Freethought NOW!

In honor of Blasphemy Day and Bill Donohue: Damn the pope

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Today is International Blasphemy Rights Day, a lovely little celebration put on by our friends at the Center for Inquiry. On this day, we celebrate and exercise our right to speak freely, even if that speech criticizes religion or is considered blasphemous. On this day, we stand in solidarity with our nonreligious brothers and sisters around the world, many of who are arrested, punished and persecuted for exercising the rights we enjoy here.

Robert Ingersoll, The Great Agnostic. One of his biographers, Susan Jacoby, will be speaking at FFRF's convention.
Robert Ingersoll, The Great Agnostic. One of his biographers, Susan Jacoby, will be speaking at FFRF’s convention.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s charitable arm, Nonbelief Relief, has worked to help those brothers and sisters, particularly the blasphemous bloggers of Bangladesh. This summer, Nonbelief Relief wired emergency stipends to 11 different threatened Bangladeshi nonbelievers. That work continues, and Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who was grievously injured during a machete attack that killed her husband Avijit Roy last year, will be speaking at FFRF’s convention next week.

Bill Donohue, the Catholic League’s resident bloviator, is particularly upset that people might choose to blaspheme his god and his church. Indeed he claims that CFI “harbor[s] a special hatred of Catholicism.”

So in honor of International Blasphemy Rights Day and in honor of Mr. Donohue, let me just say: Damn the pope. This pope, as we’ve pointed, is all talk, not action. He’s no different than the host of popes before him, except that he might be a little better at public relations. In short, the pope is still a moral hypocrite. That’s why my colleague at CFI, Paul Fidalgo, has dubbed him “Pope Fluffy.”

A blasphemous photo of Pope Fluffy uncovered in the FFRF archives.
A blasphemous photo of Pope Fluffy uncovered in the FFRF archives.

And while we’re on the subject of Catholicism, if you consider yourself a Catholic, you owe it to yourself take a hard look at the beliefs required by your Church’s religious law.

A right worth having is a right worth exercising. And the right to blaspheme is vital. As Justice Robert Jackson put it in the Barnette decision, one of the seminal cases protecting the First Amendment: “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

This quote comes from the Barnette decision in 1943. It's the case that upheld the rights of citizens to remain seated during the Pledge of Allegiance.
This quote comes from the Barnette decision in 1943. It’s the case that upheld the rights of citizens to remain seated during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Jackson knew more than most about “exterminating dissenters,” lessons he learned while serving as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. Jackson is also remembered for his powerful dissent—one of the best ever—in Korematsu, the case that upheld U.S. internment camps for citizens with Japanese heritage.

So today, exercise your right to blaspheme. Damn the gods you were taught to believe in or the irrational dogma you grew up in. Should you face opposition, remember the words of Robert G. Ingersoll, who defended a man against a blasphemy charge in New Jersey in 1887: “Any church that imprisons a man because he has used an argument against its creed, will simply convince the world that it cannot answer the argument.”

Please share this article: