Secular Sabotage

by William A. Donohue

  Meanwhile, we sent the incriminating photos to scores of civic organizations in Milwaukee, showing them that this is the kind of event that Miller likes to sponsor. What we wanted was a statement from Miller acknowledging that it objected to three incidents (in addition to the poster ad that featured its logo). We cited the selling of religious symbols as sex toys; the hoisting of a stripper and a man dressed as Jesus in cages above a Catholic church on a Sunday; and the public mocking of nuns. Finally, Miller said that “we are aware of other disrespectful activities, objects and groups associated with or present at the fair which, like the promotional poster, violate our marketing policies. We extend our original apology to include these unfortunate events and items as well.” Accordingly, we called off the PR campaign and the boycott. 63

  The Folsom Street Fair in 2008 was just as perverse—naked men having sex in the street—but there was no Miller sponsorship.

  Gay Protests Turn Ugly

  It is not just gay parades and street fairs that are offensive, it is gay activism in the wake of a losing effort. Consider what happened after California voters supported a resolution that effectively denied the right to gay marriage. Proposition 8, which affirmed marriage between a man and a woman, passed over the objections of gay activists. So what did many of them do? React like barbarians.

  Protesters in many California cities took to the streets, snarling traffic and endangering public safety. Houses and cars were vandalized. Rioting protesters shouted “Separation of Church and Hate.” Supporters of traditional marriage were called Nazis. African Americans, who more than any group oppose gay marriage, were called the N word. Latinos carrying pro-marriage signs were assaulted. But the biggest attack was visited on people of faith.

  Mormons generally have not been major players in the culture wars. But Proposition 8 got them going: they spent a lot of time and money seeking to support it. The reaction on the part of some gays was amazing. Mormons who removed offensive signs from their property were beaten; “Mormon scum” was shouted at worshippers; the Book of Mormon was set on fire in a Mormon chapel. Other religious groups were also targeted. An elderly woman was roughed up by an angry crowd and the cross she was carrying was smashed to the ground. “Bigots Live Here” was scrawled on a Christian church; Catholic churches were trashed and swastikas were placed on their lawns; a white substance resembling anthrax was sent to a Knights of Columbus printing plant and to Mormon temples. 64

  Radical gays opposed to gay marriage—they oppose it because they don’t want to be like heterosexuals—were even worse. A group called Bash Back! stormed an evangelical church in Lansing, Michigan. Protesters outside the church were beating on buckets, screaming “Jesus was a homo” on a megaphone and carrying an upside-down pink cross. Inside the church, well-dressed protesters set off fire alarms, charged the pulpit, and unfurled a huge rainbow-colored flag with the inscription IT’S OKAY TO BE GAY! BASH BACK! The church was vandalized, obscenities were shouted, and worshippers were confronted. 65 This was not the work of some unhappy campers, it was the work of gay fascists.

  Bash Back! offers further evidence of the nihilistic nature of today’s secular radicals. They may be on the opposite side of gay activists who want same-sex marriage, but they have one thing in common with them: they hate Christianity with a passion and will do everything they can to slaughter it.

  Everyone thought that gays who objected to Proposition 8 would give up their protest once the election was over. Not only did it continue for weeks, a church was vandalized in 2009 over this issue. Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, a gay-friendly church in San Francisco’s Castro District, had swastikas painted on its facade; the names Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and Niederauer (the San Francisco archbishop) were scrawled beside the Nazi symbols. 66

  Those who love to dabble in “root causes” would have to conclude that at least part of the blame goes to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Both Newsom and the Board have shown nothing but contempt for the First Amendment rights of Catholics. When crucifixes are sold as sex toys and gays dressed as nuns invade a Catholic church during Mass—the same Holy Redeemer Church—at the annual Folsom Street Fair, they say nothing. Indeed, the cops are told not to arrest men who mutilate themselves and perform oral sex on each other in public. But the Board was quite vocal about showing its profound hostility to the Catholic Church in 2006, when it issued a resolution condemning the Church’s opposition to gay couples adopting children; it said the Church was “meddling” in the affairs of San Francisco. When it comes to anti-Catholicism and the breakdown of civility, San Francisco has no equal in the United States.

  Sexual saboteurs are never going to give up their assault on religion. That’s because they are in constant rebellion against any person or institution that counsels restraint. Moreover, anyone who thinks this is a problem that can be resolved by education is living in another world. The nihilistic impulse that the sexual saboteurs embody is so thoroughly irrational that no amount of education will ever check it. Even after all the funerals they have attended, they still don’t get it.

  CHAPTER 4

  Artistic Sabotage

  Andres Serrano will forever be remembered for putting a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, declaring it to be art, and convincing sentient men and women that he isn’t a fraud. Robert Mapplethorpe will forever be remembered for picturing himself with a bullwhip in his behind, declaring it to be art, and convincing sentient men and women that he isn’t a fraud. Among the fooled was the United States government: the National Endowment for the Arts contributed to both of these monstrosities. Which means the taxpayers were raped.

  Serrano and Mapplethorpe may be the best known of their genre, but they have not been without competition. Incapable of promoting their own vision of liberty, these depraved artists cannot resist the temptation to destroy. They are cultural nihilists of the first order, and they have nothing but contempt for the common good. “In the past two decades,” writes art historian Michael J. Lewis, “artists have presented the body covered with simulated sores (Hannah Wilke), smeared with chocolate as a surrogate for excrement (Karen Finley), outfitted with grotesque and misshapen sexual prosthetics (Cindy Sherman), and in a state of rigor mortis and incipient putrefaction (Andres Serrano).” 1 In 2008, Serrano struck again, only this time his photographic display consisted of jars of animal feces; in a demonstration of his commitment to inclusion, he graciously made a contribution of his own. 2

  Obscenity often accompanies blasphemy—they are joined at the culture’s hip—as many an artist can testify. Take the work of Robert Gober. He is an ex-Catholic gay man who rejects the Church’s teachings on sexuality. In 1997, he was the talk of the town in Los Angeles when the Museum of Contemporary Art hosted one of his exhibitions that defiled the Mother of God.

  In the promotional literature for Gober’s work, it said that after sculpting Our Blessed Mother in clay and then draping her in a robe made of plaster, Gober “pierced his Virgin Mary with a phallic culvert pipe.” Here’s why: “The fact that the corrugated pipe’s screwlike ribs penetrate the body bloodlessly evokes the Immaculate Conception by which the Virgin Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without the violent stain of original sin, as well as the miraculous conception of Christ himself. Yet, the culvert deprives the Virgin Mary of the womb from which Christ was born.” Such deprivation, it is assumed, constitutes an artistic statement of some renown. 3

  The year before Gober’s exhibit was shown, the Los Angeles–based Tom of the Finland Foundation awarded its grand prize for artistic expression to a drawing by Garilyn Brune: it showed a priest performing fellatio on Jesus. 4 Just as vulgar was a drawing by a Penn State female student. Done for a class assignment, she crafted a huge bloody vagina shaped in grotto-like fashion, complete with human hair, with a statue of the Virgin Mary placed inside it. 5 Similarly, in 2006, at the KFMK Gallery in New York City, an exhibit of the work of John Santerineross featured a photo
of a woman with her genitals cut and bleeding; a crucifix was placed below the woman, and the blood from her mutilated genitalia was shown running into a wine glass. Just so we got the point, the photo was dubbed “The Transformation of the Madonna.” 6

  These artistic assassins want to artistically assassinate Christianity, especially Catholicism. They are not artists who are simply making a statement. They are nihilists. Not to understand the difference between artists who protest Christianity’s teachings on sexuality, and moral anarchists out to sabotage Christianity altogether, is not only to miss what is at stake, it does an injustice to their work.

  Many of these artists have a fetish for the scatological. In 2002, at the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts in Napa, California, an exhibition of the work of Antoni Miralda featured the display of figurines depicting the pope and nuns defecating. 7 Even sicker is the admission of “Chocolate Jesus” artist Cosimo Cavallaro who said in a radio debate he had with me that in addition to using chocolate to sculpt his creations, he also uses feces. When asked where he gets them, he said he uses his own. 8

  Not only is this stuff considered art, it is considered meritorious. In 2008, the art faculty at New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art voted as one of the “best” student displays a series of paintings that featured a man with his pants pulled down and with a crucifix extended from his rectum; a man with his pants down and an angel holding two Rosaries with a penis attached to each of them; and a painting of a naked man with an erection and a halo hovering over his head. 9

  No wonder such junk art has been mistaken by custodians in the United States and Britain and given the heave-ho along with the rest of the garbage. For example, in 2003, a custodian at the Boulder Public Library said there was no sign to indicate that the art was anything but what it looked like—a pile of trash. The following year, a custodian at the Tate took the artwork of Gustav Metzger and threw it in the garbage. And why not? The “art” was a clear plastic bag filled with litter. 10 None of this is new. Indeed, in 1959, New York Times critic John Canaday stunned the avant-garde set by suggesting that “freaks, charlatans and the misled” had passed themselves off as legitimate. “Let us admit,” he wrote, “that the nature of abstract expressionism allows exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception.” He aptly concluded, “We have been had.” 11

  Much of the nihilistic quality of modern art is rooted in Dada, a term that, appropriately, has no meaning. In 1916, Marcel Janco described the phenomenon that was at work when he said, “Everything had to be demolished.” And by that he meant that nothing would be spared. Most especially, this meant an assault on the bourgeois “idea of art, attacking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.” 12

  Sometimes the public says enough is enough. Such was the case with the uproar caused by the 1999 Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

  Sensation was a beastly British art exhibit that garnered international attention. The paintings, owned by Charles Saatchi, not only displayed dead animals and sexually mutilated bodies, they also included a painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, that was laced with elephant dung and spotted with pictures of vaginas and anuses. It was this “creative” display that drew fire from the Catholic League.

  A reporter from the New York Daily News first gave me the heads-up on the exhibit. After securing a copy of the Sensation catalog, I issued a news release on September 16. Shortly thereafter New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani joined the Catholic League in labeling the exhibit “Catholic bashing”; he also threatened to close the museum. I called for a boycott of the museum, posting an ad asking Catholic teachers in the Brooklyn Diocese to join us in this effort. We also wrote to every member of the New York City Council requesting that the museum be defunded.

  We branded the exhibit “snuff art” because it depicted mannequins of grotesquely distorted children, some with penises in place of their noses; there were two clear boxes, one filled with maggots, the other with a cow’s head; there was a bisected pig in formaldehyde; and there was a 13-foot-high portrait of Myra Hindley, Britain’s most famous child molester. Roger Kimball of the New Criterion knew what was going on: “Anyone familiar with the history of Dada and Surrealism has seen it all before: the pornography, the pathological fascination with decay and mutilation, toying with blasphemy (dressed up, occasionally, as a new religiosity).” 13 Yes, this was cultural nihilism taken to a new level.

  But it was The Holy Virgin Mary by artist Chris Ofili that mobilized the Catholic League and that ultimately became the focus of the controversy. The position of the League, which was echoed by Mayor Giuliani, was that showing the exhibit was entirely legal. Making the public pay for it was, however, outrageous. “This has gone beyond the vulgar, the blasphemous and the scatological,” I told the press. 14

  On October 2, 1999, the day the exhibit opened, the Catholic League mounted a large protest and held a press conference in front of the museum. We also did something novel. We distributed “Vomit Bags” to the first 500 attendees. The vomit bags, which had a label on them saying they were courtesy of the Catholic League, were distributed in response to the museum’s warning that seeing the exhibit could make someone sick. I agreed with the museum official who made this remark, hence the vomit bags. When a TV reporter asked if it was really necessary to distribute the bags, I told her that puke not only stinks, it can be slippery as well, and we didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I’m not sure she was convinced. 15

  The media, of course, loved this story. After all, it had so many permutations: there were artistic, ethical, legal, economic, religious, and political issues involved. Throughout, the position of the Catholic League was that the exhibit was entirely legal and entirely immoral. Yes, the paintings should not be censored, but no, the taxpayers should not be forced to fund it. Here’s what I said on the Today show of September 27: “And when you throw elephant dung and have pictures of vaginas and anuses surrounding her [the Blessed Mother] in this kind of invidious fashion, my answer is go show your filth down the street. Find a fat cat bigot. There are a lot of fat cat bigots who don’t like Catholics in this country—let them sponsor it. But if the government cannot sponsor my religion, and it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t be in the business of allowing people to bash my religion. What this is is pure unadulterated hate speech. And the government should not be involved in hate speech against my religion or anyone else’s.” 16

  On the day of the Catholic League rally at the museum, I was asked on National Public Radio why I objected to the art, especially given the fact that art often shocks people. “You want to shock people,” I said, “why don’t you take your own mother and wipe crap over her? But don’t dare take our spiritual mother, the spiritual mother of people worldwide and millions of people in the New York City area, and desecrate her.” At the rally, I addressed another bogus argument, the curious notion that there are multiple interpretations to this. “Only people who have been drunk on the ideas of modern art would believe this,” I said. “If somebody puts a swastika on a synagogue, there’s only one answer—and everyone knows what it is. When you throw elephant dung with pornographic pictures on Our Blessed Mother, there’s only one meaning.” 17

  One of the most commonly voiced criticisms aimed at the Catholic League was that we missed the point of the elephant dung: to Africans, so the argument went, this is seen as honorific. “That’s a racist statement,” I said at the rally. “I’ve taught in Spanish Harlem. I don’t know one African-American family that when it comes to celebrating Kwanzaa, they send a pile of excrement to their friends.” 18 Not only that, I will never forget a conversation I had about this issue with a man from Nigeria that I met at a Christmas party that year. I asked him if elephant dung has positive connotations in his home country. His reaction was one of anger and laughter. By the way, the offending artist, Ofili, is not African—he’s a Brit; his parents were born in Nigeria. Besides, all
of this misses my point. Is it also an African tradition of great honor to put clips of vaginas and anuses on pictures of revered persons?

  No organization looked worse during this time than People for the American Way. The leadership not only did not condemn the art as bigoted, it defended it. It, too, took the position that the dung was a nice cultural touch. Ronald Feldman, a board member of the group, said Ofili’s painting “will be understood by others as a depiction of the enduring belief in and search for holiness in the midst of a debased and debasing culture.” 19 By “others” he must have meant bigots and the self-delusional, for everyone else knew what was meant by Ofili’s work.

  The hypocrisy in all this was too much to bear. In 1988, six months after Chicago Mayor Harold Washington died, an artist portrayed him in women’s underwear and hung his painting in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Chicago City Council immediately voted to defund the museum, and a cop literally snatched the painting off the wall. Yet no one in the artistic community screamed “censorship.” And what did the Chicago museum do? It took out full-page ads in two newspapers apologizing for what it did. Not only did the museum capitulate to the African American aldermen, it launched an affirmative action plan to hire more blacks. 20 All the Catholic League did was to say that the Brooklyn Museum of Art was not the right venue, and that those who wanted the exhibit should do it on their own dime. And for this we were blasted by the artistic community for simply exercising our right to freedom of speech and assembly.

  There was one good thing that came out of all this—it brought principled persons together. For example, one of the persons with whom I locked horns over the museum controversy was Norman Siegel, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. To this day, we agree on almost nothing, but we are good friends nonetheless. Norm is a tireless champion of civil liberties, and he is scrupulously honest. His interpretation of civil liberties and mine are very different, but this hasn’t impeded us from joining together to denounce anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism. We’ve spoken together on the streets of Harlem, outside synagogues in Queens, and at the headquarters of the New York Archdiocese.