Is there any wonder why the Catholicism that is exemplified by these fringe groups and which become the public face of the church is held up to so much disdain and ridicule by the rest of society?
These “Catholics” simply don’t get what Malachy McCourt said: “Having resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
Their poisonous comments only points out the sadness of their brand of Catholicism.

WOW! Dig a yet deeper hole for the public representation of the RCC. Not a fair comparison at all, under any circumstances.

I agree that those comments are inflammatory. However, we should not let that distract us from what is really important: fighting for the rights of the Church to operate freely and according to its values. These rights are guaranteed under the constitution, after all.

The idea of separation of Church and state is exactly that, a separation. Neither is to be allowed to interfere with the others operations. We seem to sometimes forget that when the Church steps outside of its bounds and begins to organize political actions, it is no longer protected and may be subject to taxes and laws that any other political group is subject too.
With all rights there comes responsibility.

Have conservative Catholics gone off their meds in the past couple years? A city tells them they have to abide by a civil law they don’t happen to like and that merits a breathless cry of looming genocide? That’s their notion of what true persecution is? For a bunch of guys who fancy themselves Christ’s true followers, they sure have a thin skin. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the early centuries of the church.

I think a lot of these reactions are triggered by the simple fact that for the last generation, conservative Christians could count of the federal government to support them.
Maybe not always as openly as under the near-dictatorship of Bush#43, but they knew that when push came to shove, the government was anti-civil rights and very much not interested in the separation of church and state.
Suddenly, they are confronted with a federal government based of the principles anchored in the US Constitution and they feel threatened!
That’s what is behind these statements. They’ll adjust, and, given the deeply ingrained practicality of the Catholic church, fairly quickly. It will just take a while.
Note: I didn’t say they’d change. Just, they will learn to moderate their tone.

It would be nice if Mr. Thompson learned something about our Constitution and the First Amendment. Until then, he would do everyone a favor by shutting up.
Maybe the bishops need to start talking to some of their ‘allies’ about how much harm they are doing the RCC. Most recently, we had Bill Donohue whining about how unfair it was to have the Irish government look into the way children in the care of social service agencies were treated by Catholic institutions and now we have Richard Thompson, who refuses to learn anything from the high profile cases that he loses, equating this to the Holocaust. It was certainly cruel of reality to show all of us how completely off-base he was yesterday, but I have every confidence that Mr. Thompson will continue to fight against the First Amendment with his attempts to replace it with his own dogmatic mockery of the same and learn nothing.

Are you saying that Bill Donohue isn’t upset about the way children were treated in Irish Catholic institutions but is upset at the criticim directed towards priests, nuns and “Christian” brothers who abused these children? Where is the shame here?

Mareczku,
Are you implying we should be ashamed of ourselves for being furious over the way these children were so abused?
Or do you mean you are appalled by Donohue’s knee-jerk defence of the Church in this as in everything else?