Posted on 09/23/2002 4:53:06 AM PDT by Preston Noell
Please join this protest in Chicago on Wednesday, September 25th, 11:30 to l:00 pm.
Chicago Catholics Protest "Blasphemous" Cartoon
Friday, September 20, 2002
By The Leader-Chicago Bureau - Chicago Reader's cartoonist Garret Gaston focus of protest
During lunch hour on September 25, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) will publicly protest a recent cartoon published in The Chicago Reader. Catholics and other faiths plan to demonstrate across the street from the paper's downtown Chicago office at shortly before noon on Wednesday to voice their outrage with Garret Gaston's cartoon, "Papal Makeover," a piece the TFP calls "blasphemous."
link to cartoon: http://www.illinoisleader.com/content/img/f2062/Papal.jpg
On June 21st, The Chicago Reader, a 130,000-reader weekend newspaper, published a cartoon with the Pope dispensing "red hot birth control pills," saying, "we were just kidding about Original Sin" and suggesting immoral actions in the confessional, proposing a "new recipe for communion" using chocolate chips, among other images offensive to Catholics.
Each Thursday, The Chicago Reader is distributed freely at 1200 locations to upper middle class, single, college-attending professionals, 59% male and 41% female. Garret Gaston's cartoons are syndicated in less than ten papers nationally, including a news source in San Diego.
Before mobilizing a network of over 200,000 activists nationwide, American TFP President Raymond Drake sent a protest letter, asking The Chicago Reader for an unqualified apology and a written commitment that it will never again publish such blasphemies.
"This blatant, filthy mockery of the Papacy and the Church is a grave insult to God and to all Catholics" wrote Mr. Drake in a letter to the editor published by The Reader. "Facing these blasphemies we have no other option than to stand up and defend the honor of God and our Catholic Faith."
Gaston is known and has won awards for his "alternative" style in cartooning. And in a letter to the editor in reply to a reader condemning the cartoon, Gaston wrote, "I was actually calling through my comic strip for its readers to consider that the church has as little business promoting sexual behaviors as it does condemning them," and that if the reader "feels that as a Catholic [he] is being unfairly persecuted by a licentious cartoonist, I suggest he try being sexually persecuted by a powerful religion that professes to be the mouthpiece of God."
The Reader has not apologized or responded to the TFP's demands.
C. Preston Noell, head of the TFP's Chicago Bureau asks, "If this cartoon does not awaken our holy outrage, can we still consider ourselves Catholic?"
Noell is heading up the protest in Chicago. "We have been successful in the past in effecting the media," Noell said. "TFP is sending out 500,000 anti-blasphemy cards that will be returned to the Chicago Reader and we are planning next week's rally to held in front of The Chicago Reader's offices at Illinois & State Streets in downtown Chicago."
If the rally does not effect change in policy, other tactics may be used to influence the publication, Noell said.
"We may begin pressure on the paper's major advertisers," Noell said. "Perrier Water, Loyola University and United Parcel are all major advertisers in The Chicago Reader. We have asked for an apology and a promise to not print another cartoon of blasphemous nature. We will push until we protect our doctrine from these attacks."
Noell encouraged anyone to attend the rally and everyone to check the TFP's website to email the Chicago Reader a protest letter directly by visiting their website at http://www.tfp.org or by calling the TFP's Chicago area office at 847.692.2585.
"We hope that another 'Catholic backlash' will occur as it did in Disney's movie Dogma that bombed a year or so ago. We know that if there's enough outrage, we will turn this around."
Leni
I wish that they wouldn't use the word "blasphemous" to describe what is better described as "bigoted." (Even if it is in fact blasphemous.)
Calling something "blasphemous" just does not register with the media elites because they see nothing wrong with blasphemy. Whereas, if you call the same thing "racist" or "bigoted" or "biased," you push the buttons that get the reaction you want.
I don't see any "hate". In fact, it seems to me that the cartoon is making fun not of religion, but of "anything for mass appeal" commercialism.
Looks to me that its real target is crass liberalism, showing how absurd it is by demonstrating its ridiculousness compared to something more substantial like catholicism.
There is a difference between parody ("Nunsense" the musical) and this piece of s--- trash. Catholics can take a joke as well as anyone, and we don't have a problem poking fun at ourselves, but this is obviously malicious. Apparently this cartoonist is gay and has issues with the Church, and is using his column to spew.
I wonder if this newpaper would print a similar cartoon condemning the gays of America? I think not.
Consider the words of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan...
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness. Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness.
[21] For from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretense of successsion to St. Peter, their whole hiearchy (or kingdom of darkness) may be compared to the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits and the feats they play in the night). And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily percieve that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen empire.
[23] The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.
Not even Catholic but it was awful! What a jerk.
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