After we learned what Sen. Marco Rubio had to say about Atul Gawande, a Biden nominee for a senior healthcare post, we joined with him in seeking his defeat.

Gawande is a Professor of Surgery at the Harvard School of Medicine, a Rhodes Scholar, a distinguished author, and the former CEO of a healthcare organization. This is surely why President Biden nominated him to be assistant administrator of the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

There are good reasons, however, why the senator from Florida sounded the alarm on Gawande. He is a defender of infanticide. As evidence of this, Rubio pointed to an infamous essay from 1998 that Gawande wrote on this subject.

Gawande casually describes what partial-birth abortion entails. “The fetus is delivered feet first. To get the large head out, the doctor cuts open a hole at the base of the fetus’s skull and inserts tubing to suck out the brain, which collapses the skull. Often, but not always, the fetus is injected lethally beforehand.”

Gawande knows how normal people react to this monstrous procedure, and he has a ready answer for them. “If partial-birth abortion is too gruesome to allow, however, it is hard to see how other late abortions, especially D and Es [dilatation and evacuation], are any different.”

He’s right about that.

“About 80 percent of late-term abortions are done by D and E,” Gawande says. “A couple of days ahead, small, absorbent rods are put in the pregnant woman’s cervical opening to expand it gradually. Then, for the actual procedure, she—and the fetus—are given heavy sedation or general anesthesia. The doctor breaks her bag of water and drains out the fluid. The opening won’t let the fetus out whole. So the doctor uses metal tongs, physically crushes the head, and dismembers the fetus. The pieces are pulled out and counted to confirm that nothing was missed.”

Gawande speaks with clinical detachment about the most Nazi-like practices.

“What makes abortion disturbing is that the fetus is big now—like a fully formed child. Two of my obstetrician friends, both strongly pro-choice, told me that, even when it is a mother’s life at stake and abortion is absolutely necessary, doing the D and E feels ‘horrible.’ We imagine, as we look in the fetus’s eyes, that there is someone in there.”

We asked our email subscribers to contact Sen. Rubio showing their support for his opposition to Gawande. Regrettably, we stood virtually alone among activist organizations in doing so.

The 2020 Annual Report on clergy sexual abuse published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops brings good news.

During the period July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2020, there were 22 current allegations involving minors. Given that there are approximately 50,000 members of the clergy (49,926), and the number of substantiated charges are 6, this means that 99.9% of the clergy did not have a substantiated accusation made against him in the last year we have data.

This is nothing new. From 2010 to 2020, the average number of substantiated charges made against the Catholic clergy stands at 5.9. In short, this problem has almost been wiped out in the Catholic Church.

There is no other institution in society where adults regularly interact with minors that can match this record. But don’t expect state attorneys general to launch a probe of the sexual abuse of minors in any of them.

What has changed is a reduction in the percent of abuse committed by homosexuals. Typically, 8 in 10 cases of abuse involve male-on-male sex, the victims being postpubescent boys. The latest data show that this figure has dropped to 6 in 10. The decrease makes sense: the seminaries have done a much better job screening for candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies.

We continue to deplore the failure of the media to cite data which contradict the false narrative that the scandal is ongoing. That is an absolute lie.

In the name of helping families, President Biden wants to reward many of those who broke into our country illegally by making them millionaires. However, American families that are living here legally and elect to place their children in religious child care centers have to wing it on their own.

On October 31, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked President Biden “Is it true we’re going to give $450,000 to border crossers who are separated?” Biden simply looked away and scratched his head.

On November 3, Doocy said to the president that news reports were surfacing that “your administration is planning to pay illegal immigrants who are separated from their families at the border up to $450,000 each, possibly a million dollars per family. Do you think that might incentivize more people to come over illegally?”

Biden took umbrage at Doocy’s comment, accusing Fox News of “sending that garbage out,” adding that “it is not true.” After rhetorically raising the question that Doocy asked, he flatly said, “That’s not going to happen.”

What Biden calls “garbage,” however, is the official policy of his administration. It’s just that he was the last to find out. Now, like the obedient soul he is, he’s on board.

On November 4, Doocy asked Karine Jean-Pierre, Deputy White House press secretary, about the $450,000 prize for illegal aliens. She said the president was “perfectly comfortable” with that decision. Doocy then asked, “what changed, from yesterday” when Biden said, “That’s not going to happen?” She skirted his question, choosing instead to blame Trump for creating this problem.

Biden’s professed interest in child care is well documented. Speaking of his big social spending bill, he said in August, “Child care is personal to me—that’s why I’ve put it front and center in my Build Back Better Agenda.” On October 26, he said of this bill, “Every American family deserves access to high quality, affordable child care.” This is a lie.

On pp. 1399-1400 of the 2,468 page Build Back Better Act, H.R. 5376, it addresses child care for religious entities. “A recipient of funds under this subsection may not use the funds for modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities that are primarily used for sectarian instruction or religious worship or in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission.”

In other words, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Mormons who place their children in a child care center of their faith are not entitled to any assistance.

Due to pressure from religious organizations, it appeared likely that the wording of the bill would be changed to include them. Even so, we know that Biden wanted to exclude them.

The bottom line is clear. Bust into our country illegally and you stand to become a millionaire. Put your kid in a religious child care center, and you’re on your own. This is the face of social justice, Biden style.

Halloween is a time when children dress up as monsters and witches. It’s also a time when some adults get dressed up, but, unlike the children, they actually think they’ve adopted a new identity. To wit: CNN did a story about German Catholic women who dress up as priests and sincerely believe they’ve become members of the clergy.

As always, the wannabe priests are senior citizens. CNN described the protesters as “mostly gray-haired women.” At a rally, they were “singing along—at full pelt.” The protesting malcontents held signs, “Women, what are you waiting for?”

They are a rather motley crew. “Almost everyone is wearing a rainbow mask. One woman dressed as a clown sends a stream of giant bubbles into the air.” This isn’t a playground for pre-school kids—it’s a demonstration conducted by adult women.

No matter, CNN takes them seriously. It says they want to “modernize” the German Catholic Church. Indeed, it says these “feminists [are] trying to save the Catholic Church.” Save it or kill it?

CNN is badly informed. The data convincingly show that the more “modern” a religious body is, the more likely it is to wither and die. It is not the orthodox religious dioceses and orders of priests and nuns that are dying—it’s the more “relevant” among them. Indeed, the German Catholic Church is in trouble precisely because it is the most “modern” Catholic entity in Europe, if not the world. Ditto for its Protestant brothers.

A majority of Germans identify as either Catholic (22.6 million) or Protestant (20.7 million). While only 10 percent of Catholics attend church on Sunday, the figure for Protestants is barely 3 percent. In 2019, 272,000 Catholics left the Church; the number of Protestants who fled was proportionately greater, 270,000. Similarly, a Pew survey on this issue, published in 2019, found that “Germany’s share of Protestants has decreased at a faster rate than Catholics.”

The same pattern is also found in the U.S. In fact, the divide between the orthodox and the heterodox is evident across religions. It’s the mainline Protestant denominations that have witnessed the greatest decline, not the evangelical and fundamentalist communities. Orthodox Jews are growing; this is not true of Conservative and Reform Jews. In short, the more a major religion succumbs to the dominant culture, the more irrelevant it becomes to its flock.

It’s not hard to figure out. Why would a young Catholic girl, for instance, consider joining an order of nuns that is largely indistinguishable in dress, living arrangements and work from her friends who are married with a family? In other words, the more trendy a religion is, the less special it becomes.

CNN wrote this piece for one reason: it wants women priests. To that end, it wants to convince the public that the time has come for the Church to change. It could have done a similar story on the Mormons, the Orthodox churches, Orthodox Judaism, the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, Islam, and the Southern Baptist Convention—they all have an all-male clergy—but the big fish to fry is the Catholic Church.

This kind of media manipulation is not lost on most Americans. It explains why so many of them hold the profession of journalism in such low regard. They never seem to learn.

Randall Balmer is a Dartmouth professor who maintains that the origins of the conservative evangelical-Catholic alliance, or what he prefers to call “the religious right,” are rooted in racism. A liberal evangelical himself, he has written about this story many times, and recounts it again in his new book, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. But is he right?

Balmer is certainly right to say that abortion was not the real reason why conservative evangelicals and Catholics initially came together. When Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, Catholics stood alone in opposing it. Unfortunately, this was at a time when Protestants, and Jews as well, reflexively took the opposite side on many moral issues that Catholics took.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that evangelicals pivoted and joined the fight for the unborn. Ever since, the two sides have worked together, owing much to the work of Chuck Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus; both deceased, they cemented the evangelical-Catholic alliance.

Balmer recalls a meeting in November 1990 in Washington marking the ten-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election. He said he was surprised to be invited to this closed-door meeting given that it was populated by many influential conservative leaders. Also in attendance was Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Heritage Foundation.

Weyrich observed that it was not abortion that initially drew the two religious strands together: the political movement began with a controversy involving Bob Jones University’s racist strictures, including a ban on interracial dating.

To make his case, Balmer says that a federal court decision in 1971 affirming the right of the IRS to deny a tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools was seized upon by Weyrich to forge a union between evangelicals and Catholics. He therefore argues that the alliance was anchored in racism.

To be sure, it was the racist policies of Bob Jones (which was also well known for its anti-Catholicism) that galvanized the IRS. But it is a leap to conclude that it was racism that prompted Weyrich and his evangelical friends to join forces. A stronger case can be made that it was federal encroachment on religious schools that drove the movement, even if we allow that some evangelicals were racists. Indeed, it was federal overreach that primarily galvanized these two religious communities.

Balmer is correct to say that Weyrich had long been looking for an issue that would inspire a coalition, but he is unfair when he concludes that Weyrich and Jerry Falwell “sought to shift the grounds of the debate [away from racial segregation], framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.”

Weyrich and Falwell worked together not because they were segregationists, but because they wanted to mobilize the “moral majority.” That term was coined by Weyrich, and it became a movement, ably led by Falwell. Their interest was cultural decay, not racial issues. Weyrich was always looking for a more macro subject, one that transcended the contentious moral issues of the day. Indeed, even Balmer acknowledges this verity.

Balmer quotes conservative activist Grover Norquist as saying, correctly, that the religious right did not start with prayer in the school or abortion. “It started in ’77 or ’78 with the Carter administration’s attack on Christian schools and radio stations. That’s where all the organization flowed out of. It was complete self-defense.” He is correct again: it wasn’t racism that propelled the alliance; rather, it was the federal attack on the autonomy of Christian schools.

In a similar vein, Balmer quotes Weyrich’s very astute observation noting that when “the Internal Revenue Service tried to deny tax exemption to private schools, [that] more than any single act brought the fundamentalists and evangelicals into the political process.” Again, there is no mention of the race issue. It was never the predominant reason for mobilization.

Here’s more proof of Weyrich’s primary concern (again Balmer acknowledges in his book). “What caused the movement to surface was the federal government’s moves against Christian schools. This absolutely shattered the Christian community’s notions that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they pleased.”

Balmer also quotes what then presidential-candidate Ronald Reagan had to say about this matter. He told a big crowd of evangelicals in August 1980 that he stood with them in their fight against the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” of the IRS “against independent schools.” Weyrich was at the event. “We gave him a ten-minute standing ovation. The whole movement was snowballing by then.” Their applause had nothing to do with celebrations of racism.

It should also be said that prominent conservatives opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act not because they were racists, but because of what they saw as an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government and a disrespect for states’ rights.

Why does any of this matter? It matters because it is unjust to maintain that the religious right was born of racism. No, it was born out of a genuine concern for the autonomy of Christian schools, and an animus against federal encroachment on them.

In October, President Biden nominated Joseph Donnelly to be the new U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Many Catholic media outlets, including Catholic News Service, erroneously claimed he is a “pro-life” Democrat. He is not only at odds with the Catholic Church on abortion, he is pro-gay marriage, against religious liberty, and against school choice.

When Donnelly served as a congressman from Indiana (2007-2013), he was pro-life, but when he became a U.S. Senator (2013-2019), he pivoted and joined the pro-abortion camp.

While serving in the 111th Congress, 2009-2010, Donnelly agreed with the positions of National Right to Life 83% of the time. When he became a senator, his numbers dropped to 20% (2013-2014), 25% (2015-2016), and 28% (2017-2018).

NARAL, the pro-abortion giant, gave him a 0% score in 2016, but he jumped to 84% in 2017 and 80% in 2018.

Donnelly voted for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, even though the bill required Catholic non-profits, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs in their healthcare plans.

In 2017, when President Donald Trump signed a bill that would deny states the right to use Title X funds to enable abortion providers, Donnelly voted against it.

In August 2015, Donnelly voted not to fund Planned Parenthood, but literally four months later he voted to fund it. In 2018, he once again voted to have the taxpayers fund this abortion-clinic behemoth.

On gay marriage, Donnelly went through a similar “evolution.” He was initially opposed to it, but when he got to the Senate he voted for it.

In 2013, the USCCB issued a statement against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, citing, among other things, the bill for inadequate religious-liberty protections. Donnelly voted for it.

A year later, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its “Hobby Lobby” ruling—it protected the religious rights of private business owners—the Democrats sought to undo it. Donnelly voted to take away that freedom.

In 2015, he fought against an Indiana bill that would safeguard religious liberty. In Donnelly’s last term in the Senate, he voted against a school choice measure.

Joe Donnelly started out as a Catholic official who was mostly in line with the policy prescriptions of the Catholic Church. But he ended his career in government as a foe of the Church’s moral teachings.

There is a reason why Donnelly was co-chair of Catholics for Biden. Like our “devout Catholic” president, he turned rogue.

California Governor Gavin Newsom did what everyone expected him to do when he signed legislation to remove a statue of St. Junípero Serra from the state Capitol in Sacramento. We opposed this decision but almost every lawmaker was against us.

The attack on Serra is motivated by ignorance of his meritorious service to Indians in the 18th century, and a visceral hatred of Catholicism overall; it has been going on for years. The removal of the statue comes after vandals defaced it and tore it down on July 4, 2020.

On October 11, a few weeks after Newsom’s decision to displace the statue of St. Serra, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the city would no longer call the park across from Union Station by what it is commonly referred to, Fr. Junípero Serra Park.

The only good news is that Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert filed felony vandalism charges against one of the persons who destroyed the monument to St. Serra in the city.

Newsom and Garcetti preside over the most outrageous exploitation of homeless people in the United States, yet they have the audacity to accuse this Franciscan priest—who treated Indians with respect and demanded that they be given their natural rights—of oppressing them. It doesn’t get much sicker than this.

Pope Francis canonized Fr. Serra in 2015. Honest scholars know that the pope was right.

In September, the University of Pittsburgh agreed to have its fetal tissue research practices independently reviewed by the Washington, D.C. law firm of Hyman, Phelps & McNamara. In August, we called upon the Pennsylvania Auditor General to launch such an investigation. We are delighted that our effort was successful.

Over the summer, we learned that Judicial Watch was representing the Center for Medical Progress in a quest to obtain documentation of alleged human organ harvesting at Pitt. According to their probe, organs have been harvested while the baby’s heart is still beating. The University has steadfastly denied wrongdoing.

On August 17, Bill Donohue wrote to Pennsylvania Auditor General, Timothy L. DeFoor, asking him to determine whether state and federal funds are being used by Pitt for arguably criminal activity.

Donohue wrote in support of State Rep. Kathleen Rapp, and Sean Parnell, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat; both initially called for an investigation. He also wrote to Patrick Gallagher, Pitt’s Chancellor, Dr. Anantha Shekhar, Dean of the School of Medicine, and David Seldin, Assistant Vice Chancellor for News.

In our news release that same day, we printed the email address of the Auditor General, asking our subscribers to contact him. Thousands did, and their effort paid dividends.

Is Pitt involved in a fetal organ “chop shop”? We do not know. But we need to find out without delay.

“If it is true,” Donohue said in his letter to the Auditor General, “as some doctors have said, that in order to perform some of these procedures, ‘The baby’s going to have to be either born alive or be killed immediately prior to delivery,’ then justice demands that a thorough investigation take place. I urge you to do so.”

In February, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities issued an excellent statement on the propriety of human fetal tissue research. It began by emphasizing that “the dignity and inviolability of human life at every stage of development is a foundational principle of any truly civilized society.”

Regarding this kind of research, it implored the government, which allows abortion, not to “add injury to insult by treating the innocent abortion victim as a convenient laboratory animal for research protocols deemed unethical when applied to other members of the human family.”

If Pitt has nothing to hide, then so be it. But if some of the horrible accusations are true, then it must cease and desist and be held accountable. We are pleased to have played an important role in getting to the bottom of this issue.

The Most Reverend Nicholas DiMarzio, Bishop of Brooklyn, was exonerated in September by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican of charges that he sexually abused minors. Anyone who knew anything about him, as well as the lawyer who sued him, knew he was innocent from the get-go.

It is a credit to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who was authorized by the Vatican to conduct an investigation, that he took this assignment seriously by hiring a law firm that retained former FBI Director Louis Freeh to do this job.

In November 2019, Mitchell Garabedian, an unethical lawyer, announced that he was suing DiMarzio for abusing an 11-year-old boy, Mark Matzek, when he was a young priest in the 1970s.

DiMarzio categorically denied the charges and Garabedian took several months before he acted.

In June 2020, Garabedian said he found another “victim” who said he was abused around the same time as Matzek. Once again, the Boston-based attorney did not move quickly against DiMarzio, settling for a PR smear of the bishop; he eventually followed through.

The alleged second victim, Samier Tadros, said DiMarzio abused him in Holy Rosary Church in the Archdiocese of Newark. Yet as the bishop said, Tadros “did not attend the parish or the parish school and does not appear to have been Catholic.”

Bishop DiMarzio is an honorable man. He should never have had to go through these ordeals.

The rights of priests took a big step forward on July 21 when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that sided with an alleged victim of clergy sexual abuse. The law firm of Jones Day ably represented the Catholic League in an amicus brief that was filed in support of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown.

The alleged victim, Renee Rice, argued that she had been molested in the 1970s by Fr. Charles Bodziak at St. Leo’s Church in Altoona, a town about 80 miles from Pittsburgh. The priest denied the accusation.

Rice’s lawsuit claimed that two bishops tried to cover up his behavior, even though the diocese sent her a letter 10 years before her lawsuit encouraging her to come forward about her alleged abuse. Even more bizarre, she never did anything to pursue her claim until 2016. That was when a grand jury report on sexual abuse in the diocese was released. She said the report awakened her to what supposedly happened.

To top things off, Rice’s lawyers maintained that the timeline of the statute of limitations for a civil claim seeking damages for an offense should not start when the alleged injury took place. In her case that meant at the time the grand jury report was made public.

Had Rice won, it would have meant that the established law regarding the statute of limitations would have been thrown out, thus crushing the rights of the accused.

When the Catholic League filed an amicus curiae brief with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2019, Bill Donohue commented on the Superior Court ruling that sided with Rice. “We have reached a new level of creative jurisprudence when a court can invoke a jury decision as the new clock determining when the limitations period starts to run.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the Superior Court’s reasoning. We won 5-2. Justice Christine Donohue (no relation to Bill Donohue) wrote for the majority, saying, “the statute of limitations expired decades ago.” In short, Rice had an obligation to pursue her case within the stated limitation period and elected not to do so.

The Catholic League’s lawyers were very happy to note that Pennsylvania’s high court prominently cited a case that their brief highlighted, Colosimo v. Roman Catholic Bishops of Salt Lake City. It held that the lack of due diligence on the part of the plaintiff (in this case Rice) was fatal.

This victory means that the slew of “copycat” lawsuits filed after the lower court win will die on the vine. Thanks to our friends at Jones Day, the rights of priests are in much better shape.