BillDo Teaches Us About Moral Absolutes

BillDo in his
1998 annual report:

March 25

Comedy Central’s “South Park” continued its notorious Christian-bashing, with an episode that linked Christians to Nazis as oppressors of homosexuals. In a segment describing homosexuality throughout history, the character “Big Gay Al” interrupted his commentary to say, “Uh-oh, look out, it’s the oppressors—Christians and Nazis and Republicans.” The scene showed Hitler with a Catholic priest to the right and a Republican on the left—the priest waving a cross, the Republican an American flag.

BillDo in 2004:

George Soros, the billionaire left-wing Bush-hater who funds the website (MoveOn.org has compared Bush to Hitler)

BillDo in 2006:

Want a sample of his politics? In 2005, McCourt took part in a rally, ‘The Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime,’ that compared the Bush administration to Hitler’s regime.

BillDo in his
2008 annual report:

Bill Maher continued his non-stop assault on Catholicism in 2008 by lashing out several times on TV and in movies. After he mocked Transubstantiation early in the year, I said on TV that I would love to step into the ring with him in Madison Square Garden so I could “floor him.” The comment was made in jest, but he kept repeating it all year, feigning victim status. His rant against the pope, made just before the Holy Father visited the U.S. in April, included a comment calling Pope Benedict XVI a Nazi. He apologized (sort of) after we went after him.

So I think the lesson is clear: comparing people to Hitler or Nazis is
unacceptable, and rightfully causes outrage. Right?

BillDo yesterday:

CBS/SHOWTIME AIRS NAZI-LIKE ASSAULT

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on last night’s edition of Penn & Teller’s show. The program aired on Showtime which is owned by CBS:

The Nazis couldn’t have done better.

Ah, but that’s different, isn’t it? Behavior that’s completely
unacceptable in one set of circumstances may be okay in another.
Right, Bill?

BillDo in 2002:

Moral relativism is not only an intellectually bankrupt idea, its real-life consequences can be deadly.

Not until our society comes to accept
what the Catholic Church teaches—that there are moral absolutes and that all
life is sacred—will we turn the corner.

BillDo in 2004:

What I’m a little bit tired of is the same kind of cruel caricature. And I love the way the movie ends. You know, here we have this idea that moral absolutes are bad. We need gray areas. Oh, really? Let me tell you something, Brian, you made this movie. Millions of people have lost their lives in the last century because of selling the idea that there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, we are back to different strokes for different people. We put pizzas into ovens in this country, they put Jews into ovens in Nazi Germany. Yet, that may not have been your intention, sir, but you’re selling an idea which is toxic.

BillDo in 2005:

Pope Benedict XVI knows that a society absent moral absolutes is capable of great evil. His homily on the "dictatorship of relativism" owes much to John Paul II’s encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, one of the most brilliant statements ever written on the relation between morality and liberty.

Hm. Maybe BillDo should learn how to delete embarrassing archives from
his site.

Or maybe the lesson to be learned is that pointing out Billy-boy’s
hypocrisy is like walking up to a barrel filled with slow-moving fish,
with a rocket launcher bolted to the side and aimed straight into the
barrel, and only someone with too much time on his hands, like me,
would bother to actually pull the trigger.

Recession Forces People to Resort to Common Sense

From today’s Washington Post:

Bottled Water Boom Appears Tapped Out

[…] sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers, who have discovered that tap water is practically free.

I’ll let Penn and Teller
show the lack of difference between bottled and tap water.
I’ll just add that the

I found with a quick search costs $6.23 for 24 0.5l bottles. That
works out to $1.97/gallon. My water utility, on the other hand,
charges a
maximum rate
of $5.08 per thousand gallons.

Who could possibly have predicted that in a recession, people would
turn to the generic product, when it costs 630 times less than the
name-brand?