Bill Donohue

In the 1930s, if a Republican politician chose to go to Hitler’s Germany for his honeymoon, he would have been hounded from office. But in the 1980s and 1990s two Democrats and one independent (with close ties to the Democrats) chose to go to communist countries for their honeymoon. One of them is Tim Walz, the newly minted Democratic vice presidential candidate. We need to know why.

In 1989, Walz moved to Communist China to teach at a high school for a year. He later said it was “one of the best things I’ve ever done.” Five years later he got married and chose to honeymoon there. He has been to China at least 30 times.

When Walz was chosen to join Vice President Kamala Harris on the presidential ticket, the Chinese state media noted his frequent trips there and praised him for “fostering cultural exchanges.”

Under Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1976, 77 million people were killed, far outdoing the body count under Hitler and Stalin. While Walz has criticized human rights abuses in China in recent years, he has never explained why he would honeymoon in a nation with a history of mass murder. Nor has he explained why he is reticient about condemning Communist China for threatening the security of Taiwan.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who frequently caucuses with the Democrats, spent his honeymoon in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). The communists killed 66 million, mostly under Stalin.

Like Walz, Sanders has never explained why he would honeymoon in such a blood-stained country. He did so in 1988. While he was there he condemned U.S. foreign policy, but said nothing about egregious human rights abuses in the USSR.

In 1972, Sanders said that U.S. policy in Vietnam was “almost as bad as what Hitler did.” In 1985, he had a friendly sit-down with Daniel Ortega, the communist dictator of Nicaragua. In 1989, he visited Castro’s Cuba, praising the communists for their healthcare system, schools and housing, but saying nothing about the political prisoners being held. Today he refuses to condemn the oppressive Marxist regime of Maduro in Venezuela.

In 1994, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went on his honeymoon to Cuba. What he did was illegal, but that didn’t matter. He never told his children about this—they found out after he admitted it on TV; they were told their parents honeymooned in Canada.

In 1988, de Blasio went to Nicaragua to support the communist Sandinista regime. In 1990, he said he supported “democratic socialism” (which is an oxymoron), but when he was asked about this by the New York Times in 2013, he denied it. When the reporter said he has the evidence, de Blasio said, “It doesn’t matter.”

It does matter to the American people that left-wing political leaders cozy up to communist totalitarian dictators. De Blasio is out of office and Sanders is going nowhere, but for Walz, that is a different story. He needs to come clean. It is one thing to teach in Communist China, quite another to celebrate a wedding there. And why all the back and forth trips?

Contact Walz’s chief of staff: Chris.Schmitter@state.mn.us

Bill Donohue

Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her vice presidential pick. His policies on religious liberty and sexual issues mirror hers.

In 2024, Walz approved legislation that would protect religious liberty in Minnesota’s Human Rights Law. However, this was done after a 2023 bill that he signed into law that stripped them of their protections. The 2023 law caused an uproar across the state and forced Walz and the Democrats to retreat. The Catholic Conference of Minnesota was heavily invested in passing the 2024 law.

In 2023, Walz signed a bill into law that specifically excluded Christian universities with statements of faith from Minnesota’s Postsecondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program. This program allows high school students to  enroll at local colleges at no cost to them; they can receive both high school and college credits. This law was struck down in the courts after a Christian family sued Walz. The case was Loe v. Walz. No friend of religious liberty would ever have banned Christians from this program.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, Walz banned houses of worship from having gatherings of larger than 10 people. After the heads of Minnesota’s Catholic and Lutheran churches said they would reopen May 26, 2020, Walz quickly changed his position and allowed the churches to reopen. He had previously allowed retail stores, casinos, bars and restaurants to open at 50 percent capacity, and he okayed the opening of the Mall of America. The hard line he took for houses of worship smacked of an anti-religious bias.

Walz’s position on abortion is consistent with that of Harris’. He not only has no record of opposing an abortion for any reason—or at any time during pregnancy—he is so radical that in May 2023 he signed a funding bill that repealed Minnesota’s protection for babies born following a botched abortion. In other words, he legalized selective infanticide.

On January 31, 2023, Walz enshrined the “right” to abortion and other reproductive health care measures into Minnesota statutes. This law was designed to protect abortion in the state from future Supreme Court decisions.

When it comes to transgenderism—the anti-science movement that promotes the right of males and females (including minors) to switch their sex—the Biden-Harris team is the most radical administration in American history. Walz is on board, 100 percent.

On April 27, 2023, he signed a law that banned “conversion therapy.” House File 16 “prohibits mental health practitioners or mental health professionals from providing conversion therapy to vulnerable adults and clients under age 18.”

In other words, Walz wants to stop teenage girls (80 percent of those who “transition” to the other sex are females) from having the right to correct the mistake they made—often aided and abetted by corrupt therapists and medical professionals—in attempting to change their sex. These exploited young people want to “detransition” back to their father-determined sex, but Walz wants to take this right away from them.

On April 27, 2023, Walz signed a law that turned Minnesota into a transgender sanctuary state. House File 146 “prevents state courts or officials from complying with child removal requests, extraditions, arrests, or subpoenas related to gender-affirming health care that a person receives in Minnesota.”

In other words, this law gives state courts temporary emergency jurisdiction over any child in Minnesota who has “been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care.” If a child runs away, and moves to a state to receive “gender-affirming care,” Minnesota would not return the child to his parents under this law. Similarly, in a custody battle, a parent could take the child to Minnesota for “gender-affirming care” and the out-of-state parent would have no recourse in Minnesota’s courts.

Tim Walz is no friend of religious liberty, the rights of the unborn, and the welfare of young people. There will be no tension between him and Harris on any of these issues.

Bill Donohue

Utopians throughout the ages have dreamed of an egalitarian society where everyone is equal. Add Kamala Harris to the list. But given her entitled background, it makes us doubt her sincerity.

When she was running for president in 2020, Harris said in a video that “There’s a big difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’” She is right about that, but her interpretation of what these terms mean is deeply flawed. She thinks, as do all those on the Left these days, that equity means equal outcomes. It does not. It means fairness. Equality means sameness.

No matter, the most important thing Harris said in her video was, “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” In the real world, her idea explodes.

Let’s say everyone is given the same salary. Now we achieved the “equitable” society Harris wants—we all end up at the same place. No one has any more than anyone else. But for how long?

What if Jones sees a portrait that Smith has drawn and wants to buy it.  What if others observe what is happening and want to compete with Jones to buy the portrait? After the bidding war is over and Jones wins, Smith is richer than everyone else. Bingo—inequality rears its ugly head again.

The only way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to deny all the Joneses the  freedom to spend their money the way they want, thus making sure everyone remains at the same place. In other words, the quest for an egalitarian society can never succeed and always winds up oppressing the masses.

In a track meet, all runners start at the same spot. But they don’t finish at the same spot. We can, and should, do what we can to ensure that everyone who wants to compete should have an equal opportunity to do so, but we should never jimmy the race to force all runners to cross the finish line at the same time.

It is strange that Harris would even want such a society. She is the product of black privilege. Her late mother, Shyamala, was raised in a caste society in India where upward mobility does not exist. She occupied the top tier—she was a member of the Brahmins. Critical race theorists label them oppressors.

She boasted about it. “In Indian society, we go by birth. We are Brahmins, that is the top caste. Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money. For Brahmins, the bloodline is the most important. My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years.”

It would be hard to find a more full-throated celebration of inequality than this.

What about Kamala’s dad, Donald Harris? He traces his ancestry to slavemasters. The Stanford University professor of economics, who has accused his daughter of smearing his Jamaican ancestors by saying they are a bunch of potheads, admitted in 2018 that his grandmother was a descendant of Hamilton Brown. He was a plantation and slave owner in northern Jamaica. He owned scores of slaves, most of whom were brought from Africa, which has a long history of slavery.

Given her pedigree, this raises the question: Is Kamala suffering from black guilt? More important, however, is why anyone running for president of the United States would want to craft a society where everyone ends up in the same place. Not only is that impossible, attempts to do so yield totalitarian results.

Bill Donohue

One of the nation’s leading hate groups, Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), has filed a formal complaint with the IRS arguing that the Catholic League has “engaged in unlawful political campaigning.” It cites a recent post where I said, “Kamala Harris is not religion-friendly.” It provides not a single instance whereby we violated any IRS stricture—it simply repeats my criticisms of Harris. That is not only my First Amendment right, it does not run afoul of IRS rules.

For more than 30 years, there have been many attempts made to hound me from public life. Some have gotten to the point where I have had to contact law enforcement, at the federal and local level, and bodyguards. This latest effort—the militant atheists would like to take away the Catholic League’s tax-exempt status—will fail, just like the rest of them.

My foes should have learned by now that no one can shut Bill Donohue up. We will continue to publicly hammer anti-Catholic bigots. We will be deterred by no one. Bet on it.

Contact Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president: algaylor@ffrf.org

Bill Donohue

It’s settled. Those who denied that the vulgar show performed at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics was not about the Last Supper have been proven wrong. Referring to the bigoted artist, Thomas Jolly, a spokesperson for the Olympics said the following in a statement to the New York Post: “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting.”

So much for the nonsense that this anti-Catholic stunt—which featured a mostly naked man and drag queens—was a celebration of the Greek god, Dionysus.

Every honest person knows that this obscene portrayal was done to assault Christian sensibilities. Yet many denied the obvious. Here are some who did.

• Boston French Consulate: “The ceremony was designed to celebrate the unity of the Olympic spirit.” They accepted Jolly’s lying response, saying that “the performance in question was inspired by the image of a pagan feast,” one that paid homage to Dionysus, “the Greek god of festivities and wine.”
• The official account for the Olympics on X posted “The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.”
• In an interview with BFM, Thomas Jolly said, “The idea was to do a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus.” He added, “You’ll never find in my work any desire to mock or denigrate anyone. I wanted a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.”
• Phillippe Katerine, the performer who dressed as the semi-naked blue man in the Olympic scene, said that the performance “was mostly a misunderstanding. Because when it comes down to it, it wasn’t about representing ‘the Last Supper’ at all.”
• Barbara Butch, the DJ at the center of the skit, wrote in a now inaccessible Instagram post that she “was the Greek God of the Sun, Apollo, and referenced Jan van Bijlert’s painting ‘The Feast of the Gods,’ which is displayed in a French art museum.”
• Snopes “fact checker” Jack Izzo writes, “So at the end of the segment, when the top of a large serving platter rose to reveal a blue man (French singer Phillippe Katerine) wrapped in grapevines, Jolly was not referencing Jesus and ‘The Last Supper,’ but rather Dionysus, the Greek God of wine and festivity.”
• Writing for MSNBC, Anthea Butler commented, “The moral panic over a scene of drag queens feasting at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics set off a firestorm of outrage from religious conservatives and politicians who believed the scene was a mockery of the Last Supper. Except it wasn’t about the Last Supper at all.”
• Sally Jenkins writes in the Washington Post, “That drag queen sequence was meant to refer, like Delville, to Greek pagan celebrations — not, as some Christian leaders insist, to mock Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper.'”
• Louise Marshall, an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and an expert in Renaissance Art, is quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Frankly, when I looked at the clips, ‘The Last Supper’ isn’t necessarily what springs to mind. It seems very lighthearted and funny and witty and very inclusive.”
• “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said on the July 29 show that “The guy that put it all together said it was from ‘The Feast of the Gods,’ which is a 17th Century Dutch painting of the Greek Olympian gods, you know, the Olympian gods because it’s the Olympics.” She further stated “There are too many people in the picture for it to be the 12 disciples and then the seven or eight other people in the picture.”
• Dutch art historian Walther Schoonenberg posted on X that “The tableau vivant or ‘living painting’ in the opening ceremony of Paris 2024 was of The Feast of the Gods, by Jan van Bijlert from 1635.”
• In an Instagram post, “Full House” actress Jodie Sweetin said, “The drag queens of the Olympics were re-creating the feast of Dionysus, not the last supper.” The post continued “And even if you thought it was a Christian reference — what’s the harm? Why is it a ‘parody’ and not a tribute? Can drag queens not be Christian too?”
• Donna Kelce, the mother of NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce, shared a Facebook post by user Jeff Rose that said, “The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics wasn’t a mock of the Last Supper. If you have any knowledge of the Greek origin of the Olympics and the French’s rich history of theater you would have gotten this. However, because of your veiled homophobia, some of you can’t discern factual information.”

All of these people are guilty of denying the truth. Worse, they seek to blame those who are offended for misrepresenting Jolly’s obscene and bigoted portrayal. What he did is hate speech, and attempts to justify it are as obscene as his stunt.