This is the article that appeared in the November 2022 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release, here.

Bill Donohue

Throughout the Western world, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender movement is at a gallop pace. Men and women think they can change their sex and men are told they can get pregnant. It’s all a lie. Worse, many who believe this madness have set their eyes on children. Take, for example, Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH).

There are some parents and grandparents who think that DQSH is a fun-loving way for kids to appreciate diversity. What’s wrong with men dressed as women reading to kids in the local library?

Upon closer inspection, it becomes quite clear that these events were founded to promote an agenda, the goal of which is to normalize aberrant sexual behavior.

No place in the U.S. celebrates DQSH more than San Francisco. Here is what a writer for The Federalist had to say about this last year. “DQSH has brought not just one, not two, but at least three convicted sex criminals, two of whom are convicted pedophiles, into confined spaces with large numbers of young children on multiple occasions. Its events also have been sponsored by a man who’s been charged with seven counts of child pornography possession.”

DQSH was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Michelle Tomasik, who goes by Michelle Tea. Though she has no academic credentials—she never even went to college—her standing in the lesbian community led to a post at Tulane University as a Writer-in-Residence.

Growing up in Chelsea, Massachusetts she recalled how her stepfather spied on her through a hole that he drilled in the wall; he never disputed the abuse. When her mother decided to stay with him nonetheless, she bolted and left for Boston with her female lover. After her girlfriend became a prostitute, she followed suit.

Then Tea “married” Dashiell Lippmann in 2013. It wasn’t a happy day. Following the ceremony, she aborted her five-month-old baby who had died within her (doctors mixed Dashiell’s eggs with donor sperm and implanted the embryo in Tea.) She tried to abort the baby before the wedding but was afraid of miscarrying “all over” her bridal gown. “I wanted this clot of cells taken out of me so I could go on with my life,” she said.

Why did Tea found DQSH? Gaytimes said it was to introduce kids to the “LGBTQ+ culture.” She could not do so without the backing of the American Library Association (ALA). Those who run it are 87% white and 81% female, and virtually all of them are on the left.

The ALA is responsible for the spread of DQSH throughout the country; local libraries pay gays to run the events. A blog post to the ALA a few years ago encouraged librarians to promote the LGBT agenda by “sneakily fit[ting] stuff in current programs.”

One of the most popular books stocked by libraries is The Gender Fairy. It is meant for infants. It tells them “only you know whether you are a boy or girl. No one can tell you.” That means parents, of course. Similarly, a teacher was caught on video telling her class, “It’s OK to be different. There is no such thing as ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ things.” The students were first-graders.

What’s going on? Why have these librarians and teachers become activists for the LGBT cause? Lil Miss Hot Mess is one of the nation’s leading drag queen authors and activists promoting DQSH. She says she loves it when kids realize “that things aren’t necessarily the way they’ve always been told they have to be.” Again, a clear shot at parents. Who are they to tell their children what’s right and wrong?

L. Ron Hubby, a San Francisco drag queen, likes to sing to kids and tell stories. He says DQSH seeks to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity in childhood.” Not quite. It would be more truthful to say these programs are designed to plant the seeds of gender fluidity in children. A New York leader of DQSH also named “gender fluidity” as the number-one concept he seeks to instill in kids.

Another DQSH activist said she wants children to understand they don’t have to be a “cookie cutter kid,” meaning it is okay to rebel against the norms and expectations set by their parents. A psychology professor from the University of Kentucky echoed this saying, DQSH “ultimately provides children with a really flexible model of gender.” In other words, being a boy or a girl is interchangeable.

Kevin Roberts is president of The Heritage Foundation. He is concerned about our culture creating a “new generation of drag kids.” He’s right. This past summer a video emerged of a young girl gyrating to music at a drag show as adults tossed dollar bills at her. It got so bad at a Brooklyn gay bar a few years ago that a reporter who covered a drag event said, “I left after seeing a child dance on stage for money at nighttime.”

When a six-year-old boy saw a tall man dressed as a woman at a library drag event, he asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” “Well,” he said, “I guess I was born a boy. But I like to dress like a girl.” The message sent was not hard to understand.

In July, after a topless drag queen at a Miami bar sought to entertain a girl—she was “between three and five years old”—the performer boasted, “Children belong at drag shows!!!! Children deserve to see fun & expression & freedom.” This is why another drag queen in Pennsylvania showed up shirtless teaching children how to spin on a stripper’s pole at a Pride Festival.

This is the face of freedom for drag queens—watching little kids be sexualized by perverts.

The sexual libertinism that is at the root of DQSH is, of course, notoriously anti-Catholic. The most famous drag queen of all, Ru Paul, likes to parade around in garb that mocks Catholics. Unsurprisingly, he calls his relationship with Georges LeBar an “open marriage,” explaining that he would not want to “put restraints” on the man he loves. That way both can cheat with abandon.

RuPaul’s fans at Slate reviewed his more famous gigs, saying of his of his assembly of queens, “you might have thought they were processing into a house of worship rather than a drag competition reality show set. Our Lady of Guadalupe embroidered tops, Sacred Heart of Jesus hats, cross appliques, rosary-adorned boots, and a crown of thorns were just some of the looks served.” RuPaul offered his customary closing, “Can I get an amen up in here?”

In August, I sent a letter to the president of Tennessee Tech University complaining about a drag queen performer dressed as a Franciscan friar who pranced on stage while children showered him with cash (the president took the matter seriously). The most common drag events that assault Catholic sensibilities are those put on by the San Francisco-based Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of homosexuals dressed as nuns.

They regularly hold DQSH events in urban libraries. Princeton professor Robert P. George, a member of the Catholic League’s board of advisors, knows what they are doing.

“It’s a message of power. The group in question, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, is sending a message that they have the power to enter into the public domain, a publicly funded institution, I believe, not a private one, and to essentially hold a catechism class for this new religion that they’ve created, a religion of hedonism, of self-indulgence….”

It does not speak well of corporate leaders and politicians, virtually all of whom are Democrats, that they back DQSH events. Target, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Hewlett-Packard sponsor such fare, knowing that children are the key audience. Two San Francisco-based entities, the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, do likewise.

Over the past summer, the Democratic Party hosted several DQSH events. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says her goal is to have “A drag queen for every school.” New York City funds DQSH performances, and its mayor, Eric Adams, justifies the spending saying that “literacy” is a “core to what our city embraces.” Note: the majority of students in grades 3-8 in New York City public schools are unable to read at grade level.

No one beats Scott Wiener, a California state senator who represents San Francisco. A homosexual radical, he is a strong advocate for DQSH. He is also known for sponsoring a bill that says adults who have oral and anal sex with minors should not be required to register as sex offenders.

There are those who worship at the altar of non-judgmentalism, tolerance and diversity who regard all critics of DQSH as a secular sacrilege. Their creed—and that is what it is—does not allow for criticism of any gay or transgender event short of violence. They should listen to what honest persons involved in DQSH have to say.

Drag queen Kitty Demure warned parents last year about taking their kids to such events.

“I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children… What in the hell has a drag queen ever done to make you have so much respect for them and admire them so much? Other than put on makeup and jump on the floor and writhe around and do sexual things on stage? I have absolutely no idea why you would want that to influence your child. Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child?”

Demure wasn’t finished with his reality check. “A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on. And backstage there’s a lot of nudity, sex, and drugs… So I don’t think this is an avenue you would want your child to explore… But to actually get [your children] involved in drag is extremely, extremely irresponsible on your part.”

He also warned against taking kids to Pride events, saying “they don’t belong there. There’s a lot of adult activity that is going on at gay Pride events and in the nightclubs. And I think it’s just irresponsible—they’re all like that. Children should not be a part of this culture.”

Last year the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir sang a song with a message to parents.

“We’ll convert your children. It happens bit by bit. Quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it. We’ll convert your children. Yes, we will. There’s really no escaping it. We’ll convert your children. We’re coming for them! We’re coming for your children! We’re coming for your children! We’ll convert your children!”

It would be so nice to think that these are just throw-away lines designed to pull the chain of uptight parents. And for some gays, that’s probably true. But for many others, this is exactly what they mean. Why would anyone in his right mind want to give the jokers the benefit of the doubt?

Bill Donohue

The following is an analysis of our survey of Catholics conducted for us by McLaughlin & Associates. They did a great job. Those who would like to see the raw data can access it on our website.

I had a hand in framing several of the questions; I put my sociological training to good use. Too often pollsters ask questions designed to elicit a response that dovetails with their own political leanings. Our survey asks a number of questions that other surveys of Catholics would never ask.

How accurate is the survey? If all Catholics were asked to respond, there is a 95% chance that the results of this survey would not be off by more than 3.4%, (higher or lower). Unlike other polls of Catholics, we made sure to include Hispanics (they were 35% of the respondents); we paid extra to have the answers of those who responded in Spanish translated. In short, we are proud of the scientific nature of the poll.

The numbers presented have been rounded and may not equal 100%.

In terms of political preferences, 39% of the respondents were Democrats; 27% were Republicans; 34% were Independents. In terms of ideology, 30% were liberals; 36% moderates; 34% conservatives.

Respondents were asked what they thought about the pope, the president and the speaker of the house: 43% said Pope Francis made the Church better; 10% said he made it worse; 39% said it remained the same. When asked, “Joe Biden is a devout Catholic,” 40% agreed and 32% disagreed; 28% said they didn’t know. Rep. Nancy Pelosi didn’t do too well: 29% agreed she is “a devout Catholic”; 32% disagreed; 38% didn’t know.

In terms of Mass attendance, 38% attend weekly; 13% monthly; 49% rarely. Those most likely to attend weekly are Hispanics (42%), African Americans (50%), Asian/Other (46%), men (45%), married (43%), Republicans (42%), and Catholics in the South (41%). The least likely include whites (34%) and women (32%).

Yet when asked how important your Catholic faith is in your life, 9-in-10 (88%) said it was important. One of the most encouraging findings was the large number of Catholics who rarely or never attend church who said that their Catholic faith was important to them: 78% said it was! Might they be persuaded to return to church more often?

Are the news media biased against Catholics? A majority (57%) agree that it is, and only 31% disagree. Republicans are more critical than Democrats: 74% said the media are biased; 46% of Democrats and 56% of Independents agree.

Does this matter? Yes. It no doubt helps to explain why 62% of Catholics agree that “it is getting harder to practice your faith and express your faith publicly in America.” While two out of three practicing Catholics (weekly and monthly churchgoers) say it is getting harder, even 58% of those who rarely or never go to church agree that it is.

Is the Catholic Church an important voice of morality in America? You bet it is: 75% say it is. This includes 86% of weekly and 74% of monthly churchgoers; almost 7-in-10 (68%) of who those who rarely or never go to church also agree.

We know that the clergy sexual abuse scandal took its toll on Catholics, but now that the evidence shows it is mostly in the past—despite what the naysayers believe—it is heartening to learn that six-in-ten (59%) Catholics say “the Church has learned from its mistakes and is now doing everything it can to help keep children safe.” Only 29% disagree. The more often one goes to church the more optimistic that person is.

Respondents were given 13 issues to choose from regarding what they believe is the most important job of the Catholic Church. The top six answers were: promote family values; poverty/homelessness; Catholic values; religious liberty; Catholic education; and unborn/adoption services.

When asked if the Catholic Church should speak out more on moral issues, the results were auspicious: by a margin of 74% to 19%, respondents answered affirmatively. This is good news for those clergy members who may have been intimidated from speaking out more—the laity want you to speak out more!

More good news: 73% of Catholics identify as personally pro-life; 23% say they are pro-choice (most of them say their faith is not important to them). Church attendance matters: the figures for weekly churchgoers, monthly churchgoers and those who rarely or never attend are 68%, 52% and 41% respectively.

How does this play out? When asked to agree or disagree about the propriety of the government forcing Catholic doctors and Catholic hospitals to perform abortions or sex-transition services against their will, 72% said the government should not do so; 19% disagreed. Even seven-in-ten (69%) of those who rarely or never go to church say the government should not do so. Though pro-choice Catholics were the least opposed to government coercion, the majority of them (57%) said it was wrong.

Respondents were asked about gay and transgender issues. “While it is wrong for small businessmen to refuse services to gays, they have a religious right not to provide services that force them to approve of same-sex marriage.” While 47% agreed, almost as many, 42% disagreed. The answers were decided in a big way by church attendance—those who go to church the most were the most likely to agree (59%).

This suggests that the more exposure a Catholic has to the secular culture, the more likely he is to take a liberal position on this issue. Blacks offered the most conservative response, with 70% defending the right of small businessmen not to affirm services for gay marriages.

“The Catholic Church should continue to teach that there are only two sexes, male and female, and should not change its teaching.” Six-in-ten (59%) agreed and a third (32%) disagreed. On this question, Hispanics (73%) and blacks (70%) were the most likely to agree; the figure for whites was 61%. There was a huge difference between the sexes: 70% of the men and 50% of the women are in agreement that the Church should not change its teaching on this subject.

October 11 marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of Vatican II. Did the Church go too fast or too slow in making changes, or were the changes just about right? There was no majority answer: 20% said the changes were too many and too fast; 37% said too few and too slow; 28% answered just about right.

Church critics say that the Church should get with the times and change.

Catholics were asked why it is that those religions which tailor their teachings to what is popular are losing members faster than those that keep to traditional moral teachings (this is undeniably true). Six-in-ten (59%) said it’s because they went too far; 35% said they didn’t go far enough. The most likely to say these religions went too far were weekly churchgoers (58%), pro-lifers (65%); blacks (65%); and men (58%).

I specifically wanted these last three questions included.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing for a religion to stick to its principles? A clear majority (56%) said it was best to stick to principles and beliefs; 33% said the religion in question should conform to modern-day opinions. Now consider how the answers changed when the question was about the Catholic religion only.

The survey found that 66% of Catholics said that whether they agreed with most positions in the Catholic Church, or differed on some issues, the Church should not change its principles because of public opinion; only 27% said it should modernize. Even 55% of those who rarely or never go to church say the Church should not bend to what is popular! Weekly churchgoers (82%), pro-lifers (84%) and blacks (77%) were the most insistent on the Church sticking to its principles.

I wanted to take it a step further. “If the Catholic church did NOT change its positions as many have suggested, how would that affect your commitment to the church?”

Those who said they would be “more committed” totaled 29%; 41% said they would be “as committed.” Which means that 70% of Catholics either would be more committed, or as committed, to the Church if it did not make the changes that many say it should make. Only 7% said they would be less committed.

Conclusion

The survey clearly shows that Mass attendance is a key factor in explaining the level of fidelity to Church teachings. Leading the way are blacks and Hispanics, Republicans, pro-lifers and men. Trailing are white people, especially women, and Democrats. The situation with whites is serious, particularly among young women. It is serious because whites are in a better position to contribute to the Church than are blacks and Hispanics.

On a more positive note, the extent to which Catholics—even the non-practicing ones—find their faith to be important, is great news. That they also want the Church to speak up more on moral issues is something that cannot be punctuated enough. Our culture is in a state of crisis and if the Catholic voice is silent, matters will only deteriorate.

The support for conscience rights is gratifying, but more must be done to articulate the Church’s teachings on gays and gender ideology. Too many Catholic schools, especially colleges and universities, are failing us.

Most impressive is the degree to which Catholics admire the constancy of Catholic teachings, even if they may not always agree with everything the Church teaches—they do not want it to cave into public pressure. This needs to be taken to heart by the laity and clergy alike. Most polls would never tap this subject.

I have long argued that there is a big difference between a preference and a demand. It is one thing if Catholics say they are okay with married priests, women priests, etc.; it is quite another if they demand these changes be made.

By way of analogy, an example I often give is my stance on the National Anthem. Would I prefer “God Bless America” to the “Star Spangled Banner”? Yes. Am I going to join a demonstration demanding that the change be made? No. It really doesn’t matter that much to me.

Moreover, it really doesn’t matter to most Catholics—including those who prefer that the Church make some changes in its teachings—if the Church holds to tradition. In fact, they appreciate it when the Church stands fast on principle.

The public is being manipulated by pollsters and the media into thinking otherwise. That’s because they want the Church to secularize.

We know that all of us are sinners and that bad decisions have been made by senior officials in the Church. We should remember, however, that none could have strayed had fidelity to Church teachings been paramount. We don’t need to change the Church in any dramatic fashion, but we do need to change the minds of Catholics and non-Catholics alike about the wisdom of those teachings.

Finally, the finding that Catholics feel it harder to practice and express their faith in public is hardly a surprise to those of us at the Catholic League. Trust us—we are not walking away from this issue.

Accenture
Adidas
Adobe
AirBnb
Alaska Airlines
Amazon
Apple
AT&T
Bank of America
Ben & Jerry’s
Blackrock
Bloomberg L.P.
The Body Shop
Boston Consulting Group
Box.com
Bridgestone
Bumble
Buzzfeed
Chobani
Cigna***
Citigroup
CiviTech
CNN
Comcast
Condé Nast***
CVS
Deloitte
Deutsche Bank
Dick’s Sporting Goods
Discord
Disney
DoorDash
Douglas Elliman
Duolingo
Ernst & Young
Estee Lauder
Expedia
Ford
Goldman Sachs***
GoodRx
Google
GrubHub
Gucci
H&M
HP
Ikea***
Impossible Foods
Indeed
Intuit
J. Crew
Johnson & Johnson
JP Morgan Chase
KPMG
Kroger
Levi Strauss
Live Nation
Lyft
Mastercard
Match Group
Meta (Facebook)
Microsoft***
Momentive***
Morgan Stanley
Mozilla
Neiman Marcus
Netflix***
New York Times***
Nike
Nordstrom
OpenSea
Oracle
Paramount
Patagonia
Paypal
PriceWaterhouseCooper
Proctor & Gamble
Ralph Lauren
Reddit
Salesforce
Sephora
Snap
Sony Music***
Starbucks***
Sundance
Target
Tesla
T-Mobile
Uber
United Healthcare Group
United Talent Agency
Vimeo
Vox Media
Walgreens
Warner Brothers
Warner Music Group
Wells Fargo
WeWork
Yahoo
Yelp
Zillow***
Zoom

*** These eleven companies provide “gender-affirming care.” This means they will facilitate the transition to the opposite sex.

Bill Donohue

In the run-up to the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, and in its aftermath, many of the nation’s top corporations announced they would pay for abortions in their healthcare plans.

Their goal is to short-circuit states which have already elected to pass restrictive abortion legislation, or planned on doing so. These woke corporations said they will pay the travel expenses for an employee’s abortion. They announced this before President Biden said he would use Medicaid to help women get abortions out of state if they live in a state that has banned abortion.

The ruling class loves virtue signaling. They will soon change their tune once they are faced with the realities of their decision. Make no mistake, they have created an ethical and legal minefield for themselves.

On the ethical front, how do these companies explain their total lack of interest in paying women to access adoption services? If they are truly pro-choice, why is this option not being funded?

Peter Rex is founder and CEO of Rex, a Florida-based entity that builds and invests in tech companies. He, along with the Texas-based insurance company, Buffer, is paying for adoptions, “as well as covering the full costs of birth for employees who keep their children.” He chides the woke companies. “These businesses are ignoring the possibility that many employees may simply need a little more help to carry their baby to term.”

Rex is putting his money where his mouth is, saying that “my business has decided to give up to $7,500 to employees who want to have their baby and give it up for adoption.” But adoption is not something that moves the ruling class the way aborting children does.

Some of these companies are in a race to show how courageously woke they are. For example, of the 101 companies we list, 11 also offer to pay for “gender-affirming care” (they are highlighted). Patagonia is even offering to pay for the “Training and bail for those who peacefully protest for reproductive justice.”

How this is going to play out legally remains to be seen.

Peter Bamburger, a business professor at Tel Aviv University, sees lots of problems on the horizon. “Even before dealing with the bigger issues—reputational harm, political retribution and exposure to legal liability—associated with using employee benefits to help employees access abortion services, employers are going to have to be prepared to face off against a byzantine mix of bureaucratic, legal and tax challenges.”

The minefield is actually worse than what he describes.

Will workers sue for discrimination saying their decision to explore adoption services are not being funded? What if those who “transition” to the other sex decide they want to detransition, citing mental health issues? If pro-abortion protesters who are locked up are entitled to bail benefits, how can pro-life protesters be treated any differently?

If an employee wants to travel to another state to obtain an abortion, how can she protect her privacy interests? How can the company insure that her co-workers won’t find out? Will her boss know the reason for her absence?

How will the company know she is really pregnant, and not just seeking to get a vacation on their dime? Will they demand she submit to a pregnancy test? Will she be entitled to “loss of pregnancy” benefits (Vox Media does) if she is depressed after her abortion? Can part-time workers get this benefit?

Will a Texas man who claims to be a woman be given money to travel to his hometown in New York for his abortion? Or will he be denied funding on the basis that a man can’t get pregnant and therefore cannot have an abortion? What a sweet lawsuit that would be.

This is hardly an exaggeration. In 2020, the Association of LGBTQ Journalists awarded Samantha Schmidt an Excellence in Journalism award for her 2019 story in the Washington Post. The online title of her piece was, “A Mother, But Not a Woman.” The man she wrote about insisted on being called “they.”

Companies should stay out of politics and just attend to business, providing for basic healthcare services. But if they insist on doing otherwise, workers should demand what Impossible Foods says it will cover: in addition to travel, it pays for lodging, meals and child care for employees who travel out of state to get their abortion. Employees should not settle for fast food—go to the best steakhouse in town and enjoy a fine bottle of wine.

One final piece of advice. After the worker has enjoyed her stay she should go home and tell her boss she met a pro-life activist who convinced her not to kill her kid. If the company demands to be reimbursed, she should sue them for violating her pro-choice rights.

Bill Donohue

Few persons have done more damage to free societies than George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire. Yet in left-wing circles, the 91-year-old is regarded as a hero. That may have something to do with the fact that his Open Society Foundations have been greasing them for decades.

Soros’ fans in the media and education consider him to be a champion of social justice causes. In reality, he is doing more harm to African Americans today than any single person in the nation.

His war on blacks stems from his funding of local D.A.’s who go easy on violent criminals—these attorneys are a main reason why there has been a big spike in crime in urban areas—and by opposing educational reforms, such as charter schools and school choice. Similarly, he supports the legalization of drugs, and the open borders’ policies that facilitate it.

In all cases, the victims are mostly blacks. If Soros were a Klansman, he would surely be known as one of the Imperial Wizards.

Soros has always been in love with power, the signature attribute of the Left. In 1946, he told his father, “I’d like to go to Moscow to find out about communism. I mean that’s where the power is.” He was right—Stalin’s genocidal regime was all about power. The power grab that most interests Soros today is the international regulation of speech on the internet. He wants to control speech worldwide.

Like many of those rich persons on the Left, Soros milked the capitalist system that he later tried to destroy. Unlike most Americans, he disparages the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming there are no “self-evident truths.” Not surprisingly, his idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness does not impel him to defend the life of the unborn; he is also a strong advocate of assisted suicide.

Soros is known as a “self-hating Jew.” As a young man in Hungary he became a Nazi collaborator. In a “60 Minutes” interview, Soros admitted that he helped confiscate property from Jews. He told Steve Kroft that he never regretted doing so. When asked if this was difficult, Soros said, “Not, not at all. Not at all.” Stunned, Kroft said, “No feeling of guilt?” “No” came the reply.

The hatred that Soros has for Israel is indisputable. He funds groups such as Bend the Arc, a far-left Jewish group that supports anti-Semites such as Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. He also throws considerable money at the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions) which is trying to bankrupt Israel. By funding the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, he is instrumental in branding Israel an “apartheid” racist state, the two bodies promoting this cause.

There is no shortage of influential persons who have tried to defend Soros from these accusations. Their favorite tactic is to accuse his critics of anti-Semitism. The Associated Press rallied to his side in 2017 by publishing a hackneyed story, “Demonization of Soros Recalls Old anti-Semitic Conspiracies.”

The New York Times often smells a whiff of anti-Semitism whenever Soros is criticized as a “globalist” and a “left-wing radical.” It declared such terms to be “barely coded anti-Semitism,” even though both labels are undeniably true and have nothing to do with bigotry.

To show how flatulent these accusations of anti-Semitism are, consider that the former prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was accused of making “common anti-Semitic canards” for his criticism of Soros. More recently, when the ADL criticized Tucker Carlson for being an anti-Semite—the Fox News host said Soros’ goal was “destruction aimed at the West”—it was rebuked by the Coalition of Jewish Values, which represents more than 2,000 Orthodox rabbis; they said the ADL’s characterization was “grossly misplaced.”

Soros has a long history of supporting anti-Catholicism, and that means lining up with the Democratic Party. When President Obama was in power, the atheist billionaire threw his weight behind Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United, two Catholic front-groups founded to manipulate Catholic voters.

Under President Trump, the Open Society Foundations funded by Soros gave money to organizations seeking to undermine the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. Faithful America, another Soros operation, asked for a Justice Department investigation of Attorney General Bill Barr for the crime of speaking about militant secularists at Notre Dame Law School.

President Biden has won the backing of Soros-funded organizations on several occasions. Even before he became president, Vote Common Good drew on 1,600 faith leaders (they were really a motley crew of left-wing activists) to openly support Biden in the race for the White House. Soros underwrote this effort as well. Earlier in 2020, after Cardinal Timothy Dolan thanked President Trump on a conference call for his outreach to Catholics, Faith in Life, another Soros entity, started a campaign to discredit Dolan.

Once Biden took office, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop José Gomez, raised concerns about having a pro-abortion Catholic in the White House. That was enough to trigger an enormous backlash; pro-abortion forces piled on him nationwide. Simply raising the propriety of a pro-abortion Catholic president receiving Holy Communion was sufficient to attack Gomez again. Faith in Public Life and Faithful America led the charge.

No one person in the United States has funded more Catholic dissident organizations than Soros. In actuality, these entities are more like letterheads than organizations. They typically have no members and some would not exist without Soros’ backing. It’s a shell game—they were founded to weaken the moral authority of the bishops by convincing Catholics and non-Catholics alike of the legitimacy of dissident voices.

Some Soros-funded activists used to work for the bishops’ conference, thus suggesting that there are sources working within the Church to submarine it. One of the most prominent is John Gehring of Faith in Public Life. An anti-Catholic extremist, he wraps himself in Catholic cloth, telling the media he is an authentic Catholic leader. Meanwhile he libels the “white hierarchy” of bishops for not supporting Black Lives Matter, the wholly discredited Marxist organization that is under investigation for fraud in many states.

Gehring is a master manipulator of the media. In 2012, he sent a memo to many reporters and commentators instructing them on how to handle the bishops. He was concerned that a bishop-sponsored project, “Fortnight for Freedom,” could hurt left-wing causes.

He taught the media how to deal with declarations about the “war on the Catholic Church,” a reference to Catholic League admonitions that some bishops took to heart. He accused the bishops of making “inflammatory and irresponsible rhetoric,” all the while inflaming anti-Catholic sentiment in the media. A copy of his memo was leaked to me by a reporter and I issued a news release exposing his deceitful campaign.

When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, Faith in Action did Soros’ bidding by seeking to engage the pope on economic and racial justice issues he was sympathetic towards. It, too, was a stealth campaign, organized to politicize the pope’s message. Soros invested $650,000 in this effort.

Catholics for Choice is the oldest anti-Catholic “Catholic” entity in the modern era. Though no organization has given it more money than the Ford Foundation, Soros’ foundations have not been miserly. This letterhead has a history of lying about the Church’s official teaching on abortion.

Soros likes abortion so much that he dropped a bundle in 2016 trying to convince Catholics in Ireland that they needed to get rid of their “pro-life” beliefs and vote to repeal its Eighth Amendment ban on abortion. He scored a victory for death in 2018.

Some who now receive money from Soros have turned to violence to further their cause. Two years ago, mobs took to the streets to smash statues of American icons. A favorite target of these saboteurs were statues of Father Junípero Serra (later made a saint), the 18th century priest who pioneered the rights of Indians.

One of the most prominent persons to justify the violence was Morning Star Gali, an American Indian. Her command of history was so bad she couldn’t distinguish between Spanish colonizers who mistreated Indians, and heroes like Serra who championed their cause. Who funded her? Soros, of course.

In January, Catholics for Choice vandalized the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. At a prayer vigil that was held there before the March for Life, the Soros-funded entity desecrated the Basilica by using light-projecting technology to post anti-Catholic messages on it.

If there are two Soros-operated entities that the Catholic League has fought the most it would be Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. We don’t engage them anymore—our relentless attacks on them have effectively disabled them.

Both of the two anti-Catholic “Catholic” groups were founded in 2005, following the defeat of John Kerry the year before. Kerry lost to President George W. Bush in part because of the “values voters,” a bloc of mostly Catholic and evangelical Protestants who stood for traditional values. Soros wasn’t happy with these traditionalists, or the outcome, and sought a corrective by establishing phony Catholic groups to alter the political landscape.

It was a stealth campaign to end all stealth campaigns. There was nothing Catholic about either of these entities, but they gave the impression to the public that one could be a Catholic in good standing and oppose the Church’s teachings on marriage, the family and sexuality. In 2016, they came crashing down.

That is when the Wikileaks revelations became public. Leaked emails showed that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, sought to create mutiny in the Catholic Church by funding Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. One of Podesta’s associates, Sandy Newman, said there was a need for a “Catholic spring,” and that the goal should be to “plant the seeds of the revolution.” Made possible, of course, with Soros’ money.

There is one other aspect to this story that’s worth mentioning. After Obama was elected in 2008, the IRS contacted me to say that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating IRS strictures for non-profit organizations. After the probe was finally finished, we received a slap on the wrist. I promised the IRS official I would not stop hammering pro-abortion anti-Catholic politicians, and that he should inform his superiors of my pledge.

More important, I told him that I knew who was behind the attempt to destroy me. Just before the 2008 election, a CNN staffer sent me copies of a long document detailing news releases I had sent that allegedly violated IRS rules. She did this because the person who sent it to her tried to get me kicked off TV; he sent the document to validate his request.

When the IRS complaint was sent to me before Thanksgiving in 2008, I quickly concluded that it looked amazingly like the document forwarded to me by the CNN employee. It was sent to her by Catholics United.

In other words, Soros was behind the attempt to silence the Catholic League. He lost. It’s too bad he hasn’t lost more often—his legacy of hate has done much harm.

Bill Donohue

On May 14, I was awarded an honorary degree from Ave Maria Law School. I also gave the Commencement address to the graduating class.

Tom Monaghan founded Ave Maria University, located in Ave Maria, Florida and Ave Maria Law School, which is independent of the university and is located in Naples, Florida.

Tom is the founder of Domino’s Pizza, which he sold many years ago. He is a member of the board of advisors of the Catholic League and the founder of Legatus, an organization of Catholic business executives.

When Tom called me to receive the honorary degree and offer the Commencement address, I was delighted. There are not very many truly Catholic institutions of higher education left; most have succumbed to the dominant culture and have become increasingly secular.

Ave Maria University and Ave Maria Law School are different. They are both unapologetically Catholic. It is a tribute to Tom that he took his fortune and spent it on making two first-class Catholic schools.

The following is the transcript of the remarks which I prepared, though the address was given with more spontaneity than what appears here. The audience was appreciative and fun to be with on this special occasion.

In my lifetime I have had the opportunity to meet with many outstanding individuals, including presidents and popes, but of all the successful persons I have met, none has been more humble and more self-giving than Tom Monaghan. He is truly one of the great Americans of our age, and we Catholics are fortunate to count him as one of our own.

Tom had a vision: he wanted to build a first-class Catholic institution of higher learning, and he has done so. You graduates are testimony to his work.

Regrettably, there are many Catholic colleges and universities these days that have lost their moorings. Some have pro-abortion student clubs on campus—Georgetown has two—while others have openly rejected core Catholic teachings on marriage, the family and sexuality. Ave Maria University, and Ave Maria Law School, are different: they are faithful to the Catholic tradition, and they have done so without compromising their commitment to academic excellence.

Catholic colleges that have lost their way are not unique: most colleges and universities have lost their way. The typical college administrator and faculty member will tell you that higher education exists so that all ideas can be discussed, without favor for one set of ideas over another. They are wrong, seriously wrong.

The fact is freedom of speech does not exist anymore on most college campuses. Heterodox views are not allowed. Thought control is the rule, not the exception. I know—I spent 20 years on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars, and I ran the Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania chapters for decades. This organization is wholly opposed to the politicization of the academy. As you might expect, it is very busy these days.

Philip Hamburger is a professor of law at Columbia University; he is also a courageous and brilliant scholar. He recently wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal about a Georgetown law professor who is on leave, pending an investigation. What did he do wrong? He issued an inoffensive tweet, one that nonetheless managed to anger the law dean. Here is what Hamburger said about it.

“The problem is now pervasive in law schools. On account of mere dissent, deans investigate faculty for their views, give them meager salary increases, bar them from teaching some subjects, and even threaten to fire them—as at Georgetown. It’s not only deans. Faculties or their appointment committees regularly refuse to hire people with the wrong views. Just as bad, student law-review editors exclude dissenting students from their boards and even threaten to fire editors whom they discover to have the wrong views, whether on pronouns or matters of law.”

In other words, administrators and faculty who tout higher education as citadels of free speech are wrong. As I have said many times on radio and TV, there is more free speech at your local neighborhood pub than there is on your local college campus.

The elites who run higher education are not only phonies, they are wrong to maintain that colleges and universities were founded as places where all ideas can be discussed and weighed. No they were not. Higher education was founded for one reason: the pursuit of truth.

A number of years ago I was asked to go on “The Today Show” to debate a Columbia University dean. He defended the school’s invitation to have Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak on campus. He made his case on free speech grounds.

I replied that colleges and universities constitute a community, and as such, they have normative strictures. They do not exist so that every voice can be heard; rather, they exist so that truth can be pursued. That is why Columbia should no more invite someone from the Flat Earth Society to speak on campus anymore than it should invite someone who denies the Holocaust, as Ahmadinejad does.

Does that mean that such persons should not be allowed to speak? Not at all. They should be allowed to speak at forums that were founded as free-speech venues, places like Madison Square Garden or Central Park. But higher education is different. If the existence of the Holocaust is subject to debate on campus, then the school should shut down.

To be sure, the pursuit of truth is contingent on freedom of speech. Therefore, restrictive lines that are capriciously drawn, or that defy reason—as they do at Georgetown Law—must not be tolerated. That leaves a lot of wiggle room for the pursuit of truth to be realized, without compromising the integrity of colleges and universities.

In the 1990s, I spoke to Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After my talk, two male students cornered me saying, rather smugly, that I sounded like one of those patriotic American types. I plead guilty, referencing my veteran status. I said to them, “you obviously disagree with me, and believe that all cultures are equal, and that none is morally better than the other.” They smiled and said that is exactly what they believe.

I then said, “in this country we put pizzas into ovens, and in Hitler’s Germany they put Jews into ovens—that’s just a matter of different strokes for different folks. Isn’t that right?” That wiped the smile from their face and they nervously shook their heads saying no, that can’t be right. But it is, I replied, what I said is logically consistent with your position. Now if you are not happy with that, I commented, perhaps it’s time you rethought your position and spent more time assessing first principles.

Truth matters. To take another example, the Catholic tradition respects natural rights and natural law. Those who sneer at this tradition have not thought things through anymore than the CMU students did.

What did the Nazis who were on trial at Nuremberg say in their defense? They said they were only following orders when they put Jews into ovens. They were telling the truth, they said, yet they were convicted. But on what basis? They did not violate the positive law, the actual written law. No, they were convicted because the tribunal concluded that they were really not telling the whole truth.

Sir Henry Shawcross, the British prosecutor, said there could be no immunity “for those who obey orders which—whether legal or not in the country where they were issued—are manifestly contrary to the very law of nature from which international law has grown.”

It was the Nazis violation of the “law of nature,” or the natural law, that got them convicted. While it is true that Aristotle is regarded as the father of the natural law, it was Aquinas who gave it a Catholic cast, inspiring Catholic theologians and philosophers to provide it with such a rich tradition. From them, we learned that fundamental ideas of right and wrong are inscribed in the hearts of all of us.

The Nazis knew that, too. Naturally, Catholics are never given credit for their contribution to the very basis upon which the Nazis were found guilty. There is an objective moral order, and attempts to deny this truth are scurrilous. Indeed, they may even be lethal.

No matter, postmodernist thought has rendered the very idea of truth to be invalid. Indeed, postmodernist professors like to boast that only the badly educated—the “deplorables”—still believe there is such a thing as truth. They like to cite Nietzsche’s remark, “There are no facts, just interpretations.” I like to remind them that there is another figure in German history who similarly said, “There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or the scientific sense.” His name was Adolf Hitler.

The latest iteration of the “there is no such thing as truth” school of thought is the fanciful idea that pregnant woman are not carrying a baby. So what is she carrying? Is it a seal? Have you ever heard of a pregnant woman who invited you to her “fetus shower?”

In 2005, Hillary Clinton said, “We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.” She never said why. By contrast, we never think it is “sad” when we learn that a family member has to get a root canal. It may be unfortunate, but it is not “sad.” Furthermore, the choice to undergo this dental procedure would never be deemed “tragic.” Her failure to tell the truth was itself telling.

Two men can say they are married, but everyone knows that marriage, which is a universal institution, was founded to facilitate the creation of a family. Two men cannot create a family—they have been disqualified by nature, and by nature’s God. We all know this to be true, yet some prefer to live in a state of denial.

Another fiction is the bizarre idea that the sexes are interchangeable. They are not. People may identify as someone of the opposite sex—they may identify as a giraffe—but that doesn’t change reality. You are either female, with XX chromosomes, or male, with XY chromosomes. No one is walking around with XYZ chromosomes. They may exist in their head, or on a professor’s blackboard, but the truth is that transgenderism is a fiction.

Unfortunately, these examples of postmodernism’s denial of truth are commonplace on college campuses. There are exceptions, of course, and Ave Maria Law School is a primary example. It is testimony to the gift that Tom Monaghan gave you, and indeed all Catholics. It is up to you, as graduates, to make good on his effort. You have been given the tools, now it’s time to execute.

We don’t need any more Catholic spectators. We need gladiators, men and women who have the courage to stand up for their Catholic convictions. If you do, you will not only endear yourself to God, you will make this a better country.

For decades, parents, teachers, the clergy, health professionals and public officials have warned against drug use. In more recent times, some states and cities have legalized marijuana, and in a few cases they have dropped penalties for smaller amounts of other drugs. We now have evidence that those places which have relaxed restrictions have paid a big price: the results are devastating.

On April 1, 2022, the House of Representatives voted 220-204 to decriminalize marijuana. The bill now goes to the Senate. New York Senator Chuck Schumer is not satisfied to decriminalize marijuana—he wants to legalize it altogether. He said that federal legislation to do so was a “priority” for the Senate.

Polling data indicate that a majority of Americans are in favor of legalizing marijuana, though the only organized effort to do so is coming from those who expect to profit from it. Yet Schumer justified his enthusiasm by saying the legislation is needed to restore “justice for communities impacted by the War on Drugs—especially communities of color.”

The fact is there has been no groundswell of support by Asians, Hispanics or African Americans to legalize marijuana. Indeed, there is no campaign among “communities of color” to legalize any drugs.

If Schumer were right, we should be able to see a marked difference of opinion between whites and blacks on this issue. But there isn’t. Between 2015 and 2021, Pew Research Center conducted several surveys on support for marijuana legalization, and in five of them they listed support for it based on race and ethnicity. There was almost no difference between whites and blacks on this issue in the surveys taken in 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2021 (there were two in 2021).

Polls measure preferences; they do not measure demand. There is a big difference between the two. Quite frankly, there is no demand coming from blacks, or from any other sector of society, for drug legalization. Blacks, in particular, may want to rethink their position.

A Pew Research Center study released in 2022 found that blacks have been hit the hardest by drugs. “As recently as 2015, Black men were considerably less likely than both White men and American Indian or Alaska Native men to die from drug overdose. Since then, the death rate among Black men has more than tripled—rising 213%—while rates among men in every other major racial or ethnic group have increased at a slower pace.”

It also found that “death rates among Black women rose 144% between 2015 and 2020, far outpacing the percentage increases among women in every other racial or ethnic group during the same period.”

In the 1980s, Harlem congressman Charles Rangel supported the War on Drugs that Senator Schumer decries. He said that “a lot of the drug-related bleeding was staunched.” He also made an insightful comment about why white leaders want to legalize drugs. “It seems to me that more white America is saying, let’s legalize drugs because we can’t deal with the problem.” He was not naive in understanding who pays the biggest price for this policy.

Let’s face it. There is big money involved. There is an entire industry waiting to cash in on drug legalization, and it has no plans on stopping after marijuana is legalized.

Parents were asked in a Yahoo News/Marist poll in 2017 what behaviors they worried about the most in their children. Marijuana use topped the list, beating out concerns over drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, having sex or cheating on a test.

Parents keep an eye on these issues. It was reported in 2022 that drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 Americans, which is more than those who die in vehicle accidents and from guns combined. It is also almost twice the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War between 1954 and 1975.

Doctors have been telling us for decades about the harm that smoking cigarettes does to our body, especially our lungs. They have also been telling us about the seriousness of respiratory problems caused by COVID-19. Why, then, is the campaign to legalize a substance that causes more respiratory problems being undertaken at this time? Moreover, according to one prominent physician, “One joint today is like 17 joints in the 1970s.”

If the health issues attendant to marijuana use were more widely known, support for legalization would wane.

Kenneth L. Davis is the president and chief executive of the Mount Sinai Health System and Mary Jeanne Kreek was the head of the Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases at Rockefeller University. Their review of the medical literature led them to conclude that marijuana is not the harmless substance that many believe.

Marijuana has a “deleterious impact on cognitive development in adolescents, impairing executive function, processing speed, memory, attention span and concentration. The damage is measurable with an I.Q. test. Researchers who tracked subjects from childhood through age 38 found a consequential I.Q. decline over the 25-year period among adolescents who consistently used marijuana every week. In addition, studies have shown that substantial adolescent exposure to marijuana may be a predictor of opiod use disorders.” They add that the brain is still developing in young people to age 25.

Today’s potent marijuana can make users psychotic. A 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that adolescent marijuana use was associated with significant increases in developing depression and suicidal behavior during adulthood.

Roughly a third of marijuana users become dependent on it and it has proven to be deadly for some of those who have damaged their lungs and heart. In fact, one study found that “a person’s risk of heart attack during the first hour after smoking marijuana is nearly five times his or her usual risk.” A peer-reviewed article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that young people who use marijuana were twice more likely to experience a heart attack.

Pregnant women who use marijuana are causing severe behavioral problems for their children. According to Melinda Wenner Moyer, a contributing editor at Scientific American, “deficits in language comprehension, visual perception, attention and memory” are well-documented problems associated with such children. Also, some studies show that marijuana use during pregnancy is linked to “low birth weight, reduced IQ, autism, delusional thoughts and attention problems,” owing in large part to the fact that “cannabis today is nothing like the cannabis of years past.”

Those who make the case for marijuana legalization like to cite the growing acceptance of medical marijuana as a reason to change our views about this matter. But a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that medical marijuana “is associated with higher opoid mortality” and that legalizing the substance is “associated with greater death rates” when compared to keeping it illegal.

In March, 2022, Massachusetts General Hospital released a report that showed that medical marijuana can cause serious psychological and physical health issues and that it usually fails to improve symptoms of “pain, anxiety, and depression.” It also increases the risk of addiction to the drug, even when prescribed.

If legalizing marijuana were inconsequential, we would know it from studying what has happened in Colorado.

Between 2012, when marijuana was legalized, and 2019, marijuana-related traffic deaths increased by 151 percent, while overall state deaths increased by only 35 percent. Nationwide, between 2000 and 2018 vehicle fatalities from marijuana more than doubled from nine percent to 22 percent, meaning that the situation in Colorado is much worse. Emergency room visits for users increased 52 percent in Colorado, while marijuana-related hospitalizations increased by 148 percent.

Marijuana did not become available for recreational sales until two years after it was legalized. The New York Times did a review of what happened over the next five years. “Nearly twice as many Coloradans smoke pot as the rest of America.” The consequences were horrific.

The Times reporter spoke with Andrew Monte, an emergency and medical technology physician and researcher at the University of Colorado. Some of the heavy users he treated suffered from “severe vomiting.” Patients in the emergency room with marijuana-related cases were “five times as likely to have a mental-health issue as those with other cases.”

Children who consumed edibles came to Dr. Monte “disoriented, dehydrated or hallucinating after consuming too much marijuana.” A father of three shot his wife dead after eating edibles. Such stories are commonplace among attending physicians.

That’s not all. Violent crime since legalization increased in Colorado by 19 percent; it increased by 3.7 percent nationwide. Property crime increased by eight percent as compared to a national decrease of 13.6 percent. No wonder that one study concluded that “for every dollar gained in tax revenue, Coloradans spent approximately $4.50 to mitigate the effects of legalization.”

Coloradans like their drugs so much that they embarked on a campaign to legalize other drugs. In 2019, lawmakers made the possession of small amounts of heroin and cocaine a misdemeanor, not a felony. The Democrat-controlled legislature included fentanyl, the most dangerous of them all. Colorado prosecutors pleaded with lawmakers to exempt fentanyl—four grams is the equivalent of 13,000 deadly doses—but they refused. What happened? Opiod overdose deaths increased by 54 percent in 2020.

In 2018, King County, which encompasses Seattle, and neighboring Snohomish County, stopped charging people for small amounts of hard drugs. Meth overdoses skyrocketed, going from 18 deaths in 2008 to 197 in 2019. Heroin overdose deaths jumped from 45 to 147 and fentanyl-related deaths climbed from 9 to 106, during the same time period. Seattle radio talk-show host Jason Rantz says decriminalization made “the problems worse.” In fact, he brands it “an unmitigated disaster.” There are now calls to reverse this law.

One of the great myths about drug legalization is that it will dry up the black market. In fact, just the opposite happens. The Mexican cartels are not stupid. To make up for the loss in revenue from trafficking in marijuana, they have expanded their operations in heroin and meth.

States which have legalized pot have attracted an entire new thriving market in marijuana fields. According to Steven Malanga at the Manhattan Institute, California’s experiment in legalizing marijuana shops has led to illegal growers undercutting the price of legal weed. The black market drug lords, he says, don’t have to pay for “the cost of a license, taxes on sales, and the financial burdens of complying with state health regulations.” The final tally is incontestable. “As a result,” he says, “production of illegal pot is increasing.”

In December 2021, San Francisco supervisors got the message and unanimously voted to suspend the city’s tax on pot through 2022, in an attempt to curb illegal marijuana sales.

No policy can stop the demand for drugs, but making it easier to access is the worst alternative. Indeed, it has proven to be a death sentence for too many Americans.

Fr. D. Paul Sullins

In America you can go to a therapist and get nonjudgmental help for psychological distress due to divorce, adultery, prostitution, promiscuity, polyamory, pornography, pedophilia, and many other issues related to sexual choices and behavior. If you want to amend your behavior—for example, to stop promiscuity or viewing pornography—talking with a trained therapist can often help bring personal insight and strength to do so. Many clergy and pastoral counselors help persons who struggle to follow, or wrestle with guilt from not following, their faith’s moral demands in these areas. Catholics may be familiar with networks of psychotherapists such as CatholicTherapists.com, who operate in full adherence to the magisterium of the Catholic Church, or Rachel’s Vineyard, who are committed to serving women and men recover from the pain of abortion.

You can get such help for every problem, that is, except one: in a growing number of places in America, if a young person struggles with being sexually attracted to persons of the same sex, it is against the law for a therapist to help him or her try to reduce or avoid acting on those attractions. The therapist is required, by law, to affirm that same-sex attraction is unchangeable and anal sex is natural and healthy. Currently 28 states and several dozen cities or counties have in place bans on therapy that may take a different approach. Violators are subject to hefty fines, typically five figures per violation.

If you think that such censorship only applies to licensed therapists, and would not inhibit clergy from talking about their faith, think again. Proposed laws against “conversion therapy” would prohibit much more than therapy. Fr. Philip Bochanski, Executive Director of the Courage apostolate, recently explained to me in an email how such legislation could harm the Church’s outreach to same-sex attracted Catholics:

People who are troubled by their experience of same-sex attractions or gender identity discordance sometimes seek out therapy to understand this experience better and to achieve the integration of sexuality that is at the heart of the Church’s definition of chastity. But unless the counselor affirms that such experiences are natural, inborn and perfectly healthy, their discussions with their patients or clients are often considered “conversion therapy.” …

Proponents of [laws banning conversion therapy] have been increasingly successful in convincing the general public that whenever a parish priest, a college chaplain, or an apostolate like Courage talks to someone about the importance of living virtuously and choosing chaste friendship instead of same-sex intimate relationships, what they’re really doing is practicing “conversion therapy.” This is a serious mischaracterization, and gives people the mistaken impression that the Church and its ministers are intentionally harming people and trying to “pray away the gay.”

The intended effect of such legislation seems clear: it will restrict the freedom, and often the willingness, of pastoral ministers and other people of faith and good will to speak, in public or one-on-one, about what the Word of God has to say on issues of sexual morality, attraction and identity.

Pending or existing therapy bans in other parts of the world confirm the reality of the threat to religious freedom that Father Bochanski describes. Canada prohibited “non-affirmative” or “conversion” therapy nationwide last year, France last month, and England is considering a ban. The United Nations has made a global ban on conversion therapy a priority.

• In response to the proposed ban in Great Britain, last December thousands of pastors and church workers, including Catholic bishops, priests and deacons, wrote an open letter to Parliament stating: “We see in these proposals a clear possibility that our duty as ministers, of proclaiming the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and calling people to find life in him, which includes living by his laws, will be criminalised.” The signatories publicly pledged that they would continue to teach and preach the Biblical view of sexuality and sex difference, even if it meant serving time in prison.
• In January 2022 a prominent member of the parliament of Finland was indicted on criminal charges for tweeting a photograph of a Bible verse (Romans 1:24-27) after her church, the Finnish Lutheran Church, sponsored a gay pride event. If convicted, the penalty for this 62-year-old medical doctor and mother of five, the former Interior Minister of Finland, will be two years in jail. She also faces additional jail time, as does her bishop, for charges related to the publication of a 2004 pamphlet titled “Male and Female He Created Them” (quoting Genesis 5:2), under laws that consider any suggestion that homosexuality is not healthy or normal to be a “crime against humanity.”

To date therapy bans in the United States have been restricted by constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, but their advocates are working to change that. The Movement Advancement Project, an LGBT advocacy agency that ranks U.S. states on how pro-gay their policies are, rates the existence of a state law protecting freedom of religion or conscience as a negative for “equality for LGBT people.” They warn that “42% of [the] LGBTQ population lives in states with statutory religious exemption laws,” complaining that such laws “permit people, churches, non-profit organizations, and sometimes corporations to seek exemptions from state laws that burden their religious beliefs.” Absent an effective response, we face a realistic prospect that laws will attempt to silence Catholic teaching and witness on human sexuality in the United States.

My research helps to respond to legal bans on so-called anti-homosexual “hate speech” or “conversion therapy,” by challenging, on the basis of objective evidence, some of the falsehoods that underlie such legislation, in particular the belief that same-sex attraction is a fixed, immutable condition. Attempting to change one’s sexual orientation, on this view, must inevitably fail, creating stress, self-hatred and disappointment that puts same-sex attracted persons at higher risk of psychological harm, especially suicide. If homosexual people are born that way, and cannot change, they conclude, it is wrongful discrimination not to affirm their same-sex desires and behavior as natural and healthy.

The Achilles heel of this argument, and the reason perhaps that LGBT activists are so concerned with banning any discussion of the possibility of change in sexual orientation, is that there is abundant evidence that people can and do change their same-sex attractions and behavior. Two compilations of such stories have been published just in the past year, each with dozens of stories of persons happily leaving homosexual practices: X Out Loud: Emerging Ex-LGBT Voices, and Changed: Once-gay stories. (One can be forgiven for not knowing about them; both books have been deplatformed from Amazon and any mention of them is blocked by Twitter and Facebook.)

In addition to personal accounts, there is strong evidence from population and survey data that homosexual attraction and behavior can and does change. Population surveys that collect sex partner histories have long documented that the majority of persons who report having only homosexual sex partners before age 25 have, by age 40, reverted to having only heterosexual sex partners. Last Spring I (with Dr. Christopher Rosik and Paul Santero) published the results of a survey of 125 men who had undergone some form of “sexual orientation change efforts.” or SOCE, a blanket term for all forms of conversion therapy and related pastoral practices.

We found that over half of them (55%) achieved at least partial remission of unwanted same-sex sexuality. Over a quarter (26%) of the men who had engaged in same-sex acts now engaged exclusively in heterosexual sex, in most cases with a married partner, and 14% reported that their sexual attractions were now completely heterosexual.

Their psychological state generally improved following SOCE. Over a third (35%) experienced a strong reduction in depression and over a fifth (22%) reported reduced suicidality. This evidence directly contradicts the claim that homosexual attraction and behavior can never change and that attempting to do so will make persons more suicidal.

Opponents may argue that less successful SOCE alumni, who were not able to change their orientation, may experience more psychological harm. The stories celebrated in the secular media are all of this type, that is, of SOCE alumni who still identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, and who report feeling harmed, typically more suicidal, by the experience.

To address this question, in January 2022 I published a study that compared a population sample of homosexual and bisexual persons who had undergone SOCE with those who hadn’t, to see if the former were currently more likely to manifest greater psychological distress. None of the study participants had been successful in discontinuing same-sex attraction or behavior. Strikingly, I found that the two groups were statistically identical for seven measures of current harmful behavior, including self-inflicted harm (cutting), alcohol dependence, substance abuse, thoughts of suicide, planning suicide, declaring an intent to commit suicide, or attempting suicide. This result was notable because the SOCE participants were subject to worse childhood family conditions, higher minority stress and discrimination, and lower socioeconomic status, all of which are correlated with a higher risk of harmful behavior, yet following SOCE their level of harm was no higher than their peers who had not experienced these conditions. After accounting for these differences, the risk of suicide attempts was five times lower following SOCE than for those never undergoing SOCE—the opposite of what LGBT advocates allege.

These findings confirm Fr. Bochanski’s insights quoted previously, who adds in conclusion:

Ultimately, legislation like this, and the rhetoric that accompanies it, will make it less likely that people experiencing same-sex attractions or gender identity discordance will seek out the pastoral care that they need and deserve. … [In this way] the legislation … may end up hurting some of the very people whom they say they are trying to protect.

Those who confess that the Word of creation became flesh in Christ believe that reason and faith converge on the same set of truths about God and humanity. I hope these empirical truths, which mirror those of the Catholic faith, will help to open minds to understand, and hearts to pull back from criminal censorship, with potentially brutal consequences, of opinions and religious convictions with which they disagree.

Father Paul Sullins, Ph.D., taught sociology at The Catholic University of America and is a Senior Research Associate at the Ruth Institute.

Bill Donohue

It has been chic for some time to say things about white people that if said about blacks would be branded racist. Now it is in vogue like never before.

The irony is that the racist comments are being said by those who consider themselves to be anti-racist. They are not—they are every bit as racist as George Wallace was. To top things off, many round out their bigotry by making anti-Christian and sexist remarks. In short, they have a special hatred of white Christian men.

Here are a few examples.

“White Christian nationalists may not physically attack the Capitol again, as on January 6. But the movement is assaulting the rights of atheists, racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ people, and many others with their extremist legislation.” Nick Fish, president, American Atheists, January 4, 2022

“January 6th was very much a religious event—white Christian nationalism on display. We must remember that fact. Because evidence is mounting that white Christian nationalism could provide the theological cover for more events like it.” Samuel L. Perry, Ph.D., and Andrew Whitehead, Ph.D., Time, January 4, 2022

“They’re white so-called Christian conservatives who feel like this country was built by them for them, and so everyone but them needs to suck it up and let them have their way or else.” Joy Reid, MSNBC, January 3, 2022

“It’s not the messaging, folks. This country simply loves white supremacy.” Jemele Hill, former ESPN anchor, November 3, 2021

“Glenn Youngkin’s victory proves White ignorance is a powerful weapon,” arguing that the “campaign discovered that this contingent of angry, willfully ignorant White people was the key ingredient needed to elect a GOP governor in Virginia for the first time since 2009.” Ja’han Jones, MSNBC, November 3, 2021

“We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white-guy ban.” Don Lemon, CNN, October 25, 2021

“White Christianity is a Christianity that is based on the following: Jesus is white. Jesus privileges white culture and white supremacy, and the political aspirations of whiteness over and against everything else.” Anthea Butler, Ph.D., Salon, October 19, 2021

“Practically, we must reject what have, for too long, been three articles of our faith: that the Bible is a blueprint for a white Christian America; that Jesus, the son of God, is a white savior; and that the church is a sanctuary of white innocence. Most fundamentally, we must confess that whatever the personal sins of white people, in the past and present, they pale in comparison to the systemic ways we have built and blessed a society that reflects a conviction that, to us and to God, our lives matter more.” Robert P. Jones, Ph.D., Time, September 2021

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was “a true cautionary tale for the US, which has our own far religious right dreaming of a theocracy that would impose a particular brand of Christianity, drive women from the workforce and solely into childbirth, and control all politics.” Joy Reid, MSNBC, August 14, 2021

“All White people are at some level, at the unconscious level, connected to racism, its unavoidable. I think all men are sexist at some level. I think that’s absolutely the case.” Marc Lamont Hill, Ph.D., Black News Tonight, July 11, 2021

“This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil….I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.” Dr. Aruna Khilanani, guest lecturer at Yale, June 4, 2021

“I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color….I have been struck…by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, May 19, 2021

These people get away with making racist remarks because there is no penalty for doing so. In fact, what they are saying is music to the ears of the ruling class, which has become complicit in their racism.

A long-standing liberal tenet—that we should condemn all forms of prejudice and discrimination equally—came under attack in the 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson decided that equal opportunity was outdated: he said the new goal should be equal outcomes.

Ironically, this new thinking, which has since become a staple of liberal thought, was announced at the very moment when equal opportunity was finally emerging, thanks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Affirmative action, and the quotas which it entailed, was the start of legally discriminating against white people. Today the idea of justifying racism against whites is expressed in many government policies, most of which have nothing to do with affirmative action.

On December 27, 2021, the New York State Department of Health issued a new policy on the distribution of anti-Covid treatments. To be a recipient, the patient must “have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for serious illness.” One of the risk factors is being a “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity,” meaning that white people have been shoved to the back of the line.

A doctor who justified the racism said that blacks and Hispanics were harder hit with Covid, which is true. It is also true that being overweight makes it more likely that one will acquire Covid, and both minority groups are more likely to be overweight than whites. Is that a function of racism, or is it a volitional outcome?

At the federal level, the Biden administration had been in office for just a month before it hit the ground running, going after white people. The Covid-19 relief bill offered debt forgiveness to farmers, provided they were not white. Recipients had to be “Black/African American, American Indian or Alaskan native, Hispanic or Latino, or Asian American or Pacific Islanders.”

Biden also punished white business owners. He explicitly said that his “priority will be black, Latino, Asian and Native-American-owned businesses” and “women-owned businesses.” Most white men also got the shaft when Biden said that restaurant owners would get priority in receiving federal funds if they were women, veterans and members of “socially and economically disadvantaged” groups.

These policies are a back-door way of granting reparations. Biden knows that the subject of reparations is divisive, so he is enlisting the support of the administrative state to accomplish this end.

It is not just in government where racism prevails against white people. Woke corporations have gotten into the act as well.

At American Express, complaints by white employees surfaced after it was announced that “marginalized” workers would be given priority over “privileged” employees determining promotions. Critical race theory training sessions have convinced white workers that they are likely to be passed over for a promotion—no matter how competent they are—to satisfy this new policy. Some have quit as a result.

Walmart has gone even further in trying to brainwash its employees.

In 2018, it adopted a radical training program that was made mandatory for executives; it is recommended for hourly workers. It teaches that the United States is a “white supremacy system” that oppresses people of color. Whites, the employees learn, are guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority.” The “white supremacy culture” is comprised of such elements as “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “right to comfort” and “worship of the written word.”

These nefarious qualities are considered “damaging to both people of color and to white people.”

It could therefore be argued that it is racist to insist that African American students learn how to read and write—that could be seen as “worship of the written word.” No doubt the Klan would approve.

I checked to see what the racial composition of Walmart is. There are nine members on the Executive Committee: eight of them are white. This means, according to their logic, that Walmart is a racist institution. If they had any decency, they would resign in mass. But instead they collect huge salaries while lording over their minimum wage workers. And it is a sure bet that they prize their “right to comfort” while commanding their yachts.

Making white people today pay for the sins of white people yesterday can run into problems with the courts. In October, a former senior officer at a North Carolina-health based care organization won $10 million when a jury found that his sex and race illegally led to his termination: he was canned so that a “more diverse” workforce could be achieved. Imagine trying that in the NBA—firing black basketball players so that more Pacific Islanders can play.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that white firefighters were discriminated against when a test was discarded after blacks didn’t do too well on it: eliminating the test prevented the white guys from being eligible for promotion. The decision, Ricci v. DeStefano, came about when Frank Ricci sought to get a promotion but was denied even though he scored sixth highest on the exam out of 118-test takers. He was so determined to succeed that he quit his second job so he could enlist in preparatory courses to pass the test. A dyslexic, he paid $1,000 to have someone read textbooks onto audiotapes.

In 2017, a poll found that 55% of white people believed there was discrimination against white people in America. By the same token, last year researchers at Tufts University revealed that many whites believe “reverse racism” is a real problem. Yet there is precious little being said about this issue by the media, never mind activist organizations.

What is driving this condition? Elites believe that the best way to achieve racial equality is by mandating equal outcomes. They are thrice wrong: such attempts create a white backlash; they will never substantially yield black progress; and they deflect attention away from the root causes of racial inequality.

The latter have less to do with discrimination today than they do a host of serious familial and behavioral problems in the black community. Every honest person who has studied this issue knows this to be true, but most are afraid to say so. The failure of the ruling class to admit to this, and to act on it, is the number-one reason we have this problem today.

If the elites really wanted to help blacks, they would champion charter public schools and support school choice initiatives that include the right of black parents to send their children to a Catholic school.

In the end, whitey really is the problem, but not for the reasons attributed to him.

Michael P. McDonald, Director of Communications

The following is a shortened version of what is posted on our website.

If one considers the hostility the Catholic Church and traditional Judeo-Christian values faced from the Biden Administration, corporations, education, and the perpetually aggrieved activist class, 2021 was a long year. However, the Catholic League managed to achieve many victories.

Out of all the enemies hostile to the Catholic Church, the government poses the most danger of them all. Particularly, with Joe Biden holding the presidency, the forces of the federal government ushered in many anti-Catholic policies. That this occurred under a self-described “devout Catholic” made this all the more infuriating.

Biden wasted no time attacking teachings at the heart of the Church. On January 20th, his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order allowing males who claim to be female the right to compete with females in high school and college sports. He also approved of them showering together.

On January 22, Biden said he was “committed to codifying Roe v. Wade.”

Then, on January 28, he issued an executive order to rescind the Mexico City Policy, the rule that bars U.S. foreign aid to international non-profit organizations that provide for abortion or abortion counseling. Biden also asked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to begin the process of rescinding the Trump administration’s Title X family planning rule; among other things, it denies funds to Planned Parenthood and other abortion mills.

On February 14, the White House issued a statement that the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships “will not prefer one faith over another or favor religious over secular organizations.” But the whole point of creating an office of faith-based programs was to prioritize religious social service agencies.
Biden’s decision to appoint Melissa Rogers to head this endeavor was even more telling. He could not have chosen a more seasoned secularist to steer these faith-based entities.

On May 14, our worst fears for the office were confirmed. Rogers met with representatives from six secular organizations. None of them were religion-friendly and some are positively militant in their agenda.

Biden pushed for action on the Equality Act. The effect of this legislation is to promote the most comprehensive assault on Christianity ever written into law.

The Equality Act has two major goals: it would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity to the definition of sex; it would also significantly undermine the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) by allowing gay rights to trump religious rights.

On September 20, the White House issued a statement saying, “The Administration strongly supports House passage of H.R. 3755, the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021.” The proposed law has nothing to do with women’s health—it is a pro-abortion bill.

Biden surrounded himself with henchmen who have long track records of hostility to religious liberties. Xavier Becerra was President Biden’s worst nominee for a Cabinet post. The man is a menace to life and liberty and has no business serving in this capacity. The Catholic League found 16 serious flaws with his nomination. While we sent our detailed list of complaints to the Senate, they voted 50-49 to confirm him as Secretary of HHS.

In October, President Biden nominated Joseph Donnelly to be the new U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. When Donnelly served as a congressman, he was largely pro-life, but when he became a U.S. Senator, he pivoted and joined the pro-abortion camp. There is a reason why Donnelly was co-chair of Catholics for Biden. Like our “devout Catholic” president, he turned rogue.

We did better at securing victories on the state level.

North Dakota State Sen. Judy Lee introduced legislation that would bust the seal of the confessional. The Catholic League quickly jumped into the fray. We mobilized our supporters to put pressure on the legislators to kill this bill. Soon after our supporters expressed their outrage, the legislation was withdrawn.

Another major victory we scored this year, ensuring the due process rights of accused priests, was in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The court ruled 5-2 that the statute of limitations begins when an alleged crime took place not when the so-called victim recalls the alleged offense. In their ruling, the court cited an amicus brief from the law firm Jones Day hired by the Catholic League.

We learned that Judicial Watch was representing the Center for Medical Progress in a quest to obtain documentation of alleged human organ harvesting at the University of Pittsburgh. According to their probe, organs were harvested while the baby’s heart was still beating.

Bill Donohue wrote a letter to Pennsylvania Auditor General, Timothy L. DeFoor, asking him to determine whether state and federal funds were being used by Pitt for arguably criminal activity. This was another victory because in September the university agreed to have its fetal tissue research practices independently reviewed.

While the forces of the federal government working against traditional Catholic values created challenges, we unfortunately witnessed a massive sea change on the part of the corporations.

For instance, Major League Baseball (MLB) decided to get involved in politics and promote social justice causes in America; however, MLB has no problem working with Communist China to increase revenue. This is the same communist regime that is committing the biggest violation of human rights, particularly the right to religious liberty, in the world today. To call out MLB for this hypocrisy, Bill Donohue wrote an open letter to the Commissioner of Baseball, Rob Manfred, and called on our supporters to contact him as well. Manfred got belted by our email base.

Although corporations are largely succumbing to cancel culture and woke ideologies, the Catholic League continued to fight and has been successful in making them relent on some of their more egregious violations.

Catholic World Report (CWR) received notice from Twitter that its account had been locked for hateful conduct when it described HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine as “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman.”

Three hours after we listed the email address of a key official at Twitter, asking our subscribers to protest its decision to freeze CWR’s account, Twitter reversed itself.

As the new school year began, what children learn became one of the biggest flash points in the culture war. With this as our backdrop, the Catholic League reviewed many prominent history and government textbooks.

One thing became abundantly apparent from our deep dive into these textbooks; namely, the current curriculum provides a biased perspective against traditional and Catholic values. By and large, these textbooks present religion, traditional values, and conservatism in a negative light.

In 2021, activist organizations joined the culture war on Catholicism as well.

The bishops were their favorite targets. Ultimately, this stemmed from Biden’s radical departures from Catholic teachings. On June 16, the bishops met to discuss how to address this situation. They agreed to formulate a teaching document on the Eucharist. On November 15, they met to complete their task. While the final document did not address the problems Biden created, that did not stop the activists from attacking them.

Faithful America and Faith in Public Life, two groups funded by atheist billionaire and Catholic-hater George Soros, were the most vocal to attack the bishops.

However, attacks on the bishops were not limited to Soros-funded paid activists. Even politicians heaped insults on the bishops. Rep. Jared Huffman tweeted, “If they’re [the Catholic bishops] going to politically weaponize religion by ‘rebuking’ Democrats who support women’s reproductive choice, then a ‘rebuke’ of their tax-exempt status may be in order.” After our supporters lambasted him, he changed his tune.

Unfortunately, the activists did not just limit their attacks on the Church to insults and threats. In 2021, we saw a continuation of the vandalism and destruction of Catholic property.

If there was one Catholic target the activists loved going after in 2021, it was St. Junípero Serra. The 18th century priest did more for the rights of indigenous peoples than any of his contemporaries, yet activists across California, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, have removed his statue and name from the public square.

Over Thanksgiving, the media revealed that the Salvation Army’s elites made common cause with the activists in promulgating Critical Race Theory. The International Salvation Army issued a lengthy report, “Let’s Talk About Racism,” that accuses white people of being racists and therefore must apologize while arguing that America is an inherently racist society.

The Catholic League issued a comprehensive report analyzing the initial statement from the Salvation Army and the hypocrisy in their efforts to cover their tracks. Once again, our supporters expressed their ire and hopefully the elites at the Salvation Army will stop this nonsense that gives a bad name to their noble volunteers.

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court made several strong rulings defending religious liberty. First, the Court dealt a blow to church restrictions in California. This led to a slew of victories over states limiting the ability to worship. Later in the year, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Catholic foster care agencies can reject gay couples from adopting children. This was a huge victory for religious liberty.

However, not everyone is a fan of religious liberty. For instance, in December, Mollie Paige Mumau, who was listed as a member of the board of directors for the National Education Association (NEA), took to social media attacking those who sought a religious exemption from vaccine mandates. She specifically said they deserved to lose their jobs, get very ill, and die. Additionally, she recommended that they be shot for not getting the vaccine.

Bill Donohue sent a letter to the NEA urging the leadership to remove Mumau from her position on the board. Within a week, she was no longer employed at her school leaving her with no standing in education. The Catholic League was the only civil rights group in the nation to weigh in on this fight.

In a bold defense of the Church, Bill Donohue released his new book The Truth About Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes. In its pages, he sets the record straight and defends the Church.

Additionally, the Catholic League launched a new YouTube series. The “Catholic League Forum” takes a timely look at the big issues threatening our Church and freedoms in pithy and entertaining segments.

With so many forces working against us, the Catholic League not only continues to find new ways to fight but more importantly score significant victories. While no one can guarantee what 2022 might bring, with the fantastic support of our members, the Catholic League will continue the staunch defense of the Church and undoubtedly secure more victories.