Maher Dressed as Deceased Steve Irwin for Halloween

Bill Maher has pissed off millions of Catholics with his over-the-top comments about the Pope’s visit to the United States and the sexual abuse scandal within the church that has affected thousands of victims.

There is a petition at FireBillMaher.com that people can sign in protest of Maher’s latest comments on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. You can also watch the video of Maher bashing the Catholics at the site.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Bill, you shouldn’t be saying that the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult.” For one thing, altar boys can’t even get pregnant. But really, what tripped up the little cult on the prairie was that they only abused hundreds of kids, not thousands, all over the world. Cults get raided, religions get parades. How does the Catholic Church get away with all of their buggery? Volume, volume, volume!

If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.’ It’s like, if you can’t pay your mortgage, you’re a deadbeat. But if you can’t pay a million mortgages, you’re BearStearns and we bail you out. And that is who the Catholic Church is: the BearStearns of organized pedophilia – too big, too fat.

When the current pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul’s Dick Cheney, he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the Statute of Limitations ran out. And that’s the Church’s attitude: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’ which is fine, far be it from me to criticize religion.

But just remember one thing: if the Pope was — instead of a religious figure — merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of day care centers, where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he’d be arrested faster than you can say ‘who wants to touch Mr. Wiggle?’

Maher goes way too far in his comments but he is not totally off base with them. Don’t get me wrong, Maher is a first-class jerk who is a very angry man that was probably molested himself as a little boy.

Here is a look at some of his comments over the past decade about Catholics:

November 1999:

“Catholics practice what they want to practice. They go to see the pope ‘cause he’s a big celebrity, but they go home and they masturbate …”

August 2000:

“Priests, a lot of times, molest boys, OK? They are celibate and it’s a magnet for homosexual pedophiles.” Actor William McNamara, a guest on the same show, opined that the Catholic Church should allow priests to marry and “give the altar boys’ rectums a break.”

March 2002:

“Before puberty, I would say nobody caused me more pain than the Catholics… I apparently was not attractive enough to be hit on [by priests].”

May 2002:

“I have hated the Church way before anyone else. I have been pounding religion for nine years on this show.”
“… I offer this modest proposal that the Catholic Church just drop the pretense and just go gay. Just come out of the confessional. Preach the sermon on the mountain. Embrace it. Let the straight people be Baptists. It’s high time you gay Catholics stood up and announced to the world, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get Eucharist.’”

May 2003:

Maher had a limited run on Broadway with a show titled “Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home.” In it he included these pieces of scripted “humor”:
“The problem is they drill religion into your head when you are very young. Well, when you are four years old, you believe in Santa Claus, too. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the Virgin Birth, sure! When you’re a priest everyday spewing this bulls— about the apple and the snake, etc., you can see him just saying, ‘Ah, f— it, just blow me, kid!’”
“Come on, it’s so gay, the Church! With the robes and the smoke and kneeling in front of the priest with your mouth open eating God.”

April 2005:

“For those who did not make the funeral, the Vatican has asked that in lieu of flowers, just stop touching your d—.”
“People waited in line for 24 hours to see the pope’s body and when they got to see the pope, they smelled worse than he did.”

May 2007:

“And it’s easy to start a religion! Watch, I’ll do it for you: I had a vision last night! A vision! The Blessed Virgin Mary came to me – I don’t know how she got past the guards – and she told me it’s high time to take the high ground from the Seventh Day Adventists and give it to the 24-hour party people. And what happens in the confessional stays in the confessional. Gay men, don’t say you’re life partners; say you’re a nunnery of two. ‘We weren’t having sex, officer, I was performing a very private Mass, here in my car. I was letting my rod and staff comfort him. Take this and eat of it, for this is my roommate Barry. And for all those who believe, there is a special place for you in Kevin.’”

January 2008:

“You can’t be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god. That doesn’t make you a person of faith … that makes you a schizophrenic.”
“…UFOs are a lot more likely than a space god [that] flew down bodily and you know who was the Son of God and you know had sex with a Palestinian woman…”