractors, but also against its maniacs. Beyond protecting the reputation of the ideology itself, it gives the public certain cues for how to spot the nutters from those who really have something to say in defense of their tradition.

Right now, the Catholic League’s tight lips on this issue (and I sincerely doubt they have not received any of these letters yet) are making them look like fools. They are twiddling their thumbs and pretending that no wrong has been done in their name while militants and terrorists sit at their computers and try to do the League’s dirty work for them. If the Catholic League does not step up to the plate on this issue, I am sure that there are many, more reasonable Catholic organizations who would just love to publicly shame the League as much as they would love to publicly shame the threat-writers themselves.

A running count of how long we have been waiting for the League to show a little maturity is maintained on the sidebar of this author’s blog.