Censors don’t read, but they do go to movie theaters.
—Bryan Alexander on the absurdity of protests against the years-old, highly successful His Dark Materials YA fantasy series by Philip Pullman only when its first installment, The Golden Compass, is being made into a motion picture. So you can add “illiterate” to the heap of vituperative adjectives I use to describe the Catholic League. (I went to a Catholic high school, man. Some things you don’t forget.)
Oh, they read, they just like publicity. When the 6th Harry Potter book came out, a church here in New Mexico had a good old-fashioned book burning in celebration. The HDM books have sold well, but never been blockbusters so it wasn’t probably worth their time to really protest. But for a movie that’s going nationwide with millions of dollars in marketing, protesting that really gets their names in the papers. So at the risk of giving the Catholic League a little credit, I think they can actually read, it’s just that they’re publicity whores.
I was watching An Evening with Kevin Smith, and he was talking about the Catholic League’s protests of Dogma. He said once they managed to get Disney to drop the movie and he was forced to release it independently, they didn’t care anymore and stopped protesting. So yeah, publicity whores.
There’s a great clip out there from Opie & Anthony when they put the League’s noxious gasbag-in-chief William Donohue on at the same time as Louis CK, and they start talking about Donohue’s denunciation of CK’s sitcom Lucky Louie. It quickly becomes apparent that Donohue never saw an episode, despite having “written” the condemnatory press release. His out was more or less “I have a staff that tells me what to be outraged about.”