We have an STD crisis on our hands, one that many elites continue to misunderstand.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia are at an all-time high. Nearly 2.5 million cases were reported in 2018. What makes this so disturbing is the fact that not too long ago these three diseases had been in decline; they have been increasing for the past five years.

Most alarming is the 40 percent increase in congenital syphilis, cases where newborns contract the disease from their mothers. This resulted in the deaths of 94 infants in 2018.

Gonorrhea and chlamydia increased by 5 and 3 percent, respectively, between 2017 and 2018. Since 2014, the former disease increased by 63 percent and the latter by 19 percent.

What’s driving the increase? The CDC says it can be explained by a decrease in condom use among young people and among homosexuals (or what they politely call MSM, which stands for “men having sex with men”), increased screening among some groups, and budget cuts to sexual health programs.

In the 1950s, the birth control pill was not available, abortion was illegal, sex education hardly existed, and we spent almost nothing on sexual health programs. According to elite logic in 2019, STD rates should have been through the sky, yet they hardly existed. That’s today’s problem.

What we didn’t have in the 1950s was the fallout of a sexual revolution.

For example, the CDC reports that gay and bisexual men, who are a small minority of the population, accounted for the majority (54 percent) of all syphilis cases in 2018. Earlier this year, it said that primary and secondary syphilis—the most infectious stages of the disease—were mostly attributable to homosexuals; they accounted for almost 90 percent of all cases.

How can this be? Is there anyone—gay or straight—who hasn’t heard about the consequences of promiscuity?

The STD crisis is no mystery. But it takes guts to tell the truth.

On August 24, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution, spawned by the Secular Coalition for America, that formally embraced agnostics, atheists, and the unaffiliated. The resolution heralded their “value, ethical soundness, and importance,” boasting of their multiple contributions to society.

There is nothing wrong with any political party reaching out to those who are not religious. But there is a big difference between the rank-and-file and the extremists who claim to represent them.

This is not the first time that senior officials in the Democratic Party have laid anchor with militant atheists. In 2010, several officials from the Obama administration met with representatives from the Secular Coalition for America. This entity represents every extreme anti-religion organization in the nation, including American Atheists and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. As Bill Donohue said in 2010 of these people, many “would crush Christianity if they could.”

Two years earlier, President Obama announced the formation of his Catholic National Advisory Council. On public policy issues such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and school vouchers, not one of the twenty-six named agreed with the Church on all three. In other words, dissident Catholics were favored over those who are loyal to the Church.

The following underscores what Donohue has said. Consider the policy positions of those Catholics who in 2019 declared their candidacy for president.

Joe Biden: The former vice president had, as a U.S. Senator, supported various restrictions on abortion funding and even expressed reservations about Roe v. Wade. But Biden has now fully abandoned any pretense of moderation. As recently as June he revoked his long-held support for the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding for abortions.

In 1996, Biden voted in favor of the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which upheld marriage as between one man and one woman. But in 2012, as vice president, he reversed his position and endorsed gay marriage.

Moreover, in 2016, in clear defiance of Catholic teaching, he officiated at a gay wedding.

Biden also supports the Equality Act. It is the most comprehensive assault on religious liberty, the right to life, and privacy rights ever packaged into one bill. The U.S. Bishops have opposed it as an assault on religious liberty and the right to life. Yet Biden promises that it will be his top legislative priority.

Julian Castro: While saying “the Catholic faith has never been far from my life,” Castro supports unrestricted abortion. He vigorously opposed a Texas law banning abortion after 20 weeks. He has even proclaimed that “trans females” should have access to abortion—even though a “trans female” is actually a biological male who cannot get pregnant!

Castro has long supported gay marriage. He states that “I separate any one faith or belief system from the responsibility that one has in public service.”

John Delaney: Rep. Delaney also touts his Catholicism, yet he supports the entire pro-abortion agenda, including taxpayer funding for abortions. He also supports forcing Catholic non-profits to pay for abortion-inducing drugs in their healthcare plans. He wants to repeal the Hyde Amendment and the Mexico City policy, which blocks federal funds for promoting abortion overseas. Most astonishingly, he voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

Not surprisingly, he supports gay marriage, another deviation from Church teachings.

Kirsten Gillibrand: [She has since dropped out.] Gillibrand has vowed to “prevent all restrictions” on abortion and to protect taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. She has a 100% pro-abortion voting record and voted against a bill to protect newborns from infanticide earlier this year.

Gillibrand wants to codify the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage into federal law. She brags that she “led the effort to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act” and she is “a proud original cosponsor of the Equality Act,” openly declaring her opposition to religious freedom.

Beto O’Rourke: Former Congressman O’Rourke, a lifelong Catholic, has a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL. While in Congress, he voted against a resolution to ban abortion after 20 weeks, urged President Obama to fund abortions in foreign countries through American foreign aid, and voted against a bill which would reinstate the federal ban on taxpayer dollars being used for abortions. During the presidential campaign, a questioner asked O’Rourke, “On abortion, you said it’s a woman’s right to choose. Does that include up until the third trimester?” “Absolutely,” he answered.

O’Rourke supports gay marriage, as well as the Equality Act, stating, “We cannot allow religious freedom to be used as a guise for discrimination.”

Tim Ryan: Rep. Ryan’s record on abortion has been mixed, but that recently changed when he fully embraced the pro-abortion position. He also flipped against Church teachings when he voted to expand embryonic stem cell research. He even went so far as to vote against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. This explains why he has earned a 100% rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Predictably, he supports gay marriage and boasts that he is an original co-sponsor of the Equality Act.

When the Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act it was principally concerned about undoing racial discrimination against African Americans; to a lesser extent, it was aimed at providing equal protection for women. Title VII bans discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. LGBT activists have long argued that the category of sex should include sexual orientation.

Oral arguments for three related cases will be heard this month by the U.S. Supreme Court. One case, Altitude Express v. Zarda, involves a skydiving instructor who was fired when a customer found out he was a homosexual. The USCCB is not involved in this case.

R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC and Aimee Stephens, involves a male funeral home director who was fired when he said he was going to dress like a woman while working at a Christian funeral home.

Bostock v. Clayton County turns on a decision to fire a child welfare services coordinator when the employer learned he was a homosexual.

More than 200 corporations have weighed in on the side of LGBT activists. They want Title VII to include sexual orientation as a protected class, alongside the category of sex.

Everyone concedes that when Title VII was rendered, it was designed to level the playing field for blacks and women, having nothing to do with sexual orientation. No matter, the corporations are attempting to do just that: they want sexual orientation to be indistinguishable in law from sex.

The USCCB’s friend-of-the-court briefs on the latter two cases maintain that of the five protected categories in Title VII, four are immutable characteristics, not subject to change: race, color, sex, and national origin. Religion, being a constellation of beliefs and practices, is clearly amenable to change. Most important, it is simply wrong, on many levels, to conflate sex with sexual orientation.

Sex is immutable; sexual orientation is not. Despite efforts to criminalize those who work in professions that help homosexuals to transition to a heterosexual status, the fact remains that some homosexuals have been able to change their orientation. Ergo, sexual orientation is not an immutable characteristic analogous to sex.

Lawyers representing the LGBT activists see no difference between arguing on behalf of homosexuals and defending transgender persons—it’s all a matter of treating people equally regardless of their sexual orientation or their gender identity. But such characteristics are not in any way analogous to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

In the Harris Funeral Homes brief, the USCCB says, quite rightly, that “Sex cannot be changed even by surgical alteration of the genitals.” That is correct. Bruce Jenner may call himself Caitlyn Jenner, have his genitals changed, and dress like a woman, but he cannot change his chromosomal makeup: he still carries a Y chromosome (as well as an X). In other words, he is a man. No amount of self-identification, which is a psychological variable, can undo what nature has ordained.

In the Bostock brief, the USCCB makes an equally sound argument when it contends that many religions hold that “there is a difference between an inclination toward homosexual conduct, which they do not regard as per se immoral, and homosexual conduct, which they do.” This commonsensical view eludes the corporate brief in behalf of the LGBT agenda.

It is fundamentally wrong to equate discrimination based on race or sex with sexual orientation. Being white or black, or a man or a woman, doesn’t orient anyone toward anything: race and sex are attributes anchored in nature and have nothing to do with conduct. The same is not true of sexual orientation: The object of the orientation is behavior. As such, this puts it into a moral category, one that may rationally elicit approval or disapproval. Those who harbor religious objections to certain sexual acts or relationships should not be told they have no right to object.

In the Harris brief, the USCCB says, with good reason, that if Title VII were to forbid discrimination based on gender identity, it could mean “the ability of faith-based and other schools to deal effectively and prudently with the problem of gender dysphoria, in such areas as locker room and bathroom access, use of pronouns, single-sex housing, and the preservation of athletic opportunities for women.”

Similarly, in the Bostock brief, the USCCB argues that “Interpreting ‘sex’ to mean ‘sexual orientation’ could affect the ability of faith-based homeless shelters, transitional homes, and schools to offer and to make appropriate placements with respect to housing.”

When Bill Donohue first took over as president of the Catholic League, he was contacted by a woman who had placed an ad for someone to be a live-in provider for her mentally disabled son. One of the persons who sought the job complained when he was disqualified because of his homosexual status. Was not the mother entitled to reject his application based on his sexual orientation and her Catholic convictions?

Let’s pray the right decision will be reached when the high court renders its final decision next year.

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) is considering a proposal that would greatly increase state oversight over private and religious schools—threatening the academic autonomy and religious freedom of Catholic schools.

The proposed regulations would delegate direct oversight of private and religious schools to the superintendents and school boards of the public school districts in which they are located. So, for example, on Long Island, the Mineola school district would be given authority to oversee Chaminade High School, and the Uniondale school district would oversee Kellenberg Memorial High School. District officials would be required to visit the Catholic schools periodically to make determinations regarding such things as curricula, testing and teacher competence.

“Test scores, report cards, teacher lesson plans, statistical data, etc., would all be subject to their review,” explains Chaminade principal Brother Joseph Bellizzi.

This is an unacceptable intrusion into the autonomy of our Catholic schools, and a clear violation of the separation of church and state. It is blatant overkill, ostensibly in response to complaints that some ultra-Orthodox yeshivas were failing to provide basic academic instruction. Now the state is using that limited problem to justify a blanket power grab that would put all private and religious schools under its control.

Besides being an attack on religious liberty, this is absurd from an academic standpoint. As Brother Joseph Bellizzi and Kellenberg principal Brother Kenneth Hoagland point out, their schools have always maintained a comprehensive educational program, “equal or superior to the program of studies dictated by the NYSED.” Indeed, given how some Catholic schools, particularly in low income communities, outperform their public school counterparts, perhaps it is the Catholic school administrators who should be overseeing the public schools.

That of course, would never happen—and shouldn’t, given the religious mission of Catholic schools. But the double standard in New York State education policy is glaring. Constantly, we are told that the state can in no way—even indirectly—financially assist the families of Catholic school children, without violating the “separation of church and state.” Yet now the state presumes to intrude directly into the classrooms and administration of our Catholic schools, in order to fix a problem that does not exist.

August 22 was a United Nations milestone: it was the International Day Commemorating the Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief. A resolution marking this day was unanimously passed in May; it was introduced by Poland, no stranger to religious persecution.

On May 28, Poland’s foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, addressed the General Assembly about this historic event. “The world has been experiencing an unprecedented rise of violence against religious communities and people belonging to religious minorities.” He went on to say that “Any act of violence against people belonging to religious minorities cannot be accepted.”

When Aid to the Church in Need released its 2018 “Religious Freedom Report,” it noted that 61 percent of the world’s population live in nations where religious freedom is obstructed or completely denied. It estimated that 327 million Christians live in nations where they are persecuted for their faith.

In 2019, Open Doors released its report on religious persecution. It put the number of Christians being persecuted at over 245 million. In the period November 1, 2017-October 31, 2018, it found that 4,305 Christians were killed because of their faith.

Christians need to speak up more about the violence, church burnings, vandalism, and the like. In Europe, Christians in France are the most targeted. There were 875 attacks on Christian sites in 2018, and acts of theft and vandalism at Christian sites are peaking.

It was distressing to read what Georges Pontier, the head of the French Bishops Conference had to say about these attacks. “We do not want to develop a discourse of persecution. We do not wish to complain.” The bishop is mistaken. The discourse of persecution has already begun, so he either participates in it or not. History shows that there is no virtue in confronting persecution with silence; it only ensures more of it.

Acting more responsibly is President Trump. On July 17, he met with 27 victims of religious persecution from around the world, pledging his support for religious freedom. He was commended by Freedom House for doing so.

No one believes that religious persecution will end any time soon, but it is important for the United Nations to set aside a day to draw attention to this very serious problem. We hope it will now put some teeth into this resolution.

Recently, when the leader of the South Bay Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, California learned that the city was sponsoring a Drag Queen Story Time event at the local public library, he protested. Pastor Amado Huizar, and his congregation, found it inappropriate to use taxpayers’ dollars to fund a Drag Queen Story Hour. The mayor sided with the LGBTQ activists.

Vandals subsequently trashed the church. “Lucifer” and other Satanic messages were spray-painted on the church, alongside sexual vulgarities. The police are investigating the incident as a hate crime. As of now, there is no direct evidence tying the two events, though obviously the pastor and his flock are suspicious.

Leaving aside the vandalism, the larger question is the propriety of using public funds to sponsor such events. This is now the subject of debate in conservative quarters. National Review author David French takes the libertarian position, arguing that Drag Queen Story Hour events should be protected by the First Amendment. New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari takes a social conservative position, saying they should not be protected. These kinds of debates are hardly new, but this latest one has sparked considerable controversy.

The stance outlined by French sees freedom of speech as an end. It is not.

The Founders saw the First Amendment provision on free speech as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. The end is the makings of the good society, a goal that is best achieved by allowing robust political discourse. This explains why the Founders opposed an absolutist reading of the First Amendment: not all exercises of speech are equal, and some are worthy of censorship. Indeed, the same Congress that passed the First Amendment in 1791, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, barring seditious speech, seven years later.

There are many exceptions to the First Amendment that make good common sense. We have laws against libel, slander, perjury, obscenity, incitement to riot, “fighting words,” speech which presents a “clear and present danger,” copyright infringement, racist notices put in homeowners’ mailboxes, harassing phone calls, false advertising, lying about one’s credentials when seeking employment, verbal agreements in restraint of trade, contemptuous speech in the courtroom, treasonous speech, lying on tax returns, solicitation of a crime, etc.

No serious person regards these expressions as contributing to the makings of the good society—they actually retard that end—which explains why their proscription is uncontroversial.

The mayor of Chula Vista, Mary Salas, defends the Drag Queen Hour by saying the event is not designed to “propagandize a lifestyle.” She is sadly mistaken. It is nothing but propaganda. Don’t take our word for it—read what the stated goal of the Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is at dragqueenstoryhour.org.

“DQSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” By “gender fluidity” it is meant that sex is not an immutable characteristic. To put it differently, the LGBTQ goal is to teach kids that a person can switch sexes, being a boy today and a girl tomorrow, depending on one’s self-identification (and/or surgical changes).

DQSH focuses on children 3-8. Yes, there are readings, songs, and the like. There are also “dress-up” exercises aimed at celebrating “gender diversity and all kinds of difference[s].” To what end? The objective is to see that kids are “free from the constraints of prescribed gender roles. In other words, there’s no such thing as ‘girl clothes’ and ‘boy clothes,’ or ‘girl toys’ and ‘boy toys.’ DQSH teaches children that there are many ways to express themselves and their gender, and they are all OK.”

This is pure propaganda for the LGBTQ agenda. Of course they say there is no such thing as boy and girl clothes or toys—they teach that there is no such thing as a boy or a girl!

Teaching that gender is fluid is a lie. Gender is a sociological term that describes socially learned roles that are appropriate for boys and girls. Importantly, such roles take their cues from nature—their social construction is rooted in the biological differences between men and women.

For example, boys are more aggressive than girls, but not because they have been taught that way—they have more testosterone. Similarly, motherhood is not a cultural invention (as the president of Smith College maintains)—it is an expression of what nature ordains. Which explains why male and female attributes are so common in every society in the history of the world.

Most important, a free society depends on nurturing virtue, or good habits, all of which depend on inculcating a modicum of restraint. What does DQSH nurture? “DQSH teaches children to follow their passions and embrace gender diversity in themselves and others.”

That’s just what our narcissistic society needs more of—teaching kids to follow their passions. They do that quite well, thank you, without tutoring. What they need is the ability to harness their passions, directing their energy toward socially constructive ends. That takes discipline, a property not advanced by the devotees of Drag Queen Story Hour.

We live in a world of fiction: the fiction that a pregnant woman is not really carrying a baby; the fiction that two men can actually marry; the fiction that a male is a female merely because he says he is. And so on. We even have ideological strands of fiction, the latest of which is Christian nationalism.

Most Americans have never heard of Christian nationalism. With good reason: it exists only in the minds of left-wing activists, some of whom are alienated Christians. The latter are now organized and have set forth their convictions in a statement, “Christians Against Christian Nationalism”; it was released in July 2019.

The statement never tells us who these people are. Surely they could have found one poster boy to be the face of this scourge, but they did not. So what is this ideology? “Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation.”

In other words, Christian nationalists seek a special status, one that should be ratified by the state. They can’t name anyone because the concept is a fiction. If they knew anything about the history of the First Amendment provisions on religion, which were written by Madison, they would know what he said when asked what the meaning of the establishment provision is.

Madison said it meant that the government could not create a national church and that it could not show favoritism of one religion over another. That was it. Are we to believe that Christians are so angry with Madison’s reasoning that they have formed a nationalist movement? Nonsense.

According to the logic of these left-wing activists, the Founders were Christian nationalists. After all, they had no problem with state religions—they existed in Massachusetts until 1833. The fact is we were founded on Judeo-Christian principles: that is not debatable. Indeed, the Founding, absent the role that Christianity played, is unintelligible.

Jefferson, allegedly Mr. Separation of Church and State, paid homage to the nation’s beginnings when he awarded $300 to the Kaskaskias Indians so they could build a Catholic church. He authorized spending $100 a year for seven years to support a Catholic priest. He also authorized setting aside government lands for the sole purpose of religious activities, allowing Moravian missionaries to promote Christianity.

Would that make Jefferson a Christian nationalist? According to today’s separation of church and state extremists, it would.

Let’s get back to the definition of Christian nationalism. The statement says this ideology “implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian.” Why do these nationalists only imply such a belief? Why don’t the proponents of this dangerous belief system make their convictions unambiguous? Here is the answer: because those who are responsible for inventing Christian nationalism can’t quote any public figure who has commented as such.

The statement then takes the leap of asserting that Christian nationalism is a close cousin to White nationalism. Surely there are Klansmen-like racists, but they are not the ones terrorizing urban America: it is those who wear black masks and head gear who have taken to the streets, beating up innocent persons. That’s what the fascists from Antifa do.

The left is good at inventing a crisis and then offering solutions to fix it, the result of which is more intolerance and oppression of those they hate. That’s what is driving their push to eradicate Christian nationalism.

There is nothing new about the fiction of Christian nationalism; it’s just that its latest iteration is being rolled out to prop up White nationalism. Consider the following observation.

“Over the past few decades, religious conservatives have forged an alliance to confront the unremitting secular assault on the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Unfortunately, whenever the conservatives fight back—usually to maintain or restore the status quo, for example, to keep ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance—they are demonized for doing so. In fact, demonization is one of the most popular weapons in the arsenal of those out to annihilate our culture. The most common accusation holds that traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Jews desire nothing less than a theocracy in America.”

Bill Donohue wrote those words a decade ago in his book, Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America. What’s changed is the conjoining of religion with race, making Americans believe that some dark forces, rooted in Christian and White nationalism, are threatening our liberties. Those who are behind this ploy are engaged in religious and racial baiting.

This entire campaign of demonization is designed to further divide the nation, pitting Americans against each other. The left thrives on division, seeing it as an opportunity to marginalize and ultimately destroy their adversaries. For freedom to prevail, a robust public expression of religion must exist. That is what scares the daylights out of these activists.

According to left-wing activists who are scared to death about religious liberty, the twin devils of our day are White nationalism and Christian nationalism. They say they go hand-in-hand. That is what those who issued the statement “Christians Against Christian Nationalism” contend.

Most of the Christians who are featured as the leading critics of Christian Nationalism are Protestants: of the nineteen, there are only two Catholics among them. Baptists from various denominations are the most overrepresented (none of whom belong to the Southern Baptist Convention—those conservatives would be among the bad guys).

One of the two Catholics is Sister Simone Campbell of “Nuns on the Bus” fame. She is the head of a Catholic dissident group, NETWORK. She is known for working against the religious rights of the Little Sisters of the Poor—hoping to make them pay for abortion-inducing drugs in their healthcare plan—and for endorsing the Equality Act, which would decimate religious liberty, especially for Catholics.

The other Catholic is Patrick Carolan, who runs the Franciscan Action Network. He is opposed to Catholic schools that insist that their teachers abide by Catholic tenets on marriage and family. He argues that a Catholic teacher who is “married” to someone of the same sex should be permitted to teach at a Catholic school, even if it means violating a contract that he voluntarily signed upholding Catholic teachings. He also thinks Catholic lay groups should support gay marriage.

If there is one religious entity that is in full support of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, it is the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC). It came down squarely in favor of two gay men who sought to deny a Christian baker his right not to endorse their “wedding.” On August 10, BJC leaders attended the Progressive National Baptist Convention in Atlanta, a conference that addressed the horrors of Christian nationalism. For the record, BJC hates to see “In God We Trust” banners in public spaces.

Andrew Whitehead is generally regarded as the intellectual force behind Christians Against Christian Nationalism. Bill Donohue shares one thing in common with him: they are both sociologists. The Clemson University professor was recently asked if Christian nationalists “think you have to be Christian to be truly American?” He said yes, that’s what they believe. He did not name anyone who supposedly entertains this view.

Whitehead says that his research convinces him that “the more strongly you embrace Christian nationalism, the more likely you are to hold negative attitudes toward racial and religious minorities.” He did not say why Christians are far more generous in their charitable giving than secularists are (much of that charity goes to racial and religious minorities). Nor did he say why Catholics, who are a religious minority, are subjected to “negative attitudes” by the secularists who comprise the cultural elites: from Hollywood to Harvard, Catholic bashing is sport.

In his interview with Deseret News, Whitehead wondered about the religious affiliation of the El Paso and Dayton mass shooters. We don’t know much about the former mass murderer, but we do know that the latter was a hard-core Satanist.

In a 2018 paper he co-authored, Whitehead made the claim that there was a connection between Christian nationalists and gun ownership. He fingered Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, as Exhibit A. Whitehead cited a portion of a speech that LaPierre made in 2018, after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

“The genius of those documents [the Founding documents], the brilliance of America, of our country itself,” LaPierre said, “is that all of our freedoms in this country are for every single citizen.” Whitehead’s argument imploded right before his eyes, but he didn’t get it. LaPierre did not say that the United States was founded exclusively for Christians—he said our freedoms apply to “every single citizen.” What is it about that sentence that Whitehead doesn’t get?

Whitehead also quoted LaPierre saying our freedoms, such as the right to bear arms, were “granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright.” This is not the voice of a Christian nationalist—it is the voice of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Our unalienable rights, Jefferson said, come not from government but from our “Creator.” Whitehead needs to take a remedial course in American history.

In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “This is a Christian nation.” It was simply acknowledging that our nation’s heritage is rooted in Christianity. Not to recognize this historical fact is plain stupidity. What is worse is the attempt to silence those who proudly proclaim this verity.

There are no Christians organized to take over the nation, making non-Christians second-class citizens. This is pure propaganda, a vicious lie told by those who believe that Christian conservatives are somehow un-American and a threat to liberty. The threat is not coming from them, but from those who are making this charge.

Conservative Christians are a net asset to America, and should be defensive about nothing.

Helping the vulnerable is a noble goal, but when those who champion its cause resort to sloganeering, it discredits their efforts. Here are two recent examples.

On August 19, Religion News Service published a glowing interview with the 89-year old founder of Bread for the World, Art Simon. A former Lutheran pastor, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity in combating poverty. The problem is that the organization that he founded has never given a dime to the poor, or provided services for them.

Bread for the World is a lobbying organization that pressures the Congress to provide more welfare programs for the poor. Its goal is to educate the public, especially lawmakers, about hunger in the United States and abroad. It also analyzes public policies designed to end poverty. What it does not do is to touch the lives of the poor.

There is a better way to tackle poverty than to help more middle-class bureaucrats police the poor in Washington. That is the Mother Teresa way. She was not opposed to government programs instituted to help the poor, but she saw their role as secondary. She knew that the poor needed food, clothing and shelter, as well as medicinal care. But that was not enough: They needed love.

When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher boasted to Mother Teresa that Britain had a fine welfare system, the saintly nun replied, “But do you have love?” For Mother Teresa, helping the poor is ideally a personal exchange, an ongoing relationship between two parties; it is not a “program.”

Vijay Prashad was born and raised in Calcutta. He became a Communist and an ardent defender of government programs. But he praised Mother Teresa for her work with lepers and children. She and her fellow nuns “certainly brought relief for many people, not in medical terms,” he said, “but with love and affection.” This is particularly important when dealing with the sick and dying.

On August 19, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that committed the state to respect “the human rights and dignity” of every person, including respect for “the sanctity of every human life.”

This is pure nonsense. The bill has nothing to do with respecting “the sanctity of every human life.” Just ask those who throw out the trash in abortion clinics. The wording of the bill deals exclusively with putting more restrictions on the police when dealing with life and death situations. The “sanctity” of life that Newsom wants to protect refers to thugs out to kill the cops.

Newsom likes abortion so much that on May 31 he invited women from across the country—make that the world since he doesn’t believe in borders—to come to California to get their abortions.

Sloganeering about the poor is a cheap way to combat poverty. Sloganeering about the sanctity of human life, while actively working against it, is more than hypocritical—it is despicable.

On September 10, there was a congressional hearing on the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. The bill has continuously been blocked by Democrats in the House from consideration.

According to Rep. Chris Smith, the bill “seeks to end or at least mitigate this egregious child abuse [allowing a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion to die] by requiring that a health care provider must ‘exercise the same degree of professional skill, care and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age or be fined and/or face up to five years in prison.'”

The bill does not seek to penalize the mother. Indeed, it explicitly says that no mother will ever be prosecuted. That is why Smith calls the bill “humane, pro-child human rights legislation” that “empowers the woman upon whom the abortion is performed to obtain appropriate relief in a civil action.”
Regarding this last point, Smith cited the case of a woman who sought an abortion, but the baby was born alive. Her baby girl was born “gasping for air,” yet the abortion clinic owner decided to cut the umbilical cord. The baby was then thrown in the trash.

Most Americans would be appalled by such barbarism. But the media will never inform them of what is happening. It is a sure bet that there will be no “60 Minutes” segment depicting what happens following a botched abortion.