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."
KI1 14:22 And Judah did evil in the sight of the LORD, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins which they had committed, above all that their fathers had done.KI1 14:23 For they also built them high places, and images, and groves, on every high hill, and under every green tree.
KI1 14:24 And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the LORD cast out before the children of Israel.
[Snip]
KI1 15:11 And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did David his father.
KI1 15:12 And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.
I doubt that's his point, but I just thought I'd throw that out for discussion.
Oh, how are the mightly fallen! It makes a person want to cry.
This wheezing, flabby, girlie-poo-poo hissy fit over a fourth-rate CARTOONIST is all that is left in the United States of the greatest human instituiton ever devised; whose handiworks included the greatest disputes over the very nature of human beings; the greatest artistic depictions of man's dignity; the greatest musical achievements; in fact, the greatest IDEA for a God ever imagined (or intuited)--for those to whom faith does not come naturally.
And on another front a representative of the Church is accepting an apology from a fourth-rate hollywood actor who played Superman, for some comments he made about his tragically parylyzed brain.
The horror. The horror.
It's even more horrible than I thought it was going to be.
In answer to your question, I think homosexuals are just sexually disabled and people who see it are not surprised.
I see that you took the time to complement FF578 yesterday on a thread after he had been criticized right there for proposing the execution for homosexual behavior (as well as for premarital sex, pornography and blasphemy) on a previous thread.
Do you also support these proposals as well?
Please note, I took the time to answer your question.
So the corporate conformist press dictates the proper sensibiliites of a lot of people in this, the best of all possible democracies--eh?
And then people wonder how mohammedan mass murderers could even THINK of doing what they did on September 11th, 2002.
Some people are so intellectually and morally disengaged that they leave very few civilized means of registering outrage--get the picture?
When Catholics men had hair on their chests we used to register very well indeed---even with the terminally tone deaf.
The cartoon was mocking the Catholic church as a dogmatic institution.
Will they continue to molest young boys and keep their homosexual outreach program prohibited by Bible docterine, too?
Will they add gay nuns?
I find it odd the Catholics are so outraged by a cartoon in a small newspaper, but so forgiving of homosexual pedophile priests.
One destroyed the immortal souls of hundreds of innocent children, the other just black ink on a piece of paper. What's really the worst of two evils? Hello?
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