On the February 9 edition of CNNH’s “Joy Behar Show,” homosexual activist Michelangelo Signorile said the following: “You have this pope saying that homosexuality is the end of civilization. That we have to protect the culture from homosexuality the way we have to protect the rainforest from degradation. You know, we’ve got a bishop in Guam who just said that gays are worse than the Islamic fundamentalists.” To which Behar said, “Oh, my God.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue calls them out on these lies:

None of what Signorile said is true. Not only has the pope never said that homosexuality is the “end of civilization,” a Lexis-Nexis search reveals that he has never even used that term.

Regarding the comment on homosexuality and the rainforest, here is exactly what the pope said in December 2008: “That which has come to be expressed and understood with the term ‘gender’ effectively results in man’s self-emancipation from Creation (nature) and from the Creator. Man wants to do everything by himself and to decide always and exclusively about anything that concerns him personally. But this is to live against truth, to live against the Spirit Creator. The tropical rainforests deserve our protection, yes, but man does not deserve it less as a Creature of the Spirit himself, in whom is inscribed a message that does not mean a contradiction of human freedom but its condition.” Nowhere is homosexuality mentioned, never mind the spin Signorile put on it.

Last October, Guam Archbishop Anthony Apuron said that “Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they repress such behavior by death.” But he did not sanction such measures. Indeed, he unequivocally condemned them. “Terrorism as a way to oppose the degeneration of the culture is to be rejected completely since such violence is itself another form of degeneracy.” So Signorile again twisted what was actually said.

Common decency suggests that a retraction be made.

Contact Behar’s executive producer: Conway.Cliff@turner.com

Actress Lindsay Lohan is featured on the cover of the latest edition of the French fashion magazine, Purple, wearing a low-neck white outfit with her hands outstretched and a crown of thorns on her head. Catholic League president Bill Donohue had this to say about it:

Not only is the pose inappropriate, the timing is offensive: Lent begins next week.

Lohan, an ex-Catholic who is spiritually homeless, recently said, “I’m all about Karma…what goes around comes around.” If she believes that, then it behooves her to apologize to Christians before it’s too late.

Looks like Tiger Woods is not the only celebrity who would benefit by converting to Christianity these days. Forgiveness occupies a central place in Christianity, but the predicate to forgiveness is repentance.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a new report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) on sex education:

The goal of IPPF is to sexually engineer society, and one way to accomplish this feat is to smear religious conservatives, especially Catholics. This new report not only substantiates this charge, it makes it clear that Planned Parenthood wants to bring its irresponsible ideas to bear on kids.

“IPPF uses the terms young people, youth and adolescents interchangeably to refer to people who are between 10 and 24.” In other words, 5th graders should be treated the same way graduate students are when it comes to their “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

The entire program is based on a faulty assumption. IPPF says that “The taboo on youth sexuality is one of the key forces driving the AIDS epidemic and high rates of teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality.” Nonsense. In the 1950s, there was no sex education in the schools, the pill was not commercially available and AIDS didn’t exist. Yet the out-of-wedlock birth rate was comparatively miniscule and sexually transmitted diseases were relatively rare. All because of taboos.

According to IPPF, it’s those Catholics—who are indistinguishable from radical Islamists—who are the problem. “Fundamentalist and other religious groups—the Catholic Church and madrasas (Islamic schools) for example—have imposed tremendous barriers that prevent young people, particularly, from obtaining information and services related to sex and reproduction.”

So the kids in Sister Mary’s class who learn about responsible sex are analogous to Imam Mohammad’s kids who are either denied sex education or are told that homosexuality is punishable by death. Finally, why is it that public school students, who know so much more about sex than those dunces in the parochial schools, are precisely the ones walking around with the highest rates of illegitimacy, abortion and herpes?

Click here to see video of Bill Donohue discussing this report.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue addresses remarks made by Sarah Silverman last night on Joy Behar’s show:

On “The View” yesterday, they played a small portion of Sarah Silverman’s obscene rant against Pope Benedict XVI that she made last October on Bill Maher’s show; it omitted the most vile comments she made. Last night, she was questioned about this incident by Joy Behar and instead of apologizing, she doubled down: she said that if the pope sells the Vatican, “any involvement in the Holocaust” will be discounted.

When asked whether we should accept Mel Gibson’s apology for his drunken anti-Semitic comments made four years ago, she made a snide remark dismissing the apology altogether. Then she added, “I don’t think he has a problem with the Jews, he just wants to clear up the fact that the Holocaust never happened.”

Here are the facts: the pope’s “involvement” in the Holocaust was to be conscripted into the Hitler Youth program, along with every other young German boy at that time; he escaped when he got the chance. To libel him the way Silverman did is downright despicable.

Gibson never denied the Holocaust. His father, Hutton, has made some loopy comments doubting the extent of the Holocaust, but Mel Gibson never said anything like that. Ergo, he was also libeled.

Sarah Silverman uses obscene language about the pope, libels him, repeats the offense, extends no apology, is hailed as a hero and suffers no penalty. Furthermore, she declines to accept Gibson’s apology, libels him, refuses to apologize, is hailed as a hero and suffers no penalty.

Some say that Silverman was just joking. We’re not buying it. So was Imus.

Chris Robichaud is president of Silverman’s publicist company.
Contact: crobichaud@bncpr.com

On today’s edition of “The View,” they ran a clip of entertainer Sarah Silverman’s appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show. In the portion of the show they aired today, Silverman is shown slamming Pope Benedict XVI for not selling the Vatican to feed the poor.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue raises some questions about it:

Mel Gibson has a new movie out, and all that many reporters can talk about is the anti-Semitic remark he made four years ago when inebriated. By contrast, Sarah Silverman got a pass last October for her foul-mouthed attack on the pope—rendered when cold sober—and had it repeated today, much to the delight of Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar.

If they had any guts, they would have aired the most indefensible thing Silverman said on Maher’s show. She said if the pope sells the Vatican, he “will get crazy p—y. All the p—y.”

Silverman was nothing if not defensive about her anti-Catholic remarks being made by a Jew. She said that this “has nothing to do with me being Jewish. You know, a lot of mail was like, ‘What if it was Jewish?’ You know, yeah. If the Jews owned something like that I would be, I’d have no religion. I’m not talking as a Jew. I just can’t help that I’m a Jew—it comes out of my pores.”

Silverman should feel guilty. Just as it is despicable for ex-Catholics like Hasselbeck and Behar to relentlessly assault Catholic sensibilities, it is despicable for a Jew to do so as well.

After Gibson made his drunken remarks, he said, “I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said.” But Silverman will never apologize to Catholics for her scripted hate speech. The double standard is sickening.

Contact “The View” executive producer: bill.geddie@abc.com

Catholic League president Bill Donohue directs his comments at an editorial in today’s New York Times:

If someone were nominated to serve in a major legal position in a Republican administration who previously tried to take away the tax exempt status of Islamic mosques and institutions—for purely political reasons—everyone knows that he or she would never be given a hearing.

So why is Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel still being considered? She tried in the late 1980s to take away the tax exempt status of the Roman Catholic Church, all because she wanted to silence the Church’s voice on abortion. Yet the New York Times audaciously asserts today that the “baseless objections” and “baseless concerns” of her critics should be ignored.

Since when are objections to proven instances of bigotry considered “baseless”? Would it be “baseless” to object to someone who wants to deny Muslims the same tax exempt status afforded Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others? Would not such a person be branded a bigot who is unfit to serve in any administration, especially in a high post in the Justice Department? If the answer is obvious, then why is her nomination even alive?

Wiccans and pagans at the Air Force Academy have a worship area on campus made up of stones set in a circle. Recently, someone placed a wooden cross at this site. The reaction of the Academy was boilerplate. Catholic League president Bill Donohue explains why he is contacting members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee:

If I visited a Grotto on a college campus and saw a symbol of some other religion there, I would complain. But if that was all there was to it, I would not treat the incident as an example of hate speech. By comparison, Air Force Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Gould did just that when the cross was found at the pagan site. “We absolutely will not stand for this type of destructive behavior,” he said.

“Destructive”? None of the stones were kicked about, and there was nothing else left to destroy. “I consider this no different than someone writing graffiti on the Cadet Chapel,” he continued. In other words, Gould believes there is no difference between neutering a religious symbol and defacing religious property. He also sees a cross at a pagan site as the equivalent of graffiti on a church. This is more than overkill—it is grossly insulting to Catholics and Protestants.

The cross was also compared to a swastika. Mikey Weinstein, a past graduate of the Academy who incredibly has clients of his watchdog group on campus, said that the cross at the pagan site was tantamount to having a swastika in the Jewish center! Weinstein has long insisted that Evangelicals are guilty of intolerance at the Academy, though a 2005 report on this issue found “no overt discrimination.” But the report did detail examples of religious intolerance against Catholics and Protestants.

These remarks have added to the chilling atmosphere that Catholics and Protestants must endure. I wrote to the Congress in 2005 about this matter, and I am doing so again. We need to know why hypersensitivity to non-Christians has evolved into insensitivity to Christians.

Contact: Michael.Gould@usafa.edu

In a new study published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, abstinence-based sex education programs yielded results far superior to competing strategies. John B. Jemmott III, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, led the federally funded research. This study, which focused on African American students from four public middle schools in the Northeast between the years 2001 and 2004, is being hailed by the scientific community for its methodological excellence.

Sociologist Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, looked at the many aspects of this landmark study:

An honest look at the evidence yields several conclusions, one of which is that “safe sex” programs are a danger to American youth and need to be defunded by the Obama administration immediately.

The student body was divided into four different groups: those who received an abstinence-only education; those who followed a “safe sex” curriculum; those who were exposed to a comprehensive program that included elements of both approaches; and those who were introduced to a “healthy living” curriculum, e.g., advice on eating and exercise.

The worst results stemmed from those who followed the “safe sex” strategy: 52 percent started having sex. The best results came from those who followed the abstinence-only approach: 33 percent of the students started having sex. Those in the blended program, and those in the “healthy living” one, yielded results of 42 and 47 percent, respectively. In other words, even those kids who were not given a sex education program at all did better than those in the “safe sex” group.

The Obama administration mindlessly cut all funding for abstinence-only programs, citing the lack of scientific evidence for such models. Now that their beloved “here’s how to put a condom on a cucumber” approach to sex ed is a proven disaster, it’s time to cut “safe sex” programs and put all the money into abstinence-only ones. It’s also time to fund voucher programs: black kids in Catholic schools succeed both in and out of the classroom.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue looks at attempts to persuade President Obama not to attend the National Prayer Breakfast:

The National Prayer Breakfast is held the first Thursday of every February, and is attended by senior members of the incumbent administration and Congress. The Washington event, which attracts some 3,500 leaders from the U.S. and abroad, is organized by a Christian group, The Fellowship Foundation (a.k.a. “The Family”), that keeps a low profile. This year the secular left is pressuring the president, and others, not to attend.

The stated reasons for opposing the event include the organizer’s alleged “shadowy” nature and the invitation extended to David Bahati, the Ugandan lawmaker who wrote a bill labeled as anti-gay. Those leading the charge include pundits and activists like Adele M. Stan, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Huffington Post writers, Mother Jones, et al. A press conference scheduled tomorrow protesting the event is being attended by the likes of practicing gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, Americans United leader Barry Lynn, and spokesmen for assorted homosexual groups.

The real reason for the opposition has to do with censoring the voice of religious conservatives in Washington. Bahati, for example, is not going, so that issue is a non-starter. Moreover, Hillary Clinton is a long-time member of The Fellowship Foundation, making silly the “shadowy” accusation. Indeed, if the Secretary of State isn’t bothered by the group, then that just goes to show how utterly fringe the opposition is.

Surely the secular left see in President Obama one of their own. But he knows how it would look if he broke stride with precedent, especially at a time when the public is not exactly jumping for joy over his performance. Look for Obama to go and his base to whine.