William Donohue unleashed gay, black, Jewish stereotypes while speaking out against The Da Vinci Code

Summary: On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, William Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, argued that Christians are under attack by eight popular books, including Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Donohue asserted that Christians have every right to be offended by books that are "hypercritical" of Christianity, just as other groups would be offended by a book that claimed that "blacks are natural-born killers, or that gays are naturally born to be moral slugs, or that Jews are taking over the world."

On the April 17 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, William A. Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, invoked stereotypes about gays, African-Americans, and Jews while arguing that Christians are under attack by eight popular books, including Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, March 2003). Donohue argued that Christians have every right to be offended by books that are "hypercritical" of Christianity, just as other groups would be offended by a book that claimed that "blacks are natural-born killers, or that gays are naturally born to be moral slugs, or that Jews are taking over the world."

Donohue's remarks came in defense of Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, who recently spoke out against several popular fiction books, including the The Da Vinci Code, which he found offensive to Christianity. As Media Matters for America has noted, Donohue frequently appears as a guest on Scarborough Country and other TV news programs, often attacking gays and progressives.

From the April 17 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country:

JOE SCARBOROUGH (host): Bill Donohue, did the archbishop of Canterbury overreact to a Hollywood movie, a work of fiction?

DONOHUE: Oh, I wish more Catholic bishops and cardinals were speaking out like him.

You know, isn't it interesting? We usually are rapping priests and ministers and rabbis for not being relevant. And now, when he tries to be relevant about something which has become a cottage industry, rapping Christianity, now he's criticized.

You know, it's not just The Da Vinci Code. You've got five books in the fiction list, over the last couple weeks, which tell lies about Christianity. You have three books right now on the non-fiction bestseller list, which are basically hypercritical. One of them is an incredible screed itself.

So, here, we have Christianity under attack. Intellectuals like to rap it. And then we're called whiners. Now, you just try to do this with blacks. Can you imagine if you had eight books that are bestsellers right now, saying that blacks are natural-born killers, or that gays are naturally born to be moral slugs, or that Jews are taking over the world? Could you imagine if somebody then said about blacks and Jews and gays were whiners because they were complaining about this intellectual assault? No.

What the archbishop of Canterbury was doing was telling the truth. And that is to say, if you're a Christian and you take your religion seriously, you'd better be aware of what's going on. It's a matter of self-defense.

—B.F.