Salon declares "Sinéad Was Right..."

Sinéad was right
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By Jake Tapper
Ten years after ripping up a photo of the pope to protest sexual abuse in the Catholic Church -- and destroying her career -- Sinéad O'Connor returns to talk about her new album of Irish folk, her kids and why she sympathizes with America.
Roughly 10 years before I meet with her, Sinéad O'Connor, the shorn, angry, alt-rock balladeer, committed what seemed like career suicide. On "Saturday Night Live" the night of October 3, 1992, O'Connor implored the audience to "fight the real enemy," whereupon she tore up a photograph of His Holiness Pope John Paul II.
I've come to talk to O'Connor today to discuss what almost no one seems to remember: She tore up that picture of the Pope to protest pedophilia in the Catholic Church and the complicity of church hierarchy.
Not that O'Connor didn't try to make that clear. By singing the Bob Marley song "War" -- and changing the line "fight racial injustice" to "fight sexual abuse" -- she thought she would be bringing the issue of child sexual abuse to the national consciousness. But however widespread they may have been back in Dublin, revelations that various Catholic dioceses were defending pedophile priests, and shuffling them from parish to parish, were eons away from the American consciousness.
So instead she set off a firestorm of anti-O'Connor protests. Stunned, SNL executives didn't know how to react as the switchboard lit up. Thousands of irate calls poured in. In the NBC control room, the director, Dave Wilson, purposely did not press the "applause" button. Less than two weeks later, O'Connor -- whose 1990 Grammy-nominated album "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got," with the hit single "Nothing Compares 2 U," was No. 1 in Billboard for eight weeks -- was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden.
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