Bill Donohue

The Arizona Diamondbacks will host a “Catholic Night” this evening at Chase Field. This is the first of its kind in Arizona, or in any other baseball park.

Last year, Catholics, and those from other faith communities, turned out in big numbers to attend the first “Faith and Family Night” game; another one was held last month. But the one tonight is different: it is a joint effort of the Diamondbacks and the Diocese of Phoenix. The home team is hosting the Houston Astros.

There are four levels of tickets, ranging from $24 to $46. The Diamondbacks have pledged $5 of each ticket will go to the diocese’s “Catholic School Support 365” program. It provides funding for Catholic families who need assistance to pay tuition due to a hardship situation—medical emergencies, lost jobs, death of a parent or sibling—allowing them to grow in their Catholic faith.

In June, we led a culture war against the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring a vile anti-Catholic gay group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The message was delivered to Major League Baseball—Catholics are fed up being insulted by the elites. That is why events like “Catholic Night” are welcomed. It is a stark rebuke to religious bigots.

Congratulations to the Arizona Diamondbacks and to Bishop John Dolan of the Diocese of Phoenix. We hope other teams follow suit.

Contact Garrett King, who is responsible for managing this event for the team: gking@dbacks.com

Contact Brett Meister, Phoenix Diocese director of communications: bmeister@dphx.org

Bill Donohue

We are not just decriminalizing marijuana—we are decriminalizing street crime.

In New York City, where I work, kids are coming to school high on marijuana, addicts are shooting up in daylight, the mentally ill are shoving people onto subway tracks, teens are jumping the turnstiles, and  those operating motorized bikes and scooters are running into pedestrians and cars. Most are not arrested and the few that are wind up back on the street before the cops complete the paperwork.

It’s not just in New York. All of the following happened this week.

In Philadelphia, over 100 youths ransacked stores and stole property. It started Tuesday night and did not end until Wednesday morning. Apparently, these kids don’t go to school or work, so what exactly do they do all day, besides commit crime?

This time they did not cannibalize their own neighborhood—they went on a rampage for eight hours in Central City, as well as North and West Philly. They targeted retail stores like Lululemon, the Apple Store, Footlocker, Walmart, Family Dollar, GameStop and others. Only around 50 were arrested. They were back at it again Wednesday night into Thursday morning, this time hauling away liquor and sneakers.

In New York City, a $5,000 painting was stolen in a smash-and-grab robbery on Monday. The gallery promotes the work of modern masters such as Keith Haring, Picasso and Andy Warhol. The thief had a car waiting for him. No arrests were made.

Target, the retail giant, sports a progressive politics, so it was only fitting that it suffer the consequences of its ideas. It announced on Tuesday that it is closing nine stores, all because the smash-and-grabbers are out-of-control. They are closing stores in East Harlem, New York, three in the San Francisco Bay Area, three in Portland, and two in Seattle. Target expects to have losses of over $1.2 billion this fiscal year—and its innocent customers will pay for it in higher prices.

On Tuesday, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors told the police, who have been demonized for years, that they could use almost $16 million to fight smash-and-grab crime. Statewide, Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided not to go after the criminals. Instead, he is doling out $267 million to reimburse store owners who have been victimized by smash-and-grab criminals. So now the taxpayers are paying for their loss of inventory.

On Sunday, smash-and-grabbers hit two Silver Lake businesses in Los Angeles. They went after the high-end sneakers—they love pricey sneakers. This was the fourth time they raided the store.

Nationwide, the National Retail Foundation says that the inventory losses this year now top $112 billion.

On Tuesday, there were three armed robberies in the middle of the day in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago. The police said this was a “trend.” To fight back, they are using helicopters, bicycles, license plate readers and specialized teams of officers.

In the 18th District, which includes most of Lincoln Park, and a few other communities, there have been about 300 robberies this year. The District Captain says teenagers are stealing cars to do the robberies and after they ditch one, they “get one the next day,” he says. “So it’s like Whac-a-Mole. We’re constantly playing cat and mouse.”

Oh, yes, in Chicago last weekend, 30 were shot and three were killed. One of them was Charles Hobson Sr. He went out to get something from  his truck and was shot dead. He was 86.

Every one of these cities are run by Democrats. None believe in law and order. In fact, it’s even worse than this. Consider how we treat violent street criminals as compared to the January 6 rioters, none of whom  killed anyone.

Antifa, the urban terrorist group, gets its money by teaming with outfits such as the National Lawyers Guild, the champion defender of communism. The activist attorneys show up to video tape Antifa interactions with the cops, selectively choosing footage to implicate the police. If they win a settlement, the money goes into their pockets so they can act as “legal observers” the next time.

Earlier this year, Philadelphia agreed to pay $9.25 million to 343 “protesters” who said they suffered “physical and emotional” injuries. What were they doing? The police were forced to use tear gas and pepper spray to clear them from a major highway at a Black Lives Matter riot.

In July, New York City agreed to pay more than $13 million to “protesters” who rioted during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. They got about $10,000 each. In a separate New York riot, the “protesters” were rewarded at least $21,500 each in a $6 million settlement.

The latest scheme to deal with crime in New York City starts on Sunday. There will be free bus service for five neighborhoods. To qualify, residents must live in a low-income area where “fare evasion” is commonplace. Once again, law breakers are rewarded and the innocent pay.

As I point out in my book, War on Virtue, social problems like these will continue as long as white liberals refuse to jettison their racism and start treating blacks as equals. They are the ones driving the decriminalization of street crime, and blacks are their biggest victims.

Bill Donohue

NBC News recently did a story on people who claim to be able to change their race. This created a firestorm. Many of those who are quick to say we can change our sex (what they inaccurately call “gender”) are livid at the idea that we can change our race. But according to their own logic, they are clearly wrong.

If self-identity is dispositive for sex—that is precisely what gender ideology maintains—why not for race? In other words, if a male claims to be a female, why can’t someone of one race claim to be that of another, if all that matters is self-identification?

NBC’s experts claim there is a dramatic difference. Race, they say, is  purely a social construct, having no basis in biology. But that is what gender ideology holds as well. So if both race and sex are purely social constructs, why can we change our sex but not our race? The logic implodes.

The fact is that sex is purely a biological concept whereas race has biological and social roots. Not to be confusing, but “gender” refers to socially learned roles that are appropriate for males and females; therefore, there is a social component to male-female differences.

Our sex is determined by nature. To be specific, the father determines the sex of the offspring. No one assigns our sex at birth—it is recorded, and what is recorded has been evident from conception. Society has nothing to do with it. To put it differently, we cannot change our chromosomal characteristics. Nature can be stubborn.

Race is more complicated.

Toni Morrison has said, “There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race—scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct… it has a social function, racism.”

She is partly right: racism is a social construct. But to treat race as such is flatly wrong. Morrison has bought into the myth, prominent among the devotees of critical race theory, that race is a social construct created to maintain white supremacy.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is no conservative, but he is an honest scholar whose writings are often attacked by those on the Left. For one, he does not buy into the false notion that human nature does not exist. He also doesn’t buy the conventional wisdom on race. “To oppose racism,” he says, “you don’t have to say ‘races don’t exist’”

Nicholas Wade is a former New York Times writer who has written a splendid book on genes and race. “By referring to anyone who explores the biological basis of race as a ‘scientific racist,’ and thus in essence demonizing them as racists, the academic left has managed to suppress almost all discussion of human differences.”

He takes sociologists to task for “incorrectly inferr[ing] that there is no biological basis for race, confirming their preference for regarding race as just a social construct.” He pointedly asks, “How did the academic world contrive to reach a position on race so far removed from reality and commonsense observation?”

Wade’s last comment merits our attention. If race is purely a social construct, how do we explain that sickle cell anemia primarily affects black Americans?  The CDC says that sickle cell disease is “a group of inherited blood cell disorders that primarily affects Black or African American persons.” It says nothing about it being socially constructed.

Why are Asian Americans twice as likely to develop stomach cancer compared to Caucasians? Why do they have twice the incidence of liver cancer? Are we to believe that cancer is also a social construct?

Wade admits that “genetic differences from one race to another are slight and subtle,” and he acknowledges that genes “can be overwhelmed by learned behaviors, or culture.” But he cautions, “To say that genes explain everything about human social behavior would be as absurd as to assume that they explain nothing.”

How many races are there? The numbers vary, but the strongest evidence points to three: Africans, East Asians and Caucasian. To back up what he says, Wade consults the findings of physical anthropologists, especially those who do forensics.

“Human skulls fall into three distinctive shapes, which reflect their owners’ degree of ancestry in the three main races, Caucasian, East Asian and African. African skulls have rounder nose and eye cavities, and jaws that protrude forward, whereas Caucasians and East Asians have flatter faces. Caucasian skulls are longer, have larger chinbones and tear-shaped nose openings. East Asian skulls tend to be short and broad with wide cheekbones.” Only an ideological zealot would claim that skulls are socially constructed.

There is something else going on here that bears discussion. Those who claim we can change our sex but not our race do so because it sustains their belief that our sexual identity is a fluid concept. Race plays no such role.

It is nonsense to say we can change our sex, any more than we can change our race. Those who argue otherwise are playing a game, one that is intellectually dishonest.

Bill Donohue

Disney CEO Bob Iger should have stayed in retirement. These are not good days for the former family-friendly entertainment giant. He can only blame himself. When he left in 2020 as CEO, he passed the baton to Bob Chapek, but he never really retired. He shadowed Chapek, making it clear to the Disney brass that he was still the man.

Chapek needlessly picked a fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was upset about the governor’s determination to stop the moral corruption of children in the school curriculum. He lost. Predictably, Iger was ready to resurface. He must now regret doing so.

Disney’s stock has plummeted to a nine-year low. Its streaming business, films and TV networks are in trouble. Most of the summer movies bombed. It lost north of $900 million over its last eight films. One big reason is its insistence on tailoring some of its children’s movies to please gay activists. This doesn’t go over big in the United States, never  mind in the Middle East; they ban this trash.

Does Disney get it? There are signs that it does, but no one should trust Iger or his henchmen.

On September 19, Disney investors met at Walt Disney Resort in Orlando. One of the things on their mind was the alienation of families—just how much gay and trans fare can mothers and fathers put up with? Whatever happened to Snow White and the Lion King?

Iger could not dodge the issue. He tried to calm the waters by telling investors he will “quiet the noise,” meaning he got the memo about overdoing the LGBTQ agenda.

This is not the first time Iger has conceded that Disney has gone off the reservation. In July, he said in an interview that “the last thing that I want for the company is for the company to be dragged into any culture war.” In April, he told one nervous investor, “Our primary mission needs to be to entertain… and to have a positive impact on the world. I’m very serious about that. It should not be agenda-driven.”

No one “dragged” Disney into the culture wars—it dove in head first. That is why the Catholic League released a documentary at the beginning of the year, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom,” that details how it changed from its noble origins into a vehicle for gay and trans propaganda. Given the huge audience we reached, we are confident that we played a role in the pushback.

In March, 2022, Karey Burke, the entertainment chief in charge of content (she now works for another Disney holding, 20th Television) boasted that she wants at least half of all future Disney characters to be LGBTQ or racial minorities. For her, it was personal. She said in a Zoom call, “I’m here as the mother of two queer children, actually, one transgender child and one pansexual child, and also as a leader.”

It would be wrong for conservatives to conclude that Disney has moved beyond Burke’s vision. In the April interview that Iger gave saying he doesn’t want any more of the culture wars, he had the audacity to say that it is “preposterous” to claim that Disney “is in any way sexualizing our children.” Then why did the gay-crazy New York Times accuse Disney of just that?

There are rumors that Disney is going to sell some of its acquisitions. Some are saying the entire company may be for sale. We’ll see. But if Iger does not tap the brakes on the company’s anti-family fare—throwing Burke’s plan in the garbage—the end may come sooner than he thinks.

We are giving away our DVD on Disney for free to the first 250 people  who request a copy. Just send $6 to cover shipping and handling. To pay by credit card, call 212 371-3191, or go to our website and click on DVD at the top.

Contact Disney’s communication chief: Kristina.Schake@disney.com

Bill Donohue

We learned in January that “traditional” Catholics were being investigated by the FBI for the crime of being traditional Catholics. We were assured by FBI Director Christopher Wray that only one Field Office, in Richmond, was involved. Then we learned that the FBI was also going after “mainline” Catholics, and had developed a plan to spy  on them. Then we learned that it wasn’t just one Field Office—agents in Los Angeles and Portland were also involved in the probe.

Wray has repeatedly said he knew nothing about Catholics being targeted. In fact, when he testified in July he said that when he first learned about this he was “aghast.” Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, testified on September 20 saying that he, too, knew nothing about this. When he found out, he told Rep. Jeff Van Drew that he was “appalled.” Garland said the same thing when he testified last winter.

Let’s assume they are telling the truth—neither man knew anything about those in their employ involved in raping the constitutional rights of ordinary Americans. (Garland, by the way, previously said he knew  nothing about the firebombing of Catholic churches by Jane’s Revenge in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.) Let’s also assume they were “aghast” and “appalled” about what happened.

What exactly have they done about it?

There has been no public record, nor statement of any kind, issued by either Wray or Garland regarding steps taken to hold those accountable for this egregious violation of the First Amendment rights of practicing Catholics. Have disciplinary measures of any kind been invoked? Has there been an internal investigation of the FBI seeking to learn if other  agents have also been spying on Catholics?

Let’s recall that Catholics were being targeted by the FBI if they were disdainful of Pope Francis, liked the Latin Mass, or if they criticized pro-abortion activists on Twitter (now X).

No field agent decided to just dream this caper up because he had nothing  else to do. No doubt many agents knew. We need to get to the bottom of this and find out who was involved, what triggered this egregious abuse of power—was it someone in the FBI who concocted this scheme, or was it someone from the outside who crafted it? We also need to know  exactly what was going to be done with the information once the probe was completed.

To this end, I am writing to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and to Committee member Rep. Van Drew, asking for their cooperation in finding the answers to these questions.

Contact Russell Dye, communications director for Rep. Jordan: russell.dye@mail.house.gov

Bill Donohue

This is a bellwether moment: On September 20, 2023, the New York Times finally conceded that there is no family form better than the nuclear family.

While it is breaking news to liberals that single-parent families are deeply flawed—the children typically do poorly in school and beyond—astute sociologists have known for decades that the nuclear family is the blue chip model. Consider the data. In 2020, 40.5 percent of babies in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. In 1940, the figure was 3.8 percent. Now ask yourself, what social trends have happened since then that derailed the nuclear family?

The person responsible for this bellwether moment at the New York Times is Melissa S. Kearney. An economics professor at the University of Maryland, she wrote an op-ed in the newspaper declaring, “The Rise of Single-Parent Families is Bad for Kids.” Thus did she shock the liberal readers of the newspaper, most of whom believed—thanks in part to the Times—that at best, all family forms were equal. Many others have been convinced that the much-ballyhooed nuclear family was nothing but a patriarchal institution of oppression.

Readers of the Times have been given plenty of reasons to draw the wrong conclusion.

In 2019, the Times asked students 13 and older to comment on an article by Michael Gonchar that asked, “Does society need a more expansive definition of ‘family,’ in your opinion?”

In 2020, Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” He posited that the nuclear family was an atypical form in the 1950s, and that in any event we would be better off today with extended families. Not true. We have known at least since the work of anthropologist George Murdock in the 1940s that the nuclear family is not only not atypical, it is a cultural universal. Furthermore, extended families have their own problems, and are not an option for most Americans.

Sarah Prager wrote a piece on parenting in the Times in 2020 that bashed the nuclear family for its “heteronormative” pretensions. She said her kids have two mothers and no father, and instead of identifying that arrangement as the problem, she blamed paperwork she has to fill out that is based on the traditional family. No doubt left-handers complain that society is not fair to them, either.

Last year, the Times ran a piece by Jessica Grose asking readers to “Celebrate Different Kinds of Families.” She made the argument that the decline of the nuclear family was good for society.

As I pointed out in The War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class is Killing the American Dream, the Left has long sought to intentionally destroy the family.

In the early nineteenth century, Robert Owen in England and Charles Fourier in France both made it plain that the traditional family was a problem. Owen called marriage “evil,” and Fourier praised orgies for their “liberating” effects. In the late nineteenth century, Karl Marx called the nuclear family the generator of “domestic slavery.”

In the twentieth century, Wilhelm Reich, who was a sex maniac and the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” preached the wonders of libertinism. Herbert Marcuse, godfather of the New Left, said the nuclear family was the source of “sexual repression.” He recommended a “polymorphous perverse” sexuality, one that would abolish the family. They both had an effect on left-wing activists like Linda Gordon: she insisted that “the nuclear family must be destroyed.”

More recently, Black Lives Matter explicitly said that its goal was to destroy the nuclear family. In 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African History and Culture slammed the nuclear family for its “whiteness,” making the case that it is not good for blacks to adopt this model. Surely the Klan would agree with Black Lives Matter and the Smithsonian.

It is commendable that Kearney ends her article with a plea to “find effective ways to strengthen families” and to provide for “stable two-parent homes.” She can begin by first telling her left-wing colleagues in the academy to stop denigrating the one family model that is vastly superior to all the others, namely the nuclear family.

Contact the Opinion Editor at the New York Times, Kathleen Kingsbury: Kathleen.Kingsbury@nytimes.com

Ronald J. Rychlak

A rash of news stories claim there is new evidence that shows the Vatican knew about the Holocaust earlier than it admitted. We asked Professor Ron Rychlak to offer a response.

The New York Times headline read, “Pope Pius XII Likely Knew of Holocaust, Newly Discovered Letter Suggests.” CNN reported, “Wartime Pope Pius XII probably knew about Holocaust early on, letters show.” Fox News said, “Wartime letter show Pope Pius XII may have known about Holocaust earlier than previously thought.” On and on they went.

Giovanni Coco, an official with the Vatican archives, recently discovered a letter dated December 14, 1942. It had been written by an anti-Nazi German Jesuit priest, Father Lothar König, and it was addressed to Pius XII’s personal secretary, Father Robert Leiber.

The letter, which is part of a set of archival papers set to be published in the near future, reported that an estimated 6,000 Jews and Poles were being killed every day at the Belzec concentration camp in what was then German-occupied Poland (today it’s part of western Ukraine). König also referred to the operation of “blast furnaces” and made reference to the Auschwitz and Dachau camps.

That news outlets find this revelation significant is probably not surprising. The reporters have not studied the matters in detail. Author David Kertzer, however, has built a career critiquing the papacy. Nevertheless, he has been promoting the importance of this letter. He should know better.

As most scholars who work in this field know, the Vatican received reports of atrocities as early as 1941. This letter, dated December 14, 1942, came just three days before the Allied joint statement which said:

From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again.

Pius had been invited to join this statement, but he opted to make his own statement on Christmas day.

Pius must have been shown the Allied statement well before it was released. Moreover, it is fair to assume that the pope received the December 14 letter after at least a short delay from when it was dated. In other words, the letter likely came after he had seen a draft of the Allied statement. Thus, it did not give him any new information about the atrocities.

On Christmas Day, less than two weeks after the date on the letter, Pius issued his own statement in which he spoke of “hundreds of thousands who, without any fault on their part, sometimes only because of their nationality or race, have been consigned to death or gradual extinction.” The New York Times editorialized, “This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent….”

Of course, Pius did not limit himself to words. In 1941, he provided the Allies with advance information about German troop movements, and as Mark Riebling explained in his book Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler, Pius was connected to at least three plots to topple Hitler, starting just after he assumed the seat of Peter in late 1939 and continuing until at least the summer of 1944 with the bomb plot involving German military Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, portrayed by Tom Cruise in the motion picture Valkyrie.

One part of the December 1942 letter is left out of many news accounts. In it, Father König urged the Holy See to not make public what he was revealing in the letter because he feared for his own life and the lives of the others who had provided the intelligence. This is but one of several such messages that Pius had to take into account when he chose action and diplomacy over banging away at the bully pulpit.

That so many outlets have failed to report that part of the letter suggests that others either miss the importance of the message or they are intentionally downplaying a very serious threat. That’s either poor history or dishonest journalism. We’re entitled to better.

Ronald J. Rychlak is a Distinguished University Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi and serves on advisory board of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Bill Donohue

The Pew Research Center recently released extensive survey data on marriage and the family that yielded some conflicting results. On the one hand, the public is worried about the current state of affairs, but on the other hand it appears they don’t fully understand why.

When asked about the future of the country, 40 percent said they were very or somewhat pessimistic about the institution of marriage and the family; only 25 percent were very or somewhat optimistic. One reason for this is that one-in-two Americans hold a negative view of the trend toward few children being raised by two married parents.

It is also true that many more take a negative attitude than a positive one about fewer people getting married. This may explain why 41 percent say they have a negative view about the future of the Social Security system; only 23 percent have a positive view.

We know, for example, that 90 percent of the money used to pay for Social Security payments today are collected from payroll tax contributions and reimbursements from the General Fund of the Treasury. This means that seniors, who are the largest age demographic group, are dependent on a relatively small pool of contributors. Declining birth rates have severe economic consequences.

There are several disturbing signs that suggest the public has not come to terms with their concerns over the future of marriage and the family.

When asked about people having fewer children, the public is evenly split: 27 percent have a negative view and 25 percent take a positive view. As for couples living together before getting married, only 29 percent disapprove; the majority (55 percent) say it is neither a positive or a negative thing.

What is more important, having a job or career that is enjoyable, or having children? The results are not even close: 73 percent choose the former and only 26 percent the latter. What about “open marriages,” where both spouses agree they can date and have sex with other people? Fully one-in-three say it is okay; half are not. Among those 18-to-29, a majority (51 percent) are fine with it.

These findings are the summarized results as reported by Pew. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these surveys is what Pew decided not to highlight.

Digging deeper into the data, it is revealing that Pew mentioned the age demographic in reference to views on “open marriages,” but not the one that tapped sexual orientation. The fact is that no demographic group is more enthusiastic about allowing spouses to mutually cheat than those who are lesbian, gay or bisexual: 75 percent say it is okay.

So why didn’t Pew highlight this instead of the age demographic? It clearly has an interest in protecting gays.

We know from the work of sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz that most gays (82 percent) cheat on each other. So it is hardly surprising that they are okay with “open marriages.” They have a hard time practicing fidelity.

Overall, data like these indicate that a strong anti-natalist strain is evident in the country. Radical individualism is clearly the greatest single threat to family stability, and has been since the 1960s. The heyday of strong American families was the 1950s, when most married young, had relatively large families, and stayed married.

So while Americans are worried about the future of marriage and the family, their penchant for individualism, and in some cases narcissism, leaves them a conflicted lot.

In general, the survey findings show that religious Americans are more likely to put family interests above the interests of the individual; the religiously unaffiliated are just the opposite. Consequently, the decline in religious beliefs and practices (religiosity) figures prominently in this discussion.

Without a restoration of religiosity, the prospects for building strong marriages and families are not auspicious. The clergy need to speak to these issues more than they have in the past. They need to help the faithful connect the sociological dots.

Bill Donohue

On September 12, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), ripped Americans who are in favor of school choice and parental rights, comparing them to segregationists. Even worse, she lashed out at Christians who support these initiatives. She made her remarks to Seth D. Harris, a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University.

Weingarten said she got the idea that there is little difference between the segregationists of old and today’s promoters of school choice and parental rights from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the seriously disgraced far left-wing organization. She concluded that these Americans want to “divide parents versus teachers.”

Now it is well known that Catholics have long been the mainstay of the school choice movement; they are also among the most vociferous supporters of parental rights. Let’s be clear: this does not mean that anyone who opposes both of these causes is necessarily a bigot. But in Weingarten’s case, she took the next step: she engaged in Christian bashing.

After speaking at length, with utter contempt and derision, about those who are pro-school choice and pro-parental rights, Weingarten let her guard down and went right for the jugular. “They want to have, basically, a Christian ideology, their particular Christian ideology to dominate the country as opposed to those that was born on the freedom of the exercise of religion.”

The subject under discussion had nothing to do with religion, so it tells us volumes about Weingarten that she would indict Christians, without cause.

What she said just prior to her bigoted remark puts her animus against Christians in perspective. She had just commented that some parents want school choice because they want universal vouchers, and “others want it because they hate knowledge.”

So who is it that “hates knowledge?” Those Americans who are bent on shoving their “Christian ideology” down our throats. The context says it all.

In other words, taxpaying parents who believe that they should have the right to send their child to the school of their choice—which includes most African Americans—and insist that their rights as parents be respected by the state, are somehow seeking to impose a Christian ideology on the nation. To top it off, these same religious zealots “hate knowledge.”

Weingarten should resign. The hatred that she has for millions of school choice and parental rights advocates—especially those who are Christian—disqualifies her from serving in any public role.

Contact Andrew Crook, National Press Secretary at AFT: acrook@aft.org

Bill Donohue

There is an important ballot initiative in Ohio this November on the issue of abortion that has generated considerable controversy. The discussion should ideally center on what limits should be placed on abortion.  Unfortunately, the pro-abortion side cannot confine itself to this issue, and has chosen instead to take the low road. To be specific, it is flexing  its anti-Catholic muscles in public.

Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights is running a TV ad statewide that shows a man kneeling in prayer in a Catholic church. There is a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on one wall, and the Stations of the Cross on another wall.

This imagery is purely demagogic: it is inviting the people of Ohio to think that the Catholic Church is seeking to impose its views on everyone. This is a classic case of Catholic baiting.

The Catholic Church does not impose its teachings on anyone: it proposes what is true, and everyone is free to disagree. Moreover, what the Church teaches about abortion is totally consistent with Biology 101: life begins at conception, and not a day later.

Those who reject what Catholicism and science teach can do so; they can believe whatever they want. What they cannot do is promote anti-Catholic bigotry.

The Ohio coalition supporting this invidious TV ad includes such anti-Catholic groups as Catholics for Choice and Faith in Public Life, both funded by George Soros. We have written about these groups in detail for decades. The bishops have several times condemned Catholics for Choice, and Faith in Public Life has a record of coaching the media on how to manipulate the bishops.

The Catholic League appeals to voters in Ohio to reject this bigoted TV ad. It further asks that those who champion abortion rights denounce this stunt by calling it for what it is—anti-Catholic bigotry.

We are contacting the Ohio media and leaders in government at all levels about this disgraceful attack.

Contact: info@ohioansunitedforreproductiverights.win