US: Catholic League wants Bill Maher’s show pulled after Dan Savage appearance

League president says comments on the Nov 22 segment were 'particularly vicious'

The president of the Catholic League in the US is calling for the cancellation of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher after a Nov 22 segment in which guest Dan Savage slammed Larry Silva, the bishop of Honolulu, for alleging that children will face a greater risk of suicide if they have same-sex parents.

In an Aug 22 letter on gay marriage, Bishop Silva wrote, “Children will be the greatest casualties, in that they will be deprived of being raised in a loving home by a mother and a father who loves them and whose love cooperated with God’s plan in creating them. When children are deprived of such a home, there will be more poverty, more social ills, more juvenile suicides, and more problems than we can imagine.”

On Maher’s show, Savage said that Silva’s notion is “total bullshit” and that he is “confusing children with gay parents with children who are raped by Catholic priests.”

He added, “Sorry, I am just done being lectured about children and their safety by Catholic-fucking bishops, priests, cardinals.”

For Catholic League president Bill Donohue, the segment, which he called “particularly vicious,” was the last straw, saying it was time to shut down the show “once and for all.”

“We are sending to every member of Time Warner’s board of directors a copy of 54 anti-Catholic statements made by Bill Maher on TV,” Donohue says on the Catholic League’s website.

Natasha Barsotti is originally from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. She had high aspirations of representing her country in Olympic Games sprint events, but after a while the firing of the starting gun proved too much for her nerves. So she went off to university instead. Her first professional love has always been journalism. After pursuing a Master of Journalism at UBC , she began freelancing at Xtra West — now Xtra Vancouver — in 2006, becoming a full-time reporter there in 2008.

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