New York Times Undervalues Women

This article by Bill Donohue was originally published by Newsmax on May 7, 2015.

“Catholicism Undervalues Women” was the title of an article in yesterday’s New York Times by columnist Frank Bruni. He should be careful about throwing the first stone: the Times has a notorious record of undervaluing women. Indeed, it worked hard to deny women the right to vote in 1920, a bit of history its everyday readers would find hard to believe.

There are 29 senior positions listed on the masthead of the Times today, and men control 19, or 66 percent, of them. There are six top jobs: publisher, chairman, executive editor, editorial page editor, chief executive editor, and chief information officer. Men control all of them. The lowest on the totem pole, secretary, is occupied by a woman.

Hiring is incestuous at the Times. Two powerful families, the Ochses and Sulzbergers, have run the newspaper since the late 19th century. Adolph S. Ochs took over in 1896 and made sure to put his daughter, Iphigene, on the board of directors. However, he denied her the right to work at the newspaper. Why? Because she was a woman.

Iphigene married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and he conveniently succeeded her father. They had one son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known as Punch, and he managed to take over the reins in 1963; his three sisters also sat on the board with him. The dynasty continued when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. took over as publisher in 1992; he was joined by his five cousins at the paper. The concentration of power hit new heights when Junior became chairman of the newspaper in 1997.

In 2011, the Times hired the first woman to run the newspaper, Jill Abramson. She was fired a year ago; a man took her place. It soon came to light that she was discriminated against because she was a woman. Indeed, she was paid considerably less than the male editor who preceded her, Bill Keller. This was no fluke: when she succeeded Keller as managing editor, she also received less than him in pay and pension benefits.

None of this sat well with females at the Times. Then it was learned that a former managing editor of news operations, John Geddes, was also making more money than Abramson. When her lawyer inquired about the disparity, the alarms went off.

It must be noted that Abramson was not the first senior female executive to be fired by Sulzberger. Janet Robinson, a friend of Abramson, was hired in 2004 to run the Times company, and she did a fine job for many years. Moreover, she and Sulzberger worked closely together. But their relationship soured once his new girlfriend, Claudia Gonzalez, entered the picture.

From all accounts, Gonzalez, a stately Mexican executive, wasn’t too keen on Robinson. It didn’t take long before the Sulzberger-Robinson bond began to break, and in December 2011 he canned her. She exited with a good-bye package worth $24 million.

Robinson was replaced by a man. Mark Thompson is the former BBC official who still claims he knew nothing about the behavior of Jimmy Savile, the serial pedophile rapist who worked at the company for decades. The evidence, as I have recounted elsewhere, is not supportive of Thompson’s claim.

These are not mere anecdotes. Just one year ago, the Women’s Media Center rated the nation’s top ten newspapers on gender hiring and the New York Times was dead last: it had the biggest gender gap — 69 percent of the bylines went to men. In the 1970s, the paper was sued for sex discrimination, and had to settle with 560 women employees. It took that to get the Times to launch an affirmative action hiring plan.

The New York Times likes to look down its nose at middle America, aka fly-over country. Yet Wyoming was the first state to allow women the right to vote. At that time, the newspaper of record was fighting hard to maintain the all-male vote. In 1915, when the suffrage amendment was defeated in New York State, no one was happier than Adolph Ochs, the paper’s owner.

The Catholic Church has biblical reasons, beginning with Jesus, for its teachings on ordination. What reason, other than prejudice, does The New York Times have for undervaluing women?

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of six books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

Appalling Lack of Concern for Persecuted Christians

This article by Bill Donohue was originally published by Newsmax on April 29, 2015.

“Why Doesn’t the left Advocate for Persecuted Christians?” That is the question recently raised by Lucia Annunziata in the Italian edition of the Huffington Post (click here for the piece by Andrea Gagliarducci on her article).

Annunziata is a courageous woman — it takes guts for an atheist journalist to call out her friends on the left. She hammered them for their deadly silence on Christian persecution: “I ask myself where is the left, with a capital L?” She notes that its reticence is occurring “in front of the most terrible of crimes against the weakest — the massacres of Christians whose blood is shed in many parts of the world.”

The Italian leftist doesn’t mince words. “Why have I not received any petition to sign, though I receive many of varied kinds? Why has no one promoted, if not a public protest, a sit-in, or a meeting? I hear no slogans for persecuted Christians, nor do I get documents or petitions on the issue.”

Though she is wrong to praise the left for their “defense of the weakest” (e.g., they lead the fight to kill the unborn) she is right to say that “with few exceptions, never does the left express pain or horror for the men and women who die because of their faith.”

The answer to Annunziata’s question is straightforward: The left doesn’t care about Christian persecution because it doesn’t care about Christians. This is an understatement: it would be more accurate to say it has an animus against Christianity.

Why the hostility? Sexuality, pure and simple. It wants a no-holds-barred libertine understanding of sexuality. As such, it rightly identifies Christianity, especially Catholicism, as a bulwark to its advancement. Ironically, it is the West’s rejection of Catholicism’s sexual ethics, which prizes restraint, that is responsible for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Christians are getting it at home as well as abroad. While Muslim barbarians are murdering Christians abroad, without any push back from the left, left-wing Christian bashers at home are justifying anti-Christian bigotry. Consider the rants of Jeffrey Tayler, who writes for Salon.

Tayler’s most recent article on this subject is a congratulatory statement made on behalf of his hero, Bill Maher. If bigotry were against the law, Maher would have been jailed long ago. Tayler likes Maher’s brand of anti-Catholic humor, which is why he wants more of it. Earlier this year he implored readers to “offend religion more.”

It is one thing to be a proud bigot, quite another to be an historical dunce. Anyone who thinks that the world’s first totalitarians, namely, the architects of the French Revolution, are responsible for freedom of speech and rule of law is badly educated. If it weren’t for the Catholic Church, which gave us the world’s first universities and the world’s first successful opposition to tyranny, haters such as Tayler wouldn’t enjoy the protections they do.

The left has spawned every secular totalitarian regime in history, and Islam is responsible for every religious totalitarian movement the world has seen. Conservatives and Christians, by contrast, have never bequeathed a single political, economic, social, and cultural dictatorship.

Conservatism, as championed by Edmund Burke, believes in a small role for government; and Christianity, as championed by Catholicism, believes in natural law and natural rights. Both of these ideas are as anathema to the left as they are to totalitarianism.

That is why Hitler chose to govern the National Socialist Party; he ruled from the left. Moreover, from their crusades against Christianity in the 20th century — led by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot — to their current tolerance for Islamist terrorism — the left has never been the friend of liberty. Just the opposite.

What motivates left-wing totalitarianism, as I point out in my new book, “The Catholic Advantage: Why Health, Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful,” is utopianism. The left rejects nature, and nature’s God, as well as Original Sin, which is why it is so confident about reconstructing human nature and setting everything right.

But in reality there is no such thing as heaven on earth. In fact, when the left gets control, it delivers nothing but poverty and genocide. To be idealistic is admirable; to be utopian is dangerous.

We are lucky to have Lucia Annunziata’s voice heard. Too bad she is a freak among the left.

Achieving Health, Happiness, and Heaven

This article by Bill Donohue was originally published by Newsmax on March 4, 2015

We all want to be healthy, happy, and make it to heaven; even atheists who do not believe in heaven would prefer they enter the pearly gates if given only two choices. Who are the most likely, and the least likely, to achieve the Three H’s of health, happiness, and heaven is the subject of my new book, “The Catholic Advantage: Why Health, Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful.”

The real challenge, I found, is not deciding who these people are — the data on the first two H’s are uncontested (and there is little disagreement on the attributes that make us likely candidates for heaven) — the difficult part was explaining why some have a decided advantage over others. From scouring the evidence, it became clear that the Three B’s — beliefs, bonds, and boundaries — were the key to achieving the Three H’s.

To make my argument, I selected practicing Catholics, priests, nuns (especially cloistered sisters), and saints as representative of the Catholic model. I chose Hollywood celebrities and intellectuals to represent the secular model. On the face of it, these two secular groups have little in common, but what unites them is their agnosticism and atheism: the former have no time for God, and the latter think they are smarter than God. On the whole, both suffer from poor physical and mental health, are largely unhappy, and are not exactly charitable or altruistic.

The first of the Three B’s, beliefs, is an important variable explaining our physical and mental health. Patients who pray for relief of a specific medical condition usually find that their prayers have been answered. Indeed, frequent prayer is clearly related to physical and emotional well-being. Intercessory prayer, or absent prayer, also yields important results.

The second B, bonds, is another advantage Catholics have. The word religion is derived from the Latin, religare, which means “to bind together.” The opportunities that parish life provide in establishing bonds —retreats, parties, organized pastoral and political events — are plentiful. Moreover, these relationships are a great resource in time of need.

What do agnostics and atheists have to fall back on? For many of them, their beliefs are self-centered and their bonds are fragmented. It is not without consequence that celebrities are known for their narcissism and intellectuals are famous for their egotism.

Boundaries, the third B, are a critical element in determining our physical and mental health. Those who do not respect the need to use the brakes that God gave us are precisely the ones most likely to engage in risky behaviors; on this score, celebrities and intellectuals have no rival. By contrast, those who do not see constraint as a liability — cloistered nuns come quickly to mind — are among the healthiest and happiness people on earth.

Surveys show that the most generous Americans are the most religious, and that the least generous are the least religious. If you are looking to see charitableness in action, go to Utah or Alabama; don’t waste your time visiting New England. Does this mean that conservatives are much more generous than liberals? Yes, the data show exactly that.

Altruism is not easy to measure, but those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust have properly been chosen as exemplars. The evidence shows that it wasn’t the self-absorbed who put their lives on the line — they were the least likely — it was those who had a clear sense of right and wrong, and duty to others. Catholics were prominent among them.

Secular intellectuals are split on the idea of heaven: Some scoff at it altogether while others hold that heaven on earth can be achieved. Their efforts to establish utopia, however, have all ended in bloodshed.

Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual architect of the French Revolution, the quest for the “new man” — human beings who are not self-interested — has yielded nothing but genocide. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all visionaries who sought to create the “new man,” thus ushering in a utopian wonderland; similarly, Hitler thought he could reinstitute a new sense of community and rescue Western civilization.

All of these secular maniacs rejected original sin. That was their fatal flaw. They saw human nature as malleable, akin to putty; it could be shaped and reshaped at their will. So they thought. Heaven exists, but only in the afterlife.

All things considered, there really is a Catholic advantage. Exercising the Three B’s — beliefs, bonds, and boundaries — is the surest way to achieve the Three H’s of health, happiness, and heaven. But they cannot be “adopted.” That’s because the Three H’s are a residual, the natural byproduct of living the life of a faithful Catholic. To say it pays sweet dividends cannot be argued, even by agnostics and atheists.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ — Shameful Work of Abuse

This article by Bill Donohue was published by Newsmax on February 9, 2015

Betty Friedan’s classic, “The Feminist Mystique,” launched the feminist revolution of the 1960s. Women, she said, were too often controlled by men, left to live a sterile suburban life that amounted to a “comfortable concentration camp.” Fast forward to Valentine’s Day 2015. Millions of women will celebrate their liberation by going to see, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the movie based on the book by E.L. James. What they will be celebrating is a young woman’s total domination by a control freak.

The book and the movie are an attempt to take the kink out of kinky, i.e., to normalize sexual deviance. Paradoxically, those most drawn to the book are seeking to find the liberation that Friedan promised. But this time they are not interested in competing with men in the workforce; rather, they are seeking to submit themselves to what might be called Fifty Shades of Slavery. That’s a rough index of the many ways they can indulge their BDSM (bondage, dominance, and sadomasochism) fantasies.

A professional dominatrix in Los Angeles, Mistress Trinity, says she uses the book “in sessions as a torture device.” She is very serious. “Very bad slaves have to read the book aloud and act out scenes. One of my slaves pleaded with me to stop the pain, offering to receive 100 strokes of the cane if he could stop reading.”

Do most women attracted to this book aspire to being a slave? No, but it would be a big mistake to underestimate their interest in being dominated by a man. That there are as many males willing to assume the role of quasi-slavemaster is indisputable.

Fans of the book love Christian, the protagonist who gets Ana to submit to his will (her consent is a sham). He is the consummate manipulator. After she is beaten by him, he attempts to massage her emotions by instructing her to move on. “Don’t waste your energy on guilt, feelings of wrongdoing, etc.” Score one for Christian.

Ana gets assaulted over and over, but unlike many in real life who toy with BDSM, she recovers. Those who think I am exaggerating, consider what Cory Silverberg, an expert on the subject, says, “They’re a common sight in ER departments and something doctors and nurses expect.”

Doctors who have to deal with the embarrassing consequences of BDSM agree.
These practices are not limited to adults. A scientific study of BDSM found that colorectal foreign bodies have been extracted from the rectums of two-year olds. “Bottles, light bulbs . . . fruits or vegetables are just a few of the objects extracted from the colon or rectum. Other, more unusual items include old radio vacuum tubes, coat hangers, and enema kits filled with red wine instead of the standard enema fluid.”

A respected emergency room physician, who also practices BDSM, offers sage advice — beware of glass. “Glass toys seemingly have gained in popularity recently, but so has the dangers associated with them. . . . Glass toys should be avoided at all costs — no matter how tempting.”

It is debatable which is worse, the physical or the psychological damage incurred by BDSM. It is also debatable who else is attracted to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” besides white suburban mothers.

Dr. Judith Reisman, a psychologist who has written extensively on sexual deviance, agrees with the assessment of the book by one of her clinical psychiatrist associates. The book, they maintain, is about pedophilia.

Ana, the female who submits, is given the age of 21 but her “true emotional age is much-much younger.” She has had “no sexual experience whatsoever,” a clear turn-on to pedophiles. Also, she talks “like a girl.” They note that she “talks about cartwheels, and skipping, over and over again,” which is why they conclude that this “is the language and imagery of a girl.”

Even Mistress Trinity sees the girl in Ana. She calls her a “naive college student with an elementary school vocabulary.” Significantly, Sam Taylor Johnson, the filmmaker, describes Ana as a girl. He pointedly says that his goal was to “take this girl on a journey.”

When looked at from this perspective, it makes sense that the opening panel on the website of the book’s author features Christian saying to Ana, “I want to show you my playroom.”

So there may be more than just some innocent fantasies at work. “Fifty Shades of Slavery” aptly describes what else is in play.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

De Blasio Suffers From Leadership Problems

This article was originally published by Newsmax on December 9, 2014 by Bill Donohue

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s disastrous first year was not the result of mistakes — it was the result of his ideology. Mistakes can be rectified. Hard-core ideological convictions are rarely reversed, which is why things will get worse in 2015.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani inherited a mess made by Mayor David Dinkins. Eight years later New York rebounded. In his 12 years in office, Mayor Mike Bloomberg changed some of Giuliani’s policies, but he never tampered with the quality-of-life issues that his predecessor worked hard to achieve.

In one year, de Blasio has managed to undo the reforms of the past 20 years. “The bums are back.” That’s a common refrain on the street these days. Giuliani and Bloomberg tackled the issue of homelessness head-on, providing alternatives to all-night loitering. Now commuters going to work in the morning regularly find men sleeping in the corridors of Penn Station. Beggars have returned as well, hustling on the trains and sidewalks.

Under Giuliani, able-bodied adults on public assistance were required to work as a condition of welfare. But under de Blasio, workfare is being eliminated. Over the next two years, able-bodied welfare recipients will be allowed to go to school — they can go full time to college for a year — and enroll in training programs. But 60 percent of these people lack a high school diploma; most of them dropped out of school.

Under Bloomberg, failing public schools were shut down and replaced with smaller ones. Under de Blasio, failing public schools are being rewarded with more money. They will be given $150 million in additional resources over the next two years. In fact, lousy teachers will not be given the boot — they will be given more money for professional training. When it comes to schools that actually succeed, such as Catholic schools and charter schools in the inner city, de Blasio has no use for them.

He opposes school vouchers and wants to kill charter schools. Yet he says he is a friend of the poor. Under Giuliani and Bloomberg, the police were well respected and morale was good. Under de Blasio, the cops have been demonized and morale is in the toilet. By embracing Al Sharpton, he has poisoned race relations — by embracing the urban anarchists, he has promoted incivility. All of these decisions were well-thought through, a function of his extremist and polarizing ideas.

De Blasio’s refusal to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade inspired other politicians to do the same, sending a message to Irish Catholics that they had better get in line with parade-busting homosexuals. His promise to destroy the horse-and-carriage industry targets Irish and Latino Catholics, and is as unnecessary as his St. Patrick’s Day antics.

Most New Yorkers did not vote for de Blasio, or for any of the other mayoral candidates. Nonetheless, they should have known that a man who raised money for the Communists in Nicaragua, honeymooned in Communist Cuba — illegally — and sided with the Occupy Wall Street thugs, was a man destined to crush New York City. But the good news is that they are learning fast. I just hope it’s not too late — he has three more years to wreak havoc.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

Catholic Theologians Lack Self-Reflection on Race

This article was originally published by Newsmax on December 9, 2014

by Bill Donohue

A remarkable document, “Statement of Catholic Theologians on Racial Justice,” released Dec. 8, is a clear window into the thinking of those who are teaching on Catholic campuses. It is not a pretty picture. Signed by hundreds of professors, the statement evinces a wholesale disregard for the truth. Just as bad, the phony hand-wringing is nauseating.

What prompted this moralistic outburst are the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. To make sure the reader gets the point they want to make, the theologians write about the killings of “Black” persons by “White policeman”; the capitalized letters are done for racial effect. What angers the professors are “the failures of the grand jury process to indict some of the police officers involved” — and other instances of alleged racial injustice.

They need to be specific. Where is the evidence that the grand jury failed in either the Brown or the Garner case? After all, the scholars believe that the two cops involved, Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, should have been indicted, so either the classroom experts have evidence that the grand jury didn’t hear or they simply didn’t like the decision.

Here are some inconvenient facts:

Ten minutes before the encounter between Wilson and Brown, Wilson learned of an emergency call about a two-year old who was having trouble breathing. EMS was supposed to respond but the police officer volunteered to go because he could get there sooner. The child he attended to was African-American.
Ten minutes before they met, Brown was robbing a store, flying high on drugs. On his way back from the emergency call, Wilson spotted Brown walking in the middle of the street and told him to use the sidewalk. This provoked Brown who then assaulted Wilson. Brown fled, Wilson pursued him, and then the 6-foot-four, 292 pound Brown lunged at the cop with his head down. Wilson saw him put his hand on his waistband and fired.
Brown was never shot in the back and all the forensic evidence supported Wilson’s account, as did many witnesses. There were three blacks on the 12-member grand jury.
The chief officer on the scene of the Garner confrontation was a black female cop, though few media outlets have said so. She supervised Pantaleo and the other police officers, and at no time did she order them to stop doing what they were doing. Garner, like Brown, resisted arrest, and given his size—he was 6-foot-3 and weighed 350 pounds—he was not easy to take down.
For nine weeks, the grand jury heard from 50 witnesses and assessed 60 pieces of evidence. There were nine non-whites on the 23-member panel of jurors. In order to indict Pantaleo, they had to conclude that he knew there was a substantial risk that Garner would have died if he pursued him.

Do the Catholic theologians have evidence that these mixed-race jurors got it wrong? Do they think the jurors are just as racist as the cops? I am a sociologist who has taught Criminology. I also worked in a high-crime neighborhood with blacks and Hispanics. From my research and experience, most people of color are good, law-abiding persons, but they are plagued by a minority of young men who threaten their security. It is the innocent who deserve our empathy — not the thugs who prey on them.

The theologians got one thing right. They should examine themselves for their complicity in the sin of racism. There is much to ponder, but it is not racism against blacks they need to consider; rather, it is their racism and their classism against white police officers that should command their attention. One passing positive reference to the police doesn’t cut it.

Similarly, it is a cheap throwaway line to say, “We commit ourselves to placing our bodies and/or privileges on the line in visible, public solidarity with movements of protest to address the deep-seated racism of our nation.”

If they had any guts, they never would have given themselves an option. It’s time they took to the streets to see what the urban anarchists are really like.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

Cosby Spurned by Liberal Media

This article was originally published by Newsmax on November 26, 2014

by Bill Donohue

If Bill Cosby’s biggest problem is fending off all the serious allegations against him, his biggest blunder was his straight talk about young black men, beginning 10 years ago.

Liberals never forgave him, and now it is payback time.

In a remarkably frank article in today’s New York Times, David Carr recounts how those who interviewed Cosby knew of the accusations made against him, yet failed to ask about them; even Cosby’s biographer looked the other way.

Things began to change when Cosby became critical of the young black male lifestyle. “But that moralism,” Carr writes, “which put legs under his career as an author and a public figure, made Mr. Cosby a target.”

Carr credits a 2005 ABC News report on accusations against Cosby for starting the ball rolling. That was followed by a “Today” show piece and a damning story in Philadelphia magazine. I researched the timeline and found that Carr is correct.

The first major statement Cosby made about blacks who play to the stereotype about them came on May 17, 2004. Cosby spoke at Constitution Hall in Washington on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision barring segregation. Here is an excerpt of what Cosby said: “I can’t even talk the way these people talk. ‘Why you ain’t where you is, blah, blah.’ Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads!

“You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth! It’s time for you to not accept this language that these people are speaking which will take them nowhere. What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?”

In early July 2004, Cosby spoke before the Rainbow/Push Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund’s annual conference. He sounded the same theme, criticizing blacks for using profanity and invoking the N-word. “They think they’re hip. They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re also laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.” He implored young black men to “stop beating up your women because you can’t find a job, because you didn’t want to get an education and now you’re [earning] minimum wage.”

Ever since, the response to Cosby has never been the same. The irony is plain to see: according to today’s liberal values, his crime was not the drugging and predatory behavior he allegedly engaged in — it was his betrayal of liberal expectations.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

Catholic Schools Under Fire From Secularists

This article by Bill Donohue was originally published by Newsmax on November 19, 2014

In the past week, there have been several news stories and critical essays, both here and abroad, about a teacher who was fired from an Indiana Catholic school after church officials learned that she was undergoing in vitro fertilization; this is a procedure Pope Francis himself lambasted last Sunday.

In September, when two gay teachers at a Catholic school in St. Louis were asked to resign after they recently wed, news outlets also exploded. Ditto for similar recent stories in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Whether one agrees or not with Catholic rules governing teachers and students, until recently it was seen as no one’s business but those who support and run these schools. But no more. In fact, there is a determined effort by secularists to force Catholic schools to tailor their strictures to the wisdom of civil law.

What is particularly disturbing about this development is that it is occurring after the Supreme Court affirmed the doctrine of “ministerial exception” in 2012; the ruling insulates religious entities from most discrimination lawsuits brought by employees.

We decided to investigate whether activists and media outlets interested in policing Catholic schools are just as busy monitoring Muslim and Jewish schools (yeshivas). Our hunch was right: Catholics schools merit the selective scrutiny of militant secularists.

Schools for Muslims and Jews have very strict codes of conduct that teachers and students must observe. Even visitors are told what is expected of them. Here is an example of the rules these schools have adopted.

MUSLIM SCHOOLS

The American Youth Academy Faculty/Staff Handbook and Student/Parent Handbook are provided to school principals as models on the Islamic Schools League of America website.

The following excerpts are from the American Youth Academy’s Faculty/Staff Handbook Policies & Procedures:

Religious and Ethnic Tolerance
Members of AYA’s administration, faculty, staff, parents and/or students are not allowed to promote any religious beliefs and/or practices besides those that are accepted and/or taught by AYA while on AYA property, at AYA events or to AYA students and/or staff. Promotion refers to talking about or distributing information about these beliefs and/or on any published medium, including social networking sites.

Dismissing Students, Parents and/or Staff
AYA reserves the right to dismiss a student, parent and/or staff-member whose presence in the school is considered detrimental to the best interest of the student, of fellow students, or of the school in general.

AYA also reserves the right to terminate or not renew a student’s enrollment contract if the school concludes that the actions of a parent or guardian make a positive and constructive relationship impossible, or otherwise seriously interfere with the school’s accomplishment of its mission.

Faculty and staff are expected to:

Accept all the consequences of their actions, in the event that the undesirable action/behavior continues after they receive a letter from the principal/administrator. In that case, there will be full administrative meeting with the teacher/staff member, and a decision will be made to determine the appropriate consequence.
Be suspended for 1-3 days without pay, if they continue to refuse to abide by the rules and policies.
Be dismissed from the school.

Excerpts from the American Youth Academy’s Student-Parent-Handbook

Uniform & Dress Code
The following are not allowed at any time:
Open-toed shoes; jeans; make-up (including kohl, clear nail polish, lip gloss, etc.)
White Hijab Gr. 5
Hijab for Prayer Gr. 3 & 4
Gr. 6-12 Girls: Navy Blue Abaya or Two-Piece Outfit To be purchased at AYA
White or Gray Plain Hijab

School Visitor Dress Code
Out of respect for the school’s dress code/uniform policy and the fact that the school is in such close proximity to the Masjid, school visitors are asked to dress modestly, even Islamically, if possible. For female visitors, this means that clothing should be loose and should not be revealing. A head covering is recommended for Muslim visitors.

Discipline Policy
Reverence for Allah, repentance (Taubah), respect, justice and patience. Reverence and love for Allah will be the guiding principle in correcting and preventing inappropriate behavior. Students will be given opportunities to repent after misbehaving.

Level 2 Behavior & Consequences
Inappropriate Intermingling

Level 3 Behavior & Consequences
A student charged with a Level 3 violation will be subject to an open suspension of up to 10 days and a recommendation for expulsion to the school board and/or legal action.

Immodest Behavior or Physical Contact
Committing acts that are sexual in nature and fall outside the Islamic teaching on this matter including vulgar, lewd, or promiscuous conduct both on-campus or at any school-sponsored activities.

Formal apology required

JEWISH SCHOOLS

The following excerpts are from the Manhattan Day School/Yeshiva Ohr Torah’s School Handbook:

Halachic Standards
Our school formulates reasonable and appropriate policies based on Halachic standards. These include dress code, kashrut, and the wearing of Kippah and Tzitzit. It affects other areas as well, such as limiting solo female singing to third grade and below.

Food, parties, and classroom celebrations
Food brought in to the school must have proper rabbinical endorsement. Birthday parties are not celebrated in class beyond the kindergarten level.

Safety
Baseball and other types of cards or collectibles may not be brought to school. Expensive jewelry should not be brought to school.

Visits to School
When visiting the school for celebrations, conferences, or for any other reason, please observe the same rules which we ask our faculty and students to follow regarding mode of dress, or bringing food into the building. Male visitors must wear a kippah. Women are requested to dress appropriately. Please do not visit any classroom above kindergarten.

We searched in vain for instances where these strictures elicited a strong critical response from those who do not belong to Islam or Judaism. It proves the point we are making: It is not the content of the rules that Catholic schools adopt that triggers such a strong response — it is an animus against Catholicism.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

Church Squeezed on Gay Marriage

This article was originally published by Newsmax on October 24, 2014.

by Bill Donohue

The collision course between gay rights and religious rights picked up speed this week when President Obama defended gay marriage as a constitutional right.

Never before has any president even come close to staking out such a remarkable position.

It wasn’t too long ago that Obama was arguing against homosexual marriage on the basis of his religious convictions. In 2004, he said that “marriage, in the minds of a lot of voters, has a religious connotation.”

In 2008, he emphasized that he was one of those voters, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Even after Obama could no longer find God in the mix — he endorsed gay marriage in 2012 — he still defended the right of religious institutions to “define and consecrate marriage.” But now that he has discovered a right to gay marriage in the U.S. Constitution — one that clearly escaped the Framers, as well as jurisprudential experts throughout the nation’s history — he has teed up the ultimate collision, the secured First Amendment to religious liberty versus the alleged constitutional right of two men to marry.

For years we have been told by the promoters of gay marriage that those who have religious objections need not worry. In 2012, when Denmark legalized homosexual marriage, churches were forced to perform same-sex weddings. This did not deter Emily Bazelon at Slate from saying that there is “not a chance” that churches in the U.S. would be “forced to perform gay weddings.” She even called such predictions “the scare tactic conservative groups use to frighten voters.” She shouted, “We are not Denmark!”

Bazelon’s reasoning — “We have a deep-rooted, constitutional division between church and state and an equally deep-rooted, constitutional protection of freedom of religion”— is now questioned by our president.

By elevating gay marriage to a constitutional right, he seeks to at least challenge, if not eviscerate, the rights she so confidently asserts.

Earlier this year, I was challenged by Chris Cuomo on CNN about this subject. I argued that “we’re going into the churches” with this issue. He replied, “But we’re not going there. Nobody is saying that a religious organization has to perform gay marriages. Nobody. Nobody.”

Just this week, along came somebody.

In a small town outside Boise, Idaho two ordained ministers were sued for refusing to perform a gay wedding. If convicted, they face going to prison for three years and stiff fines.

In 1996, Andrew Sullivan, a strong advocate of gay marriage, told us that “no one is seeking to force any church to change any doctrine in any way.” Times have changed.

Today, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) the nation’s most influential gay lobbying organization, and many catholic dissident groups, are doing just that. HRC is now monitoring and rating bishops on how they fare on this subject, seeking to intimidate what they call “The Best of the Worst Catholic Bishops Across the Country.”

The gay activist playbook always leaves the big issues until last, which is why attempts to force the churches to perform gay weddings are uncommon for the moment.

Not so with lesser issues.

Adoption, foster care services, social service agencies, school personnel policies, government contracts and grants, clubs on college campuses — anywhere Christian-operated entities touch on gay rights — there are attempts to whip religious institutions into line. Quite frankly, when it comes to the autonomy of Christian institutions to decide their doctrinal prerogatives, gay rights leaders and activist judges show nothing but contempt.

Obama’s decision to cast gay marriage as a constitutional right should send a signal to religious conservatives. Nothing short of a constitutional amendment affirming marriage as the union between a man and a woman can protect religious institutions from the heavy hand of government.

Those who say this issue is lost are ignoring how we got to this point.

Were it not for unelected judges overturning the express will of the people — in state after state — attempts to subvert marriage, properly understood, would not have succeeded.

We need to return power to the people, the one expression of power that those who previously championed this slogan literally fear today.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.

Why Liberals Are Selfish

This article was originally published by Newsmax on October 8, 2014

by Bill Donohue

Celebrity superstar Lena Dunham spent the summer on a book tour that employed a host of comedians, musicians, and artists as part of the warm-up acts for her gig. She makes $6 million a year, and pulled in over $300,000 for her summer tour. Yet she never paid her staff a penny, keeping all the loot for herself. When she was exposed as a fraud, she lied: “As an artist raised by artists, no one believes more than I do that creators should be fairly compensated for their time, their labor, and their talents.”

Mario Batali is known as Mr. Liberal in New York City. He also rips off the poor. Two years ago, he and his partner agreed to pony up $5.25 million to settle their cash-skimming schemes at eight restaurants. They took 4 to 5 percent of each shift’s wine and drink sales from the workers’ tip pool, took an unlawful “tip credit” that pushed pay below minimum wage, and failed to pay extra for shifts lasting more than 10 hours.

Dunham and Batali are not an anomaly. The Chronicle of Philanthropy tracks charitable giving, and the results of its latest study, released this week, show that liberals across the nation are selfish, giving less to the poor than conservatives. This is nothing new but the figures are nonetheless impressive.

The four top cities in terms of income are also hotbeds of liberalism: Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Each posted a decline from 2006 to 2012 in how much residents gave as a percentage of their income to charity.

Adjusting for income, the most generous 10 cities are, from the top down: Salt Lake City, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, Dallas-Fort Worth, Charlotte, and Virginia Beach. The least generous are, from the bottom up: Hartford, Providence, San Jose, Boston, Buffalo-Niagara Falls, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

Notice that most of the most generous states are known for their conservative values, and most of the least generous are known for their liberal values. The breakdown politically is similar. Of the top 10 most generous states, all 10 voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Of the bottom 10 least generous states, all but one voted for Barack Obama.

No one disputes that liberals rhetorically champion the cause of the poor more than conservatives — it is one of their most defining characteristics — so why is it that they are the most miserly in parting with their money to help the poor?

We know from other studies that those who are the most religious give way more of their adjusted income to the poor than those who are not observant. Mormons and Baptists, in particular, are known for their generosity, but not those who live in secular college towns. Still, there is more than religion in play.

Liberals believe that the government should help the poor, not them, personally. But picking another man’s pocket to assist the needy isn’t charity — it’s redistribution. As Mother Teresa taught us, charity, if it is real, must cost us. It costs nothing to take from Peter to pay Paul.

In other words, the data provide no rational explanation why liberals should be able to claim the moral high ground in the war on poverty. It is they who are the selfish ones.

Dr. William Donohue is the president of and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. The publisher of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst, Bill 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. The author of five books, two on the ACLU, and the winner of several teaching awards and many awards from the Catholic community, Donohue has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows speaking on civil liberties and social issues. Read more reports from Bill Donohue — Click Here Now.