Bill Donohue comments on two articles posted yesterday by the New York Daily News on pending bills that lift the statute of limitations on offenses involving the sexual abuse of minors:

The big news, as determined by the Daily News, is that the New York State Catholic Conference hires lobbyists to push for desired legislative outcomes. Of course, it has been doing so all along. Moreover, it hardly has a monopoly on lobbying: virtually every secular and sectarian organization in New York State that is in any way impacted by Albany lawmakers hires lobbyists. However, it is rarely headline news when they do so. There is a veiled message here: Just how kosher is it for the Catholic Church to lobby Albany?

One of the articles, “Child-Abuse Law Reform Died in 2009 Senate Power Struggle,” is startling for its grand omission: it never mentions that in 2009 the teachers’ unions spent a small fortune trying to kill a bill that included public entities; it would have made it easier for kids raped by public school employees to sue, no matter how long ago it occurred. Usually, these bills on the sexual abuse of minors never blanket the public schools, so it was interesting to see the public school establishment jack up its efforts once it was included in the legislation.

How much do the New York public schools spend on lobbying? A whole lot more than the Catholic Church. Between 2007 and 2016, the New York Catholic Conference spent $2.1 million. In the first six months of 2014, the public schools spent more than $10 million!

One of the principal organizations opposing the Catholic Church’s efforts to stop unjust legislation—it is unjust because it gives public schools a pass and its purpose is to stick it to Catholics—is the Stop Abuse Campaign. I tried to find out who is contributing to its coffers, but when I got to the webpage, “Financial Information,” up popped, “Coming Soon.” How cute. That, too, should be of interest to the Daily News, but it isn’t.

Contact Ken Lovett: klovett@nydailynews.com

Bill Donohue comments on the ongoing sexual abuse of children in Hollywood:

Back in 2011, actor Corey Feldman blew the lid off of what he termed “the number one problem in Hollywood”: sexual abuse of child actors by industry managers, publicists and agents. Feldman blamed the troubled life and early death of his best friend, fellow child actor Corey Haim, on Haim having been raped and sexually abused by a “Hollywood mogul” years before.

Now the Hollywood Reporter is out with an interview in which Feldman charges that, five years later, this scandal is “growing, not shrinking.” Yet the silence, within the entertainment industry and the media, remains deafening.

Last November, I wrote about the media and film industry’s suppression of the movie “An Open Secret,” which provided a devastating look at the way Hollywood predators manipulated, intimidated, and raped aspiring child actors. In contrast to the movie “Spotlight,” hailed by reviewers and industry moguls for its treatment of the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese, “An Open Secret” received few screening opportunities and even less media attention. “Though it was directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg,” Business Insider notes this week, “the film had a very small theatrical release.”

The reason is obvious. While Hollywood heaps plaudits upon itself for forthrightly confronting the sexual abuse of children in “Spotlight”, it has no interest in turning the spotlight on its own abuse scandal.

Rather than aggressively address that scandal—as the Catholic Church has done—Hollywood continues to protect its child predators. And so the problem, as Corey Feldman attests, only grows worse.

Bill Donohue comments on lawyer Michael Dowd’s latest slap at the Catholic Church:

In its ongoing series promoting changes in New York’s statute of limitations laws regarding sexual abuse of minors, the New York Daily News today ran a news story and an editorial on the Senate Majority Leader’s past connection to a law firm that represents a Catholic diocese.

The editorial recognizes the complexity of balancing victims’ rights with those of the accused in changing statutes of limitations. It thus calls for vigorous, open debate of various proposals. And it urges the Senate Majority Leader not to let his past law firm ties stop him from facilitating such open debate.

The news story, however, contains this quote from steeple-chasing lawyer Michael Dowd: “There is nothing more fundamental to the diocese than keeping money in their pocket.”

Dowd, who has become a fixture on the sue-the-Catholic Church legal circuit, knows full well that the Catholic Church is by far the largest private provider of social services in New York State. As such, he knows that the issue is not about keeping money in the Church’s pocket. It is about maintaining the resources necessary for the Church to continue helping the countless numbers of New Yorkers who depend on its services for food, clothing, housing, health care, education and more.

The focus on protecting children has made some positive progress in New York this year. For example, the Catholic League has long trumpeted the urgent need to end the double standard that protects abusers in the public sector, like public school teachers. Now that call has been picked up by the editors at the Daily News, several state legislators, and even Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

But amid this sincere effort to develop policies that better protect children, there will always be those whose priority, as we noted several weeks ago in an ad in the Albany Times Union, is simply to stick it to the Catholic Church. And that is the priority served by gratuitous comments like Michael Dowd’s.

To read Bill Donohue’s Newsmax article on the controversy over transgender policies in the schools, click here.

Bill Donohue comments on the ACLU suing the federal government:

Having lost repeatedly in the courts in their efforts to sue Catholic hospitals directly, the ACLU has now turned its legal guns on the U.S. government.

The issue is the same as it has always been: Catholic hospitals, which provide “excellent care” according to ACLU ally MergerWatch, insist on extending that excellent care to unborn children—rather than aborting them, as the ACLU demands. The courts have consistently upheld the right of Catholic hospitals to abide by the Church’s moral and ethical guidelines, which, of course, prohibit abortion.

So now the ACLU resorts to seeking out horrifying tales of Catholic hospitals endangering women’s health by denying them “proper emergency care”—meaning, of course, abortions. Back in 2014, they filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for federal government records documenting such alleged “complaints” against Catholic hospitals. None were forthcoming. And so the ACLU is now suing the feds under FOIA.

Their obsession with Catholic hospitals, as they make clear again today on their website, is driven by the fact that “the number of Catholic hospitals continues to climb.” Most people would see that as a good thing—extending the excellent care provided by Catholic hospitals to more people and more communities. But to the ACLU it is a problem, and that is because Catholic healthcare is based on respect for every human life.

Bill Donohue comments on remarks made by British atheist Richard Dawkins on religion:

Richard Dawkins is not content to promote the virtues of atheism, whatever they may be, he is positively given to trashing religion. “I’m all for offending people’s religion,” he told the English media. “I think it should be offended at every opportunity.”

If there is one thing Dawkins likes about Christianity, especially Catholicism, it is the freedom he has in promoting hate speech against it; he admits that he pays no price for doing so. But when it comes to beating up on Islam, he must always prepare for a backlash, and not just from Muslims: he gets flack from those who like to bash Christianity.

Those who criticize Islam, Dawkins says, “are often accused of racism, which is absurd.” Worse, “People are terrified of being thought racist.”

He’s right on both counts: Islam is a religion, not a race, and people are terrified of being labeled a racist. And, yes, there is a double standard in play—it’s okay to denigrate Christians but not Muslims. This duplicity, of course, is a signature of contemporary liberalism. Where he falters is in his conviction that people of faith deserve to be offended.

Radical Muslims have more in common with liberals than Dawkins: he is an honest bigot, and they are unprincipled bigots. For example, Iran is currently hosting a Holocaust Cartoon Contest, drawing on some 150 works from 50 countries. One reason for the event is to highlight the different responses engendered by the Charlie Hebdo controversy; those cartoons obscenely mocked Islam. As one official put it, the “contest and exhibition intends to display the West’s double standard towards freedom of expression as it allows sacrilege of Islamic sanctities.”

Dawkins, liberals, and radical Muslims agree on one thing: when it comes to Christians, there can’t be enough hate speech. Indeed, offending them should be done “at every opportunity.”

Bill Donohue comments on the 2015 Annual Report on clergy sexual abuse that was released last week by the National Review Board of the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015, there were seven substantiated allegations against clergy for the sexual abuse of minors that were made by current minors. Given that the data covered priests (35,987) and deacons (16,251), this means that .01 percent of the 52,238 members of the clergy had a substantiated allegation made against him; conversely, 99.99 percent did not.

Why is this not being widely reported by the media—including the Catholic media?

Reuters is so dishonest that it reports on the 838 persons who came forward with an accusation (mostly about offenses years ago), saying that is a 35 percent increase from the previous year. What it doesn’t say is that last year there was a 5 percent increase in the number of false accusations made against the dioceses and eparchies, and a whopping 86 percent increase in false accusations made against religious institutes.

Some things, of course, never change. As usual, 81 percent of the victims were male, and most were postpubescent; 16 percent were under the age of 10. Which means that homosexuals accounted for the lion’s share of the problem, though no one will mention this fact. The John Jay researchers certainly will not: they said in 2011 that the high rate of male victims in the 1960s and 1970s was due to priests not having access to female altar servers. Nonsense. They have had plenty of access for years, but it is still the gay priests who are doing the molesting. This was never a crime of opportunity. That’s pure propaganda.

Similarly, psychologist Dr. Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea predicted in 2003, “You will see some kind of bubble in 2005, when the people who were abused in the 1990s come forward.” She could not have been more wrong—the bubble never surfaced, not then and not now. She’s been wrong all along.

Bill Donohue comments on the “Do No Harm Act”:

Two days ago, Rep. Joseph Kennedy III and Rep. Bobby Scott introduced the “Do No Harm Act.” It is designed to gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that ensures First Amendment religious liberty protections for all Americans.

Why would any congressman want to undermine religious liberty? Bathrooms and showers. Yes, these two places are now in the sights of homosexual activists and their ilk. Their agenda has led them, in short order, from the altar to the john.

Religious liberty was so popular in 1993 that Rep. Chuck Schumer (now a senator) and Sen. Ted Kennedy introduced RFRA, and President Bill Clinton signed it. Even the ACLU loved the bill. But now liberals hate it.

What broke? Kennedy and Scott, and the ACLU, say that RFRA (and laws like it in the states) has been “misconstrued,” and is being used against men who feel they’re a woman, and vice versa. The logic is not easy to follow, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Once upon a time, men thought they were men and women thought they were women, but not today: some are confused. Stay with me, please.

Some of the confused want to use bathrooms that belong to the opposite sex, but since they feel they belong to the opposite sex, they want to use those facilities. They would also like to shower with those of the opposite sex—why not?—or with those of the sex they feel they belong to. We’re almost there.

What does this have to do with RFRA? Religious institutions, under RFRA, can claim to be exempt from laws that would force them to accommodate the confused. Which is why those who have targeted the johns are pushing for the new law.

“Keep your feelings to yourself” never made more sense.

Bill Donohue comments on a bill passed today by the Oklahoma legislature making it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion:

It is up to Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin to sign this bill if it is to become law. Currently, it is a felony in Oklahoma for non-doctors to perform an abortion, so this bill simply adds doctors to the list. Quite frankly, it would be illogical not to do so: It is not the training of the abortionist that is the crux of the matter, it is the procedure, and its aftermath, that counts.

This bill would not apply in instances where the woman’s life is in danger, or when a miscarriage warrants an operation; felony charges would not be brought against a doctor who performed an abortion in those cases. Unlike some other state laws that restrict abortion, this legislation does not make exceptions for rape, incest, or the woman’s health (the latter is typically interpreted to cover her alleged emotional state, not her physical health).

The lawmaker who sponsored the bill, Sen. Nathan Dahm, said, “Since I believe that life begins at conception, it should be protected, and I believe it’s a core function of state government to defend that life from the beginning of conception.”

Noble though Sen. Dahm’s statement is, all he had to say is, “Since life begins at conception….” There is no need to personalize his comment, citing his beliefs. Life obviously begins at conception—this is Biology 101. Those who maintain otherwise are advancing an unscientific argument, to say nothing of its morally objectionable nature.

The champions of abortion rights are on the wrong side of humanity. Change is not easy to accept, especially for those unaccustomed to thinking for themselves, but they need to get with it before the train of history leaves them standing at the station. Kids need to be protected, in and out of the womb.

Gov. Fallin needs to hear from you.

Contact her chief of staff: Denise.Northrup@gov.ok.gov

Bill Donohue comments on the killing of a pregnant woman because she refused to abort her child:

The media have put a gag order on themselves. If an abortion doctor is killed, it is headline news, but because a pregnant woman was murdered for refusing to have an abortion, the media are ignoring this story.

A candlelight vigil was held last Saturday night at Jones Park in North Asheville, North Carolina, for Candace Pickens. The pregnant woman, 22, was found dead in a nearby elementary school playground earlier that day; she was shot in the head, as was her son who had just turned three. The accused, Nathaniel Dixon, is being tried for her murder and for the shooting of her son. Significantly, he was also arrested for the first-degree murder of her unborn child.

“She had recently found out she was pregnant and was murdered because she refused an abortion,” her friends said.

Where is the media coverage—the story is several days old? Where is the outrage? Where are the champions of women’s rights? Where is the logic in allowing doctors to kill unborn children while prosecuting non-doctors for killing unborn children? The abortion-rights industry is unraveling, and the moral grounds upon which it stands is fast turning into quicksand