It’s ‘The Marjorie Greene Comedy Hour’ or ‘The How Did Such A Nut Get Elected Comedy Hour’
Welcome to the latest in a series of episodes of the “Marjorie Taylor Greene Comedy Hour,” also known as the “The How Did Such A Nut Get Elected Show.” On her last show, the Republican “lawmaker” from Georgia was explaining how she meant nothing when she referred in a text she sent to other members of congress on the possibility of trump declaring “marshall” (her spelling) law during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the Capitol.
Recently, Greene hammered away on her favorite campaign bogeyman, that illegal immigrants are destroying the country, replacing the majority white, Christian America and that Satan is controlling the Catholic Churches when they provide succor and housing to immigrants who have fled the poverty and danger of their home countries to begin a new and better life under the mantle of the Statue of Liberty. Greene made the comments on a radio interview with right wing militant Michael Voris of Church Militant, a show that the Southern Poverty Law Center placed on its 2020 list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
Most recently, Greene stood shoulder to shoulder at a news conference with Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott as he explained his latest plans to curb illegal immigration across the nation’s southern border. Last month, Abbott ordered State Troopers to inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico across four border states, an effort which clogged international trade and left produce rotting in trucks awaiting inspections, but no drugs, no weapons, no contraband. Abbott’s actions are his response to the the expiration this month of Title 42, a COVID-19 health order that was heavily used as an excuse by the trump administration to expel immigrants and asylum seekers. With the pandemic waning, the Title 42 restrictions are considered no longer needed for public health purposes.
As she has offered her well-researched, academic opinions on Jewish space lasers, so she opined about the Roman Catholic Church and the horned, red-skinned monster with a pitchfork who rules hell. Curiously, her criticisms were aimed at others with similar views.
“Satan’s controlling the (Catholic) Church,” Greene said in an interview with Voris, a former TV reporter who is the president and founder of Saint Michael’s Media, a Christian right-wing apostolate based in Ferndale, Mich., which produces catechetical and news videos and articles on the website ChurchMilitant.com. Church Militant refers to itself as the Christian militia which “does battle against sin, the devil and the demonic rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Since it formed in 2008, its videos have attracted 10 million views on YouTube and Voris has become a well-known, aggressive global advocate for ultra-conservative Catholics.
Greene criticized Catholic Relief Services and other Christian organizations for receiving federal funds to assist in resettlement efforts. The congresswoman also recommended that the U.S. should deny aid to countries where people illegally immigrate from and to America.
“The church is not doing its job and it’s not adhering to the teachings of Christ,” Greene said. While the Bible preaches love, Greene said that the Catholic Church has it all wrong by extending loving hands to immigrants.
The Catholic Church is “destroying our laws. It means completely perverting what our Constitution says. It means taking unreal advantage of the American taxpayer. And it means pushing a globalist policy on the American people and forcing America to become something that we are not supposed to be.”
Voris explained on his Wikopedia page that in his 20s and 30s, he had sex with gay men and women but that he rejected homosexuality when he found faith.
“From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins,” Voris said. “On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. These are the sins of my past life in this area which are all now publicly admitted and owned by me. That was before my reversion to the Faith. Since my reversion, I abhor all these sins.”
Voris said that after his brother and mother died, he became an “aggressive global advocate for conservative Catholics … on a burning mission to save Catholicism and America by trying to warn the public about what is a decline of morality in society.”
After being a guest speaker at several Catholic parishes in Detroit and serving as a host on the Michigan Catholic Radio network, in 2006 Voris started the digital television studio St. Michael’s Media in Ferndale. In 2011, the Archdiocese of Detroit notified Voris and RealCatholicTV that “it [did] not regard them as being authorized to use the word ‘Catholic’ to identify or promote their public activities.” A year later, the company name RealCatholicTV.com was changed to “ChurchMilitant.tv” and later ChurchMilitant.com.
Some critics in the Catholic Church have said that “(Voris’s) remarks, at times, promote division and extremism.”
In April 2011, Voris was banned from speaking at Marywood University or other diocesan facilities after Voris questioned the validity of Rabbinical Judaism, the mainstream form of Judaism. Another controversy surrounded his comments regarding democracy.
“The only way to prevent a democracy from committing suicide is to limit the vote to faithful Catholics,” Voris said. “The only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship, a Catholic monarch who protects his people from themselves and bestows on them what they need, not necessarily what they want.”
Voris and his media company are financed by Marc Brammer, a business developer for Moody’s who lives in South Bend, Ind., and is a member of Opus Dei, a group known for its strict, traditional views.
Opus Dei, formally the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei, was founded in Spain in 1928 by Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá. It is an institution of the Catholic Church and most members are lay people. Opus Dei has been described as “the most controversial force in the Catholic Church” because of aggressive recruiting methods, strict rules governing members, elitism, alleged misogyny and support of or participation in authoritarian or right-wing governments, including the fascist Franco regime which governed in Spain until 1978.
Voris and Brammer have criticized “Americanism,” a term they apply to the post-1960s culture that has hurt Catholics.
“Our Catholic Church is infected with Americanism that has gone wrong,” said Brammer, in a nod to the trumpian MAGA credo. “Not that America is wrong. But America’s best days are not today; it was in the past, just like the Catholic Church.”
Greene’s comments did not sit well and were strongly condemned by Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Donohue, 75, has been president of the Catholic League in the United States since 1993. He also is an adjunct scholar with conservative Heritage Foundation. He campaigns against what he perceives as the discrimination and defamation of Catholics and Catholicism. He has opposed same sex marriage and denied the 2009 findings of the Ryan Commission, which point out multiple instances of rape and persuasive evidence of endemic sexual, emotional, and physical abuse throughout the Catholic School system in Ireland.
Donohue publicly denied the criminal charges and said that most offenses occurred before 1970 when “corporal punishment,” as Donohue termed it, was not thought unacceptable, and referred to the victims as “miscreants.”
In December 2004, Donohue applauded Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” and said that “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the Messiah.”
In a statement, Donahue said that Greene had “plenty of opportunities to make rational criticisms of the agency, but instead she slandered the entire Catholic Church.” Donahue said that Greene should “apologize to Catholics immediately” for her comments about Satan and the church. “She is a disgrace.”
Greene responded to Donohue’s remarks that she was referring to church leadership and not the Catholic Church as a whole.
“I refuse to use kinder, gentler language as Bill Donohue might prefer when I talk about his disgusting and corrupt friends, who have made him rich with the donations from ordinary churchgoing Catholics,” Greene wrote.
In her statement, Greene wrote that she was born and raised a Catholic but stopped attending Mass when she became a mother, “because I realized that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.”
“It’s the church leadership I was referring to when I invoked the Devil,” said Greene, a strong trumper, and anti-vaxxer who has defended the rioters who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 22, 2012.
“Just so we’re clear, bishops, when I said ‘controlled by Satan,’ I wasn’t talking about the Catholic Church. I was talking about you. The Catholic Church must throw out these monsters instead of lecturing the people its own bishops have driven away.” she said.
“America’s Catholic bishops are some of the worst in the world. They have lied, deceived and committed despicable criminal acts for decades, driving millions out of the Church, causing children to kill themselves, emotionally crippling others and sentencing countless victims to lives of deep mental pain,” Greene said.
Maybe Greene isn’t as passionate as she claims and her latest statements are more an effort to steer public attention away from the “marshall” law comments she made in the infamous text shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, in which she told then-President Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to mention to trump, “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law.”
Maybe.