Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
There is going to be a rally in Chicago on Wednesday of this week in which Christians are going to protest anti-Catholic ridicule by a well-known community newspaper. Rob Sherman Advocacy will be there, too, but our position will be to oppose all religious ridicule, whether it's anti-Catholic ridicule by a newspaper or anti-Atheist ridicule by Roman Catholics or by the government.
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About three months ago, The Chicago Reader newspaper apparently ran a cartoon that ridiculed Roman Catholic Pope John Paul II. An anti-liberal Roman Catholic advocacy group, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) was offended by the cartoon, so they will be picketing the downtown Chicago offices of The Reader on Wednesday. An official with that group, whose first name is Preston, told me that they don't know exactly how many protesters that they will have on the scene on Wednesday, but he was expected something in the range of four hundred people, plus news media and a police escort.
It is a common, prudent and appropriate practice for Chicago's Finest to escort groups involved in this type of situation. What they do is maintain the peace while going to great effort to ensure that all parties have an opportunity to express themselves in a lawful manner, while keeping conflicting parties separated. This is not the police department from the days of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. They now do a magnificent job of facilitating First Amendment activity in a truly unbiased way.
It's a tradition in America for newspapers to mock figures who are in the news when the newsmakers are involved in controversial issues. Certainly, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have had a notorious record for centuries of sexual abuse of children and other crimes against society. Contrary to the preference of TFP, religious figures are not exempt from being selected by newspapers for lampooning.
The Roman Catholic Bible is full of rude, negative innuendoes against atheists. In fact, their bible just could be the place from which The Reader got the idea to engage in rude ridicule of people on account of their religious ideology. The difference, however, between the religious ridicule in the bible and the religious ridicule in The Reader is that each edition of The Reader gets thrown away and forgotten after a few days, while the terrible, defamatory comments about atheists that appear in each edition of the Roman Catholic bible get passed down from generation to generation. Each new generation of young Roman Catholics are taught to condemn and ridicule atheists by the very people that are now complaining that members of their group are being ridiculed by The Reader.
Rob Sherman Advocacy does not condone what The Reader has done. In fact, RS Advocacy opposes all forms of religion-based ridicule. That means that, while RS Advocacy opposes anti-Catholic ridicule by The Reader, we also oppose anti-atheist ridicule by the Roman Catholic bible and by government, too.
Let's see if TFP, on Wednesday, will be willing to oppose all religious ridicule, especially the kind that they engage in against atheists, or if they are only against religious ridicule when it is their ox that is being gored.
If you'd like to join me in downtown Chicago on Wednesday of this week from about noon to about one o'clock, please contact me using one of the methods indicated below. Even if you can't make it, perhaps you can become a financial supporter of Rob Sherman Advocacy to help subsidize the cost of stopping religious ridicule in this country, especially the kind that Roman Catholics foment against atheists.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
7410
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-7410
A post office box is used
because
the street address uses a curb mail box,
which is not secure.
Telephone: (847) 870-0700
Fax: (847) 870-1156
E-mail: rob followed by the at symbol followed by robsherman dot com