Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on remarks by Pope Francis that have been censored by the media:

Pope Francis says gay couples cannot be considered a family. The media know he said this but, with few exceptions, they refused to run this story. The blackout, it is easy to prove, was intentional.

On June 16, Pope Francis spoke to an Italian family association, and following his scripted remarks, he made some unscripted comments. He denounced those couples who screen for abnormalities in the womb, likening the decision to a Nazi-like tactic. “Last century,” he said, “the whole world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves.”

The following media outlets covered this story:

AP, UPI, ABC Online, NBC NY, CNN, Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant, New York Times, Orlando Sentinel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Portland Press Herald, Sentinel Sun, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

In the same spontaneous address, Pope Francis said only heterosexuals can form a family. “It is painful to say this today: People speak of varied families, of various kinds of family,” but “the family [as] man and woman in the image of God is the only one.”

With the exception of CNN and the Wall Street Journal, not one of the media outlets that covered the pope’s remarks on abortion had a word to say about this comment (CNN downplayed its significance). Were it not for a few foreign sources—led by the German media outlet, Deutsche Press-Agentur—most of us would not know of this admission by Pope Francis.

This matters not simply because of media bias, but because of something much more important: the manipulation of public opinion in the run-up to the World Meeting of Families. This Vatican event will take place in Ireland August 22-26. Gay activists are desperately trying to redefine the family to include homosexual couples. Pope Francis has just thrown a monkey wrench into their agenda. This is why the media intentionally decided to censor his remarks.

Kudos to Pope Francis for speaking truth to power, and shame on the media for engaging in a widespread cover-up.

Bill Donohue comments on a coming Pennsylvania grand jury report:

Pennsylvania authorities are about to release a grand jury report on clergy sexual abuse of minors in six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses. Activists and media are predicting a “bombshell” report. What has really taken place is an anti-Catholic witch hunt.

Why else would then-Attorney General Kathleen Kane (she is now the former Pennsylvania Attorney General, having been convicted of perjury, criminal conspiracy and obstruction of justice) single out the Catholic Church when she launched this grand jury probe?

What about sports coaches, Boy Scout leaders, psychologists, public school teachers, rabbis, ministers, and every other group of adults who work with children or adolescents? Anyone who knows anything about the subject of the sexual abuse of minors knows that there is not a single such group or institution that has not had a lousy record of dealing with this problem.

Pennsylvanians certainly know it, especially with regard to the rampant and ongoing scandal of sexual abuse of students in the public schools.

“Pa. ranks No. 2 in teacher sex crimes,” ran the headline in the Pottsdam, Pa. Mercury over an AP story in July of 2014. Seven months later, pennlive.com reported: “Predators in the classroom on the rise in Pa., analysis shows.” The story reported abuse of students by school personnel had quadrupled since 2007.

“It’s an enormous problem all across the country, and Pennsylvania’s at the top of it,” said Terry Abbot, who at the time (2015) was chairman of Houston-based Drive West Communications, which had tracked this issue nationwide for more than a year. “This isn’t a list you want to lead.”

And it’s not a scandal Pennsylvania authorities or media want to probe. In a local sidebar to the July 2014 AP story, the Mercury listed eight “recent cases” in which teachers, coaches, and an administrator had been convicted of sexually abusing minors in their charge.

The statewide grand jury probe of Catholic dioceses grew out of a grand jury investigation of the Altoona-Johnstown diocese, which resulted from Kane’s intervention in a case involving one Catholic high school in that diocese. So if that was enough to trigger a statewide investigation of Catholic dioceses dating back to World War II, why wasn’t this rash of much more recent cases in one region of Pennsylvania enough to trigger a statewide grand jury probe of sexual abuse in the public schools?

State Rep. Mark Rozzi called for this statewide probe of the Catholic Church and is now cheerleading in anticipation of its release. Why has he never similarly called for a statewide probe of Pennsylvania’s government schools, given that his state has ranked number two in the country in teacher sex crimes?

And why did Rozzi for years sponsor legislation that would suspend the statute of limitations on abuse committed in private (read Catholic) institutions going back endlessly, while giving public schools a pass?

Similarly, why has the Philadelphia Inquirer championed Rozzi’s legislation, without ever calling for an end to the doctrine of sovereign immunity which protects public schools and their abusive personnel from such lawsuits?

In every case, the answer is the same. Their real interest is sticking it to the Catholic Church, not protecting children. The coming grand jury report is just more of the same.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the votes taken last night by a Virginia school board:

The Fairfax County school board last night adopted a series of radical changes that had been proposed to its sex education curriculum—but only after unanimously passing amendments that restored clergy to its list of competent advisers.

The original proposal had stricken clergy as recommended advisors to students who are confused about sexuality—even as it stated that “Emphasis will be placed on tolerance and nondiscrimination of all people.” That the board has now removed a provision that blatantly discriminated against clergy is an important victory for religious tolerance. As we stated on June 13, this was the most pressing issue for the Catholic League.

This victory does not negate the many other disturbing changes that the Fairfax County school board has made in its Family Life Education Curriculum. From replacing the correct term “biological sex” with misleading terms like “sex assigned at birth” and “gender identity,” to promoting drugs alongside abstinence in preventing sexually transmitted diseases, the board is acting irresponsibly as it promotes an ideological agenda.

We are pleased that the board heard our outcry, and that of many others, who protested the anti-clergy discriminatory proposal.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Samantha Bee’s problems with sponsors:

On June 8, I issued a news release, “Verizon and P&G Asked to Drop Samantha Bee.” We provided email addresses so our followers could contact both companies. A few hours later, we received a call from an official at Verizon indicating that the company might pull its ads. On June 12, I issued a news release, “Will Verizon Drop Ads for Bee’s Show?” Email contacts for both Verizon and P&G were again provided.

Good news: On the June 13 edition of Samantha Bee’s TBS show, “Full Frontal,” neither Verizon nor P&G advertised on her show. In fact, most of the advertisements were for movies or Turner Broadcasting shows. The word is out: sponsoring Samantha Bee’s show is a very risky ordeal.

Our work is not done. There was one new big sponsor on Bee’s June 13 show: Wendy’s. If Wendy’s hears from you, it is likely they will follow in the footsteps of Verizon and P&G.

No respectable company wants to be associated with a show whose host uses the “c-word” to describe women she hates. We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that Bee’s relentless anti-Catholicism is a key motivating force behind our campaign.

Contact: Tammie.Morgan@Wendys.com

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on proposed changes by a Virginia school board district:

The Fairfax County school board will vote June 14 on a series of proposed changes to the sex education curriculum. Elites in the Northern Virginia suburban community are weighing policy changes that are deeply disturbing, both from a moral and a pedagogical perspective.

The Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee is the body making the proposals. The list of changes reads like a page out of the gay rights agenda, so thoroughly out of touch with reality are they. Before assessing them, the most pressing issue for the Catholic League is the proposal to eliminate the clergy from the list of competent advisors to young persons who are confused about sexuality.

No reason is given why priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, and others, should be eliminated as a resource to students struggling with sexual issues. To make matters even more absurd, after recommending that the clergy be stricken from the list of advisors, the document prepared by the Advisory Committee says, “Emphasis will be placed on tolerance and nondiscrimination of all people.”

Tolerance and nondiscrimination? What the Advisory Committee is proposing is intolerance and discrimination. Indeed, the proposal smacks of religious hostility, a scourge that the U.S. Supreme Court said last week (see the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision) is constitutionally prohibited. Is the Fairfax County school board prepared to spend large sums of money on a lawsuit challenging its discriminatory initiative?

The Advisory Committee sets anchor with the gay rights agenda by denying human nature. It says individual identity will be described as “sex assigned at birth, gender identity (includes transgender), gender role, and sexual orientation (includes heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual).”

The first two identities constitute pedagogical nonsense. Sex is not assigned—it is determined by the father. Gender identity is a misleading term: boys who think they are girls, and girls who think they are boys, deserve to be treated for their mental disorder, not pandered to by school officials.

Currently, students in the Fairfax County school district learn that abstinence is the one and only 100 percent effective method of preventing sexually transmitted diseases. The proposed change says abstinence is the “most effective” method. There is no new scientific research that merits the change. Indeed, it is being done for purely ideological reasons: to conform to the gay agenda, the Advisory Committee wants to include drugs alongside abstinence.

For example, a drug is available to those who are HIV-negative but who have a relatively high risk of contracting HIV. It is called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. One of the proposals is to teach students about this option.

This is irresponsible: Schools should not be in the business of pushing drugs on sexually reckless students—they should be promoting counseling, with an eye towards abstinence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that “Anal sex is the highest-risk sexual behavior for HIV transmission.” Moreover, just last month, the CDC found that 70 percent of new HIV infections are among gay and bisexual men, the riskiest sexual practice being anal sex.

Why is there no mention of the dangers of anal sex in this document? Students are told to stop smoking, are they not? They are not told to try electronic cigarettes. Why is the Advisory Committee dodging its responsibility? The answer is obvious: the members do not want to depart from the gay agenda.

There are many traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims—and persons of other faiths, and no faith at all—living in Fairfax County who may object to these radical proposals. Have they been briefed on them? Have the clergy been notified that they may no longer be allowed to counsel students struggling with sexual issues?

What happens in Fairfax County may happen elsewhere. Let your voice be heard now.

Contact Fairfax County School Board chairman Jane Strauss: Jane.Strauss@fcps.edu

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the latest report on priestly sexual abuse:

In 2004, two years after the priestly sexual abuse scandal broke in the media, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop released its first annual audit of this subject. We have been tracking this issue every year, noting the incredible progress, and have now concluded that it is time to discontinue the audits. Here’s why.

In the latest audit, the 2017 Annual Report, there were 24 new allegations made by minors during the period July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017. But only six were substantiated; the clergy were removed from ministry. Moreover, four of the six allegations were made against the same priest. This means that of the 50,245 priests and deacons, .006 percent of the clergy had a substantiated charge made against him.

The 2016 Annual Report showed that there were two new substantiated cases made against 52,238 priests and deacons. This means that .004 percent of the clergy had a substantiated charge made against him.

In short, over the past two years, an average of .005 percent of the clergy had a substantiated charge made against him.

The time has come to end the audits. If not now, when?

The problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church occurred mostly between 1965 and 1985. Now that it is harder for practicing homosexuals to enter the priesthood—they are responsible for 8 in 10 cases of the sexual abuse of minors (pedophiles are responsible for less than 5 percent)—there is no need for the annual study.

To be sure, the training programs and screening procedures that have worked so well should continue, but it makes no sense to waste money on a study of this magnitude any longer. Indeed, it only feeds the erroneous perception that the problem continues unabated. This is not our problem anymore. We need to have the guts to say so.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the sponsors of the Samantha Bee TBS show, “Full Frontal”:

Newsbusters, the media monitoring arm of the Media Research Center, revealed last week that several sponsors of the Samantha Bee show of May 30—the one where she used the “c-word” to describe Ivanka Trump—did not post an advertisement on the next edition of “Full Frontal”; most of those who pulled their ads from the June 6 edition did so quietly.

Verizon was one of the only big companies to run an ad on both shows. Procter & Gamble (P&G) ran an ad for Cascade on the June 6 edition.

On June 8, we issued a news release posting my letters to the CEO and Chairman of Verizon and the CEO and Chairman of P&G: I asked them to discontinue advertising on Bee’s show. We also listed email contact information for both companies so that our followers could get in touch with them.

A woman from Verizon called a few hours later indicating that they had gotten the message; they were inundated with emails asking Verizon to pull its sponsorship. Although she did not say definitively that Verizon was going to discontinue its ads, she indicated that that may happen.

We look for Verizon not to advertise on Bee’s next show, which is June 13. We also hope that P&G will pull its sponsorship. Either way, we will address this issue again on June 14.

Contact: James J. Gerace, Chief Communications Officer, Verizon: james.gerace@verizon.com

For P&G, contact: mediateam.im@pg.com

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the results of a new Gallup poll on abortion:

In a survey released June 11, Gallup found that a majority of Americans, 53%, say abortion should be legal in only a few circumstance (35%) or in no circumstances (18%). This means that most Americans reject abortion-on-demand, the effective ruling of the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

The survey also found that as many Americans identify as “pro-life” (48%) as they do “pro-choice” (48%).

Importantly, more Americans, 48%, believe abortion to be morally wrong; 43% disagree.

Gallup senior editor Jeffrey M. Jones offered an interpretation that deserves a rebuttal.

Jones could have written that the survey results show how out of touch Roe v. Wade is with the public, but he elected not to comment.

Jones also says that “During the 1990s—when Gallup first asked the question [about identifying as “pro-choice” or “pro-life”]—more Americans personally identified as pro-choice than as pro-life by 51% to 40%, on average.”

In fact, those results are from the second survey on this issue. The first one showed that 56% of Americans identified as “pro-choice” compared to a mere 33% who said they were “pro-life.” In other words, the “pro-choice” side has declined by 8% (56% to 48%) since the mid-1990s, while the “pro-life” side jumped by 15% (33% to 48%). That’s a huge difference, yet Jones says nothing about it.

“By a slim five-percentage-point margin, 48% to 43%,” Jones says, “Americans believe abortion is wrong from a moral perspective.” Five percentage points is not huge, but neither is it “slim.” Furthermore, the difference is statistically significant.

Jones will not be alone in downplaying the good news. Don’t look for the mainstream media to run headlines saying, “Majority of Americans Oppose Roe v. Wade.” Nor will they tout the fact that more Americans think abortion is morally wrong than are okay with it. And they certainly won’t discuss why the pro-life side is ascendant, climbing 15% since the mid-1990s.

Whenever there is bad news on abortion, look for the media to highlight it. Whenever there is good news, look for them to bury it. That’s why so few have any respect for journalism these days. The dishonesty is rampant.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on last night’s Tony Awards:

A national writer for the Associated Press, Jocelyn Noveck, described the Tony Awards as an event “where tolerance and inclusion were constant themes.” So this is what Robert De Niro was doing—exercising his “tolerance”—when he screamed “F*** Trump”?

At least De Niro didn’t threaten violence against the president, which he did previously (“I’d like to punch Donald Trump in the face,” he said during the last presidential campaign). More recently, he vigorously defended Michelle Wolf’s obscene-laden address at the White House Correspondents Dinner. This is how Mr. Tolerance acts.

Another beacon of tolerance who spoke at the Tony Awards was Tony Kushner. He implored the audience to “heal our country.”

Kushner’s idea of healing is to bash Catholics and Jews. He not only cheered when Terrence McNally gave us “Corpus Christi,” the play where Christ is depicted as having sex with the twelve apostles, he lashed out at the Catholic League for exercising its First Amendment right to free speech by protesting the play.

After Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming, Kushner blamed the pope for the homosexual’s death: “Pope John Paul II endorses murder,” the healer said. He has also been relentless in bashing the democratic state of Israel.

When Andrew Garfield won the best actor award, he took the occasion to reference the Supreme Court decision which affirmed religious liberty in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. He sided against the decision calling on everyone to say “no to bigotry, no to shame, no to exclusion.”

It’s too bad Garfield didn’t direct his comments at the gay bullies who took aim at the baker, Jack Phillips. “We declined to create one custom cake to celebrate a wedding ceremony that would directly violate my faith’s teachings…and it resulted in five years of court battle, 40 percent of my business, losing half my staff and even death threats,” Phillips said.

Tolerance. Inclusion. Civility. The New York-Hollywood axis may shout those virtues from the rooftop, but in practice they violate them with regularity. There are no bigger phonies on earth.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue wrote to the CEO of both Verizon and Procter & Gamble requesting them to discontinue advertising on Samantha Bee’s TBS show, “Full Frontal.”

To read his letters, click here.

If you want to support us in this effort, contact the following:

James J. Gerace, Chief Communications Officer, Verizon: james.gerace@verizon.com

Javier Polit, Chief Information Officer, P&G: Polit.j@pg.com