It takes some kinda guy to brag that he doesn't go to museums -- it's "Silly Billy" Donohue!

Yes, it's Bookman (Philip Baker Hall)! You remember, the library cop from the Seinfeld episode "The Library."

"The Dewey Decimal System, what a scam that was! Boy, that Dewey guy really cleaned up on that deal."

-- Kramer, to Jerry, in "The Library"

by Ken

I'll explain in a moment why this amazing line is echoing in my head at the moment. It's one of my all-time favorite lines to begin with, one that crosses way over the line into the sublime, a joyous demonstration of the sort of muck with which most of our heads are filled, just a bit muckier in Kramer's case. All right, a lot muckier.

Surely you recall the setting. It's from the legendary Seinfeld episode "The Library," in which Jerry faced the wrath of that righteous warrior for library law 'n' order, the "library copy" Bookman. (Was it my imagination, or did Philip Baker Hall, who played Bookman, and had clearly been around awhile, suddenly start appearing all over the tube? Seinfeld did often have that effect on actors' careers, but usually it was younger actors making their way. By the way, there are "embedding disabled by request" clips from the episode here and here.)

Jerry has informed Kramer that he's been ordered to appear at the New York Public Library over a copy of Tropic of Cancer its computers claim he failed to return in 1971. (Kramer's response? "Do you know how much that comes to? That's a nickel a day for 20 years. It's going to be $50,000." Or, possibly: "If it's a dime a day it could be $100,000.") Just then George rings the buzzer from downstairs.

JERRY: It's George. Wait 'til he hears we're going to the library.
KRAMER: You know I never got a library card.
JERRY [into the intercom]: Coming down.
KRAMER: It's all a bunch of cheapskates in there anyway. People sitting around reading the newspaper attached to huge wooden sticks Trying to save a quarter, ooh,
JERRY: I gotta go to the library. You want to go?
KRAMER: Yeah.

So what's got me thinking about Kramer and the Great Dewey Decimal System Scam? It's a recent declaration by an even sillier sillypants than Kramer, the Catholic League's pride and joy, Bill Donohue. We've had numerous occasions to deal with Sillypants Bill, going back to a 2007 post of Howie's, "Who's The Ugliest Bigot Of Them All, Mr. Donohue?." Not content with establishing himself as America's leading purveyor of religious bigotry and intolerance, Silly Billy is now staking out his ground as the nation's leading apostle of culture-hating cretinism.

The other morning on the radio I was startled to hear some lug positively bragging, "I don't go to museums," adding, "Most people don't go to museums." I was less startled when I realized it was Silly Billy, the world's tattiest attention queen, milky the latest orgy of phony-baloney right-wing outrage for, well, attention -- and maybe the extra bucks it's always possible to shake out of deluded right-wing stooges when you get them whipped up.

I'm sure you remember the latest tissue of lies, delusions, and obfuscations perpetrated by the usual perpetrators, over the expect everyone recalls the recent right-wing hissy fit over 15 seconds out of what L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight described on his blog as "the 13-minute video 'A Fire in My Belly' from 1987 by David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992)" which "is in part a terrifying shriek against the shocking social indifference to the AIDS crisis then engulfing the United States."

Part of the traditionally orchestrated orgy of right-wing outrage included ritual denunciation of Silly Billy on behalf of the Catholic League of America. If you wanted to argue that the Catholic establishment is made up of hopeless dimwits, you might suggest that the angriest, most die-hard Catholic-hater in history couldn't have drummed up the tiniest fraction of the anti-Catholic sentiment that Silly Billy does whenever he opens his mouth or pounds away at his word processor. What person with a shred of self-respect could fail to be reviled by an outfit that preaches the kind of crap Silly Billy does?

As Chistopher Knight, who has provided spectacular coverage of the incident, explained in a blogpost yesterday:

Donohue's earlier claims about the art exhibition at the Smithsonian's museum have been variously debunked, denounced, proven false and shown to be a case of manufactured outrage. They have also led museums and galleries across the United States and in Europe to hurriedly display the censored video, which is also widely available on the Internet, bringing it to a huge public.

[Note that, contrary to my general practice of directing readers to the onsite posting for internal links, here I've gone to a good deal of trouble to replicate the links, because they're important.]

Now Silly Billy is apparently never happy if he isn't the dumbest, most vicious, and most primitive blowhard on the media runway, and so he went beyond the other right-wing demagogues, who were demanding a cutoff of all federal funding of the Smithsonian (though actually no federal funds had been involved here) to arguing for a cutoff of all federal funding for the arts. In his post yesterday, Christopher Knight flagged the very paragraph from Silly Billy's statement that I had been planning to write about:

In a large survey of museum-going households released in April, it was found that they are significantly better educated and affluent than the U.S. population; they are also overwhelmingly white. The time has come, then, to stop funding the leisure of rich white people: all public monies for the arts should cease. Quite frankly, to make the working class pay for the leisure of the rich amounts to class discrimination. In the spirit of social justice, a better case could be made to fund professional wrestling -- it's what the working class enjoy.

Now I'm guessing you could hardly get farther from the average working-class stiff than Silly Billy, but it's part job description of a raging demagogue to know which buttons can be pushed via lying and obfuscation for maximum effect. This is, of course, the sleaziest kind of class warfare, and as usual with right-wing demagogues it's perpetrated on the pretext of denouncing the supposed class warfare of, well, people with working brains (who appear to be, as a class, the Catholic Church's most feared enemies).

It's also what got me to thinking of Kramer's maniacal denunciation of the Dewey Decimal System. If you've seen the Seinfeld episode, you recall that it's a total non-sequitur, following from nothing that's been said except the general subject of "libraries." All it comes from is the detritus cluttering Kramer's brain, in which it has somehow been worked out that "that Dewey guy" somehow cooked up and perpetrated his infamous Decimal System scam and then managed to "clean up" on it. It's all I could think of when I heard Silly Billy announce, in effect, that he's here to tell us that he's seen through the whole museum scam.

Christopher Knight, bless his soul, rather than engage that tired anti-culture argument, took Silly Billy on on his own terms in that post yesterday, titled "Are you ready to rumble? The Smithsonian vs. WWE." Referring to the paragraph of Silly Billy's statement I quoted above, he wrote:

The source of the data is not identified. But, like earlier claims, it too turns out to be false. Attendance at Smithsonian museums is 15 times larger than attendance at World Wrestling Entertainment shows.

According to a spokesman for WWE, the largest corporation in the pro wrestling field, attendance at 342 live events in 2009 (74 of them international) totaled just over 2 million. During the same time period the Smithsonian, which oversees 19 facilities, had attendance of 30 million.

The cost for museum visitors was far less too: Most Smithsonian museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, are free to the public. Tickets for WWE shows range from $15 to $70, depending on the venue and seating.

Why do right-wing demagogues always lie? It's tempting to answer simply, "Because they draw breath." But it may just be that lying is the only intellectual function they're capable of performing.

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It's to be expected that solons and soldiers of organized religion mostly get their friends and enemies backwards

""It is imperative that we come together against the anti-gay bishops. . . . The anti-gay, anti-marriage activism of our 'shepherds' is appalling and brings discredit to the Body of Christ, which should be about the Father's business of saving souls and building the kingdom, not obstructing civil rights."

-- Catholics for Equality founding board member Eugene McMullan

by Ken

Last Saturday I titled a post "If the defenders of the institution of marriage secretly mean ridicule the institution of religion, they're doing great!" And it's hard not to wonder whether the leaders and spokespersons, especially the most outspoken ones, for organized religions aren't in fact moles committed to destroying those religions from within.

Take the Catholic Church (please!). Sure, the pedophile-priest scandals, now rolling out worldwide, have been not just a nightmare for the Church hierarchy (who gives a damn about them?) but, more important, an eye-opener for the laity, the people who have always thought of themselves as good Catholics. But there's hardly any issue where the Church hasn't been every bit as offputting to anyone who cares about values, morality, and the state of the world we live in.

Just as the solons of the Republican Party seem to have set out to restrict their reach to unreconstructed Confederates of the South and the whacked-out survivalists of the West (it was really only by the dumbest luck that they stumbled into the bonanza of the teabagging loons), the Church fathers (for once we don't have to worry about gender neutrality; it's emphatically the Church "fathers," not "fathers and mothers") seem determined to strip the Catholic Carnival of any sane, principled worshippers.

Oh, they're not headed quite for extinction. The Church will always have some appeal to two groups: people who like to boss other people around, and people who like to be bossed around. But with all those other Crap Christian denominations competing so vigorously for the hearts and minds of those constituencies, the Catholic hierarchy may find itself struggling to hold onto its own enthusiasts of authoritarianism, let alone to attract new ones to replace the ones who are leaving the fold and dying off.

As I keep trying to explain, I don't think religion is inherently good or bad. Like most all human institutions it can be either, depending on who's running the show and who's in the audience. As best I can see, you can get pretty much the same split among the good, the bad, and the large middle among self-professedly religious folk that you do in the human race generally.

To the extent that organized religions promote genuine morality and humane values, they can certainly be forces for good, and the record shows that a lot of people have been drawn to each of the established religions for those reasons, and have been inspired by their faith to live lives of principle and decency, and have thereby contributed to making the world a better place for all. On the other hand, the record of evil committed in the name of religion is pretty extensive and pretty horrible.

I don't know if it's ironic, or maybe just symptomatic, but the organized religious, considering how under siege they claim to feel all the time, are staggeringly unperceptive as to who their enemies are, and who their friends. A case in point, again with reference to the Catholic Church, can be found in the response of two pillars of the Catholic Carnival of Ignorance and Hate to the advent of a group called Catholics for Equality.

I've been meaning to write about Catholics for Equality, which launched officially on September 14, for a while now. In the interim Chuck Colbert has done a nice piece for the Bay Area Reporter, which begins:

The voice of Catholic Church hierarchy from Maine to California is shrill but clear: Oppose all LGBT equality, especially same-sex marriage.

And yet support for full LGBT equality – even same-sex marriage – among Roman Catholics in the pews seems to be on the rise, according to recent public opinion polling.

So what's a pro-equality Catholic supposed to do?

Get active and be political with a new national organization that seeks to mobilize "the more than 62 percent of Catholics who support freedoms for all people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity," according to a news release from Catholics for Equality based in Washington, D.C.

For obvious reasons, the new organization has no direct access to fellow Catholics where they worship,

Instead, Catholics for Equality is relying on "a state of the art website and a strategic use of social media" – including a soon-to-be-rolled-out smartphone app – to provide as board member Aniello Alito said, "American Catholics with role models, facts, and tips on how to have a family discussion, how to challenge misinformation in our parishes, and how to ensure as Catholics their voices are heard."

Initially, Catholics for Equality plans to rely on the power of social media.

"We've built our website so that every page a supporter views, every time a user takes action, he can share that with friends on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail, and other popular social networks and services," explained Alito. "Our main goal from now until the end of the year focuses on encouraging and providing support for Catholic families, parishes, and communities to have honest and rational discussions about LGBT equality."

Catholics for Equality has received assistance from several national LGBT organizations, including Dignity, a group for LGBT Catholics, and the Human Rights Campaign.

HRC spokesman Fred Sainz said that the organization lent Catholics for Equality meeting space and "supported some of their start-up costs at less than $10,000."

A former HRC staffer, Phil Attey is presently the unpaid acting executive director for Catholics for Equality.

Already the group has hit on one ingenious way to spread the dialogue it hopes to foster among ordinary Catholics: brunch.

A specific way to facilitate conversation, Catholics for Equality suggests, is for supporters to host parish brunches or coffee hours in homes and restaurants where "people-in-the-pew" Catholics, what organizers call the "moveable middle," can hear from community and parish leaders and supporters of LGBT equality.

In Maine, for example, Religious Coalition Against Discrimination has obtained a grant to set up conversations among parishioners, meeting in small groups after Mass during coffee hour.

"The idea is to bring gay and lesbian couples and straight couples together one-on-one," with the objective of reaching "people not opposed to marriage and LGBT rights, but who are uncertain what that would look like," said board member Anne Underwood.

"We are finding creative ways to have dialogue in places where it is being suppressed," said Attey.

"What we are doing," says Father Joseph Palacios, an adjunct professor of sociology at Georgetown University and priest of the Los Angeles Archdiocese who is a founding board member, "is public action and public education on public issues. We are helping the Catholic movable middle rethink their positions. They are a fair-minded people. They want to do the right thing from their American core values and the heritage of Catholic social justice values."

A specific way to facilitate conversation, Catholics for Equality suggests, is for supporters to host parish brunches or coffee hours in homes and restaurants where "people-in-the-pew" Catholics, what organizers call the "moveable middle," can hear from community and parish leaders and supporters of LGBT equality.

In Maine, for example, Religious Coalition Against Discrimination has obtained a grant to set up conversations among parishioners, meeting in small groups after Mass during coffee hour.

"The idea is to bring gay and lesbian couples and straight couples together one-on-one," with the objective of reaching "people not opposed to marriage and LGBT rights, but who are uncertain what that would look like," said board member Anne Underwood.

"We are finding creative ways to have dialogue in places where it is being suppressed," said Attey.

"It is imperative that we come together against the anti-gay bishops," says San Francisco doctoral candidate Eugene McMullan, described as "the founder and lead organizer for Catholics for Marriage Equality in California (http://www.jointhecatholicimpact.com), who "serves on the board of the local Dignity chapter and is a parishioner at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in the Castro." McMullan continues:

We have to do it for ourselves, as a matter of principle, and to save the church we love. The anti-gay, anti-marriage activism of our "shepherds" is appalling and brings discredit to the Body of Christ, which should be about the Father's business of saving souls and building the kingdom, not obstructing civil rights.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Catholics for Equality in its young history is rousing the wrath of truly one of the vilest, most worthless and repellent life forms in the country, William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Donohue, in case you're not familiar with him, is a pile of filth who has made a career of promoting hatred and persecution in the name of doctrinal paranoia. He devotes his time to searching out any comment that can be perceived as, or twisted into, anti-Catholic sentiment, and blows it up into a war on his Holy Church -- all of which is really a cover for promoting his political views, which are substantially to the right of the late Genghis Khan.

Here's how the Catholic League has responded to the advent of Catholics for Equality:

"CATHOLIC" GAY GROUP REBUKED

September 22, 2010

His Excellency, Timothy Broglio, the Archbishop for the Military Services, released a statement to the Catholic News Agency responding to a letter from Catholics for Equality; the gay advocacy group pleaded with him to support the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Catholic League president Bill Donohue spoke to this issue today:

On June 1, Archbishop Broglio released an excellent statement recounting the Catholic Church's opposition to homosexuality. He called on Catholic chaplains in the armed forces to show respect for the dignity of homosexuals, but he also implored them to "never condone—even silently—homosexual behavior."

On September 17, a new dissident group, Catholics for Equality, wrote a letter to the archbishop that was not only critical of his Catholic position, it reeked with smugness and arrogance: "We are ready to help you and Catholic chaplains in the transition to full acceptance of gays and lesbians in the military and respectfully request a meeting with you…." So thoughtful of these malcontents to offer their help in transitioning the bishop to oppose the Catholic Church's teachings on sexuality.

Archbishop Broglio's response pulled no punches. He wondered how Catholics for Equality got the authority to identify itself as a Catholic entity, maintaining "it cannot be legitimately recognized as Catholic."

He's right. While any group can slap the label Catholic on itself, bona fide Catholics are under no obligation to acknowledge it. And by bona fide, I simply mean Catholics not in open rebellion against the teachings of the Magisterium.

Archbishop Broglio deserves the respect and support of all lay Catholics. His courage and erudition make all Catholics proud.

I say, when you can get a reaction from a golem like Bill Donohue, you're on your way.

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ANTI-JESUS BIGOT BILL DONOHUE EXPOSED ON NATIONAL TV-- SOUTH PARK STRIKES BACK AGAINST FASCISM

The far right Catholic League's Bill Donohue stands out in American politics as one of the handful of the most bigoted and hate-spewing extremists ever to seek to use the mass media to mislead the public. 1930's pro-fascist radio priest Charles Coughlin comes immediately to mind but then there's always Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps for more contemporary comparison. Today Sisyphus Shrugged asks Where's Bill? in an essay about this guys' grotesque hypocrisy. Maybe though, the answer to why he wasn't responding to Rudy Giuliani's pro-abortion announcement was because he was too busy watching himself on South Park.

Now Donohue and South Park's creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, have had their differences before-- with Donohue attacking them for some politically incorrect abomination he must have detected in one of their shows (he called them "whores" and "cowards")-- but last night's debut of the Easter episode actually features Donohue as the anti-hero, someone so contemptible that Jesus has to be resurrected so he can kill him in order to save mankind.

The episode mildly pokes fun at The DaVinci Code and then savagely exposes Donohue's fascism, bigotry and utterly anti-Christian gestalt. Even over at Alternet has three awesome clips you can must watch that show the real Bill Donohue, not the actor you always see on MSNBC and Fox "News."

WHO'S THE UGLIEST BIGOT OF THEM ALL, MR. DONOHUE?

You didn't hear a peep from DWT during that whole brouhaha about Edwards and his bloggers and that neo-fascist Donohue fellow they role out whenever they want to accuse anyone whose isn't on the extreme right of anti-Catholic bigotry. (When it comes to the extreme right, you never hear much from Donohue or his propaganda shop. Although right-wing lunatic fringe congresswoman Michele Bachmann belongs to a viciously anti-Catholic cult which considers to Catholic Pope to be the anti-Christ as part of its basic doctrine, one never hears a word from Donohue about Bachmann's bigotry. I bet you don't wonder why that is, do you?)

But Donohue doesn't have to go sniffing around the backwoods of Minnesota to find right wing bigotry. He must have a mirror in his cell, no? Or down the hall? Oh, I forgot... he draws $300,000 a year from his own little cult set-up so he probably doesn't live in a cell-- and surely does have a mirror he can peer into if he wants to really appraise some hard core bigotry.

But we'll give him a little reminder anyway. For some reason ex-GOP congressloon/possible murderer Joe Scarborough insists on portraying Donohue as a legitimate spokesperson for mainstream Catholicism, even though he's just another extremist cult nutcase. These are all quotes from William Donohue of the fascist-oriented Catholic League made on Scarborough's MSNBC Republican propaganda platform:

"People don't trust the Muslims when it comes to liberty." (February 10, 2006)

"Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." (December 20, 2004)

"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done." (April 12, 2005)

"Dean Hamer came up with this idea of the gay gene. I remember when that conversation was going on. Gays were all of a sudden worrying if people would start aborting kids when they found out the DNA suggested the kid might be gay or God forbid, we'd run out of little gay kids, so all of a sudden, they became pro-life. (December 14, 2004)

"I'm saying if a Catholic votes for Kerry because they support him on abortion rights, that is to cooperate in evil." (December 20, 2004)

"We've already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ...Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost." (December 20, 2004)

"Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn't care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face." (February 10, 2006)

"Well, first they said it [The Passion of the Christ] was anti-Semitic. That didn't work. Then they said it was too violent. That didn't work. Then they said it was S & M. That didn't work. Then they said it was pornography. That didn't work. Now they're saying it's fascistic queer-bashing. That kind of language would ordinarily get somebody taken away in a straitjacket and-- put you in the asylum. I don't know what about-- the queer-bashing is all about. I'm pretty good about picking out who queers are and I didn't see any in the movie. I'm usually pretty good at that." (March 12, 2004)

"The fact of the matter is the media elite have an aversion to religion. Some of them even have a phobia and some of them are obviously anti-religion. ...They want Tom, Dick, and Harry to get married. They want 'under God' out of the pledge of allegiance. They don't want anybody to see The Passion of the Christ. It's all tied together." (February 24, 2004)