Catholic Asian News (http://www.ucanews.com)
(1) Fury over ad that urges Catholics to quit the Church, 13 March 2012
Polarisation in the US, over same sex marriages, contraception and religious freedom, is gathering unprecedented pace. Now a secular group has published a full page ad calling on Catholics to renounce their faith.
by Kevin J. Jones
United States
A secularist group’s New York Times ad that urges Catholics to leave the Church over its’ resistance to the contraception mandate is being called “hate speech” by critics.
“Not a single Catholic who reads this ad will be impelled to leave the Church. That is not the issue,” said Catholic League president Bill Donohue. “The issue is the increase in hate speech directed at Catholics.”
The Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation ad “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church” ran on March 9 and billed itself as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.”
“Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages?” it asks. “Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on?”
The ad claims that the church is “an avowedly antidemocratic Old Boys club” and derides Catholic teaching that contraception use is sinful. It also blames the Church for causing misery, poverty, unwanted pregnancies and deaths and attacks Catholic teaching on the ordination of women, parochial schools, and the Church’s response to sex abuse.
The ad, which includes an unflattering political cartoon of a Catholic bishop, claims that the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference has made a “declaration of war against women’s right to contraception.”
(2) After running an anti-Catholic ad, NY Times refuses Islamic version, 20 March 2012
An anti-Catholic ad provoked widespread attention and a storm of protest when the New York Times published it last week. Now the anger has re-ignited with its refusal to print a similar anti-Islamic announcement.
United States
The New York Times is being accused of having a double standard when it comes to questioning religion, after it ran an ad calling on Catholics to leave their church, but nixed an ad making the same plea to Muslims.
The newspaper published an ad from Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation on March 9 which asked Catholics, “why send your children to parochial schools to be indoctrinated into the next generation of obedient donors and voters?” The ad went on to call loyalty to the faith misplaced “after two decades of sex scandals involving preying priests, church complicity, collusion and cover-up going all the way to the top.”
But in a story first reported by The Daily Caller, when Pamela Geller, a blogger and executive director of Stop Islamization of America, offered the same $39,000 for the Old Gray Lady to run an ad making a similar appeal to Muslims, the newspaper passed.
“This shows the hypocrisy of The New York Times, the “gold standard” in journalism, and its willingness to kowtow to violent Islamic supremacist intimidation,” Geller told FoxNews.com.
Geller said her anti-Shariah ad was designed to mimic the anti-Catholic one. In calling on Muslims to quit their religion, the ad asked “Why put up with an institution that dehumanizes women and non-Muslims … [do] you keep identifying with the ideology that threatens liberty for women and menaces freedom by slaughtering, oppressing and subjugating non-Muslims… Join those of us who put humanity above the vengeful, hateful and violent teachings of Islam’s ‘prophet.’”
Source: Fox News
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