On her April 5 satellite radio show, Rosie O'Donnell took her anti-Catholicism to a new level by likening the Catholic Church to the Jonestown cult. As Brian Maloney of The Radio Equalizer put it, "in Rosie's twisted world, there's really no distinction to be made between the Pope and Jim Jones, murderous cult leader responsible for the deaths of more than 900 people in the Guyanese jungle."
O'Donnell certainly has a past of Catholic/Christian bashing. On the April 19, 2007 edition of ABC's The View, she expressed her concern that having five Catholic Supreme Court justice somehow violated the separation of church and state (Barbara Walters actually defended these justices in response). Later in 2007, the Catholic League placed an ad in the New York Times complaining about O'Donnell and her then-colleague Joy Behar's anti-Catholic remarks on the ABC daytime program.
Rosie made a more notorious remark a few months earlier on September 12, 2006, when she stated that "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America."
The transcript of O'Donnell's comments from her April 5 radio program:
ROSIE O'DONNELL: I mean, if there was an organization, let's just say the- you know, the- I don't want to say that, but the Boys' Club, or one of the- you know, had the history of child abuse- you know, child torture and rape that the Catholic Church has, would you ever give money to the Boys' Club or the Girls' Club?...I'm saying that, to support an organization that- at the top of the infrastructure, are people willing to ignore the mass child abuse and torture and sexual molestation of its own constituents. I mean, it's almost like when you read about- you know, cults, Jonestown and all these cults- that they allow- you know, sexual perversity and sexual behavior.
