The Washington Post
October 6, 1992, Tuesday, Final Edition

Sinead's Perplexing Protest;
The Singer Made a Point On 'SNL,' but What Was It?

Megan Rosenfeld, Washington Post Staff Writer


   Sinead O'Connor, the Irish singer with the Kojak hairdo, was back in England
yesterday after tearing up Pope John Paul II's picture on "Saturday Night Live,"
offending a lot of people and confusing even more. While further textual
exegesis must await the cultural scholars, at this point it appears that the
singer used a song about racism to make a statement supporting abortion rights
-- that song written by a man who was vehemently against abortion.

   Did somebody say this is what happens when celebrities get involved in
politics?

   This is a case of confusing intellectual influences at best. The one thing
that was clear is that O'Connor is not fond of the pope. What was not exactly
clear is why. To make her point, O'Connor chose a song by the late Bob Marley
called "War," which uses the words of a speech made by Ethiopian Emperor Haile
Selassie in 1968. Marley was a Rastafarian, a member of a Jamaican religious
sect that holds the late king as a deity. (Selassie viewed them with surprised
tolerance.)

   Rastafaris -- as they prefer to be called -- believe that the Catholic Church
promoted or condoned slavery and the colonization of Africa. They see the pope
as the antichrist. They also view abortion as an anathema.

   O'Connor, 26, raised a Roman Catholic in Ireland, is virulently
anti-Catholic. "I believe (the Catholic Church) want children to be abused,
that's why they want to ban abortion because, unless we're being abused, they
don't have any power -- we don't reach out to them," O'Connor said in a
just-published interview in Vox, a British magazine.

   O'Connor's latest album, "Am I Not Your Girl," includes songs from musical
comedies as well as a statement at the end of the album: "I'm not a liar. And
I'm not full of hatred. But I hate lies, and so the liars hate me."

   A four-CD set of recordings made during Marley's 18-year career -- including
"War" -- is being released today.

   "She took a song made from a speech and turned it back into a speech," said
Charles Comber, a spokesman for Marley's family and foundation. "That's her
interpretation, which is her right in a democracy." O'Connor did take some
liberties with the Marley-Selassie text. The 1968 original says, "Until the
ignoble and unhappy regimes that now hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique
and South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and utterly destroyed ...
we Africans will fight if necessary and we know we shall win." O'Connor
substituted "child abuse -- yeah! Child abuse," for the names of the three
countries.

   A spokeswoman for O'Connor, Elaine Schock, said the singer could not be
reached. But she did not think that O'Connor had become a Rastafarian. Schock
noted, however, that O'Connor has been seen wearing a T-shirt that says
"Recovering Catholic."

   Comber -- deluged with calls from media around the world -- noted that both
Marley and O'Connor were active in Amnesty International. He said the Marley
Foundation was definitely against child torture. He said he couldn't speak to
the abortion issue.

   "Rastafarians are very well known for being very difficult to pin down in
terms of beliefs because they refuse to admit to any one authority in the
movement," said ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Kenneth Bilby, who has
studied Jamaican popular music for 20 years. "They put a lot of emphasis on
individual revelation and discovery." O'Connor put up a poster of Marley on the
set of "Saturday Night Live," draped the Ethiopian national colors on her
microphone and wore a necklace with another Rastafarian emblem -- a Star of
David.

   The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement yesterday deploring O'Connor's
disrespect to the pope -- evidently thinking, like others, that her Star of
David was intended as a Jewish symbol. In this case, the reference goes back to
King David and his benevolence toward the Queen of Sheba, who bore King
Solomon's son, who in turn began the monarchy of which Haile Selassie was the
last representative.

   O'Connor, who has a 6-year-old son, has said she had two abortions in the
past few years. She sees her music as an extension of her political convictions,
which are extremely vehement if sometimes incoherent.  She headed protests in
Ireland when a 14-year-old victim of rape was not allowed to get an abortion,
even to the point of breaking into the prime minister's office.

   She was an abused child, she has said in interviews. "It's my duty as a human
being to use every means possible ... to stop evil, which is child abuse,"
O'Connor said in the Vox interview. "The Jews in Germany would not have been
exterminated if Hitler had not been abused as a child. Adolf Hitler wasn't a bad
person; he was a very [screwed-up] person."