Richard Dawkins - Catholic Mischief in Glasgow
Dawkins on the recent incident in which a Scottish football referee was sacked after passing on a joke about the Pope in an e-mail:
This is the background to bitter storm that erupted recently, in which I seem to have become embroiled although I am neither Scottish nor a soccer fan. Hugh Dallas, czar of referees for the Scottish Football Association was fired because he passed on, in an eMail, a joke about Roman Catholic child rape. The pope is not, so far as we know, a pederast, but there is good evidence that he was deeply involved in covering up the crime and contributing to its repetition by priests moved to other dioceses and parishes. Anyway, this was the subject of the joke that was sent to Hugh Dallas, and he passed it on to somebody else.
The incident was brought to the attention of Peter Kearney, Director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, also based in Glasgow. Kearney demanded that Dallas should be fired, and the Scottish Football Association, under its Chief Executive Stewart Regan, did indeed fire him, together with two other officials in his office.
When I read about this, alerted by a Scottish contributor to the discussion forum on my website, I was outraged that a man should lose his job because he passed on a joke. It seemed to me to be a classic example of our society’s craven kowtowing to the religious lobby. The rest of us, it seemed to me, learn to take jokes on the chin. But the moment a religion is ‘offended’, we are all expected to tut-tut and grovel, and somebody gets fired.
Dawkins concludes:
It is almost as though, if a Scottish referee makes a joke about the pope, it is taken as evidence of pro-Rangers bias.
Oh please! Get your priorities right. There are more important things than football. When cardinals and popes cover up the crime of child rape, those of us who object are not being ‘sectarian’ or ’ anti-Catholic’ or pro-Glasgow-Rangers. We are being human.
Full article : boingboing.net