If ever there was concrete evidence that pro-women’s organizations have never been interested in women’s rights—save for the right to kill unborn babies—it is the decision by the New York Women’s Coalition to pull its support for Governor Cuomo’s women’s rights bill after it became clear that reference to abortion would be deleted.

As reported in today’s New York Times, Cuomo admitted that the Women’s Coalition “concluded that if the abortion component was not included, they did not want a scaled-down proposal.” Furthermore, Democratic lawmakers “also said they would only support a package that included the abortion language.”

The New York Women’s Coalition is not a rag-tag group that represents a few extremist organizations: 850 organizations belong to the coalition. They are now on record of intentionally subverting the rights of women. To be specific, Cuomo’s bill dealt with such issues as pay equity, domestic violence, sexual harassment in the workplace, pregnancy discrimination, and human trafficking; all total, the bill enumerated ten women’s rights.

In other words, women who are beaten by men, discriminated against on the job, sexually harassed in the workforce, and are victimized by modern-day slaveholders, can all take a walk. Unless killing kids shortly before birth is a slam dunk, there is no need to be concerned about so-called women’s rights.

Glad to know the mask is off, once and for all.

There may be no bigger hypocrite on TV than Barbara Walters. For years, she has sat back and allowed her panelists to rip Catholic priests and Catholic teachings. Never has she challenged them, and indeed she has often laughed with them as they mock Catholicism. By contrast, when her friend Bill Maher is criticized for calling Sarah Palin’s 5-year-old son “retarded” (the boy suffers from Down syndrome), Walters finds a way to exculpate him; Maher made fun of the special-needs child in a Las Vegas theater on June 8.

On the June 17 edition of “The View,” Walters said she did not believe that Maher’s “unfortunate” comment was meant to be “mean-spirited.” This is rather remarkable given that Maher has a long and sick history of mean-spiritedness. His weekly assaults on Catholicism, made on his HBO show, are proof of his viciousness. Furthermore, Maher has previously savaged Palin.

It seems that Walters’ problem has less to do with offensive remarks than it does with the person who makes them. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut,” Walters saw no humor in it at all, and indeed expressed outrage. But when Ed Schultz called Laura Ingraham a “slut,” Walters thought it was hysterical; she even feigned crying as she recounted the many times that her friend Joy Behar called her a “slut.”

Four weeks ago today, the 44-year-old daughter of Barbara Walters was arrested for drunk driving. If a “comedian” used this incident to ridicule her daughter in a public forum, no doubt Walters would take umbrage—rightly so. The last thing she would do is write it off for not being “mean-spirited.” Priests, it needs to be said, demand the same respect.

Contact executive producer, Bill Geddie: bill.geddie@abc.com

There has been a rash of stories about U.S. State Department employees taking drugs and cavorting with prostitutes. In addition, the Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, was accused of soliciting prostitutes and minor children. While all of these alleged crimes are reprehensible, the Catholic League only has interest in the charge that Gutman “routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.” (My italics.)

No media outlet was more outraged over minors being molested by priests than the Boston Globe, but it has shown no interest in this story; it has not run a single piece on it. The New York Times ran one story; the Washington Post ran one story, but unlike the Times, it never mentioned “minor children”; the Los Angeles Times, like the Globe, ignored the story altogether.

Most disturbing is CBS News. It deserves credit for breaking the story, but what it did on June 11 was indefensible. Here is what it said: “One specific example mentioned in the [Inspector General’s] memo refers to the 2011 investigations into an ambassador who ‘routinely ditched…his protective security detail,’ and inspectors suspect this was in order to ‘solicit sexual favors from prostitutes.’”

Now compare the last sentence in the paragraph above to the last sentence I quoted in the first paragraph. What is missing is any reference to “minor children.” This was not a mistake: by excising reference to “minor children,” it demanded that the reporter also excise the word “both.” He did.

In short, current allegations of child rape by government officials are far less interesting to the media than decades-old stories about priests. Let’s face it: the media, as well as pundits (and “comedians” like Bill Maher), are not interested in kids. Their interest is in the identity of the offender.

On September 13, 2011, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) announced that it had asked the ICC to prosecute Pope Benedict XVI, and other high ranking Catholic leaders, for “crimes against humanity.” The next day I wrote a letter to Luis Moreno-Ocampo at The Hague detailing the fraudulent, dishonest, politicized, and anti-Catholic history of SNAP (to read it, click here). Our goal was to subvert their efforts. We won.

The ICC has officially tossed the bogus complaint filed by SNAP and the Center for Constitutional Rights; the latter is a far-left wing group that specializes in defending Muslim terrorists sitting in Guantanamo Bay. The ICC rejected the bid to even investigate the Holy See.

Barbara Blaine and David Clohessy, both of whom have been involved in covering up for sexual abusers, are now claiming they are “neither deterred nor discouraged by this news.” Nice spin, but it won’t work. They have, in fact, been stopped in their tracks, and are now wringing their hands over this colossal defeat. Justice has been served.

If the religious liberty of the Armed Forces were secure, there would be no need for an amendment to safeguard it. Sadly, there is. Rep. John Fleming wants to make sure that the military accommodates religious expression, and for that he should be commended. Importantly, he is not an absolutist: he explicitly allows for exceptions based on “military necessity.”

In a statement released yesterday by the Office of Management and Budget, it said officers need discretion “to address potentially problematic speech and actions within their units.” It also said Fleming’s amendment “would have a significant adverse effect on good order, discipline, morale and mission accomplishment.”

All speech is “potentially problematic,” but that is hardly an argument for curbing it. It is also a red herring to say that by ensuring the First Amendment rights to free speech and religious liberty, it will cause a threat to “good order, discipline and mission accomplishment” in the military. Really? The Obama administration didn’t worry about “good order, discipline and mission accomplishment” when it was touting the virtues of gays serving openly in the military. As for morale, it is being undermined by the censorial environment that religious men and women in uniform have to tolerate.

When it comes to those who elect to mutilate their genitals in transgender surgery, we are told they can’t have too many rights. When it comes to suspected Muslim terrorists, we are told they cannot have too many rights. When it comes to pre-teen girls seeking to get birth control pills behind their parents’ back, we are told they cannot have too many rights. But when it comes to the religious rights of the Armed Forces, we are told they already have too many rights.

When we at the Catholic League first heard that a boy was allegedly raped by three different persons, two of whom were priests, we were immediately suspicious. After all, how many times in American history has anyone been raped three times by three different persons? The more we learned, the more we were convinced that “Billy Doe” was a congenital liar, school dropout, thief, and drug addict, a punk who sought to cash in on the prevailing animus against priests.

Fr. Engelhardt, whom no one has ever proved even met “Billy Doe,” was sentenced to 6 to 12 years in prison; Shero was hit with 8 to 16.

To read our account of this gross injustice, click here. My statement, which was submitted to the Philadelphia Inquirer as an ad, was turned down. It’s not every day a failing metropolitan newspaper rejects $58,000, even when the contents make the paper look bad for not doing its job.

At a Senate Finance Committee today, it was reported that the State Department found in 2010 that the majority of domestic victims enslaved in the sex industry are runaway and homeless youth. It did not say whether the child that was allegedly raped by the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium was homeless. Perhaps that is because the investigation into what Howard Gutman did was spiked by Patrick Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management.

The State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to have been infinitely more concerned about punishing whistleblowers than pedophiles. Aurelia Fedenisn, a former senior inspector general investigator at the State Department, said Gutman “routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.” Evidently, lots of people knew about it and did nothing. Gutman raised a half-million dollars for Obama in 2008 and helped finance his inaugural.

Worse, the Inspector General’s (IG) office compromised its independence by lying about the events: Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security, Eric Boswell, ordered reference to the pedophilia deleted, and the IG acceded to the request. As for Fedensin, she was threatened with criminal charges, but nothing was done about the child rapist.

Yesterday, a State Department official said that investigations sometimes result in disciplinary actions that aren’t made public. If the State Department wants to punish its johns internally, that is of no interest to the Catholic League. But when priests are being removed from ministry for “boundary violations,” and bishops are being pressured to step down because they didn’t sufficiently supervise a former groping priest, it is unconscionable—if these stories are true—that State Department higher-ups not be punished for refusing to contact the authorities about a suspected child rapist, and then engaging in a cover-up.

On December 7, 2011, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius explained why the Obama administration opposed the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that Plan B be made available without prescription to girls of all ages. “It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age,” she said. President Barack Obama agreed, saying, “As the father of two daughters, I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

So what happened to the “common knowledge” and “common sense” arguments? Why did the administration not appeal District Judge Edward Korman’s ruling? The issues are the same, both morally and medicinally. What’s changed, of course, is the timing: the outcome of the presidential election is no longer in doubt.

It’s perverse. The same people who promote a highly eroticized popular culture are the ones who promote Plan B as a panacea to adolescent sex. And yet nothing works to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases better than restraint. But the elites have divined that restraint ought to apply to smoking (save for marijuana), not sexuality.

Just weeks after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Donohue was notified by the IRS that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating the IRS Code on political activities as it relates to 501(c)(3) organizations. What the IRS did not know was that Donohue had proof who contacted them to launch the investigation: Catholics United, a George Soros-funded Catholic organization.

The IRS was contacted on June 5, 2008 to launch a probe of the Catholic League, and the letter sent to Donohue was dated November 24, 2008. The June 5 letter was sent to the IRS by lawyers from Catholics United; one of the persons who it was mailed to was Lois G. Lerner, the woman cited in the current IRS scandal.

The “evidence” was nothing more than news releases and articles that Donohue had written during the presidential campaign on various issues. The lawyers also asked the IRS to question the source of new funding we had received, implying that we received illegal contributions.

The timing was not coincidental. On October 20, Donohue issued a news release, “George Soros Funds Catholic Left,” and on October 23, he wrote another one, “Catholic Left Scandal Mounts”; both mentioned Catholics United. The same day, October 23, he was asked to go on CNN, and when Catholics United found out, they contacted the station trying to spike the interview.

The person who did this was the head of Catholics United, Chris Korzen. He said Donohue was not “an authentic Catholic commentator and representative of the Catholic Church,” and that they should either drop him altogether or put him on with Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (Catholics United is listed on the 990 of Catholics in Alliance as a related organization; Soros greases this group, and by extension, Catholics United).

The bid to keep Donohue off TV failed. But here’s the key: Korzen was dumb enough to share with CNN the complaint issued by his group to the IRS. The document, which was leaked by someone at CNN, matches nicely with the IRS complaint of November 24.

In the end, the IRS concluded that although the Catholic League had “intervened in a political campaign,” it was “unintentional”; thus, our tax-exempt status remained intact.