For Lent, Catholics give something up. Perhaps academia could show some of the tolerance it gives itself credit for by easing up on the Catholic-bashing it engages in annually.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights offers a compendium of the actions routinely taken in so-called institutions of higher learning and their breadth in staggering:
• On February 29, 2012, “The campus newspaper of Tufts University, Tufts Daily, published an article called ‘Get Your Rosaries Off Our Ovaries;’”
• On March 8, “In the March edition of GW Medicine Notes, Dr. Alan G. Wasserman, chairman of the George Washington University School of Medicine, attacked the Catholic Church in the front page section titled ‘From the Chairman.’ He used the Health and Human Services abortifacient mandate to make gross generalizations of the most vile sort about bishops and priests.” For instance, “It’s not separation of church and state that is the problem but separation of church and boys;”
• From April 12-19, 2012, “The University of Minnesota-Deluth hosted a series of events commemorating the Holocaust in a way that was patently anti-Catholic. The event was advertised with an anti-Catholic postcard depicting a Catholic prelate and a Nazi standing on top of a Jewish person;”
• From June 15 to July 31, 2012, “The ‘Annual Student Art Exhibition’ at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) featured the work of Humberto Reynoso, whose ceramic figure, ‘Self Portrait,’ depicted a man lying on his back with a red cross inserted in his anus;”
• On November 16, 2012, “At Dartmouth College, the Atheists, Humanists, Agnostics Club hosted an anti-Mother Teresa event. It featured the screening of an anti-Mother Teresa film and a discussion of Christopher Hitchens’ book, Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
