Bill Donohue

Parental rights v. transgender rights. Which should prevail? In a specific case involving a public school in a Pittsburgh suburb, a federal judge ruled on September 30 that parental rights should triumph.

A U.S. District Court judge for the Western District of Pennsylvania issued a summary judgment to three mothers who objected to Mount Lebanon School District defending a teacher who was instructing her students on gender ideology; this is not part of the school curricula. These were first-grade students and no attempt was made to notify the parents, seeking their permission in advance.

The lawsuit was filed after a first-grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School, Megan Williams (who has a transgender child), allegedly told her six and seven-year-old students that sometimes “parents are wrong” and doctors “make mistakes” about whether a newborn baby is a boy or a girl.

The suit maintains that the teacher told a boy that he can dress like a girl. The boy then told his mother, saying his teacher told him, “I can wear a dress and have hair like my mom.” When objections were raised, the administration and school board reflexively took the side of the teacher.

After the mother removed her child from Williams’ class, the teacher had the audacity to call her, wanting to know what her problem was. The mother invoked her parental rights. Williams responded, “As long as I am on this Earth, I am going to teach children what I feel they need to know” and hung up.

After the lawsuit was filed on June 8, 2022, LGBTQ advocates rushed to the side of the teacher. They were indignant over the idea that parents should be given the right to have their children “opt out” of these classes. The judge, Joy Flowers Conti, saw things differently.

“The case is about the extent of constitutional rights of parents of young children in a public elementary school to notice and the ability to opt their young children out of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics. A first-grade teacher, without providing notice or opt outs, decided to observe Transgender Awareness Day by reading noncurricular books and presenting noncurricular gender identity topics to her students. During the classroom presentation, the teacher told her students ‘parents make a guess about their children’s—when children are born, parents make a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl. Sometimes parents are wrong.’”

Judge Conti wrote that it was “constitutionally impermissible” for schools to “provide teachers with unbridled discretion to teach about a noncurricular topic—transgender identity—and not to provide notice and opt out rights based on parents’ moral and religious beliefs about transgender instruction, while providing notice and opt out rights for other sensitive secular and religious topics (my italics).”

This case shows, once again, that the public school industry has nothing but contempt for parental rights and religious liberty. Wedded to the extreme LGBTQ agenda, it has become a force for intolerance and indoctrination of the sickest kind, even to the point of exploiting little kids.

If the school district wants to appeal this decision, the Catholic League will file an amicus brief on the side of the plaintiffs.

Bill in the News (Beyond These Stone Walls): Beyond These Stone Walls has had an ever-increasing presence in the work of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. In the July/August, 2024, issue of Catalyst the “In the News” feature included two commendations for Bill Donohue and the Catholic League “for standing by Father Gordon MacRae when many others in the Church abandoned him.” READ MORE HERE

Bill Donohue

In June we released an extensive report on how President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have addressed issues relating to religious liberty. It is the most comprehensive report available on the subject.

We updated the report on the current administration. Two new entries have since been listed (they are highlighted). Now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the nominee, her record deserves to be scrutinized. The timeline runs from January 2021 to October 1, 2024. To read it click here.

To compare Harris’ record to Trump’s, click here for his record.

Bill in the News (A God Shift Podcast): Bill Donohue discusses his new book, Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis, on “A God Shift Podcast” with Shayna Rattler. To listen, click here.

Bill Donohue

Vice President Kamala Harris wants to be president, but her utter lack of engagement with the media has led even her biggest supporters to criticize her public invisibility. This explains why she went on “60 Minutes.” That was a mistake—she could not answer pointed questions. She is better suited to attending what are really TV parties, which is why she is scheduled to go on “The View” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Today she will do an interview with Howard Stern on his radio show. This is another mistake. In doing so, she is granting legitimacy to a foul-mouthed anti-Catholic bigot.

We have been tracking Stern for decades. He has a long history of mocking Jesus, bashing popes, slandering priests and attacking nuns. Make no mistake, if the object of Stern’s “comedy” were blacks or Asians (Harris’ ancestry), it’s a sure bet she wouldn’t do his show.

A recent Pew Research Center survey has Harris losing to Trump among Catholics by a margin of 52-47. Moreover, she blew off an invitation to the Al Smith Dinner, the big Catholic event held weeks before the election. Now she is going on with the obscene Catholic basher, Howard Stern.

What is really strange about this is that Catholics and Independents are the two swing demographics who will decide the election.

Makes us wonder—does Harris realize what she is doing? We know her boss has checked out, but now it seems she is doing the same, if only for different reasons.

Bill Donohue

There are constant cries from the Left warning that democracy is under assault. They are right about that, but they are wrong about the enemy: it’s not Christians we should fear—it’s people like them who are imperiling democracy. Here are a few examples of how they operate.

Christians are busy in the courts these days pursuing religious liberty claims. For defending their rights, they are being castigated by CNN. “Religious interest groups are queuing up a series of high-profile appeals at the Supreme Court this fall that could further tear down the wall separating church and state, seeking to take advantage of a friendly 6-3 conservative majority that has rapidly pushed the law in their favor in recent years.”

In other words, because religious liberty is under assault by militant secularists, allies of religious liberty have had to go to the courts seeking justice from these bullies. For this, they are accused of subverting the First Amendment. This is what white racists said in the 1960s when blacks were seeking justice in the courts—they blamed the plaintiffs. Fair-minded people know who the real threat to democracy is in both instances.

Similarly, because Republicans are filing a record number of lawsuits in the states ensuring election fairness, they are being blamed for undermining democracy, not those engaged in voter fraud. Reuters reports that the reason for the court challenges is “to sow doubts about election integrity,” and the New York Times says that “experts” believe that many of the suits “are based on unfounded, or outright false, claims.”

These stories are appearing at the same time that the Biden-Harris administration is suing Alabama for removing more that 3,000 noncitizens from the voter rolls. Why would they want to do that?

Why is it that this administration’s Department of Justice refuses to make public a plan it adopted in March 2021, two months after the election, to increase voter turnout? Who were they looking to register? Milkmen or migrants? Given that they sought the advice of left-wing advocacy groups (they are currently working with the Southern Poverty Law Center in the Alabama case), we know it wasn’t the milkman.

Hillary Clinton recently said that those who engage in speech that sounds like Russian propaganda should be “criminally charged” for exercising their freedom of speech. But apparently she is not a threat to democracy anymore than John Kerry is. He is now complaining that the First Amendment right to free speech “stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence.”

Meanwhile, religious left-wing activists recently held a conference at Georgetown University decrying attempts to destroy democracy. It is not Muslim extremists who bother them, or Iran interfering in our elections, it’s “the tenets of Christian Nationalism” that we need to guard against.

The meeting was led by Jim Wallis, the self-described “radical” who was removed from his post as editor-in-chief of Sojourners, the far-left Protestant publication which he founded and headed, for making a lousy editorial judgment. A year after he was dumped from the magazine, Georgetown rewarded him with a new post—one that he founded—as the head of the Center on Faith and Justice.

Psychologists call this phenomenon “projection,” that is, the tendency to project onto others one’s own foibles. It might also be called “gaslighting,” the manipulation of others designed to cause them to doubt their own thoughts and perception of reality. The Left is very good at that.

This is more than hypocrisy—this is propaganda at its worst. It’s done to poison the public mind, allowing the real enemies of democracy to look angelic all the while demonizing the innocent.

Bill Donohue

“Fact-checking” has blossomed into a journalistic industry. Too bad it’s so corrupt. By corrupt I mean dishonest. The latest example comes by way of the October 3rd edition of the New York Times.

On the first page of the “National” section there is a full-page spread listing 21 instances where Sen. JD Vance and Gov. Tim Walz said things during their debate that the paper deemed worthy of fact-checking. Vance was subjected to 17 of them.

Of the 17 quotes by Vance that were analyzed, only once was what he said deemed to be true. Four of his remarks were deemed false. The other twelve were scored as either “exaggerated,” “misleading” or “needs context.” By contrast, of the four quotes by Walz that were scrutinized, one was deemed to be true, one was said to be false and the other two were scored “misleading” or “exaggerated.”

It is not our job to fact-check issues that are outside our domain, but the very first one that was selected—Vance’s criticism of Walz’s position on abortion—is right in our orbit.

The Times opens with the following quote by Vance: “The statute you signed into law, it says a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives—the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to the baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”

Kate Zernike scored this as a false statement, saying, “Mr. Vance is distorting the so-called born alive law that had been in effect in Minnesota since the 1970s. That law required doctors to report when a ‘live child’ was ‘born as the result of an abortion,’ and to provide ‘all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice’ to care for that infant.”

Zernike completely misrepresents what the law said.

She only acknowledges the first part of the second sentence of the 1976 law. Here is what the entire sentence says: “All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken to preserve the life and health of the child (my italics).”

The law signed by Walz in 2023 deleted the italicized words, replacing them with “to care for the infant who is born alive.”

As I pointed out yesterday, “To ‘care for an infant’ is not the same as to ‘preserve the life’ of an infant. Keeping the baby warm is a poor substitute for keeping him alive.”

This is inexcusable. When “fact-checkers” are proven wrong, it undermines their credibility and the media outlet they work for. The bias that pervades the mainstream media, especially on abortion, is astounding.

And by the way, the law Walz signed is only tangentially related to abortion. To intentionally fail to treat an infant who survives an abortion is called infanticide, however passive the means.

Contact the “fact-checker”: zernike@nytimes.com

Bill Donohue

In the vice presidential debate, Sen. J.D. Vance accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of signing a bill that allows for infanticide. He said, “as I read the Minnesota law that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion, where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”

Walz responded by saying Vance is “trying to distort the way the law is written, to try to make a point. That’s not it at all.”

Vance asked, “What was I wrong about? Governor, please tell me, What was I wrong about?”

Walz replied, “That is not the way the law is written.”

Walz lied. That is exactly the way the law is written. Here’s the proof.

In 1976, Minnesota passed a law that required medical personnel to “preserve the life and the health of the child” who was born as a result of an abortion. To read the law, click here.

In 2023, Walz signed a law that amended this law to read that in such circumstances medical personnel should take steps to “care for the infant who is born alive.” Stricken was the requirement to “preserve the life and the health of the child.” To read the evidence, click here.

In other words, Vance was right to say that in cases of a botched abortion, “the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care.”

Now why did Walz remove the requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and the health of the child,” replacing it with the much lower standard of merely providing “care for an infant who is born alive”? To “care for an infant” is not the same as to “preserve the life” of an infant. Keeping the baby warm is a poor substitute for keeping him alive.

Those who think there is no difference need to explain why Walz found it necessary to amend the law.

In short, under the law that Walz signed last year, there is no medical requirement, or legal penalty, for passively promoting infanticide. That’s what he allows. And make no mistake, once this is allowed, it’s a short walk to allowing the elderly in nursing homes and hospitals to die. Keeping them warm while not attending to their condition is sufficient.

Still, the question is: Why does he want this? Here’s why: A baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion is testimony to the humanity of the child, thus undercutting the lie that abortion is not about killing the unborn.

To abort is to stop. Every honest person knows what is being stopped—the birth of a human being that originated at conception.

Vance was right to say that what Walz has done is “fundamentally barbaric.” The fact that Walz could not defend his decision, choosing instead to lie about it, is further proof of just how extreme he is.

Contact Walz’s chief of staff: Chris.Schmitter@state.mn.us

Bill Donohue

Clara Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, a far-left political tabloid. The nicest thing we can say about her is that she has a phobia about Christianity.

When the plane she was recently on was about to land, the Alaska Airlines attendant wished the passengers a “blessed” evening. Most on board probably thought that was a sweet thing to say. But not Jeffrey. She was so engaged that she issued an “alert” on X accusing the attendant of fostering “Creeping Christian nationalism.” She berated the employee for not using adjectives such as “great, awesome, fabulous, amazing, fantastic.”

What kind of person gets exercised over a flight attendant wishing everyone a “blessed” evening? A left-wing fanatic, that’s who. Here are a few other tweets that Jeffrey has penned.

“Admitting women into the priesthood and allowing priests to marry would be the obvious way to begin to fix the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse (and declining laity in US/Europe) problem.” But it is not straight priests who were responsible for most of the molestation—it was homosexual priests. So why would ending celibacy matter to them?

“Women will feel increasingly alienated from a church that doesn’t treat them as fully equal. Seen from that vantage point, the Catholic Church seems to be embracing ultimate extinction.” Sorry, Clara, women go to Mass more than men and they are overrepresented in parish and diocesan offices. Moreover, it is the trendy religions that are dying, not those that are true to their moorings.

“We live in a white Christian ethnostate, where a radical minority is deploying anti-democratic structural advantages to subject the rest of us to their rule.” Got me on that one. I have no idea what in the world she is talking about. But it doesn’t sound good.

Mother Jones is consumed with the idea—it is more fictional than real—that we are on the verge of Christian nationalism. The writers seem to think that patriotic Christians are going to take over, mandating that all of us go goose-stepping off to church. They invented this bogeyman to energize their base. It’s also good for fundraising—there’s big bucks in demonizing white Christian men.

Here’s a sample of the titles of articles posted on the internet by Mother Jones writers in the past few years.

• “We Need to Worry About Christian Nationalism.”
• “The Looming Threat of Christian Nationalism.”
• “A New Documentary Goes Behind the Scenes of Christian Nationalism.”
• “Mike Johnson’s Long Flirtation With Christian Nationalism”
• “RNC Delegates Sound Off on Whether America Should Be a Christian Nation”
• “It’s a Good Time to Start Worrying About Christian Nationalism”
• “Mike Johnson Conducted Seminars Promoting the US as a ‘Christian Nation’”
• “Is Florida’s SAT Replacement Exam A) Christian Nationalism or B) Woke Propaganda?”
• “Confessions of a (Former) Christian Nationalist”
• “RFK Jr. Fundraisers Tied to J6ers, QAnoners, Christian Nationalists, and Far-Right Extremists”
• “Christian Nationalists Are Closer Than You Think to Running America”
• “For Christian Nationalists, the Trump Shooting Proves He Was Anointed by God”
• “Christian Nationalists Are Opening Private Schools”
• “Mike Johnson Has Ties to a Christian Movement That Played a Key Role in Spreading Trump’s Big Lie”

Last year, David Corn, one of the more prominent Mother Jones writers, took issue with me for a piece I wrote, “Christian Bashers Aim Beyond Mike Johnson.” He raised the question, “Is It Anti-Christian to Criticize Speaker Mike Johnson?” The answer is obvious—of course not. But, of course, that was not what I said.

I took issue with “the unrelenting attacks” on Johnson’s religion, which, I contended, were designed “to discourage younger Christian conservatives from running for office; they are also meant to discredit the Founders and our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

It is not mere “criticism” to label Johnson a “hard-core theocrat.” Nor is it fair to brand him a “Christofascist.” Writing that he is a “Bigger Threat to America than Hamas Could Ever Be” is simply mad. One nutjob even compared Johnson to a “mass shooter.”

The same mentality that objects to a flight attendant wishing passengers to enjoy a “blessed” evening is quick to cast proud Christians as a menace to democracy. Those hurling these invectives are the ones we need to fear, not the so-called Christian Nationalists.

Contact Mother Jones: press@motherjones.com

Bill Donohue

The Left is good at lying, especially when it comes to the poor and their upbringing.

The first question asked of Kamala Harris by David Muir in the debate between her and Donald Trump was, “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” She responded, “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid.” Not only was that a dodge—her answer had nothing to do with the question—it was a lie.

In a lengthy piece on Breitbart about her biography, it was said that “a close look at her childhood shows that Harris and her younger sister grew up with many opportunities that many ‘middle class’ children do not have, such as living abroad, private school education, and growing up in some of the wealthiest locales in the world.”

Today, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, have an estimated net worth of $8 million and they live in a house in Brentwood, California worth over $5 million (double what they paid in 2012). The 3,500-square-foot estate has four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and a private pool. Her neighbors include Gisele Bündchen, Dr. Dre, LeBron James and Gwyneth Paltrow.

None of this would matter much if it weren’t for Harris portraying herself as an average American, and as someone whose background allows her to be the champion of the dispossessed. In actual fact, she has a slavemaster pedigree.

Her father, Stanford professor Donald Harris, is a descendant of Hamilton Brown, a slaveowner in Jamaica. He owned over 120 slaves in the early nineteenth century. He not only was a big sugar plantation slavemaster, he was an outspoken foe of the abolitionists. Moreover, he hated William Wilberforce, the most prominent public opponent of slavery.

Harris does not like to talk about her father’s slavemaster roots, and neither does she like to talk about her mother’s slavemaster roots. Indeed, her mother’s side of the family is a classic case of privilege and an exemplar of oppression.

“In Indian society, we go by birth. We are Brahmins, that is the top caste.” That is how her mother, Shyamala, described her roots.

A caste system is a type of social stratification that differs from a class system in that it does not permit mobility, either upward or downward. It’s a closed system.

At the top are the Brahmins, mostly priests and academics. The second of four castes are known as the Kshatriyas; they are the warriors, administrators and rulers. Vaishyas are the third layer, consisting of artisans, merchants, tradesmen and farmers. Then come the commoners, the Shudras, mostly peasants and servants. Last are the Dalits; they are the ones who scrub the toilets, etc.

The Brahmins received some of their bounty from selling slaves. In the case of Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, her roots are that of the Tamil Brahmins, also known as Tambrans.

Tambrans are from the southern tip of India, Tamil Nadu. They were the most advantaged group residing in the Tamil-speaking region of the country. As hereditary Hindu priests, they took over many of the elite positions in the colonial government, something which today is a source of embarrassment. This explains why Harris never mentions the words Tamil and Brahmin in her 2019 book about her life, The Truths We Hold. She doesn’t want the world to know about her elitist roots.

Slavery was not outlawed in India until 1843, yet it still exists today in parts of the country. Ironically, it still exists in the spinning mills of Tamil Nadu, Harris’ mother’s hometown area. According to a young scholar in India, “the history of Brahmins is underwritten by centuries of enslaving many millions of others.” This is the privileged basis of Harris’ mother’s ancestors.

The caste system extends back 1,500 years. The Brahmins not only held all the major positions of power in India, but unlike everyone else, they lived in rent free villages. They maintained their grip on power by practicing endogamy, marrying only their own kind; the marriages were arranged.

At the bottom of the caste system are the Dalits, also known as the Untouchables. As one contemporary Indian writer puts it, “India’s history is smeared with brutalities against lower-caste people by those higher up on the caste ladder.” The Untouchables are the most oppressed in the Hindu caste system, a function of their being considered impure.

Harris says we need reparations in the U.S. because of slavery and  discrimination. But she never addresses the oppressive conditions of the Dalits and Shudras, nor does she call for the abolition of slavery in India where it still exists.

Perversely, Harris demands that to facilitate discussions on reparations for African Americans we need to do a study of slavery and the effects of discrimination. Fine. Let us also do a study of her slavemaster pedigree. Then she can begin writing checks to those who survived the oppression visited upon their forefathers by her ancestors.

Harris likes to mouth the wonders of inclusion, yet she is the beneficiary of centuries of exclusion. Time for her to fess up.