Catholic League president Bill Donohue expressed confidence in his ongoing campaign to get Jon Stewart to apologize for a bit about a "vagina manger," and said that the next step will be to send photos of the offending joke to religious leaders.
"Quite frankly, I can't give you an exact number but just from what we can gather, thousands of people have been pounding Steve Albani at Comedy Central, and clearly Kelloggs," Donohue told BuzzFeed in a phone interview. (Albani didn't immediately return a request for comment.) "We have evidence that people have really been pounding Kellogg's," Donohue said, without going into specifics.
Yesterday, Donohue promised to mail Kellogg's executives the "vagina manger" picture. Today, the League is sending the photo to the Viacom board ("You should be as offended as we are. But if you are not, consider a picture of your own mother inserted there instead," reads the letter sent to Viacom).
And "tomorrow we'll begin with the religious leaders," said Donohue. "Every Catholic bishop in the country will get a picture."
He took credit for Delta's ending its sponsorship of the Daily Show, saying "I don't think there's any question" about whether or not the company had made the decision based on the Catholic League's actions. "Kellogg's made the mistake of blowing us off in writing. If they had any brains they'd have simply not responded at all," he said.
Donohue did discuss possible end games. If Stewart apologizes for the joke, he said, he would drop the campaign. But if the effort fails, "then my members ought to fire me," Donohue said.