A sideshow of the Media Research Center’s hypocritical fixation on Harvey Weinstein’s newly revealed history of sexual harassment is the space it gives to Bill Donohue of the right-wing Catholic League — on whose board of advisers MRC chief Brent Bozell serves, not that the MRC will reliably disclose that.
Donohue’s columns for MRC “news” division CNSNews.com have largely been a campaign of schadenfreude on Donohue’s part; as he writes in his Oct. 6 column, “Harvey Weinstein and I have been doing battle for decades—he is the supreme Catholic basher in Hollywood.”
Donohue cranked that attitude up in his Oct. 12 column, declaring, “Hollywood has had a jolly good time ridiculing the Catholic Church for its sexual abuse scandal. Now the tables have turned.” Actually, Donohue has repeatedly misrepresented the facts regarding sexual abuse in the church.
In his Oct. 11 column, Donohue railed at Weinstein for the purportedly anti-Catholic films his company has released:
In 2013, they released “Philomena,” a tale of malicious lies about Irish nuns and the Church (Harvey lobbied hard for an Oscar, but came up empty). In real life, Philomena Lee was a teenager who abandoned her out-of-wedlock son, and who, because of the good efforts of the nuns, was adopted by an American couple.
In fact, the real-life Philomena did not “abandon” her child; she was forced to sign away all rights to him to the nuns who then put him up for adoption. That, unfortunately, was a depressingly common fate at that time or women with out-of-wedlock children, who then were forced to work in the laundries operated by the nuns.
Donohue might be a more credible critic of Weinstein if he could ever be bothered to get basic facts straight.