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Republicans Use Their Long Standing Tradition Of Making Words Meaningless To Protect Child Rapists. Happy Thursday!

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | June 22, 2017 |

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | June 22, 2017 |


I sometimes wonder how much of Full Frontal’s content is intentionally constructed the way that it is, and how much of it is lucky happenstance. Take for instance last night’s episode. The show ended with a segment on Trump’s abuse of the English language, and the greater effect that has on society’s ability to communicate with itself. All set in a dystopian German film on nihilism, I’m guessing.

So all of that is correct. Words mean things. And those meanings can change over time, but the fact that the word means something is still all agreed upon. What Bee and staff miss is that it wasn’t Donald Trump who started this. Sure, he really latched onto that shit and made it his own, but he was far from the first to pretend that words don’t mean the things they do for political gain. We know this because Full Frontal included an example of it in the second segment. Try not to punch your TV, and keep a heads up around the 4:20 mark.

Did you catch that? Right after Bill Donahue demands that someone explain what’s wrong with making a racist joke using a derogatory term, it jumps to him explaining why the Catholic Church Abuse Scandal isn’t as big of a deal as we’re all making it out to be.

Not pedophilia. Most of the victims were post-pubescent. It’s not pedophilia, buddy, that’s homosexuality.

I feel like I need tickmarks to keep track of everything that’s wrong in this statement. First off, if you want to get technical on this, Bill, an adult being sexually attracted to a member of their own sex who is between the ages of eleven and nineteen isn’t homosexuality. It’s either hebephilia or ephebophilia. None of which matters because, for the most part, it’s still illegal to have sexual contact with someone under the age of consent (fuckers). Although none of that actually matters because all of the victims of Church abuse have stated that they in no way consented to the sexual contact a priest forced upon them. Which means that even if both parties were above the age of consent and were attracted to members of their own sex, it still wouldn’t constitute homosexuality because it would be rape.

So Donahue went through all of those mental gymnastics so that he could argue the Church did nothing wrong, because these were merely two consenting adults expressing their homosexual desires. Yeah, Bill, you did all that so you could defend gay sex (this is usually where I’d link to all of the horrific things that Donahue has said about the LGBTQ community, but it’s Wednesday Thursday and I really don’t have it in me to read that shit right now. You can Google it. I know for a fact it’s out there).

Except, of course, there is that one other goal Donahue has when arguing the way he does: protecting the Church at all costs. Donahue doesn’t think it’s fair that people are trying to come after the Church long after the statute of limitations has expired (which BTW, what the fuck?) so he’s framing the issue in a way where the victims are the villains. The Church used to put the needs of themselves and their priests above those of their parishes. And that led them to make a lot of horrible mistakes. Donahue is putting the needs of the Church above those of the victims that the Church wronged, and it’s leading him to completely abandon any semblance of logic or self-respect. As it turns out, refusing to give words meaning is actually easier than I thought. You just have to also be able to refuse to give meaning to the practice of being a decent human being.