Catholic League Accuses Campus Paper of Anti-Christian Double Standard
by Jim Brown
September 14, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Catholic group is calling on the student newspaper at the University of Virginia to apologize for publishing three cartoons that mock Jesus Christ and his earthly parents. One of the cartoons printed by the Cavalier Daily depicts Christ being crucified on a Cartesian coordinate plane.
Yet another cartoon portrays Christ using foul language. The paper also ran a cartoon implying that Mary, the mother of Jesus, has a sexually transmitted disease.
Kiera McCaffrey is communications director at the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which has asked the paper's editors to apologize. She says the cartoons are "gratuitous attacks on the Christian faith" and hypocritical to boot.
"We looked into the paper," McCaffrey notes. "We understand that lots of them are very edgy, and we just wanted to see if these sort of attacks are made against everybody," she says, "and we found that, last year, there was a silly remark -- about the crane being a gay bird or the gayest of all birds -- made in the cartoon in the paper; and when a gay student objected, the paper issued an apology."
Based on that discovery, the Catholic League spokeswoman notes, the group felt asking for another apology from the student paper's decision makers would not unreasonable. "We thought if the apologies are going to go to gays, they should be willing as well to apologize to Christians for these needlessly offensive cartoons," she says.
However, the Cavalier Daily is ignoring the Catholic group's request and standing by its decision to print the three anti-Christian cartoons. The newspaper's editor-in-chief, Michael Slaven, says mocking all religions is permissible under the paper's policies.
McCaffrey is unconvinced. "This is the sort of situation where we just want to highlight the hypocrisy and say, 'Not only are you appeasing gays but, if you're so quick to say you're going to offend all religions, is that really true?'" she says. "I mean, do you think these student editors would have no problem printing cartoons of Muhammed, that they wouldn't be fearful of Muslims?"
The Catholic League is accusing the Cavalier Daily of a double standard. The group feels the paper is clearly appeasing homosexuals while intentionally mocking Christians.
"It's a situation where they feel that they can do this to Christians because, what are we going to do?" McCaffrey contends. "We're going to speak up," she says, or maybe "write in some angry e-mails. They know they're not going to get into any serious trouble for it."
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
