The Corner reports that, over the weekend, Bill Maher joked on a late night talk show that it is “schizophrenic” to “be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god.” To which the Catholic Leagues’ Bill Donohue offers this vaguely ominous rejoinder:
Unlike most non-believers, who are generally content to respect the right of most Americans to believe in God, guys like Maher want a brawl. He should be careful what he wishes for because there are those who pine to deliver.
So… what exactly does this mean? Maher’s clearly not questioning the “right” to believe in God; he’s just making fun of it. And believers, for their part, are already slinging their verbal arrows back at secularists, as they have been forever. But since it doesn’t seem possible for someone like Donohue to step up his invective against secularists much above the level he’s already at, exactly how are we supposed to read the suggestion that “there are those who pine to deliver” a “brawl,” in light of which Maher should be “careful”? Am I alone in getting molto creepioso overtones here?
1 response so far ↓
1 Other Ezra // Jan 7, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Despite the sensitive nature of his complaints, Donohue always uses schoolyard-bully rhetoric, but what he means is no doubt the only thing he ever does except press releases: sending obnoxious letters with his “demands” to Time Warner and any advertisers, and eventually threatening a boycott which he can’t deliver on. When he goes into this mode he’s very clear, writing things like “It’s on” on and talking about his “beef.”
You’d have to go pretty far back to find some actual link to violence. I wonder what Catholic League’s press releases sounded like around, say, The Last Temptation of Christ–some dude did drive a van into the theater…