On January 23, Bill Donohue wrote a letter to all Montana lawmakers protesting a bill that would vitiate the seal of the confessional. On January 29, the bill was tabled by the legislators. A more serious case then emerged in Washington. Below is an excerpt of Donohue’s letter to the state’s lawmakers.

The issue of the sexual abuse of minors is a serious one, and efforts to combat it are meritorious. But good intentions are not enough. Public policy must also be judged on what it yields. If it does not correct the problem, and indeed creates new ones, then it is flawed. This is true of Senate Bill 5375 and House Bill 1211.

These bills would remove the clergy exemption from reporting information about child abuse learned in the confessional. Not only would they do nothing to curtail child abuse, they would eviscerate the priest-penitent privilege.

State encroachment on religious liberty is proscribed by the First Amendment. Accordingly, it must be weighed against the right of the state to protect children from abuse. Balancing these vital interests can be done. Indeed, it was done last year when a compromise was proposed: The priest-penitent privilege would remain, but if the priest learned that a child was in imminent danger, he had to contact the authorities. This bill passed in the Senate but languished in the House. Now the Senate is going along with the House version.

This begs a series of questions.

What broke? Where is the evidence that the compromised bill is inadequate? For that matter, where is the evidence that child molesters—in any state—report their crimes to priests in the confessional? We have been studying this issue for decades but we can’t name a single instance where this has happened. If any lawmaker has evidence to the contrary, you have an obligation to make it public. If not, what exactly are you trying to do?

Similarly, does any lawmaker really think that if priests have to choose between violating their vows and abiding by the strictures in this bill, they would choose the latter? If so, they need a reality check. A priest who breaks the seal of confession would be excommunicated from the Catholic Church. They would rather go to jail before doing so.

State Sen. Noel Frame says she is sympathetic to religious lawmakers who have a hard time dealing with this issue, but she also knows that “far too many children have been victims of abuse—the Legislature has a duty to act.” She’s right.

This begs another round of questions.

What exactly have Washington lawmakers done about child sexual abuse? As a sociologist who has written a book on this subject, I can tell you that the most likely persons to abuse a child are live-in boyfriends. Has anyone done anything about this? What about the sexual abuse of minors in the public schools? Now there is a rich subject.

In 2022, under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights studied all 50 states and found that in 2017-2018, only three states had more sexual assaults per 1,000 students than Washington. When it comes to rape or attempted rape per 1,000 students, only six states had a worse record.

Last year the Seattle Public Schools agreed to pay $16 million to a former student who said that the district failed to protect her from being sexually assaulted by two coaches. How could this possibly happen?

Now we have learned that House Democrats have introduced a new bill that would withhold notifying parents about the sexual assault of their child in school for up to 48 hours. In doing so, this bill directly overturns a parental rights bill that the voters previously approved. Worse, these same lawmakers have taken steps to permanently negate the will of the people. What’s going on? There seems to be more interest in defending the rights of assailants than there is the welfare of the child or the rights of their parents.

Those who are lobbying to promote the House and Senate bills include the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The former is a shell of what it once was, having been shown by the courts to be a total fraud. The latter is one of the most anti-Catholic atheist organizations in the nation. So these are the kinds of people some lawmakers are listening to?

There is time to reconsider this bill. Please do so.

Bill Donohue

Having authored a Ph.D. dissertation, two books, and a monograph on the ACLU, I am convinced that most of its board members and senior officials harbor a deep animus against religion. Nothing bothers them more than Christianity, especially Catholicism. This is much more than a phobia: religion is seen as a threat to liberty.

Two recent cases demonstrate this verity.

The ACLU and the American Humanist Association are bent out of shape because a West Virginia agency, the state Water Authority, has authorized a grant to a Catholic school, the College of St. Joseph the Worker, in nearby Steubenville, Ohio. The purpose of the loan is to enable the college, which specializes in developing “a solid foundation in the skilled trades,” to provide for services, such as training tradesmen, that are consistent with the mission of the state agency.

The issue is whether this violates the West Virginia Constitution.

The ACLU says it does, saying that “to force the taxpayers of West Virginia to fund its [the college’s] mission is wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional.” Similarly, the American Humanist Association says that “no one should have to pay taxes to fund someone else’s religion.”

Case law makes it clear that religious institutions may receive public funds when the purpose is not to advance religion, but to provide for services that serve the public weal. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students who attended religious schools (in this instance they were Catholic schools) could receive public transportation without violating the Constitution. The high court ruled that the law had a “public purpose,” which was the safety of the students.

In the 1970s, the courts ruled that it was constitutional to provide religious schools with textbooks. Again, this served a public purpose. The courts, however, have been so inconsistent in their rulings in these matters that no wonder the ACLU exploits any opening it sees. For example, it is legal to give textbooks to Catholic schools but not maps. Incredulously, it was decided that the books serve the students but the maps serve the school. This led Daniel Patrick Moynihan to quip, “What about an atlas—a book of maps?”

The bottom line is: The West Virginia Water Authority is not funding religious instruction at the College of St. Joseph the Worker—it is funding secular services that have a public purpose. It has every right to do so.

In an even more bizarre case, the ACLU of Massachusetts is challenging a decision made by the mayor of Quincy to erect two statues of Catholic saints outside the Quincy Public Safety Building. Mayor Thomas Koch chose St. Florian and St. Michael the Archangel; they are the patron saints of firefighters and police officers, respectively. The ACLU says the two ten-foot-tall bronze statues violates separation of church and state.

The ACLU is well aware that religious statues adorn many buildings in the nation’s capital, including the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Memorial and other public buildings. Even in Massachusetts, the Boston Public Library features the outstanding work of John Singer Sargent: his religious murals, including  “Madonna of Sorrows,” are classic. At the State House there are statues and paintings of famous Christians, clergy and laity alike.

But none of this is enough to allay the fears of the ACLU. In fact, its objections to the statues make my case: religion drives the ACLU crazy.

In the ACLU’s letter to Mayor Koch and the Quincy City Council, it said that “we note that the contemplated statue of Saint Michael is not only troubling…it depicts a figure stepping on the neck of a demon. Such violent imagery is particularly abhorrent in light of the murder of George Floyd and other acts of police brutality throughout the country.”

In other words, the revered saint who battled Satan and who is known as the guardian prince of Israel—he stood ready to defend God’s chosen people—reminds the ACLU of a serial violent criminal who resisted arrest and was subdued by the cops; he had four times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his system. Maybe if Saint Michael had been depicted as engaging in dialogue with the Devil, instead of crushing his head, the ACLU would have applauded.

The ACLU’s idea of religious liberty is to allow Black Muslims in prison to huddle together “in prayer,” outside the purview of guards, so they can plan an insurrection. But when it comes to Christian iconography on public buildings, its tolerance for religious liberty runs out.

Furthermore, its idea of separation of church and state is so extreme that it not only opposes public funds to a Catholic entity that services a public  need, it has gone to court seeking to strip the Catholic Church of its tax exempt status.

It boils down to this. The Founders believed religious liberty was integral to the makings of a free society; the ACLU believes it impedes it.

Bill in the News (First Things): …. At the same time, Donohue is fully aware of the damage that the Charter’s implementation has wrought on Catholic priests in the United States: “The average detainee in Guantanamo Bay has more rights than the average accused priest in America does today.” READ MORE HERE

Bill Donohue

 [Note: We run this article each year in honor of St. Patrick]

The heroics of St. Patrick are not appreciated as much as they should be. He is the first person in history to publicly condemn slavery, and one of the first leaders to champion the cause of equal rights.

There is much to celebrate on March 17. Fortunately, his writings, though slim, are eye-opening accounts of his life: Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus and Confession reveal much about the man. Along with other sources, they paint a picture of his saintliness.

Patrick was born in Britain in the 4th century to wealthy parents. It is likely that he was baptized, though growing up he did not share his family’s faith. He was an atheist.

When he was 15, he committed what he said was a grave sin, never saying exactly what it was; it appears it was a sexual encounter with a young girl. No matter, it would haunt him throughout his life.

At age 15 or 16 (the accounts vary), Patrick was kidnapped and enslaved by Irish barbarians. They had come to plunder his family’s estate, and took him away in chains to Ireland. While a slave, he converted to Christianity, praying incessantly at all hours of the day. After six years, he escaped, and made his way back home.

His family thought he was dead, and with good reason: no one taken by Irish raiders had managed to escape and return. St. Patrick biographer Philip Freeman describes how his family received him, stating “it was as if a ghost had returned from the dead.”

After he returned home, he had a vision while sleeping. He felt called to return to Ireland. This seemed bizarre: this is where he was brutalized as a slave. But he knew what Jesus had commanded us to do, “Love thy enemy.” He was convinced that God was calling him to become a missionary to Ireland. So he acted on it, despite the reservations of family and friends.

Patrick became a priest, practiced celibacy, and was eventually named a bishop. Contrary to what many believe, he did not introduce Christianity to Ireland, nor was he Ireland’s first bishop. But he did more to bring the
Gospel to Ireland than anyone, converting legions of pagans, especially in the northern parts of the island.

His missionary work in Ireland has been duly noted, but his strong defense of human rights has not been given its due.

No public person before him had denounced slavery, widespread though it was. Jesus was silent on the subject, Aristotle thought it was a natural way of life, and neither master nor slave saw anything fundamentally wrong with it. Patrick did.

Though he did not invoke natural law specifically, he was instinctively drawn to it. He taught that all men were created equal in the eyes of God, and that the inherent dignity of everyone must be respected.

Patrick did more than preach—he lashed out at the British dictator, Coroticus, harshly rebuking him for his mistreatment of the Irish. In fact, Patrick found his Irish converts to be more civilized than Coroticus and his band of thugs.

Patrick was way ahead of his time in the pursuit of human rights. Not only were men of every social status entitled to equal rights, so were women. In his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, he scolds “the tyrant Coroticus—a man who has no respect for God or his priests.” More important, he made a startling plea: “They must also free Christian women and captives.” His reasoning showed the power of his faith when he said, “Remember, Christ died and was crucified for these people.”

He did not mince words. “So, Coroticus, you and your wicked servants, where do you think you will end up? You have treated baptized Christian women like prizes to be handed out, all for the sake of the here and now—this brief, fleeting world.”

What makes this all the more dramatic is the way the pagan world thought about women: the idea that women were equal to men was totally foreign to them. But the women understood what Patrick was saying, and gravitated to him in large numbers. The Christian tenet that all humans possess equal dignity had taken root.

Did the Irish save civilization, as Thomas Cahill maintains? Freeman thinks not—”it had never been lost.” But everyone agrees that had it not been for St. Patrick, and the monasteries that followed, much of what we know about the ancient world would not exist.

Indeed, it is difficult to fathom how classical Greek and Roman literature would have survived had it not been for the Irish monks who attracted students from many parts of Europe. They are responsible for preserving the great works of antiquity. And all of them are indebted to St. Patrick.

It is believed that he died on March 17, sometime during the second half of the fifth century. That is his feast day, the source of many celebrations in his honor. His impact extends beyond the Irish and the Catholic Church—human rights are a global issue—making him a very special person in world history.

Bill Donohue sent the following letter today to the parties noted.

March 14, 2025

Jelani Jefferson Exum
Dean, St. John’s Univ. School of Law
8000 Utopia Parkway
Jamaica, NY 11439

Dear Dean Jefferson Exum:

A recent incident was brought to my attention about the conduct of one of your law school students, Vishai Balani. He is alleged to have attacked Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, on X (since removed). On February 22, he said Dolan was “a bootlicking disgrace with your nose up Donald Trump’s ass.” He also used derogatory language to smear New York City Councilman Robert Holden and New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino. (See the enclosed.)

I have spent many years in higher education, and have written several books on civil liberties, so I am well aware that student speech is given wide protection. I am also aware that with liberties come responsibilities, and this is especially true of Catholic institutions of higher education.

St. John’s Law Mission Statement says the school strives to foster an “equitable” environment where “respect for the rights and dignity of every person” is maintained. The Student Code of Conduct proscribes  “verbal,” as well as “physical action,” saying they are “inconsistent with the Core Values of St. John’s University.”

Regarding the Core Values, the Code says that “Students are required to engage in responsible social conduct and to model good citizenship in any community. Students shall not engage in any conduct that reflects a failure to live up to the expectations of all St. John’s students.” It ends by being specific: “Any behavior (verbal, written or physical) that abuses, assails, intimidates, demeans, and/or victimizes.”

It seems plain that Vishai Balani has violated these norms. How you handle instances like this is not my business. But as president of the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization, it is my business to combat attacks on individual Catholics and the institutional Church. Accordingly, I am asking that you take this situation seriously.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
President

cc: Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York
Fr. Brian Shanley, O.P. president of St. John’s Univ.
Jack Flynn, Director of Student Conduct
Councilman Robert Holden
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino

Bill Donohue

On March 28, a Kansas-based group, the Satanic Grotto, is planning to hold a “Black Mass” on grounds surrounding the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. The event was originally scheduled to be held at the Statehouse, but Kansas Governor Laura Kelly succeeded in getting it moved outdoors.

She insists that she has “a duty to protect protesters’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression, regardless of how offensive or distasteful I might find the content to be.” Not so fast.

The Satanic Grotto has admitted that the purpose of the “Black Mass” is to engage in blasphemy targeted at Catholics. On Facebook, it says, “We will be performing rites to the Black Mass and indulging in sacrilegious blaspheme [sic]. God will fall and Kansas will be embraced by the black flame of Lucifer.”

While it is true that blasphemy is generally seen as protected speech under the First Amendment, in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), Chief Justice Warren Burger explicitly said that the Constitution “affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility to all (my italics).”

Here’s where the “Black Mass” gets problematic.

Every Christmas season, the Catholic League receives a permit from the New York City Parks Department to display a nativity scene on public property. But not just any public property: we are allowed to do so because it is erected in Central Park. Central Park is considered a public forum, a place where freedom of expression carries no appearance of government endorsement.

Importantly, we do not apply for a right to display our crèche near City Hall, because to do so might give a reasonable person the impression that it has the tacit endorsement of government. This is the way the First Amendment is interpreted today.

Ergo, for the government of Kansas to allow an event on the grounds of the statehouse—the express purpose of which is to insult Catholics—might give the impression that it is endorsing this sacrilege. It would  therefore be party to the kind of “hostility” to religion that the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional.

The most practical way to handle this is to revoke the permit and allow the Satanic Grotto to reapply, choosing a public forum, not government property.

We are contacting the governor and all state lawmakers.

Contact the governor’s chief of staff, Will Lawrence: [email protected]   

Bill Donohue

They really don’t like Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post (WaPO). Not only did the opinion editor, David Shipley, resign, their longtime columnist Ruth Marcus called it quits; so did other staffers. Moreover, many of those who are sticking around are not happy campers. In fact, news stories report that the paper’s employees were “shocked and stunned.”

The hysterical response stems from the announcement Bezos recently made. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

Why would this set workers off? There are three possible reasons: (a) they don’t like being told what to write about, (b) they don’t like personal liberties, and (c) they don’t like free markets. In fairness, the reason why Marcus resigned was more personal—WaPO refused to publish an editorial she wrote criticizing Bezos for making the aforementioned changes.

Regarding the first reason, it is understandable that reporters and other staffers would object to anything that might compromise their independence. But how independent were they before? If a reporter, or someone on the editorial staff, were pro-life, how secure would that person be in expressing his independence from his colleagues?

Why would staffers object to free markets? After all, they make their living from a market economy. But maybe that doesn’t matter. It is hardly a secret that WaPO is home to liberal and left-wing reporters, and for them, socialism is not a dirty word. Capitalism is. This is a reflection of what they learned in school.

New York Post columnist John Stossel recently noted that a prominent TikTok star, Madeline Pendleton, told her considerably large audience that “Socialism is working better than capitalism 93% of the time.” Forget Stossel’s astute rebuttal, what matters is that a lot of young people, in particular, believe this to be true.

Similarly, Touro University professor Yuriy V. Karpov observes that half of young voters are pro-socialist. “According to a recent survey, 49.6 percent of young American voters would prefer to live in a socialist country.” But for some reason, none want to move to Venezuela.

In short, the hard left has taken command of a large portion of our nation’s youth. While staffers at WaPO may not be quite as radical as these young people, many are closer to them than they are to the Young Republicans. After all, the staffers were also trained by those on the left.

Karpov reports that a survey of faculty at elite American universities found that 91 percent identify as liberal. Importantly, he notes that “liberal” means people like Angela Davis. He accurately describes her as “a radical communist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.”

What about personal liberties? Why would staffers object to that? They don’t when it comes to drugs and abortion. But when it comes to free speech, that is problematic. Even though they make their living by exercising their right to free speech, recent studies show that liberals are the least supportive of this First Amendment right.

Two years ago, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released its annual survey on the status of free speech on campus. In a survey of almost forty-five thousand college students from 201 colleges, it found that liberals were the most intolerant of free speech; conservatives were much more tolerant.

Bezos is trying to move the newspaper away from being a forum for liberal-left thinking. He has no nefarious agenda: he simply wants employees to start showing an appreciation for the liberties that allow for a free society. That this is controversial shows how deeply ideological WaPO has become.

Bill Donohue

As we approach the 10th anniversary of homosexuals marching under their own banner in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, it behooves us to understand how this happened.

To begin with, gays were never banned from marching. As I said on radio and TV in New York for two decades, no one ever asked anyone what they did in bed and with whom. Gays were banned from marching under their own banner, and that is because to do so would deflect from what the day is all about—honoring St. Patrick. For the same reason, pro-life groups were banned from marching under their own banner.

The first gay group to march was in 1991. Mayor David Dinkins entered into a discussion with the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), the parade organizers, and a compromise was reached: members of the Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization (ILGO) could march with the mid-town chapter of the AOH, accompanied by the mayor.

When ILGO sought to march in the 1992 parade, they were barred. They were accused of “outrageous behavior” when they marched in 1991, making obscene gestures in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and in front of the reviewing stand at 5th Avenue and 67th Street.

On January 21, 1992, the Hibernian National and State Boards issued a joint statement asserting that “no organization or organizations are allowed to use New York City’s 231st Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade on March 17, 1992 as a vehicle to publicly insult any person or group watching or reviewing the parade.” They repeated the charge that ILGO engaged in “outrageous behavior and conduct.”

ILGO did not give up and proceeded to march, illegally, in the 1994 parade. They were arrested for marching without a permit on March 17, but that didn’t make any difference to Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Robert Sackett. On November 2, 1994, he threw out the charges, saying the arrest of the ILGO members was a “blatant denial of First Amendment rights.”

A week later, here is what I said about that ruling.

“Judge Sackett is an embarrassment of the courts. For him to simply disregard the fact that ILGO (a) had no permit to march (b) never sought one in the first place (c) was never denied the right to protest elsewhere and (d) had already lost in the courts in its bid to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, demonstrates that Judge Sackett shows no respect for the law.”

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that banning ILGO from the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade was constitutional. It was a private parade, the high court said, and the organizers had a First Amendment right to freedom of association, essentially affirming their right to craft their own rules.

Meanwhile in New York, the AOH handed the parade over to a new group, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee, headed by John Dunleavy. Even though the Supreme Court upheld the right of parade organizers to ban ILGO, they attempted to march in the late 1990s, and were arrested for doing so. I took pictures of them and was assaulted by one of the lesbians. I did not hit her back knowing the media would capture my retaliatory move, and blame me.

Why was ILGO so determined to march? It had nothing to do with honoring St. Patrick. This is not an opinion—it is what they said.

In 2017, Anne Maguire and Maxine Wolfe published their reminiscences on an array of subjects, one of which was the parade. Maguire, who was co-founder of ILGO, talked about the politics of the group. She explicitly said that the protests at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade “sort of dovetailed with ACT UP.” She also admitted that “the vast majority” of ILGO members were illegal aliens who sought to mobilize politically.

Maguire said that within their first year in the U.S., “somebody brought up in a meeting, ‘Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if we marched in the St. Patrick’s Day parade?’” To which most of them said, “Are you kidding me?” This is how it all began—as a lark.

They asked for a permit, were denied, and “it just completely blew up.” They saw homophobia everywhere, from being denied a permit to “ACT UP and AIDS.”

Maguire’s admission that there was a nexus between the parade and ACT UP is telling: she was referring to what ACT UP did on December 10, 1989 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. That was the day when gays crashed the Sunday 10:15 a.m. Mass, celebrated by Cardinal John O’Connor. ACT UP activists interrupted the Mass, handcuffed themselves to the pews, blew whistles, shouted obscenities and spat the Host on the floor. One of the most prominent members at the “Stop The Church” protest who was arrested was Ann Northrop.

Northrop blamed Cardinal O’Connor for AIDS, not promiscuous homosexuals. How did the archbishop cause AIDS? By saying that monogamy protects against the sexually transmitted disease! This is like blaming obesity on those who diet.

Further proof that ILGO’s interest in marching in the parade was a lark, having everything to do with making a political statement and nothing to do with honoring St. Patrick, was made plain by Maguire. In 1996, a year after the Supreme Court ruled against ILGO, she wrote the following.

“What is clear about ILGO and the St. Patrick’s Day parade is that most [ILGO] people, particularly those of us who are most actively involved, had no inclination to be associated with, never mind march in, the parade. [The protest], very simply, is where our ‘coming out’ took place.”

This is exactly what the AOH had been saying all along.

In September 2014, as I previously recounted, Dunleavy was pushed aside by the vice chairman of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee, John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University. At a press conference held at the New York Athletic Club, welcoming a gay group to march, OUT@NBCUniversal, Lahey and others spoke, but Dunleavy did not. He was treated like dirt by the heavyweights who sucked up to the media. I was never invited, and we all know why.

Lahey paired with elites from other universities, corporations, lawyers and the media to take the reins from Dunleavy. Dunleavy was a former transit dispatcher, a great blue collar guy from Ireland. He was outclassed by these sharks. It did not matter to the elites that the Supreme Court declared that parade officials had a First Amendment right to bar ILGO. What mattered is that they wanted the affirmation of elites unconnected to the parade.

Lahey and company would have us believe that the parade was being threatened with a boycott from its sponsors, and that they could not have it televised on NBC without their advertising support. It is true that Guinness, Heineken and the Ford Motor Company were planning to do just that. It is also true that Manhattan College, Fairfield University and the Irish government were pressuring parade officials.

What Lahey did not say is that they could have looked for other alternatives. What about WPIX? Would they have agreed to televise the march? What about EWTN, the Catholic media giant? What about looking for new sponsors? Quite simply, they used this as an excuse to get what they wanted all along—the elites were all on the same side.

I know that their hearts were not in it because in the spring of 2014, right after the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the issue of gays marching in 2015 was coming to a head. I met with seven owners of Irish pubs in New York City; they owned roughly 25 percent of the Irish bars. All but one agreed to my plea to boycott Guinness. Some chose to cut the price of Guinness’ competitors, thus enticing drinkers to choose an alternative; others simply took out the Guinness tap. But it was not enough to change things, and that is because parade officials wanted nothing to do with it.

On September 17, 2014, I wrote Dunleavy a letter restating how I was lied to about gays marching in the parade. I mentioned to him that one of the parade officials, John Fitzsimmons, an attorney, had called me at the end of August. I knew him well and would have fielded the call but I was in Montauk, Long Island taking a break. The call was about including a gay group in the parade in 2015. Here is part of what I said.

“I told Bernadette [the vice president] to let John know that it was okay by me [to include a gay group], as long as (a) there was a formal change in the parade rules governing marching units allowing those that have their own cause to march, and (b) a pro-life group would be marching under its own banner as well. John said he believed that a formal revision of the rules had been made, but that he had to ‘check his notes.’

“John called back saying that he checked with you about this issue, and that he also checked his notes. He said there was, in fact, a formal change in the rules, and that a pro-life group would be marching. Bernadette then urged him to pick a pro-life group so that it could be announced at the same time as the NBC gay group [which had already been approved]. He agreed to do this.”

It was plain that I had been lied to by Fitzsimmons, so I closed my letter to Dunleavy saying, “John is the source of the problem.” (Both Fitzsimmons and Dunleavy have since passed away.) I pulled our Catholic League unit the next year and we will never march again.

On the day that gays first marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade under their own banner, March 17, 2015, Northrop said she still wasn’t happy. She was angry that a gay group was chosen by NBC, which televised the march, saying “it’s all a corporate deal. It has nothing to do with really opening up the parade and welcoming gay people in and certainly not Irish gay people.”

It’s never enough for narcissistic gays—it’s always about them.

To show how crazed Northrop is, consider that she once celebrated the news that human cloning could make men obsolete. “Essentially, this is sort of the final nail in men’s coffins. Men are now totally irrelevant, if [cloning] is, in fact, true and possible and becomes routine. Men are going to have a very hard time justifying their existence on the planet, I think.” Male hatred is not unusual among radical lesbians, but this comment is hard to beat.

Ten years after the first gay group marched up Fifth Avenue, there is still no pro-life group allowed to march. Each year Irish Pro-Life USA, founded by John Aidan Byrne, requests a permit to march, and every year he is denied. Parade organizer Hilary Beirne never gets back to him.

In other words, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade officials allow homosexual groups to march but not pro-life Catholics. In short, we can thank the Irish elites, in the U.S. and Ireland, for ganging up on John Dunleavy.

Bill Donohue

The sexual abuse of children is one of the most evil acts that anyone can commit. That is why accusations must not be made casually—this is serious business. Yet that is exactly what is happening when Democrats charge that enforcing norms to ensure that males cannot compete against females in sports leads to child sexual abuse. That is a lie.

On March 3, Democrats in the Senate voted against “The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” effectively killing it (60 votes were needed and the 51 mustered by the Republicans were not enough). The bill sought to amend Title IX to prohibit schools from allowing boys and men to compete with girls and women in athletic programs.

Common sense dictates that because males are, on average, stronger and faster than females, there should be separate sports for males and females. Common decency dictates that males and females should have separate locker rooms and shower facilities. But common sense and common decency are not commonplace among Democrats.

It is bad enough to allow men to crash women’s sports—all in the name of showing tolerance for transgender individuals—but it is worse when some of those who support this travesty maintain that stopping them from doing so will cause the sexual abuse of minors.

When the House took up this bill, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called it the “Republican child predator empowerment act.” He explained that the bill “risks unleashing child predators on the children of America in the sports context.” Similarly, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the bill allows “genital examination into little girls in this country.”

Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern claimed the bill is an example of Republicans’ “creepy obsession with your kids’ private parts.” Vermont Rep. Becca Balint said that the “logical conclusion” of the bill is to violate the bodies of young girls. More recently, Rep. Jennifer McClellan went even further claiming “the only way” to enforce this bill is “to pull children’s pants down to determine what sex they are.”

When the Senate voted on the bill, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said that because the bill would ban male school athletes from competing with females, the law would “allow anyone to subject girls to invasive physical exams just because of the way they look,” leading to “an increased risk for abuse and harassment.” Sen. Dick Durbin agreed, saying the bill would allow “the right to physically inspect a girl or a young woman if the other opposing team accuses them of being transgender.”

Not one of these persons offered a scintilla of evidence to back up their outrageous claims, and no one from the media challenged them. However, they unwittingly undercut their position that self-identification determines one’s sex: if that were the case, why would the Democrats argue that “the only way” to determine one’s sex is to pull down their pants?

We decided to check the links that Google AI provides as evidence that banning males from competing with females in sports leads to child sexual abuse. What we found was another unsupported assertion. Florida Rep. Jessica Miranda said the bill “would require children to have genital exams to play high school sports,” claiming this was “nothing short of state-sanctioned sexual abuse.” So much for AI: This is not evidence—it is an opinion.

It is not as though evidence is lacking altogether. Roughly half the states have laws ensuring that males cannot compete against females, and as a result not one of them has experienced child sexual abuse. That’s because most of them insist on just one criterion: provide a birth certificate. This is true in Florida, as well, making mince meat out of Rep. Miranda’s bogus theory.

Democrats need to stop making false accusations about child sexual abuse and start explaining why they want to destroy women’s sports and women’s privacy.

Contact Minority Leader Hakeen Jeffries’ chief of staff, Tasia Jackson: [email protected]

Bill Donohue

There is a difference between those who are mostly “pro-choice,” oftentimes reluctantly so, and those who love abortion. March 10 is a festive day for the latter group. It’s called, “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day.” It’s a time when those who love abortion rally to the side of medical personnel who make a living by killing kids in utero.

The most rabid pro-abortion members of Congress who celebrate this day are Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Sen. Mazie Hirono and Sen. Gary Peters. They are responsible for a resolution marking this “happy” day, paying homage to some obscure abortionist who was killed in 1996.

We looked into the origins of “Abortion Provider Appreciation Day” and found that its original proponents were ideological extremists, many of whom belonged to the Communist Party; almost all were men.

Those who started this day in 1987 belonged to a radical group called Refuse and Resist! (“R&R!”). They opposed a “Christian fascist, fundamentalist morality.” Funded by the Ford Foundation, which is notoriously anti-Catholic, “R&R!” was pro-abortion and anti-death penalty. To put it differently, two of their goals were to kill as many innocent unborn kids as possible, and to save the lives of convicted serial murderers and rapists.

The two most famous members of “R&R!” were William Kunstler and Abbie Hoffman. Kunstler spent a good part of his life defending anyone who hated America. His clients included the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters, and the Chicago Seven. Hoffman was a member of the Chicago Seven, the group that was convicted for crossing state lines in 1968 to start a riot at the Democratic National Convention; he was co-founder of the Youth International Party, the so-called Yippies.

Other founding members of “R&R!” included Charles Clark Kissinger and Conrad Lynn. Both were members of the Communist Party. John “Tito” Gerassi joined with them, and his friend was Che Guevara, the Cuban terrorist; he also befriended Fidel Castro. “R&R!” dissolved in 2006; the day they made famous was picked up by pro-abortion zealots.

Notice that most of the founders of “Abortion Providers Appreciation Day” were men. It would be a mistake to think that they spent their lives promoting abortion. In fact their interest in abortion had almost nothing to do with the rights of women—it had to deal with their conviction that a sexual revolution was integral to a political revolution. That was their real goal. In other words, men like Kunstler used women to further their radical agenda.

Abortion is a tragedy for the babies whose lives have been taken, and for the women who made a choice that forever haunts them. The only ones who truly benefit are the abortionists—they get rich by exploiting women, all in the name of championing their rights. To celebrate these predators is obscene.