Bill Donohue

It’s settled. Those who denied that the vulgar show performed at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics was not about the Last Supper have been proven wrong. Referring to the bigoted artist, Thomas Jolly, a spokesperson for the Olympics said the following in a statement to the New York Post: “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting.”

So much for the nonsense that this anti-Catholic stunt—which featured a mostly naked man and drag queens—was a celebration of the Greek god, Dionysus.

Every honest person knows that this obscene portrayal was done to assault Christian sensibilities. Yet many denied the obvious. Here are some who did.

• Boston French Consulate: “The ceremony was designed to celebrate the unity of the Olympic spirit.” They accepted Jolly’s lying response, saying that “the performance in question was inspired by the image of a pagan feast,” one that paid homage to Dionysus, “the Greek god of festivities and wine.”
• The official account for the Olympics on X posted “The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.”
• In an interview with BFM, Thomas Jolly said, “The idea was to do a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus.” He added, “You’ll never find in my work any desire to mock or denigrate anyone. I wanted a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.”
• Phillippe Katerine, the performer who dressed as the semi-naked blue man in the Olympic scene, said that the performance “was mostly a misunderstanding. Because when it comes down to it, it wasn’t about representing ‘the Last Supper’ at all.”
• Barbara Butch, the DJ at the center of the skit, wrote in a now inaccessible Instagram post that she “was the Greek God of the Sun, Apollo, and referenced Jan van Bijlert’s painting ‘The Feast of the Gods,’ which is displayed in a French art museum.”
• Snopes “fact checker” Jack Izzo writes, “So at the end of the segment, when the top of a large serving platter rose to reveal a blue man (French singer Phillippe Katerine) wrapped in grapevines, Jolly was not referencing Jesus and ‘The Last Supper,’ but rather Dionysus, the Greek God of wine and festivity.”
• Writing for MSNBC, Anthea Butler commented, “The moral panic over a scene of drag queens feasting at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics set off a firestorm of outrage from religious conservatives and politicians who believed the scene was a mockery of the Last Supper. Except it wasn’t about the Last Supper at all.”
• Sally Jenkins writes in the Washington Post, “That drag queen sequence was meant to refer, like Delville, to Greek pagan celebrations — not, as some Christian leaders insist, to mock Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper.'”
• Louise Marshall, an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and an expert in Renaissance Art, is quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Frankly, when I looked at the clips, ‘The Last Supper’ isn’t necessarily what springs to mind. It seems very lighthearted and funny and witty and very inclusive.”
• “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said on the July 29 show that “The guy that put it all together said it was from ‘The Feast of the Gods,’ which is a 17th Century Dutch painting of the Greek Olympian gods, you know, the Olympian gods because it’s the Olympics.” She further stated “There are too many people in the picture for it to be the 12 disciples and then the seven or eight other people in the picture.”
• Dutch art historian Walther Schoonenberg posted on X that “The tableau vivant or ‘living painting’ in the opening ceremony of Paris 2024 was of The Feast of the Gods, by Jan van Bijlert from 1635.”
• In an Instagram post, “Full House” actress Jodie Sweetin said, “The drag queens of the Olympics were re-creating the feast of Dionysus, not the last supper.” The post continued “And even if you thought it was a Christian reference — what’s the harm? Why is it a ‘parody’ and not a tribute? Can drag queens not be Christian too?”
• Donna Kelce, the mother of NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce, shared a Facebook post by user Jeff Rose that said, “The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics wasn’t a mock of the Last Supper. If you have any knowledge of the Greek origin of the Olympics and the French’s rich history of theater you would have gotten this. However, because of your veiled homophobia, some of you can’t discern factual information.”

All of these people are guilty of denying the truth. Worse, they seek to blame those who are offended for misrepresenting Jolly’s obscene and bigoted portrayal. What he did is hate speech, and attempts to justify it are as obscene as his stunt.

Bill Donohue

Vice President aspirant and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said this week that not only does abortion liberate women, “men are also more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for things like access to abortion care. Men are more free.”

Buttigieg, who contends that he is married to a man, is right about that. Abortion does in fact make men free. They are free from their fatherly duties, thus allowing them to prey on women—in the name of liberating them—while appearing to be on their side. It’s a dream come true.

In an article by Judith Blake in Science, published in 1971, two years before abortion was legalized in Roe v. Wade, she found that college-educated men were the strongest supporters of legal abortion. Indeed, little has changed since then.

When I taught a course on Family Relations at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, I asked my students, most of whom were nursing students, to explain why single men have always been the greatest champions of a woman’s “right to choose”? Is it because they have long been closet feminists? Or is there something else going on? The women knew exactly what was going on. Reckless men love abortion.

In a 2022 article published by Business Insider, it found that the majority of young men (and young women) were supportive of abortion rights but that older men (those over 50) were the least supportive. This makes sense. Reckless older men have less of a vested interest in abortion, but reckless younger men see it as freeing them from their responsibilities. It allows them to tell their pregnant girlfriend to find an abortion clinic and liberate themselves of their baby; ever obliging, she can even charge it to his credit card. It’s a win-win. For him.

Survey after survey shows that public support for abortion declines markedly the later into pregnancy a woman is; there is very little support for late-term abortions and partial-birth abortions. Buttigieg disagrees. His enthusiasm for abortion rights knows no limits.

On “The View,” Meghan McCain asked Buttigieg in 2020 “exactly [what] your line is” about when to draw the line on abortion. He said “it shouldn’t be up to a government official to draw the line. It should be up to the woman who’s confronted.”

McCain pressed him, asking if he was okay with infanticide. His answer was disingenuous. “Does anybody seriously think that’s what these cases are about?” She responded, “I think that people care about that, yes.”

Similarly, the year before, Chris Wallace on “Fox News,” said to Buttigieg, “So just to be clear. You’re saying that you would be okay with a woman well into her third trimester deciding to abort her pregnancy?” To which he said, “Look, these hypotethicals are usually set up in order to provoke a strong emotional….” Wallace retorted, “It’s not hypothetical. There are 6,000 women a year who get abortions in the third trimester.” He answered, “That’s right, representing less than one percent of cases.”

In other words, Buttigieg disagrees with almost everyone. He is in the tiny minority who believe abortion should be legal in virtually every instance, regardless of how late into pregnancy it is. He can’t even condemn infanticide. This explains why he is opposed to legislation that makes it illegal to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion. It doesn’t get more radical than this.

Notice, too, that when Wallace said that 6,000 women a year get an abortion in the third trimester that Buttigieg erased their humanity by citing a statistic. That’s the way extremists think: they don’t see the faces of women or their unborn babies—they dissolve them to a stat.

Buttigieg does not want to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” His idea of male and female liberation is to make it as frequent as can be. He is way out there.

Contact Buttigieg’s chief of staff, Mohsin Syed: mohsin.syed@dot.gov

Bill in the News (Beyond These Stone Walls): January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom. READ MORE HERE

Bill Donohue

Thomas Jolly, the Artistic Director of the Olympic ceremonies, insulted Christians all over the world by offering an obscene portrayal of the Last Supper during the opening ceremonies. He is scheduled to do the closing ceremony. He should not be allowed to do so.

Yesterday, I wrote to Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, asking him to launch an investigation of French government officials who may have been complicit in this vile attack on Christian sensibilities. There is good reason to believe that they were. Today we are asking him and others to do what they can to stop Jolly from doing the closing ceremony.

We are also contacting the fifteen major sponsors of the Olympics; leading American political figures; and the U.S. Olympic Committee. We are asking that they convey to Bach their request that someone other than Jolly be permitted to conduct the closing ceremony. Surely there are competent artists who can be asked to do this, men and women whose idea of artistic expression does not include hate speech.

Please contact as many of these people and organizations that you can. Click here for the names and email addresses.

Bill in the News (The Dom Giordano Program): Dom welcomes Catholic League President Bill Donohue back onto the Dom Giordano Program to discuss the vulgar and blasphemous opening ceremony performance at the Olympics in Paris, which included a mockery of Christianity by drag queens portraying The Last Supper. Donohue, author of the recently released Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis, explains how this is just another example of secular militants expressing their desire to remove Christianity and religion from society, telling of a letter he’s drafted to send to the International Olympic Committee. To listen, click here.

This letter was sent today to the president of the International Olympic Committee. We will announce our next step addressing this issue tomorrow. Please email your concerns to: media@paris2024.org

                                                                                         July 29, 2024

Mr. Thomas Bach
President
International Olympic Committee
Maison Olympique
1007 Lausanne
Switzerland

Dear Mr. Bach:

As president of the largest Catholic civil rights organization in the United States, I am imploring you to conduct an investigation into the obscene antics that marked the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics. There is reason to believe senior members of the French government knew what Thomas Jolly was planning to do and did nothing to stop it. They may even have given their blessings to this stunt.

French president Emmanuel Macron was not kept in the dark. He learned that Jolly was planning a “great story of emancipation and freedom.” More important, it was reported by the New York Times that Macron had “a keen interest in the show” and met with Jolly “regularly.” It is hard to believe they didn’t discuss the show’s content.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo also had strong interest in the show; she, too, met with Jolly regularly. According to the Times, she said his production would be “playful, with a message of the city’s ‘openness to the world and the pleasure of diversity.’” It is hardly a big leap to conclude that Jolly disclosed to her his “playful” skit, one that would celebrate the “pleasure of diversity.”

Tony Estanguet, the President of Paris 2024, appointed Jolly to be Artistic Director of the Olympic ceremonies. In his statement in 2022 heralding his choice, he bragged how Jolly’s “extraordinary shows are proof that he knows how to break norms and take them to the next level.”

How revealing. Are we to believe that what Estanguet had in mind was a mockery of Islam?

The Associated Press reported the week before the opening ceremony that Jolly remained “extremely tight-lipped about what would eventually transpire at the ceremony.” He admitted, “I’d be fired if I tell you anything.” Perhaps. Had he disclosed what his show was about, he may have gotten fired because of the worldwide pushback from Christians. He certainly would not have lost favor with the French elite. Not one of the three that I mentioned has condemned Jolly’s bigotry.

You are in a position to get to the bottom of this. Jolly did not pull this off by himself. Those in positions of power need to be questioned about what they knew, when they knew it, and why they didn’t act to stop this vulgar assault on Christian sensibilities.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

William A. Donohue, Ph.D.

President

Bill Donohue

The vulgar parody of the Last Supper at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics in Paris was not simply the product of one very sick anti-Christian bigot. There is good reason to believe that senior French officials gave their blessings to this attack on Christianity. That is why we are asking the International Olympic Committee to launch an investigation.

Much of the attention so far has been on the antics of the man who created the offensive skit, Thomas Jolly. According to the New York Times, growing up his parents “nurtured his passions for dolls and classical dance.” They did a good job—he is a homosexual. Whether his parents nurtured his animus against Christianity, or whether it is an expression of his guilt, is unknown, but his Olympic stunt was not the solo exercise the media would have us believe.

Days before the opening ceremony, the Associated Press reported that Jolly was being “extremely tight-lipped about what would eventually transpire at the ceremony.” But everyone knew he was up to something. “‘I’ll be fired if I tell you anything,’ Jolly says with a ‘cheeky laugh.’” Now why in the world would Jolly say that? Was he planning to mock Muslims? Not on his life.

A French politician, Marion Maréchal, condemned what Jolly did, saying that he does not speak for France but was the product of a “left-wing minority.” Not so fast. There is reason to believe France’s leaders were complicit.

President Emmanuel Macron was not kept in the dark. He learned that Jolly was planning a “great story of emancipation and freedom.” More important, it was reported by the New York Times that Macron had “a keen interest in the show” and met with Jolly “regularly.” It is hard to believe they didn’t discuss the show’s content.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo also had strong interest in the show; she, too, met with Jolly regularly. According to the Times, she said his production would be “playful, with a message of the city’s ‘openness to the world and the pleasure of diversity.’” Now why in the world would she say that? What kind of “playful” skit would someone like Jolly craft that would celebrate the “pleasure of diversity”?

Tony Estanguet is President of Paris 2024; he is currently being investigated for financial improprieties. He is the one who appointed Jolly to be Artistic Director of the Olympic ceremonies. In his statement in 2022 heralding his choice, he bragged how Jolly’s “extraordinary shows are proof that he knows how to break norms and take them to the next level.” Now why in the world would he say that? Does he think Jolly was going to break Islamic norms?

The apologies that have been offered for this obscene act are totally insincere. Indeed, they are liars.

Paris 2024 spokesperson, Anne Descamps, said, “Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.” It’s true they never intended to disrespect the Amish. The opening ceremony, she said, “tried to celebrate community tolerance.” Another lie.

Jolly knew exactly what he was doing—his overriding goal was to trash Christianity. Mission accomplished. Now he wants us to believe that “My wish isn’t to be subversive, not to mock or to shock. Most of all, I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.” No real man speaks this way. Why not have the guts to tell the truth?

I am writing to International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach about this incident. He needs to investigate the extent to which French officials were complicit in this assault on Christian sensibilities.

Last November, Bach welcomed the adoption by the 78^th Session of the United Nations General Assembly of a resolution about the observance of the Olympic Games. In his address to the General Assembly, he said that sport “can only unite the entire world in peaceful competition if we are not torn apart by political, religious, cultural or other interests and differences. Therefore, we must be politically neutral and stand against any kind of discrimination.”

It is beyond debate that Jolly’s opening stunt mocking the Last Supper was done to tear apart the religious and cultural interests of Christians, thus violating the precepts Bach outlined. Those who are responsible for this travesty need to be exposed and dealt with accordingly.

Contact: media@paris2024.org

Bill in the News (TrendingPolitics): Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, came out on Thursday and stated that he believes the only reason Vice President Kamala Harris got the Democratic Party presidential nomination in light of President Joe Biden leaving the race is due to being a black woman, which he said makes her a total DEI hire. READ MORE HERE

Bill in the News (Breitbart): Catholic League president Bill Donohue pointed out Thursday that Kamala Harris got the nod as President Joe Biden’s VP because she was a black woman, which is the very definition of a DEI hire.

Dr. Donohue, who holds a PhD in sociology from NYU, notes it is disingenuous to pretend Harris was named to the post because of merit, since Joe Biden himself “eliminated 94 percent of the population” from consideration by limiting the pool to African American women. READ MORE HERE

Bill Donohue

Is diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) a good thing or a bad thing? We have been told by its supporters that it is a good thing, but now that it is being used against Kamala Harris, it is now a bad thing.

MSNBC commentator Joy Reid says, “DEI is actually a good thing,” but hastens to add that it is racist to say that Harris is a DEI hire. Wouldn’t that suggest that DEI is itself racist? By contrast, no one would say that merit is a good thing, but it is racist to say that those hired on this basis are racists.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn H. Reynolds notes that “Diversity is code for specified hiring and promotion quotas based on race, gender, sexuality and similar factors. In practice, it boils down to discrimination.” Everyone knows this is true, yet there is pushback against those who say Harris is a DEI hire. There shouldn’t be.

When he was running for president four years ago, Joe Biden said in March 2020 that he was going to pick a woman for his vice president if he were to win the nomination. That’s a quota—it automatically eliminates roughly half the adult population from consideration because of their sex. In July, when he was the presumptive nominee, he said he was considering four black women to be his running mate. Now 94 percent of the population was eliminated from consideration.

In other words, Harris was chosen because she is a black woman. So why are DEI fans upset when this is pointed out? Susan Rice, the former UN ambassador, said it was “incredibly insulting” to say Harris is a “DEI hire.” Similarly, Maxwell Frost, a Democratic congressman, said, “Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word.”

Do these people really think Harris was chosen because she was the best candidate? New York State Attorney General Letitia James seems to think so. She called her “an overachiever.” She did not say what she has achieved. We do know that she came from a privileged background yet failed her first bar exam. That put her in a special category: more than 72 percent of those who took it passed.

It didn’t matter in the end. Even though she flunked the test, she was hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. How many white people are hired for such a job after they fail the bar?

Before the Supreme Court struck down quotas, DEI was called affirmative action. Michelle Obama knows all about this. She was 32nd in her high school class. It didn’t matter in the end. She was admitted to Princeton University. One of her classmates finished 7th but she was rejected by all of the Ivy League schools she applied to. She was white.

If a baseball player who broke a major league record were to defend taking performance-enhancing drugs, but took umbrage at those who mocked his achievement, we would laugh him off the stage. Ditto for the conflicted champions of DEI. It’s too late to spin it.