Secular Sabotage
Page 8
The latter venue was the site of a press conference we had on October 4, 1999, two days after the rally at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Norm denounced anti-Catholicism and I denounced anti-Semitism. We did this because both of us had experienced bigotry during the course of this controversy. Prior to the rally outside the museum, Norm and I had been invited to speak at a public forum debating the merits of our position. At one point, I was attacked by an anti-Catholic bigot from the audience, and Norm jumped in to defend me. At the rally, when Norm sought to speak, he was attacked by an anti-Semite, and I quickly confronted the bigot. So when we held a press conference at the headquarters of the New York Archdiocese, it was labeled by the Daily News as “an extraordinary joint appearance,” and Newsday labeled it “an unlikely alliance.” 21
Perhaps not as extraordinary, but just as important, was the support that the Catholic League received from so many persons of faith. John Cardinal O’Connor and Bishop Thomas Daily of Brooklyn stood by us, as did the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization (a Pentecostal group), the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, Agudath Israel, and the Islamic Center of Long Island. 22 The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations was particularly supportive. The week before the exhibit opened, it issued a press release saying, “Displaying a religious symbol splattered with dung is deeply offensive and can hardly be said to have any redeeming social or artistic value. Today, the offense is perpetrated against a Christian symbol; tomorrow, it might be a Jewish ritual item, and then of another faith.” It also said, “we support those civic leaders who have questioned whether public funds should support this exhibition.” 23
As it turned out, there was more dirt to this issue than was found at the museum. The New York Times ran a front-page story revealing that unethical practices had colored the Sensation exhibit. The director of the museum, Arnold L. Lehman, pressed both Charles Saatchi, the owner of the art, and Christie’s, the prestigious auction house, for financing. Saatchi forked over $160,000 to the museum and then tried to conceal his “philanthropy” from the public; Christie’s was given perks. We called upon Lehman to be terminated for violating the public trust, but nothing was done. 24 So not only did Lehman give the green light to this offensive exhibition, he engineered a boatload of money from those who stood to personally profit from this venture.
The controversy refused to die. On December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Catholic League teamed with Monsignor Peter Finn, one of New York’s most prominent priests, in leading hundreds of Catholics in prayer outside the Brooklyn Museum of Art. At the rally I made it clear that our efforts were not in vain. A similarly obscene and blasphemous exhibit in Detroit lasted just two days. The director who pulled the exhibit cited the trouble in Brooklyn as the reason why he stopped it; the Detroit exhibit featured a drawing of a baby Jesus in a bathtub wearing a condom. I also pointed out that the Sensation exhibition was canceled in Australia after all the rumblings in New York made international news.
Just before the exhibition closed, I sent a package to the museum’s director. In it was a huge pooper-scooper and a package of ten hypoallergenic disposable latex gloves. “Just as we provided vomit bags to facilitate the process of puking when the exhibit opened,” I announced, “we are now providing a pooper-scooper and surgical gloves—latex, of course—to facilitate the sanitary removal of the dung. This should put to rest the rumor that we are not eco-conscious at the Catholic League. And besides, who wants to step in barf and feces while dismantling this masterpiece?” I closed my comments by saying, “We hope Arnold Lehman appreciates our thoughtfulness and puts our New Year’s gift to good use. We also hope he doesn’t exploit museum workers by ordering them to clean up his filth.” 25
In February 2001, the Brooklyn Museum of Art was back in the news, and so was the Catholic League. This time the museum decided to display Renee Cox’s “Yo Mama’s Last Supper.” It featured a color photo of Cox, a black woman, standing nude as Christ in the Last Supper. She admitted that her work was aimed at the Catholic Church, which she somehow managed to blame for slavery. When I debated her at the First Amendment Center in New York, I asked her if she would object to a portrait of white men urinating into the mouth of a black man, or an offensive portrait of Martin Luther King being displayed in a public library during Black History Month. Though I found Renee to be a nice person, I will never forget how upset she got with me for throwing these questions at her. She just didn’t get it. 26
Lots of those in the artistic community just don’t get it. And some have no sense of humor. Steven C. Dubin, a professor who teaches about art and society, called me one day about the Sensation exhibit and the Catholic League’s role in it. He seemed genuinely bewildered by what I had to say, and recorded his impressions in a book he wrote about controversial artistic exhibitions. Here is how he ended his book: “If you have any doubts that this [the whole controversy over Sensation] was a contrived affair, make note: when I asked whether art interests him, the Catholic League’s William Donohue breezily replied, ‘No. Pubs do. I go to bars, not to museums.’” 27 Come to think of it, I really wasn’t joking.
Theater
The Catholic Church, rich with tradition and ritual, has been the object of artistic expression for over 2,000 years. Some of it is reverential, some pokes light fun, and some is degrading. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You represents the latter.
The play features a malicious nun who is confronted by four of her former students, all of whom are allegedly dysfunctional as a result of their Catholic upbringing. In the course of the play, virtually every Catholic teaching is mocked. The nuns who taught generations of schoolchildren are hatefully caricatured and stereotyped. Worst of all, the life of Christ is portrayed in the vilest way, from the Nativity through the Crucifixion; the vicious depiction of Our Blessed Mother is similarly disturbing. In the end, the nun shoots and kills two of her ex-students.
It is a sign of how much radical secularists hate Catholicism that they still perform this play at local playhouses as well as on college campuses. And it is a sign of cultural sickness that Showtime, the cable television channel, made a film version of it in 2001. The movie, which starred Diane Keaton and was directed by Marshall Brickman, was seen by Brickman as constituting just deserts. He justified the attack on Catholicism by proclaiming, “any institution that backed the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Roman position on the Holocaust deserves to be the butt of a couple of jokes.” 28 It’s not certain what’s more galling—his torturing of history or his selective indignation.
The author of the play, another gay ex-Catholic, Christopher Durang, was still maintaining in 2008 that the Catholic League is wrong to cast his work as bigotry; it’s just criticism, he said. 29 Yet, in 1983, the ADL called his play “offensive, unfair and demeaning.” In 1985, the National Conference of Christians and Jews branded the play “a travesty of Catholic teaching.” That’s not all. In 1981, Frank Rich (not exactly a Catholic lackey) in the New York Times described it as a “one-act comedy [that] goes after the Catholic Church with a vengeance.” In 1990, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted that the play “takes a brutal, satirical look at Catholic dogma.” A theater critic for the Dallas Morning News said in 1998 that it was “the most virulently anti-Catholic play in American theater.” 30
There have been lots of anti-Catholic plays, but there was only one that caused thousands to take to the streets in protest—Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi. This play, written by yet another gay ex-Catholic, garnered an unprecedented coalition of religious conservatives.
The play is about a Christ-like character who is depicted as having sex with the apostles. It opened in New York City in October 1998, but only after it had been previously withdrawn by the play’s producer, the Manhattan Theatre Club; pressure from the artistic community to put the play back on the drawing board proved irresistible. For example, when it was initially announced that the play was to be canceled, 30 major playwrights sign
ed a letter demanding that the Manhattan Theatre Club stick to its guns. It was signed by such notables as Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller, Christopher Durang, A. R. Gurney, Stephen Sondheim, and Wendy Wasserstein. 31 When this was made public, I told New York 1, the New York City all-news cable channel, that I would debate any one of them. The station agreed to air the debate, but there were no takers. So much for their passion for free speech.
The Catholic League learned of the “gay Jesus” play in the spring of 1998. We immediately started building a coalition of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim groups; others later came on board. The early support from Orthodox Jews was particularly outstanding. But it didn’t take long before the New York Times, ever the friend of the artistic community, jumped into the fray. In its editorial of May 28, “Censoring Terrence McNally,” it took a veiled shot at the Catholic League: “That there is a native strain of bigotry, violence and contempt for artistic expression in this country is not news.” 32 I struck back with an op-ed page ad in the New York Times on June 15 that set the tone for the rest of the debate.
The ad was titled “‘Shylock and Sambo’ Hits Broadway.” It alleged, quite falsely, that such a play was going to hit Broadway in the fall. “An advance copy of the script says that it features gay Jewish slavemasters who sodomize their obsequious black slaves. Though the play is often vulgar, it is nonetheless a major work of art. The theater company that is producing it receives federal, state and local funding.” After commenting how gay, Jewish, and black groups were protesting, I threw the New York Times editorial back at them, attributing the comment to the Times: “That there is a native strain of bigotry, violence and contempt for artistic expression in this country is not news.” I could not resist saying that “noted playwrights have rushed to defend the play, citing freedom of speech and respect for the arts.” 33
I then bared the truth, saying this was “fairy land,” and that “The artistic community would never dream of offending gays, Jews and blacks, and the New York Times would never write such nonsense about them.” I also took on the question of censorship. “Gays tried to shut down the movie ‘Cruising,’ Jews sought to stop the publication of ‘A Nation on Trial,’ feminists blasted ‘Smack My Bitch Up,’ Puerto Ricans rallied against ‘Seinfeld,’ etc.” But none was denounced for censorship. The Catholic League, and its coalition, never called upon the government to cancel Corpus Christi. Our request was aimed at the producers. 34 All of which raises the question, Why is it that when Christian groups have concerns over the content of a play or book or movie it’s called censorship, but when gays or feminists or just about any other group speak up they are exercising free speech?
Our ad hit a nerve with the ADL. Abe Foxman, ADL’s national director, wrote to the Catholic League on July 7 expressing the ADL’s displeasure. It was the ad—not the play—that he was referring to. “We would hope that in the future you will find a way to express your legitimate concerns about matters offensive to Catholics in a manner which itself does not reflect insensitivity to other groups.” 35 In other words, the fictional analogue of Shylock and Sambo—which was designed to shock—was troubling. But apparently a play depicting Jesus sodomizing the apostles was not. The ADL had come a long way from its pre-Foxman days when it condemned Sister Mary Ignatius.
The Catholic League spent the summer of 1998 trying to get the playwright or the producer to release a copy of the script; we also spent time mobilizing religious conservatives. The New York Times got ahold of the script, and what it had to say about the play was alarming. It said that “from the beginning to the end [the script] retells the Biblical story of a Jesus-like figure—from his birth in a Texas flea-bag hotel with people having profane, violent sex in the room next door to his crucifixion as ‘king of the queers.’” It added, for good measure, that the Christ-like character, Joshua, “has a long-running affair with Judas and sexual relations with the other apostles.” The Jesus-figure also has sex on the stage, albeit in a nonexplicit way, with an HIV-positive street hustler. The script ends by saying, “If we have offended, so be it. He belongs to us as well as to you.” 36 This just goes to show how utterly arrogant, and shameless, McNally really is.
My view of the play, which I got to see a few days before opening night, was slightly different. The basic message was this: Jesus was no more divine than the rest of us and the reason He was crucified was because He approved of homosexuality. That is why He was branded King of the Queers.
The play, interestingly, was replete with gay stereotypes, ranging from the sexual to the scatological. There was crotch grabbing and a clear obsession with the male sex organ. The Christ-like figure pretended to urinate in front of the audience, and he was joined by three of the apostles, complete with sounds of urination piped into the theater. No doubt this was considered creative.
When Joshua (Jesus) turned to the apostles and proclaimed them all to be divine, he invoked a vile obscenity three times, referring to “your father,” “your mother,” and “God.” Joshua, of course, had sex with Judas at a high school prom and then had another romp with Philip. At one point, Philip said to Joshua, “I hope you have rubbers.” He then asked him to perform oral sex on him.
The key scene in the play came near the end. This was when Joshua condemned a priest for condemning homosexuality. After hearing the priest recite biblical teachings on homosexuality, Joshua charged that “you have perverted my Father’s words.” Joshua said he knows Scripture as well as anyone and that no one should take any of it literally. The Bible, he said, was about love. Joshua then presided over a “wedding” between James and Bartholomew. Not finished damning the priest, Joshua said, “I despise you,” and then proceeded to hit him several times. Not surprisingly, the all-white audience responded favorably to the violence. 37
While the play can be seen as anti-Christian, it was Catholics McNally really wanted to get. That’s why he included recitations of the Hail Mary and references to priests, nuns, and Boys Town. In any event, by the time the play was ready to open, the Catholic League had persuaded a coalition of 49 organizations, representing some of the most prestigious religious organizations in the nation, to sign a formal letter of protest. 38 But it was what happened on opening night that really shook McNally and his supporters.
On October 13, the night of the gala opening of Corpus Christi, there were two protest demonstrations outside the Manhattan Theatre Club, a publicly funded entity. There was a rally organized by the Catholic League, which included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, and there was a protest of our protest led by People for the American Way. The New York Times reported that our demonstration numbered over 2,000; only 300 joined the counterdemonstration. “The protest began with a fiery speech from William A. Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights,” the Times said. That this occurred on a rainy night made our protest all the more gratifying. “Holding a bullhorn inside an area barricaded by the police,” the news story said, “Mr. Donohue shouted criticisms at the opposition. ‘You are the real authoritarians at heart,’ he said. ‘We’re the ones that believe in tolerance, not you phonies.’” 39
The play turned out to be a bomb. Fintan O’Toole of the New York Daily News called it “utterly devoid of moral seriousness or artistic integrity.” In the New York Post, Clive Barnes called it “dull,” and David Lyons of the Wall Street Journal rebuked it for its “fatheadedness.” The Washington Post got it right when it said that “Self-pitying artists (Oscar Wilde, John Lennon, et al.) have long had the habit of comparing themselves to Jesus, but this play plummets to a whole new level of grandiosity.” And Ben Brantley of the New York Times, who was expected by many to like it, said the writing was “lazy” and in the end “flat and simpleminded.” 40 It was not lost on religious conservatives that none of the reviewers slammed the play for its Christian-bashing elements.
The most satisfying aspect of the entire controversy was the fact that religious conservatives came together
in a way that really made a statement. The New York Times correctly said that our rally “dwarfed” the counterdemonstration. 41 What it didn’t say was that the other side not only lost, they looked foolish. Billed as “A Quiet Walk for the First Amendment by People for the American Way,” their protest turned out to be nothing of the kind. Neither the Catholic League, nor any of the religious groups, ever called for government censorship. So what exactly were they protesting? Our right to protest? The sight of them holding their little balloons chanting quietly was priceless. Joining in this farce was the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN American Center, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. 42 The ACLU was smart enough to beg off.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the entire controversy was the extent to which the Catholic League was lied about by the secularists. No matter how many times I said that we would rather endure the indignity of this play before ever calling on the government to ban it, the accusation of censorship was thrown at us. A new ad hoc group, the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Alliance for Freedom and First Amendment Rights, emerged to smear the Catholic League. We were not only accused of censorship, it was implied that we were behind threats of violence aimed at the Manhattan Theatre Club. We were branded a “neo-Nazi” group, and our patriotism was impugned with the old anti-Catholic canard, “Is it pro-Rome or anti-American?” 43
The charge about violence proved never-ending. According to the Manhattan Theatre Club, they received a bomb threat. And because I had said that the Catholic League was declaring “war” on the play, commentators and news stories blamed me for it. My use of the term “war,” I said, was standard rhetoric voiced by all sides in the culture war. There was a “war on poverty,” a “war on drugs,” etc. James Carville, I had pointed out, had just said that the Democrats were declaring “war” on special prosecutor Ken Starr. Did anyone accuse Carville of violence? And if Starr’s office had received a bomb threat, would Carville have been blamed? The charge was preposterous. Moreover, the many death threats that I received proved to be of no interest to the media, though I made mention of them several times on radio and television. In the end, I did succeed in getting newspapers to correct stories that falsely accused the Catholic League of violence; we chased down such stories for years.