I’ve refrained from too much blogging about Donohue’s idiotic campaign to get Amanda fired since the first couple of days, mainly because so many others have picked up on it and Edwards came out and did as close to the right thing as he could. But let’s put it all in perspective, shall we? Who is the Donohue guy anyway? Well, besides being a gay-bashing, Jew-hating bigot, he’s also the guy who decided that one of 2001’s top ten anti-Catholic atrocities was…onion dip. No, I am not making that up.

For those who missed it, Lipton ran a print ad in the June 13, 2001 edition of The New York Press featuring a person holding a bowl of onion dip while waiting in line to take communion—the implication being that this person planned to dip the Eucharist in the onion dip.

Reasonable humor? Clever Madison Avenue marketing? Not according to Bill Donohue. In his eyes, the onion dip ad was an anti-Catholic “atrocity.”

In a sternly worded press release, Donohue claimed that the ad offended “the [central Catholic] belief that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus Christ,” and then referred to Lipton’s parent company Unilever as a “monster,” adding that “For the elites at Unilever to allow their ad department at Lipton to insult Catholics like this is the height of corporate arrogance. And stupidity.”

Donohue later claimed that the onion dip ad was one of the “Ten Worst Anti-Catholic Atrocities of 2001.”

I’m a proud atheist. I’ll never be on a campaign, TV news/opinion show, or get a job with a major paper because of it. I’m ok with that. But what I’d like to know is why anyone with a working brain would take Donohue seriously. I grok that in this day and age, Jew hating is fine, gay bashing no problem, but do the media folks at CNN and the AP and NYT (all of whom have given this man airtime/columnspace, without any opposing viewpoint I’d add) really want to be associated with a nutjob on a crusade against onion dip? That’s the standard, right- if you let someone into your space and allow them to speak, you by extension endorse everything they’ve ever written, right?

So I guess we can expect editorials and investigative news specials about the Great Onion Atrocity any day now from the Paper of Record and America’s Most Trusted Source for News.

…don’t tell them the word “onion” is already a publication, OK?