By Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by CNSNews.com August 16, 2016.

Finally, there is some justice in Pennsylvania. Its Attorney General Kathleen Kane has been found guilty on nine counts, including two felony perjury charges; she was also convicted of criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The six men and six women on the jury convicted her of leaking grand jury information, and then lying about it.

Amazingly, even after she was convicted, she remained the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, even though she was stripped of her law license. But today she stepped down, knowing she was toast.

Kane sought to destroy her opposition, and succeeded in ruining the lives of state officials; she even cost two State Supreme Court justices their jobs. Why should this matter to those outside Pennsylvania? Because Kane is a vindictive, radical feminist out to prove that she can “take down the boys.” And as I pointed out a few months ago, she also waged war against the Catholic Church.

Kane made a name for herself by promising voters that she would get to the bottom of the Penn State University scandal. She said she would review the investigation into Jerry Sandusky, the assistant coach who worked under Joe Paterno; he was convicted of sexual abuse.

So what did Kane find? No evidence of political interference, but some salacious emails by state officials; she leaked them to the press. When lawmakers pushed back, she played the woman’s card, claiming victim status against the “male-dominated political establishment.”

After flexing her feminist muscles against Penn State, Kane looked to score against the male clergy in the Catholic Church.

When the Cambria County District Attorney’s office asked Kane to launch a grand jury investigation into alleged sexual abuse that took place at Bishop McCort Catholic High School in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, she dutifully complied.

The state grand jury report, released on February 29, found widespread abuse by priests and others who worked for the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown. The alleged abuse extended back to the 1940s.

When new reports surfaced, we did our own probing at the Catholic League. We found many unanswered questions. For one, why was the Catholic Church singled out by Kane for a grand jury investigation about alleged offenses that took place during and after World War II?

On March 10, I raised this question. “Anyone who knows anything about the subject of the sexual abuse of minors knows that there is not a single demographic group, or institution, that has not had a lousy record of dealing with this problem. Swimming coaches, camp counselors, Boy Scouts, psychologists, public school teachers, rabbis, ministers, Hollywood producers—all have a sordid past. So why is it that only the Catholic Church is fingered?”

What was also striking was the presence of Mitchell Garabedian, a Massachusetts lawyer. Why was this out-of-state attorney, who has a long record of suing the Catholic Church—and who has a tarnished ethical record—pursuing this case?

Kane, her allies in the state legislature, and activists with a vendetta against the Catholic Church, also proved how phony they were by not campaigning for bills that would revise the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases involving minors that occur in the public sector.

The bills under consideration in Pennsylvania this year only targeted private [read: Catholic] schools. If a kid was raped by a public school teacher as recently as 91 days ago, and now wants to bring charges, he is out of luck: he has 90 days to file suit, otherwise it is too late. But when it comes to Catholic schools, the proposed legislation offered no clock—there was no time limit—thus allowing for lawsuits to be filed for alleged offenses dating back decades.

This is the kind of “justice” that Kane pursued. She had no interest in protecting all children—just Catholic school victims. Yet Pennsylvania ranks at the top as one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to child sexual abuse in the public schools. It should be noted that this problem hardly exists in Catholic quarters anymore.

Between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015, .01 percent of the Catholic clergy had a credible accusation made against them regarding these offenses. There is no organization in the nation that has a better record on this score today than the Church, but don’t look for the media to report it. It is too busy waving the flag for “brave” feminists like Kane.

If this isn’t outrageous enough, consider that if a priest has a credible accusation made against him for groping, he must step down immediately while a probe is conducted. Yet here we have the spectacle of the Attorney General of Pennsylvania being convicted of felonies, and still remaining on the job. She has no law license, and the judge in yesterday’s trial ordered her to surrender her passport, but she is still in charge of law enforcement.

Following her conviction, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf asked Kane to step down. If she had any integrity, she would have done so immediately, without prodding. Good riddance.

Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of seven books and many articles.

By Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by CNSNews.com July 28, 2016.

Here is a story no one is talking about: the Democrats have given up on faith-based programs.

The Democratic Party Platform does not say a word about government sponsored faith-based programs, thus closing a chapter in their playbook.

After George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, Democratic strategists correctly decided that the “value voters” were killing them. The post-election surveys showed that more than any other segment of the population, it was “values voters” who decided the election, literally creaming John Kerry. That’s when people like Mike McCurry, James Carville, and Paul Begala realized it was time the Democrats changed their tune and started talking to people of faith.

One of the religious-outreach projects launched by Bush that caught the eyes of these Democrats was his faith-based initiative. The Republicans knew that religious organizations were well situated to care for the needy and provide for an array of social services; all they needed was more money to extend their mission.

Between 2004 and 2008, the Democrats outlined a plan to mimic the Republican initiative. But they had to overcome some obstacles, one of them being their built-in aversion to Christian programs. Infinitely more concerned about separation of church and state than religious liberty, they had to walk a minefield establishing faith-based programs of their own.

Barack Obama had all the markings of someone Democrats could feel comfortable with in developing these programs. A talented orator, he electrified the crowd at the 2004 Democratic Convention by directly appealing to people of faith. So when it appeared that he may be elected president in 2008, the Democrats had a well-planned initiative ready to roll.

On July 2, 2008, I commented on Obama’s faith-based initiative; he was a presidential candidate at the time. “If a customer walked into a New York deli and said, ‘Let me have a hot dog on a roll—hold the frankfurter’—he’d likely be thrown out. That’s what the public should do to Obama’s faith-based initiative: since he wants to gut the faith from his faith-based programs, he should be told to junk it.”

My criticism stemmed from the fact that under Obama’s plan, Orthodox Jews who run a day care center were not allowed to exclusively hire Orthodox Jews. Ditto for Catholics running foster care programs—they had to hire non-Catholics. And so on. For these reasons, I said, “his initiative is a fraud.”

P.Z. Meyers agreed with me. He is a militant atheist professor whose claim to fame was driving a rusty nail into an allegedly consecrated Communion host. He listened to Obama talk about his half-baked plan and rendered his conclusion. “He’s essentially tearing down the faith-based initiatives and instead building secular-based initiatives, with the religious folks doing the work. Works for me.” And why wouldn’t it?

On February 5, 2009, I assessed President Obama’s newly designed Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The uneasiness of working with religious entities was readily apparent, allowing me to remark, “Those who walk in the middle of the street risk getting run over by cars on both sides.”

Nearly a year later, on January 15, 2010, the secularization of faith-based programs had reached such a level that I wrote a news release titled, “Time to Close Faith-Based Programs.” On June 24, 2011, after a new round of dumbing-down the religious element in these programs, I released another statement, “Shut Down Faith-Based Programs.”

The 2012 Democratic Party Platform boasted how “Faith-based organizations will always be critical allies in meeting the challenges that face our nation and our world … .” But it wasn’t just conservative critics who saw through this nonsense: Those who worked in these programs were beginning to express their frustration with the White House—nothing was getting done. The dissension has only gotten worse.

Now it’s over. Faith-based programs are no longer “critical allies”—they have been expunged from the 2016 Democratic Party Platform. By contrast, the 2016 Republican Party Platform makes seven references to faith-based programs, underscoring their importance.

Are we better off without public funding of faith-based programs? If the price to be paid is their neutering, then the answer is yes. If Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims are being ordered to subordinate their religious beliefs and practices to the high altar of secularism—just to get a dime from Uncle Sam—they are essentially being asked to engage in self-sabotage.

It has been a long time since Hillary Clinton has addressed faith-based programs, and from the looks of things, she’s in the clear—there is no one of any weight left in her party imploring her to do so.

This means that Hillary can continue her practice of discussing freedom of worship while avoiding any mention of freedom of religion. Freedom of worship means that people have the right to pray and attend religious services; freedom of religion means a full-throated public exercise of freedom. For those who think religion needs to be contained, not expanded, the former is very attractive.

Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of six books and many articles.

By Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by CNSNews.com July 19, 2016.

Catholics are as divided as the rest of the nation when it comes to voting, and many look to activist Catholic groups for guidance. While there are good people on both sides, not every organization that adopts the Catholic label is to be trusted.

For the record, I am not talking about entities that lean left or lean right—the Church itself is not one-dimensional. I am speaking about activist groups that claim to be Catholic yet receive a large share of their funding from forces that are manifestly hostile to Catholicism. This is certainly the case with Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Catholics in Alliance is a front for George Soros, the billionaire who supports abortion-on-demand and other public policy initiatives that are anathema to the Catholic Church.

It is run by Christopher Hale, a left-wing activist who works with Catholic dissidents and ex-Catholics to oppose the Church. He has an article posted on the website of Time that explains why Soros greases him: It is titled, “Trump-Pence is the Most Anti-Catholic Republican Ticket in Modern History.”

Hale is entitled to his pro-Clinton position, but it is dishonest to pretend that he is not pushing the Soros agenda. Unlike the Catholic League, which never writes grants seeking funding from a foundation, and is wholly dependent on rank-and-file Catholics for donations, Catholics in Alliance is not a true membership organization.

Over the years, Soros has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Catholics in Alliance through his Foundation to Promote Open Society and his Open Society Institute. In addition to these Soros outlets, Hale is funded by the Tides Foundation and the Arca Foundation, both of which are major contributors to far-left causes.

Two years ago, Catholics in Alliance showed its true colors by co-sponsoring dissident priests who are not in good standing with the Catholic Church, Father Helmut Schüller and Father Tony Flannery.

Father Schüller, an Austrian priest, is the activist behind “Call to Disobedience,” a reform initiative that seeks to pressure the Church to change its teachings on issues ranging from the liturgy to ordination. For example, he wants teachers of religious education to be allowed to give sermons and communion.

Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, who presides over the Austrian Bishops’ Conference, strongly rejected Schüller’s campaign saying that communion services held by the laity constituted “an open break with a central truth of our Catholic faith.”

Pope Benedict XVI denounced “Call to Disobedience” in 2012. “Recently, a group of priests from a European country issued a summons to disobedience,” he said, “and at the same time gave concrete examples of the forms this disobedience might take, even to the point of disregarding definitive decisions of the Church’s Magisterium, such as the question of women’s ordination.”

Boston Archbishop Cardinal Sean O’Malley and New York Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan both contacted Cardinal Schönborn attempting to ban Schüller from speaking in the United States. He was formally banned from dioceses in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia. None of the bishops wanted him to sow the seeds of confusion among the laity.

Father Flannery rejects several teachings from the New Testament, going so far as to question whether Jesus intended to found the Church. He also questions the virgin birth. Not surprisingly, he rejects the Church’s teachings on sexuality. He was suspended by the Vatican in 2012.

So these are the kinds of priests that Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good likes to sponsor — the ones that divide Catholics. That’s Hale’s idea of the “common good.”

It’s actually worse than this. Unlike the Catholic League, which works to defend the bishops, Catholics in Alliance partners with the professed enemies of the Church.

To be specific, the following organizations were also co-sponsors of “Call to Disobedience”: Call to Action, Catholics for Choice, CORPUS, DignityUSA, FutureChurch, National Coalition of American Nuns, New Ways Ministry, Quixote Center, Women’s Ordination Conference, and Voice of the Faithful.

Most of these groups are openly opposed to the Church’s teachings on abortion, gay marriage, and women’s ordination, and some are so extreme that their members have been excommunicated by bishops; those decisions have been upheld by the Vatican.

The leaders of Catholics in Alliance play musical chairs with Faith in Public Life, another Soros letterhead that was founded by former Marxist radical Jim Wallis. John Gehring carries the water for these men at Faith in Public Life these days.

Not all the major players are still operative: Eric McFadden, founder of Catholic Democrats, got sent up the river in 2009 for promoting an underage prostitution ring in Ohio.

The media cover up for these groups because many reporters and pundits are against the Church’s teachings on sexuality; they will do whatever they can to advance the rogue Catholic agenda. They are intentionally dishonest. This is a stealth campaign, staffed and funded by hard-core leftists, and given cover by the media.

It is not just Catholics who are ill-served when dummy groups are propped up to represent them — the public is misled as well.

By Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by CNSNews.com June 27, 2016.

In 2012, Harvard professor Karen L. King told the world that we need to rethink Jesus’ alleged celibacy. In all likelihood, she concluded, Jesus had a wife.

Her evidence? She was in possession of a fragment of papyrus that was inscribed with the words, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife … .'” In 2014, her article on this subject, “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” was published in the esteemed Harvard Theological Review. Now she reluctantly concedes that her finding is likely a forgery.

She really didn’t have much choice. The July/August edition of the Atlantic magazine offers an investigative account on the owner of the papyrus, Walter Fritz: The man is a fraud, and so is his “evidence.”

Right from the get-go, there were several notable observers who smelled a rat. Among those not fooled was the Vatican. Right after King floated her story about Jesus’ wife, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, labeled her tiny swath of papyrus an “inept forgery.” The newspaper’s editor, Gian Maria Vian, dismissed it as “a fake.”

When King went public in 2012 about her finding, she was cock-sure that she was right. Jesus’ reference to “My wife,” she said, was so clear that those words “can mean nothing else.” She also boasted that “this is the first unequivocal statement we have that claims Jesus had a wife.” When asked if ink tests may yet prove her papyrus scrap a fraud, she replied that more likely the tests “will be the cherry on the cake.”

As it turns out, there is no cake, never mind a cherry. What we have is a mess—one that she created. King showed her arrogance again when she asserted that her little fragment rose to the level of an “unequivocal statement.” If it were “unequivocal,” she wouldn’t be walking back her remarkable claims.

Moreover, her conclusion that the words “My wife” are not open to interpretation is rather curious coming from an academic: higher education these days denies the existence of truth, subjecting the plain words of a text to constant deconstruction. So why, all of a sudden, should her account be considered definitive?

King is not the only one to eat crow about her Jesus’ wife story. Roger Bagnall teaches at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. In 2012, after looking at the images of the papyrus with his colleagues, he said, “we were unanimous in believing, yes, this was OK.” He was confident it was not a forgery. “You’d have to be really kind of perversely skilled to produce something like this as a fake.”

Bagnall was duped. So was Princeton’s AnneMarie Luijendijk, a professor of religion (King served on her doctoral dissertation committee). She dug herself in deep when she exclaimed, “It would be impossible to forge.” Does she now believe in miracles?

Gnostic gospel scholar Elaine Pagels, who had previously collaborated with King on a book, told Ariel Sabar, the author of the Atlantic article, that “she had little doubt about the authenticity of the papyrus King had studied.” But how would she know? This is the same Princeton professor of religion who does not believe in the Virgin Mary, the Resurrection, and other central tenets of Christianity, but expects us to put our faith in her opinion.

When King’s “ground-breaking” story surfaced, I was more than skeptical—I was cynical. Admittedly, my New York University doctorate in sociology yields no expertise in this area. But there was sufficient grounds, right from the start, to be dismissive.

Here is what I wrote on September 19, 2012, the day the story broke in the New York Times: “We know nothing about when the scrap [of papyrus] was discovered. We know nothing about where it was discovered. We know nothing about how it was discovered. We know nothing about the context in which the words were written. And we know nothing about the owner.”

These were not the only reasons I had to be suspicious. On the same day, after doing some quick research on King, I wrote the following: “King is known for her fertile imagination. For example, she previously claimed that Mary Magdalene was one of the apostles. Even better, in the book in which she made this extraordinary claim, she ‘rejects his [Jesus’] suffering and death as the path to eternal life.’ Not much after that.”

I concluded, “So after first inventing an apostle for Jesus—who the divinity professor says is not the Savior—King has invented a wife for him. Her generosity, if not her scholarship, is beyond dispute.”

One does not have to hold a Ph.D. in any discipline to wonder why the media, and some academics, were popping the champagne. It is not hard to figure out why: they were ideologically predisposed to (a) believing King’s account and (b) rejecting the biblical one. This is not a matter of conjecture.

As soon as King’s fable was announced, she exposed her agenda. Her work, she said, casts doubt “on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy. They always say, ‘This is the tradition, this is the tradition.’ Now we see that this alternative tradition has been silenced.”

This is nonsense. No one was silenced, and she knows it. Why didn’t she name names? Who was silenced? Who did the silencing? Where is the evidence?

Laurie Goodstein, religion reporter for the New York Times, was salivating at the prospect that King was right. In her 2012 story on King’s finding, she opined that “the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple.” This is particularly relevant today, she said, because “global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.”

Goodstein then focused on her favorite target, Catholicism. “The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.”

More nonsense. The only ones clamoring for such a change are dissidents, ex-Catholics, and their allies in the media, the New York Times being chief among them.

The most recent proof of the media-harbored agenda was provided by the Washington Post. After acknowledging that King’s finding is a fake, reporter Ben Guarino said that if the scrap were real, it “could shatter one of the long-held tenets of Christianity.” He then gave away the store when he noted that the 2012 announcement “was initially greeted with applause.”

Guarino is correct, but he never explained why. It is hardly a leap of faith to conclude that those who reject the biblical account were applauding the prospect that it is factually wrong. Why? Because of the implications for ordaining women. That’s what this is all about—women priests. Science is not driving this debate, politics is.

Only a few weeks after the Harvard Theological Review printed King’s story in 2014, serious questions were raised about the authenticity of her fragment. King conceded that the young man who raised the forgery issue, Christian Askeland (he was not the first to do so), may be on to something, though she hastened to say, “I don’t think it’s a done deal.” Earlier, Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, said her finding was so fake that it “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch.”

Looks like Depuydt’s instincts were right. The Atlantic article has sent King reeling.

Sabar’s meticulous investigation showed the kind of determination to get at the truth that King never demonstrated. His real catch was the man who gave her the scrap, Walter Fritz. It wasn’t easy, but Sabar hunted him down. He pressed Fritz about the way in which he acquired the papyrus, and found there were too many inconsistencies. He also found problems with a document that Fritz said verified the fragment’s authenticity.

Sabar researched Fritz’s background, and interviewed him at length. He found him to be quite a rogue—on many issues—though not without considerable talents. In fact, he was no rookie to the subject: he studied Coptic at Berlin’s Free University’s Egyptology institute.

“By every indication,” Sabar writes, “Fritz had the skills and knowledge to forge the Jesus’s wife papyrus.” In fact, “He was the missing link between all the players in the provenance story.”

“I asked Fritz whether there was anyone alive who could vouch for any part of the provenance story,” Sabar wrote. “Did he have a single corroborating source to whom he could refer me?” Fritz replied, “I don’t know. It’s very unfortunate.” Sabar explores several possible motives he may have had, but none that proves conclusive.

One thing is for sure: Fritz’s rejection of truth made it easier for him to lie. “The truth is not absolute. The truth depends on perspectives, surroundings.”

So what did King know about Fritz? Practically nothing. He told her that he was just a “family man.” Not exactly—he was a pornographer. But not of the ordinary kind.

“Beginning in 2003,” Sabar writes, “Fritz had launched a series of pornographic sites that showcased his wife having sex with other men—often more than one at a time. One home page billed her as ‘America’s #1 Slut Wife.'” Oh yes, his “Slut Wife” was also known for channeling the voices of angels.

Stung but not shamed, King is now equivocating about her “unequivocal” finding. She says, “based on the new evidence, I’m leaning toward modern forgery.” How long it will take her to stand up straight is anyone’s guess.

If a seasoned journalist could conclude that Fritz was a fraud, why couldn’t a Harvard professor? “I had no idea about this guy, obviously,” she now says. “He lied to me.”

Why was she so incurious? Because of the scrap’s political implications? And why did Fritz choose her to pawn his “discovery”? Because he knew he would find a gullible taker? This is worthy of a “60 Minutes” investigation, but it will never happen: they might have to credit the Vatican for being right all along.

Harvard is standing by King, even though her incompetence is stunning. Moreover, the peer-reviewed Harvard Theological Review refuses to print a retraction, something King readily agrees with. “I don’t see anything to retract,”she says. “I have always thought of scholarship as a conversation.”

I guess we live in different universes. My years as a college professor were not spent pursuing a conversation—that’s what pubs are for—they were spent pursuing truth. But then again I didn’t teach at Harvard.

The media were all over King’s “discovery” in 2012: 128 newspapers covered it,and the New York Times ran its story on the front page. Now that King has been shown to be a JV player, the big media have shown little interest in reporting the forgery. As for the Times, there has been no story. And this is the “newspaper of record”?

When King initially presented her finding, she said, “This is not a career maker. If it’s a forgery, it’s a career breaker.” She was half right: It is a forgery, but it’s not a career breaker. As her most searing critic, Leo Depuydt, wryly noted, “I see King is still at Harvard. Unbelievable.”

Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of six books and many articles.

By Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by CNSNews.com June 17, 2016.

The man responsible for the Orlando killings, we’re told, was a devout Muslim who attended a mosque several times a week, brought a prayer rug to work, pledged his allegiance to ISIS, cheered the 9/11 massacre, traveled to Saudi Arabia, and was raised by his Taliban-loving father. Yet, despite all this reported evidence, Christians are being blamed for the killings.

There is no greater proof of why the Catholic League exists than this: Christians, especially Catholics, are typically held responsible for the sins of others, and this is doubly true when sexuality is implicated. Most troubling is the fact that the anti-Christian hate mongers are not just dopey bloggers—they are academics, lawyers, activists, and writers.

When it comes to Christian haters, few can top Jonathan Katz, a homosexual activist and University of Buffalo professor. Now he is deflecting attention from the role that ISIS played in the Muslim murders: he says the real culprits are Christians. In fact, he refers to the ISIS connection as merely the “ISIS thing,” as if the Islamic State were only tangentially related to the killings.

“The ISIS thing is a distraction,” Katz says, arguing that we should instead be “looking at the long legacy of anti-gay violence in this country that has itself been stoked and promoted by the Christian right.” The central problem, he says, is not to be found in “the Middle East,” but at home where the “homophobia problem” exists.

Katz has a history of bashing Christians for not embracing the gay agenda. In 2010, he objected to my criticism of a taxpayer-funded Smithsonian exhibition that featured a vile video of ants crawling all over the crucifix. For simply exercising my First Amendment right to free speech, Katz called me an“American Taliban.” I reminded him that the Taliban puts gays in human shredders.

Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern is another homosexual activist who refuses to blame Islamists for what happened, opting to point the finger at Christians instead. The title of his screed tells it all, “How Conservative Christian Activists Spent Decades Fomenting Anti-Gay Hate in Orlando.”

To make his point, Stern blames the Catholic League for cultivating gay hatred. How did we do this? By allegedly joining a boycott of Disney in 1996. He says we were angry about a Disney employment policy on gays. Stern is wrong. We didn’t join any such effort. In 1995, I led a boycott of Disney because of its role in promoting an anti-Catholic movie, “Priest” (at that time Disney owned Miramax, the film’s distributor).

Just as with Katz, Stern paints me as anti-gay for fighting anti-Catholicism. Moreover, he believes I laid the groundwork for Omar Mateen’s killing spree. Why I haven’t been arrested he does not say.

Katz, Stern, and others (Sally Kohn and the ACLU) are so driven by their hatred of Christianity that there is virtually nothing that Muslim barbarians can do that cannot be deconstructed to exculpate them and implicate Christians.

Adding to the crazy talk, and proving my point better than I could ever do, is Ben Brenkert. Like many other homosexual seminarians who never made it—he spent 10 years training to become a Jesuit priest—he has a score to settle with the Catholic Church.

Brenkert’s article in the Daily Beast on the Orlando killings says absolutely nothing about Muslims, Islam, or ISIS, but it has plenty to say about the pope, and, of course, sex.

Pope Francis decried the killings but didn’t single out homosexuals. For Brenkert, this signifies “the Church’s lack of care of the whole gay person, including the identification of the gay victims when it matters most: in their martyrdom.” For me, at least, this really is breaking news—I had no idea that the victims gave themselves up for a noble cause.

Following Katz and Stern, Brenkert exploits the Orlando killings to advance his sexual politics. He is not interested in pressing the authorities to do a better job screening for prospective terrorists; rather, he seizes this opportunity to register a complaint with the Catholic Church. His whining is hard to beat. “Sexually active gay men who are Roman Catholic cannot receive Holy Communion at Mass,” he says.

This is true. The same is true of sexually active single heterosexual men and women, as well as adulterers. But even if everyone could receive Communion, no matter the nature of the sin or the degree of contriteness, it strains credulity to assume that this has anything to do with the behavior of a Muslim maniac.

The purpose of this outburst of Christian bashing in the wake of the Orlando tragedy is to silence Christian dissent on matters sexual. Narcissistic to the bone, these gay activists will always give Islam a pass, and will always bash Christians. The issue for them is sex, not violence.

Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of six books and many articles.

By Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by CNSNews.com on June 9, 2016.

Income inequality is a natural outcome of many factors, and can never be eliminated; it is a universal fact of life. Whether it is a problem has much to do with expectations, as well as with the actual living conditions of those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

In this country, the problem of income inequality appears to be more ideological than real. To the extent it is a problem, it is not caused by structural problems such as discrimination and lack of job opportunity—this is the liberal school of thought—it is rooted in cultural problems such as delinquent norms, values, and practices.

A new study by the JPMorgan Chase & Co. Institute shines some light on the divide between the rich and the poor. The researchers analyzed 15 billion different credit/debit card transactions by 50 million persons (their identity was not disclosed). What they found is revealing, although what follows, particularly the data on eating, was curiously not stressed by the study’s authors.

When it comes to non-durable goods such as groceries and clothing, the bottom 20 percent of income earners spend 51 percent of their money on these items. This, however, isn’t much more than what most Americans spend. As we might expect, these same persons spend more on fuel, and less on cars and appliances, but again, with the exception of the top quintile, the difference is slight.

Most interesting is the percentage of income spent on restaurants. One might expect that the poor cannot afford to eat out, but this is not the case. In fact, they eat out more than most Americans. Here is the percentage of income spent on restaurants, by quintile, starting at the bottom: 16.6; 15.8; 16.0; 16.6; 17.8. Which means that only the top 20 percent eat out more than the bottom 20 percent.

The figure on eating out does not take into consideration the prevalence of food stamps, free school lunches, soup kitchens, donated non-perishable goods, Meals on Wheels, etc. that are provided to the bottom quintile.

As Terry Jeffrey of CNSNews.com has pointed out, Census Bureau data show that the majority of households that live below the poverty level own a clothes washer, clothes dryer, microwave, air conditioner, TV, video recorder/DVD, computer, landline phone, and cell phone. They are not denied the opportunity to cook—97 percent own a stove—so eating out is purely a matter of choice.

Virtually every study on eating habits, in the U.S. and abroad, concludes that the poor have the worst eating habits. They eat less fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fish, and grains, and as a result they have higher rates of obesity, heart disease, strokes, and diabetes. We know that 70 percent of the wealthy eat less than 300 junk food calories per day, and that 97 percent of the poor eat more than 300 junk food calories per day.

An article in USA Today on this subject attributes the bad eating habits of the poor to “food poverty” or “food insecurity.” By this it is meant that the cost of “healthy foods [appear] to be greater in low-income areas;” also, “a lack of proper cooking facilities in the home increases the need to eat convenience or take-away food.” Similarly, an epidemiologist from the University of Washington says that “the most nutritious diet” is “beyond the reach of the poorest Americans.”

But if the poor eat out more than most Americans, does that not suggest that it is not a lack of money that accounts for their eating habits? And if almost all the poor own a stove and a microwave, what “proper cooking facilities” do they lack?

Many years ago I taught in a very poor neighborhood in Spanish Harlem. Across the street there was a deli, and a block or two away there was a supermarket. Many of the residents did their weekly shopping at the deli. When I asked why they did not save money by going to the supermarket, I was told that the deli was more convenient.

When I asked the deli owner why he was accepting food stamps to pay for items such as beer, which is prohibited, he said it made no difference to him what his customers bought as long as he was reimbursed by the government.

A just society will treat the least among them with compassion, and do everything possible to create a more equitable playing field. But equity means fairness, not sameness (this is what equality means).

To put it differently, there is no moral obligation to ensure income equality, only equitable conditions. If bad eating habits persist—along with an array of other self-destructive behaviors—there is little others can do about it. In short, it’s the culture, stupid.

Bill Donohue is President and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. He was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of six books and many articles.

Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by Newsmax on June 2, 2016.

The rise of Donald Trump has totally confounded the chattering class. This is as true for conservatives as it is for liberals. Never in recent history have more deep-thinkers been wrong about a presidential candidate than now.

That’s because all the books they’ve read — way too many — never prepared them to understand the American people.

Like most intellectuals, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks doesn’t understand Trump’s appeal, but at least he has an inkling as to why. “I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern,” he says, “spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people of similar status and demographics to my own.”

Brooks’ sociology is accurate. Most of the intelligentsia come from a pampered class, one that insulates them from blue-collar workers and lower-middle class employees — the very heart of Trump’s appeal. Having spent more time in bookstores than in bars, they have no more idea of what life is like for blue-collar workers than Marx did in understanding factory workers — he never set foot in one.

A large swath of America is justifiably angry. For one, they experience firsthand the machinations of those below them who have learned how to game the system. Meanwhile, they and their families struggle to make ends meet.

To be specific, many in the working class, as well as those in the lower middle class, interact daily with those in the lower class, and what they see angers them. The cops, firefighters, EMTs, nurses, social workers, cab drivers, and others have good reasons to think that the deck is stacked against them.

No “Obamaphone” for these folks.

When these Americans listen to liberal members of the chattering class, they hear how bad things are for the “poor” — to say nothing of the “plight” of illegal aliens — and then they witness how these alleged unfortunates manage to pull it off.

When they listen to conservative members of the chattering class, they hear how wonderful free trade is, and then they learn how another plant is moving overseas.

Do the anti-Trump intellectuals ever experience anything like this? Have they ever seen how easy it is to rip off Uncle Sam and get away with it? Have they ever worried how their jobs might be rendered obsolete by another trade deal? Or how it feels to lose one’s job while reading about the feds bailing out the welfare cheats on Wall Street?

How many intellectuals ever served a day in the military? How about their siblings and friends? How many of their neighbors served? When they went to college, did they join ROTC?

Or, was ROTC banned on their elite campuses because the Army wasn’t sufficiently gay friendly?

So whose kids are dying in the Middle East? The very ones whom Trump appeals to. He scores with those in the lower ranks because they don’t want their kids to lose their life in one more war with Muslim barbarians.

Why is it that Trump’s base intuitively understands that the barbarians who live a tribal existence are not interested in freedom and equality, yet many intellectuals still can’t figure it out?

Why are we shoving Jeffersonian ideas down their throats when they have made it clear that they prefer to be left alone?

Too much philosophy can corrupt common sense. The time has come for real diversity: the deep thinkers need to meet the proletariat instead of chattering about them.

Dr. William Donohue is the president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Donohue is a former Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and served for two decades on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of six books, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.

Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by Newsmax on May 25, 2016.

Looks like old Descartes got it wrong. “Cogito ergo sum,” or, “I think therefore I am,” has been superseded by “Sentio ergo sum,” or, “I feel therefore I am.” Welcome to the post-Oprah world of feelings.

“Follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.” That’s what Oprah told 2008 graduates at Stanford. “And how do you know when you’re doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know is that feelings are really your GPS system for life.”

Rachel Dolezal, a blue-eyed blond, recently admitted that she felt she was an African-American. Accordingly, she told the world she was as black. She explained that “from a very young age [I] felt a spiritual, visceral, this feeling of central connection with ‘black is beautiful.'”

After her white parents said she was a white woman pretending to be black, Dolezal responded in vintage Oprah terms. “I do not feel like they are my mom and dad.”

Race, of course, is not a matter of feelings, or even volition: it is a matter of biology. Though it is contentious in some quarters to say so, we don’t choose our race any more than we choose our sex.

However, in today’s world of “Sentio ergo sum,” we are now being taught that a man can choose to be a woman — if he feels like it — and vice versa. All that is necessary for someone to belong to the opposite sex is to feel that he or she belongs to it, and bingo, it’s a done deal.

The Obama administration has not only bought into this new round of sexual subjectivism, it is demanding that educators get in line. In its May 13 letter to the public schools across the nation, the Department of Justice defined gender identity as “an individual’s internal sense of gender.”

Thus did the DOJ award feelings a privileged position over reason. That schools would be expected to honor feelings over reason is one of the most overlooked aspects of this bizarre chapter in recent American history.

We might expect therapeutic institutes to promote this view, but not educational entities.

In keeping with the Obama administration’s penchant for power, there were no public debates or hearings on this subject, just decree. Vanita Gupta, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, didn’t think dialogue, or the presentation of evidence, was necessary to adopt a new policy.

She argued that it was enough that transgender public employees may “feel afraid and stigmatized on the job.” Similarly, there are students who “feel like their campus treats them differently because of who they are,” as well as those who have been made to “feel inferior.”

It looks like her politics of feelings is winning. A female teacher in Oregon who feels she is a man just won $60,000 for claiming she was harassed on the job. Never mind that an internal investigation found no proof of harassment, or that this person no longer considers herself a man — she now prefers to be known as “transmasculine” and “genderqueen.”

To the uninitiated, those terms are just some of the labels that have become available for self-identification in New York City: There are now 31 officially recognized genders in the Big Apple, making references to “guys and gals” seem quaint, if not bigoted.

Only 0.3 percent of Americans reject their sex as determined at birth (the Obama administration uses the term “assigned” at birth); the rest of us are comfortable with being a man or a woman. To be sure, every human being deserves to be afforded human dignity, but nothing demands that we suspend the faculty of reason to decide public policy.

Facts can be stubborn, and this is especially true of biological facts. XY = male; XX = female. Men determine the sex of the child — women never do.

A man who feels he is a woman can never menstruate or get pregnant. That’s just the way it is. Chalk it up to nature, and nature’s God.

The American College of Pediatricians recently said, “No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex.” Gender roles, as sociologists instruct, are socially learned ways of behaving that are deemed appropriate for boys and girls. That they take their cues from nature is indisputable.

For example, in every society — there are no exceptions — men are more aggressive than women. This is not a function of culture, but of biology. To be specific, men have more testosterone than women. It has nothing to do with “feelings,” but with certain biological imperatives.

The Department of Justice cannot alter nature, and it cannot decide by edict that the sexes are interchangeable. There is a limit to rule by feelings. At some point, reason is bound to kick in.

Dr. William Donohue is the president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Donohue is a former Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and served for two decades on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of six books, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.

No one who has ever run for president has generated more opposition, from both his own party and the media, than Donald Trump. Yet they have all failed to stop him.

The Republican elite lined up to promote Jeb Bush, and when Trump started to soar, they sought to bring him down. News reporters and pundits, on both the left and the right, ripped Trump, sometimes maliciously.

More than a few called his followers fascists.

It does not matter what may happen subsequently — he has already beaten the political and media elite.

A new poll offers great insight into Trump’s success, though it was not designed to address his candidacy. The survey by the Media Insight Project, a joint effort of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press, shows mass public distrust of politicians and the media.

It is precisely these two segments of the elite population that Trump has hammered away at, to great effect.

Respondents were asked to comment on how much confidence they have in various sectors of society.

The top five are

• The military.

• The scientific community.

• The Supreme Court.

• Organized religion.

• And, banks and financial institutions.

The two lowest are: the press and Congress.

Only 6 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the press; the figure for the Congress is 4 percent. This survey only explored why the press is held in such low esteem. Even so, its findings shed light on Trump’s success.

Inaccurate reporting and media bias are the two most cited reasons why the public distrusts the press. To be specific, 85 percent say that accurate reporting is the most important indicator of trust, and nearly four in ten say they can recall a specific incident that caused them to lose trust in a news source.

Of those who have lost trust in the media, 25 percent say they have had a bad experience in which they have found the facts to be wrong, and another 26 percent say they have had a bad experience with one-sided reporting.

No wonder media bias against Trump has had little effect: the public distrusts those in the news business.

Moreover, he has deftly exploited this weakness by directly confronting media elites.

He has also called out Republican elites for “rigging the system,” a sentiment that is not hard to exploit given the low regard the public has for politicians.

We know from other surveys that this mass distrust has been building for some time.

A 1985 Pew Research Center survey found that 55 percent of Americans said that news organizations “get the facts straight.” In 2011, that figure dropped to 25 percent. In 1985, Pew found that 45 percent detected media bias, but in 2011 the figure was 63 percent.

What kind of bias did the public note?

In 2011, a Gallup poll found that by a margin of three-to-one, Americans said the media were biased in a liberal direction. The majority, 55 percent, also said they had “little or no trust” in the press.

In 2012, a Pew survey showed that a record high of 67 percent of Americans said they saw “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of “political bias” in the media.

More Republicans than Democrats felt this way.

How much does media bias count? In 2008, 2010, and 2012, Rasmussen surveys found that the public considers media bias to be a bigger problem than big campaign contributions.

Surely the media elite would not agree.

In 2009 Rasmussen found that 85 percent said they trust their own judgment more than the average reporter when it comes to important issues.

This factor alone tells us volumes.

No wonder the Trump bashers on the left and the right have gotten such little traction—the public has gotten use to tuning them out.

If anything, this shows that the average American is far more independent-minded than the chattering class would have us believe.

Trump did not create the public’s distrust of the political and media elite, but he sure tapped into it.

Call him lucky if you want, but Trump’s timing has proven to be near perfect.

Just ask Jeb Bush.

Dr. William Donohue is the president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Donohue is a former Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and served for two decades on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of six books, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.

Bill Donohue

This article was originally published by Newsmax on March 24, 2016.

The two Democrats running for president are rarely asked to address religious liberty issues, and that is because everyone knows that neither Hillary Clinton nor Sen. Bernie Sanders places much of a premium on such matters.

The three Republican candidates are more likely to be questioned on this subject, yet none has been asked to comment on the most pressing religious liberty legislation currently being considered: the bill that recently passed both houses of the Georgia legislature. It’s time they were asked.

The Georgia bill is similar to the laws passed by 30 other states. Essentially, it would give Georgia the same rights as enumerated in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) at the federal level.

That bill placed a heavy burden on the federal government whenever it sought to override religious liberty objections: it had to prove a “compelling government interest” before it interfered with religious rights. The majority of states adopted their own RFRA laws because the protections afforded by the bill signed by President Clinton in 1993 did not extend to the states.

There was little controversy over this issue until Indiana sought to implement its own RFRA law last year. LGBT groups objected, claiming that there should be no religious exemption for anyone who refused to service a same-sex event, even if the objections were religiously grounded.

Gov. Mike Pence, under pressure to veto the law, signed a revised version of it, over protests from the NCAA (it is headquartered in Indiana). At the time, most of the sports establishment stayed out of it, but this time Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is being lobbied hard by the Atlanta Braves, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Atlanta Hawks.

Most important, the NFL has jumped on board, threatening not to award Atlanta with the Super Bowl: Atlanta is a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Super Bowls, along with New Orleans, Miami, and Tampa. Gov. Deal has until May 3 to decide.

As Kyle Wingfield of the Atlanta Journal Constitution has said, the NFL is not only entering into highly political territory, it is hypocritical: Louisiana and Florida already have RFRA laws, so why is Georgia being singled out for retribution? It could also be asked: Where are all the horror stories of gay rights being eviscerated in the 30 states that have their own RFRA laws?

None of this should be enough to stop Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, or Gov. John Kasich from taking the side of religious liberty. But opposition to the bill is not coming merely from the sports world, or from a coalition of left-wing groups represented by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. No, it is being led by the corporate establishment.

A recently founded non-profit group, Georgia Prospers, has organized scores of businesses to work against the religious liberty bill, HB 757. Here are some of the luminaries:

AIG, Apple, AT&T, Bain, Bank of America, Atlanta Convention & Bureau, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, Cushman & Wakefield, Deloitte & Touche, Delta, Ernst & Young, Google, Home Depot, Honeywell, Hyatt Regency, IBM, InterContinental Hotels, Marriott, McKesson, Mercedes-Benz, Metro Atlanta Chamber, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PNC, Porsche, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ruth’s Chris, Sheraton, SunTrust, Tishman Speyer, Turner Broadcasting, Twitter, Unilever, UPS, Verizon, Wells Fargo.

Oh, yes, the Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta has also sided against religious liberty.

Now Disney and Marvel Studios have pledged to move their Georgia offices elsewhere if the bill becomes law. Walt Disney must be turning over in his grave—his child-friendly empire is more gay-friendly than it is religion-friendly. Pushing for Hollywood to work against religious liberty is the Human Rights Campaign, the gay activist organization.

It is one of the more astounding social transformations of our time: corporate America has gotten into bed with gay activists. These elites maintain that when there is a conflict between LGBT rights and religious rights, the latter should yield. Which means that sincerely held religious convictions about the sanctity of marriage, properly understood, should no longer be honored by the state.

In real life terms, this means that the government has a right to force practicing Christians to service a gay wedding event. Similarly, it has the authority to punish the Knights of Columbus if they do not rent their halls to two homosexuals seeking to marry.

The Republican candidates should no longer be allowed to pontificate in general about the religious exercise provision of the First Amendment. They ought to be asked to choose: Do they side with the left-wing and corporate establishment, or with men and women of faith?

Dr. William Donohue is the president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Donohue is a former Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and served for two decades on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of six books, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.