On October 23, a public library in Portland, Oregon hosted an event for children 2-6 years old that featured perverts and Catholic bashers. The venue was the Multnomah County Library.

“Drag Queen Storytime with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” was the name of the event. The “Sisters” have a long tradition of mocking nuns and bashing Catholicism; they are popular in San Francisco. Now they have set their sights on little kids.

Here is how the event was billed. “The library is proud to present an hour of kid-friendly drag! Join us for this special storytime featuring the fabulous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Sister Donna and Sister Olive, reading stories about inclusion and diversity, followed by a craft or dance party. For kids 2-6 years old with a favorite adult.”

This is one more example of some very disturbed people using sexuality as a means of getting to kids. That they used taxpayer dollars to advance their sickness is even less defensible.

By using the much-abused, and highly politicized, term “inclusion and diversity,” the drag queens tried to legitimize their behavior. But nothing can justify trying to sexualize children—even in a manner that is not perverse. The goal, of course, is to normalize sexual abnormalities, as well as anti-Catholic bigotry, two phenomena that deserve to be checked, not celebrated.

The library is to blame for not giving high profile to this event. If they are proud of having perverts and bigots address kids, they should shout it from the rooftop. Cowards and sickos.

When giving the Commencement Address at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, President Barack Obama said, “Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause.” His administration never did. Worse, it sought to violate conscience rights of pro-life Americans.

When Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, he pledged to undo the damage that his predecessor did to conscience rights. Now he has made good on his promise. On November 7, his administration released final rules on conscience rights for Americans who object to paying for abortion-inducing drugs and contraceptives in their insurance plans. They will take effect two months from now.

President Trump had to undo the Health and Human Services mandate established by the Obama administration. That provision sought to force organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their conscience by paying for morally objectionable services in their health insurance plans.

Under the new rules, an exemption is being afforded “from the contraceptive coverage mandate to entities and individuals that object to services covered by the mandate on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.” The rules are inclusive of “nonprofit organizations, small businesses, and individuals that have non-religious moral convictions.”

Kudos to President Trump for affirming religious liberty and conscience rights.

Election night was good for Christians. In two of the three states that had ballot initiatives protecting the rights of the unborn, they won: Alabama and West Virginia affirmed the right to life of children in the womb, and they also banned public funding of abortion; Oregon made it easier for a woman to abort her child.

Alabama voters affirmed religious liberty by ensuring that a person’s religious beliefs will have no effect on his civil or political rights; they also voted to allow a display of the Ten Commandments on public property.

Pro-life candidates squared off against abortion-rights candidates in the 36 states that had gubernatorial races. In September, National Right to Life listed 26 of the races as the ones to watch. Our own tally found that the pro-life candidate won 17 of those races; 9 were won by the abortion-rights candidate.

This takes on more significance when we consider that Planned Parenthood launched its largest voter contact campaign for midterm elections in history.

NARAL told voters that abortion is a children’s rights issue. “The research is clear. Restricting abortion access doesn’t just harm women. It harms their children as well.” It also tweeted, “When women are denied abortions, it affects the lives of the kids they already have.”

NARAL is right about that, but for the wrong reason: it traumatizes children to learn that their mother aborted their prospective brother or sister—they realize that it could have been them!

Perhaps the best election news is the uptick in pro-life senators. President Trump will now have an easier time getting judges appointed who are not given to discovering rights that are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times about The Satanic Temple said the organization “describes itself as a political activism group that promotes certain beliefs such as free will and political tolerance.” Satanists believe in free will and political tolerance? That inspired Donohue to check out their website.

What he found was surprising: The Satanic Temple is obsessed with abortion. Its mission statement says it offers “legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women’s reproductive autonomy.” So critical is abortion to these Satanists that they have a “Religious Rights Reproductive Rights Campaign”: it advocates on behalf of the so-called religious rights of Satanists to campaign for abortion.

The Satanic Temple has a list of legal restrictions on abortion that it finds objectionable: they range from ultrasound tests that allow the mother to hear the heartbeat of her baby to mandatory waiting periods. They also seek to undermine crisis pregnancy centers. So zealous are the Satanists in their quest for abortion rights that they oppose burial rights for the remains of children who have been aborted. To say they love abortion is hardly a stretch.

Donohue decided to engage The Satanic Temple on this issue.

Here is the email exchange:

Q: “I’m curious. Why is abortion such a big issue for Satanists?” [Nov. 13]

A: “It isn’t abortion per se, it is personal freedom.” [Nov. 13]

Q: “But if the personal freedom of a woman to have an abortion results in the wholesale denial of personal freedom for her baby, how is that a victory for liberty?” [Nov. 15]

A: “Because it isn’t a baby.” [Nov. 15]

So there you have it. A pregnant woman who, unless interrupted naturally or unnaturally, will give birth to a baby is not carrying a baby.

Brief Answers to Big Questions is Stephen Hawking’s last book. His family finished the manuscript that he started, launching the book six months after the famous physicist died. The media hullaballoo over the book centers mostly on his professed atheism. CNN shouted Hawking’s conclusion, “There is no God,” calling it a “bombshell.”

It is hardly a “bombshell” to learn that a celebrated atheist was an atheist. Hawking never declared himself a religious man, though his atheism was always shaky. Just last year, in a book about him by Kitty Ferguson, he was asked why there is a universe. “If I knew that,” he answered, “then I would know everything important.” He added, “then we would know the mind of God.”

Now we are told that in his new book, at the end of his life, he was more sure of his atheist convictions. “Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want,” Hawking said, “and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God…No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either.” Probably. Which means there may be.

Why did Hawking hedge? And why would a brilliant man who supposedly understands elements of the universe that are too complex and difficult for most of us to understand settle the question of God’s existence by choosing “the simplest explanation” available?

Would it not be just as simple to adopt Pascal’s answer to the wager he proffered? The wager entailed the consequences of believing in God versus not believing. The 17th century French philosopher said it was wiser to err on the side of caution. “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”

A popular reconstruction of Pascal’s wager goes like this: “If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.”

This is clearly one of the “simplest” alternatives to Hawking’s position. It also has the merit of being more persuasive—to lose the wager is to lose it all.

It is fascinating to learn that while Hawking cannot conceive of a personal God, and doubts there is life after death, he believes in life in outer space. In Brief Answers to Big Questions, he confesses his belief in aliens. Great. But for a guy who insists on scientific evidence for everything else, where is the proof?

Why would Hawking believe in aliens? In the book by Ferguson, he says, “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies.” He is entitled to believe that human beings are “insignificant creatures,” but he has no empirical evidence to support it.

It would have helped had Hawking identified who the significant creatures are and where they live. But he never did. More important, why is it rational for him to believe in aliens but irrational for us to believe in God?

Where Hawking fails, as do all atheists, is in responding to the central issue involving the origin of the universe. Saint John Paul II said it best. “Every scientific hypothesis about the origin of the world, such as the one that says that there is a basic atom from which the whole of the physical universe is derived,” he said in a 1981 Vatican conference on cosmology, “leaves unanswered the problem concerning the beginning of the universe. By itself, science cannot resolve this problem….”

How much of Hawking’s atheism was a function of his disability (he suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease for most of his adult life) is uncertain, but in his last book he makes this an issue. “For centuries,” he said, “it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.”

It is true that in the ancient world it was believed that the disabled must have done something wrong to merit their condition. But Hawking should have updated his readings.

Jesus healed the sick, the blind, the lame—everyone in need of help—and the religion he founded does not abandon the disabled. On the contrary, it tends to their suffering. Christians have had a phenomenal record treating the handicapped of every malady, mental and physical alike. So to invoke centuries-old beliefs (many born of paganism for that matter) as a way of indicting religion today is simply wrong.

Christians believe in mysteries, and so did Hawking, albeit of a different kind. Pascal believed in mysteries as well, but he was much more rational than Hawking.

Megyn Kelly was obviously not dropped by NBC because all the executives and hosts who work there are opposed to bigotry. In fact, many of them like it. Indeed, they have been promoting it for decades.

But the tolerant ones are not equal opportunity bigots. They are careful not to offend African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, illegal aliens, Indians, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, et al. But when it comes to priests, NBC loves to make sweeping condemnations against them, feeding every negative stereotype there is.

No other demographic group is relentlessly treated with derision, mocked in ways that range from below the belt to the positively obscene. Here is a small sample.

Let’s start with Al Roker. He called Kelly’s “blackface” remarks “ignorant and racist.”

In 2000, Roker had a book published about parenting, Don’t Make Me Stop This Car. He made the rounds on TV shows saying that his wife used a fertility drug, perganol, one he claimed was made by a company that was a subsidiary of the Vatican.

Before getting to his “joke,” it should be known that the weatherman had his facts wrong: Serono, the fertility-drug maker, was never a subsidiary of the Vatican. At one time, the Vatican owned shares in the company, but it sold them in 1970, thirty years before Roker’s book was published.

More to the point, on June 16, 2000, Roker told Larry King that perganol is extracted from a hormone, FHS, which he contended was obtained from the urine of “menopausal nuns” who live in the Vatican [note: it was actually collected from 110,000 postmenopausal women volunteers in Europe and Latin America]. He told King that the drug was “expensive stuff,” adding that “it was cheaper to adopt a nun, you know, and just have her pee in a cup.” Roker made similar cracks on other shows.

Kelly never made a cheap joke about blacks. But Roker did about nuns. Yet she is the “ignorant” bigot, not him.

Jay Leno made a career out of bashing priests. His “jokes” are too numerous to recount here, but here are a few examples.

A news story about a priest who stole church money for male escorts led Leno to quip, “Why buy the escort when the altar boys are free?” [July 7, 2010]
When told that a priest was calling for a boycott, Leno said, “Well, maybe he was just calling for a boy on a cot.” [May 14, 2010]

In his monologue, Leno commented, “And according to a New York Times poll, 54% of people feel that the Vatican is out of touch with Catholics. The other 46% are young Catholics who feel they’re way too much in touch. Way too much in touch.” [May 10, 2010]

Here’s another monologue remark. “According to a new report on teenage sex by researchers, 4% of teenagers lost their virginity in a car, and 56% lost it in their homes. When they heard this, child development experts said it might help if teenagers talked to someone like their teacher or a priest, which is how the other 40% lost it.” [February 26, 2008]

Here’s a really sick one. “In fact this Harry Potter book is so popular a lot of L.A. priests are now using it as bait.” [July 23, 2007]

This is another gem. Leno discusses a priest who accidentally drove his car into a restaurant. “Thank God it was not Chuck E. Cheese.” [June 21, 2007]

This one is hard to beat. Leno comments on a news story about the bishops holding a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas. “They wanted to hold it at the Ramada Inn because at Ramadas, the kids stay free.” [June 17, 2002]

Many more of Leno’s “jokes” could be listed, but this suffices to make the point: NBC adored his bigotry, cheering him on as he portrayed all priests as pedophiles. [Fact: Less than 5% of molesting priests were pedophiles—most were homosexuals—but NBC executives do not want to go there. They are very protective of homosexuals.]

Seth Meyers went beyond Leno by trashing the Eucharist. In one egregious instance, he stuffed his mouth with what he pretended was the Communion wafer, mocking Catholics at the same time. [October 29, 2014]

Meyers said that a Spanish hotel, inspired by Fifty Shades of Grey, was delaying its opening because it was too close to a Catholic church. “We don’t want to be next to all those creepy perverts,” he said. [August 6, 2014]

Recently, Meyers “joked” with one of his writers, Jenny Hagel, saying, “The Vatican recently refused to host an international women’s day conference because one of the speakers was a lesbian.” Hagel responded, “…and because they’re too busy hosting a 2000-year-long pedophile convention.” [October 4, 2018]

NBC’s new show, “You, Me and the Apocalypse,” wasted no time attacking priests this year. The character, Father Jude, played devil’s advocate for priests being considered for sainthood. He said, “My job is to prove they felt up kids.” [February 1, 2018]

To this could be added obscene portrayals of Catholic priests on shows such as “Law and Order,” “The Blacklist,” and “Committed” (it defiled the Eucharist). Then there are the sick remarks made on MSNBC by the likes of Keith Olbermann and Lawrence O’Donnell.

NBC executives should be honest and admit that they were looking for a way to get rid of Kelly and seized upon her “blackface” Halloween story to do so. They should also admit that they lie when they say they are opposed to bigotry in all of its manifestations. They clearly are not.

The “mass grave” hoax is back. The Irish government is planning to exhume the remains of babies allegedly buried in a mass grave in Tuam, Ireland. According to the New York Times, Ireland’s Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, is leading this campaign. The so-called mass grave is on the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in the County Galway town of Tuam.

The Times reports that this story began in 2014 when “a local amateur historian, Catherine Corless, said she had found death certificates for 796 children who died in the home from 1925 to 1961—but whose burial places were not officially recorded.”

There are several factual errors in this news story by Ed O’Loughlin. He has a history of distorting the record.

Earlier this year O’Loughlin referred to Corless as a “dogged local historian” who made headline news when “she published evidence” that nearly 800 children had died in the Tuam home, and that the remains of “some” were found in the septic tank. (Our emphasis.)

As Bill Donohue has noted several times before, the “mass grave” story is a cruel myth promoted by those whose agenda it is to smear the Catholic Church.

The myth began when Corless published a 2012 article titled, “The Home,” in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society. In it, Corless made no mention of any “mass grave.” If anything, she offered evidence that contradicts what she later claimed.

Here is what Corless said: “A few local boys [in 1975] came upon a sort of crypt in the ground, and on peering in they saw several small skulls.” She mentioned there was a “little graveyard.” That is not the makings of a mass grave.

The primary source for her “mass grave” thesis is Barry Sweeney. When he was 10, he and a friend stumbled on a hole with skeletons in it. In 2014, he was asked by the Irish Times to comment on Corless’ claim that there are “800 skeletons down that hole.” He said, “Nothing like that.” How many? “About 20,” he said. He later told the New York Times there were “maybe 15 to 20 small skeletons.” Is O’Loughlin aware of this? It was printed in the newspaper that employs him.

Corless herself admitted in 2014 that she learned from local residents that the Tuam graveyard outside the Home was dotted with “tiny markers there.” There were “bits of stones left to indicate graves.” Those “tiny markers” suggest this was a cillin graveyard, or a graveyard for children. A “mass grave” is not dotted with “tiny markers” or “bits of stones.” Yet Corless has been able to get away with these contradictory explanations.

In a 2014 news story by Douglas Dalby of the New York Times, he says of Corless’ account that she “surmised that the children’s bodies were interred in a septic tank behind the home.” (Our italic.) His verb is accurate. To surmise is to guess—it is proof of nothing.

As for Corless, she is neither an “amateur historian” nor a “local historian.” She is not a historian—local, regional, or national. She doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. She is a typist.

Furthermore, last year, when Zappone released her second Interim Report on this subject, she never used the term “mass grave,” or implied anything like it. So why is she so dogged about this issue?

She now says it is important to “demonstrate our compassion and commitment to work towards justice, truth and healing for what happened in our past and, most especially, for those who were previously abandoned.” She should instead worry about the wellbeing of children in Ireland today, beginning with child abuse in the womb.

Zappone’s alleged interest in protecting the welfare of children would be more persuasive were it not for her rabid pro-abortion record. She is an activist, not a health minister. “Married” to her girlfriend, an ex-nun, she is part of the effort to besmirch the historical record of Irish nuns. Yet were it not for the care these nuns gave to abandoned children, they would have died in the street. No one else wanted them in the early part of the last century.

Just as in the United States, pro-abortion and pro-gay activists seek to discredit the Catholic Church, thus making it easier for them to succeed. To accomplish their agenda, they are prepared to lie about the Church’s past so as to marginalize its voice today.

Catherine Corless is the typist responsible for floating the “mass grave” hoax in Tuam, Ireland. She is back in the news, this time for blasting the Bon Secours sisters for not forking up enough cash to pay for an exhumation of an alleged “mass grave” of children’s remains she says exists on the grounds of the sisters’ Mother and Baby Home. Ireland’s Minister of Children, Katherine Zappone, is behind the effort to see what is buried in the grounds.

The nuns have offered to pay almost $3 million toward the digging, an amount that Corless predictably says is too “meager.” She says the sisters have “private hospitals all over the place” and should pay much more.

In other words, the typist wants to drain money from the sick and dying today to pay for her wild goose chase about an incident that allegedly took place a hundred years ago.

The nuns should pay nothing. Let the activists like Corless in Ireland, and the Church-bashing activists in the United States like Irish Central, pony up first, then rip the Irish taxpayers for the remainder.

For two reasons, this will never happen: the nuns are too humble, and those who hate the Church—they hate its teachings on sexuality—simply want to soak it. These people are not motivated by justice for children—they are motivated by revenge. That is a sin, though in their eyes it is a virtue.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a movie that opened in New York today:

“La Religieuse” (“The Nun”) opens today in New York City for two weeks at the Film Forum. It is based on a novel by the 18th-century French writer, Denis Diderot. The New York Times provided almost a half-page review, complete with a large picture of a nun in habit standing behind a jail-like facade.

The French movie, like the book, bashes the Catholic Church. It is reviewed by J. Hoberman, who quotes what the paper’s movie critic, Vincent Canby, said about it when it debuted in 1971. “It’s with pleasure that I report its arrival,” he said.

Hoberman explains why the Times is attracted to the movie. Commenting on the central character, Suzanne, he writes, “At her first convent, Suzanne is subject to torture, interrogation and ostracism.” At her second convent, she meets the “flighty libertine abbess” who runs the joint, “experienc[ing] another sort of torment.” Hey, what’s not to like?

There is more to the script than what Hoberman allows.

After Suzanne is forced into the convent by her lousy parents, she is beaten and harassed by evil nuns. When she is transferred to the second convent, she meets a Mother Superior who is—you guessed it—a lesbian. But Suzie wants nothing to do with her advances, and this drives her predator boss insane, followed by death.

Now who would concoct such trash? Why the Enlightenment genius, Diderot, author of the famous Encyclopedia, a 35-volume exaltation of reason and knowledge. Like so many of the French intellectuals at the time, he was an atheist, something unappreciated by his parents (they wanted him to become a priest) and his Jesuit teachers.

What would possess Diderot to paint such a dark picture of nuns? Anger. Anger at the Catholic Church’s sexual ethics: He was a womanizer and a libertine, a man whose conception of sexual freedom included a rejection of the taboo against incest. That’s right, the same man who condemned fidelity in marriage and the Church’s embrace of it, found objections to sexual relations between mothers and their sons to be outdated.

Why is it that so many intellectuals who hate the Church’s teachings on sexuality turn out to be either predators or perverts? Maybe someone at the New York Times can answer that.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a New York Times series on abortion:

On December 28, an editorial in the New York Times broached an eight-part series on abortion rights that is positively astonishing. It is clearly the most rabid defense of abortion ever published by the mainstream media. The first installment was published on December 30; it will end on January 20. The entire series is now available online.

Why is the Times running this series? The best explanation is found in the first paragraph of the 8th installment. “Now that the Supreme Court has a conservative majority that appears inclined to overhaul Roe v. Wade, it is likely only a matter of time before women’s reproductive rights are ratcheted back.” Its central fear is a ruling declaring the unborn child worthy of “personhood” rights.

The thesis of the series is that any attempt to recognize the humanity of the unborn baby threatens women’s rights. According to the Times, laws that restrict abortion rights are ultimately about controlling women’s sexuality, and no group is more preyed upon than brown and black women. Peppered with anecdotes, the series pays almost no attention to data: highly debatable assertions are routinely made without any supporting evidence.

Many defenders of abortion rights will at least acknowledge the competing right to life of children in utero. But not the authors of this series. Nascent human life is referred to as nothing more than “clusters of cells,” as if these human biological properties were mere stuff.

It is this mental block—the refusal to admit the obvious—that allows the Times to object to prosecuting a woman for murder after her attempted suicide resulted in killing her eight-month-old baby. Similarly, it cannot understand why a jury convicted a pregnant woman driver of killing three persons after she drove her car over a double-yellow lined road on Long Island, crashing into another car: the driver of the other car, his wife, and the woman’s eight-month-old baby were killed (the reckless driver was under the influence of drugs and alcohol). The jury said she needlessly caused the death of her daughter (who died five days after the accident) because she was not wearing a seatbelt.

Those two babies would have lived had their mothers not acted irresponsibly, but that gets lost in the fog of abortion rights run amuck.

The contortions that the Times goes through trying to deny reality is remarkable. For example, it offers the account of a “visibly pregnant woman” seeking an abortion in another state having to deal with airport security officers. They wished her “a happy Mother’s Day.” One of them “cheerily” asked, “Is this your first?” The Times branded her experience “a surreal journey.” What is truly surreal is the paper’s interpretation.

What is really gnawing at the Times is the recent emergence of laws protecting the personhood of unborn babies. It calls them “an extreme legal argument with little precedence in American law before the 1970s.” However, the common law in Western civilization typically held that a pregnant woman convicted of a capital offense could not be executed, thus paying homage to the existence of an innocent human being. No matter, the newspaper is right to say that personhood legislation is of recent vintage.

There is a reason for this, and it has nothing to do with what the Times says: it attributes this to a move by Republicans in the 1970s to criminalize abortion. In point of fact it was technology, not politics, that proved to be the key to protecting the personhood status of unborn children. To be exact, ultrasound made the difference. Invented in the 1950s, it was not used with any regularity in U.S. hospitals until the 1970s.

How did ultrasound change the debate? Consider what Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the nation’s leading abortion-rights advocates in the 1960s and 1970s, said about the subject. [Note: This Jewish atheist later became a pro-life champion and converted to Catholicism.]

“By 1984, however, I had begun to ask myself more questions about abortion: what actually goes on in an abortion? I had done many, but abortion is a blind procedure. The doctor does not see what he is doing. He puts an instrument into a uterus and he turns on a motor, and the suction machine goes on and something is vacuumed out; it ends up as a little pile of meat in a gauze bag. I wanted to know what happened, so in 1984 I said to a friend of mine, who was doing 15 or maybe 20 abortions a day, ‘Look, do me a favor, Jay. Next Saturday, when you are doing all these abortions, put an ultrasound device on the mother and tape it for me.’

“He did, and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected that he never did another abortion. I, though I had not done an abortion in five years, was shaken to the very roots of my soul by what I saw.”

The precision of sonograms (the actual picture of an ultrasound) is much more advanced today. It would be instructive to learn what the editors of the New York Times might think of such images. Would they see “clusters of cells,” or small human beings?

The most controversial part of the series is found in the 4th and 5th installments, especially the 4th. It would be hard to find a more unpersuasive, and disturbing, attempt to discredit the damage done to unborn babies by their drug-ridden mothers. Moreover, this section of the series, while condemning racism, actually promotes it.

Part 4 condemns what it says is the “myth of the ‘crack baby.'” It criticizes the mainstream media (it includes the Times) for over- dramatizing the physical and psychological damage done to babies by their cocaine-using mothers. Reading this part of the series makes one wonder just how far radical pro-abortion reporters will go in their defense of the indefensible.

The idea of “crack babies,” the newspaper says, is a combination of “bad science and racist stereotypes.” These twin evils, we are told, were “debunked by the turn of the 2000s.” Really?

Somehow I must have missed this story. So I looked forward to reading why the “bad science” was wrong. But there was nothing there.

“The Legacy of the Myth” is the title of a section of Part 4 that led the reader to believe that the evidence would be forthcoming. It begins by saying, “Researchers debunked the ‘damage generation’ theory numerous times, finding no indication that children exposed to crack in the womb faced long-term debilitation and that the effects once tied to exposure were attributable to other drugs like alcohol and tobacco, or to factors associated with poverty, including homelessness and domestic violence.”

Let’s break down that sentence. Which researchers? Who are they? Why didn’t the article tell us? And even if other drugs can cause similar problems—which is nowhere proven—why is this proof that the “damage generation” theory of crack-using pregnant mothers has been debunked?

The underscored words are a link to a book, one which supposedly offers the evidence the Times says exists. I accessed a copy of it and nowhere does it offer any such evidence. The book, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transactional Adoption, by Laura Briggs, is more sociological than physiological. This makes sense: The author is not a professor of the natural sciences—she is a professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The relevant chapter in this book, “‘Crack Babies,’ Race and Adoption Reform, 1975-2000,” does not attempt to debunk the “bad science.” Just as important, the fact that it covers “race and adoption reform” in the last century does nothing to show why babies born today of crack-using mothers are not seriously impaired.

No wonder the Times likes this book. The author trashes people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, and Charles Krauthammer—all of whom have expressed concerns about low-income black families (almost all headed by a single woman) and the evils of drug addiction. Such politics may make for a good read in the academy, but it does nothing to shine light on why any of them were wrong.

In 2016, the National Institute on Drug Abuse concluded that besides the damage done to the women who use crack, “Babies born to mothers who use cocaine during pregnancy are often prematurely delivered, have low birth weights and smaller head circumferences, and are shorter in length than babies born to mothers who do not use cocaine.”

It added that “scientists are now finding that exposure to cocaine during fetal development may lead to subtle, yet significant, later deficits in children. They include behavior problems (e.g., difficulties with self-regulation) and deficits in some aspects of cognitive performance, information processing, and sustained attention to tasks—abilities that are important for the realization of the child’s full potential.”

Other studies describe learning disabilities that result from a damaged central nervous system and congenital heart diseases. Such children tend to do poorly in school, have social problems, and a host of other developmental disabilities.

Forget about the science for a moment. What responsible professor in a medical school would instruct students that crack-addicted mothers have little to worry about? What responsible professor in a medical school would engage students in a social analysis of racism, instead of warning about the damage being done to the physical and psychological well being of babies conceived by cocaine-using mothers?

The Times is right to note that racism has affected this issue, but it is looking in the wrong direction: It should look in the mirror. We would expect white supremacists to downplay the effects of crack on unborn black babies, not the alleged opponents of racism. The newspaper is so totally obsessed with abortion rights—it has reached a state of delirium—that it is willing to slight the harm being done to black children by their cocaine-addicted moms, all because of the necessity of denying them personhood.

It may take some time before the idea of granting personhood status to unborn babies catches on nationwide, but the vector of change is moving that way. This is why the New York Times sees this as such a frightening prospect.