Bill Donohue

She’s advertised quite a bit on Fox News, posing as an advocate for TikTok. In full habit, she is introduced as Sister Monica Clare. Most people would just assume she is a Catholic nun—there aren’t too many Protestant ones—but they would be wrong. She’s an Episcopalian.

Sister Monica Clare may look like a traditionalist, but she is very much a radical activist. She champions gender equality, “inclusion,” women’s rights (presumably abortion) and Black Lives Matter (she’s even marched with them).

Born Claudette Monica Powell, she grew up in an unhappy household. Her father was a drug addict and mentally ill. She attended a Baptist church with her family, recalling that the Southern Baptists “were very anti-Roman Catholic.” She now claims expertise in dealing with “religious trauma.”

The good sister belongs to a small group of nuns in Mendham, New Jersey. In fact, it’s a dying order: at 58, she is the youngest of them all. Before becoming a nun she was married for two years to a “fanatical atheist,” which ended in divorce.

She then considered joining a Catholic order of nuns, confessing that her life was unfulfilled. But she did not like the Church’s teachings on homosexuality and was put off by the male clergy. Lucky for her, she is now about to become an Episcopal priest.

Her future is uncertain. While she is sure to continue posting animal videos, will her quest to climb the hierarchy and assume a privileged position in the Episcopal Church leave her TikTok fans feeling disabused? Or will she use her new mantle to become an even more rabid advocate of left-wing causes?

One thing is for certain. TikTok needs her. Under fire by Republicans and Democrats alike, it has been accused of violating data privacy and national security. John F. Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, has called it a “potential threat vector” to the United States. “Chinese cyber intrusions are the most prolific in the world,” he says.

Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers has accused TikTok of conspiring with the Communists, saying, “The Chinese Communist Party poses the greatest national security threat to the United States of our time.” Congressman Mike Gallagher is even more pointed. “This is my message to Tiktok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to American users.” On March 13, the House will vote on exactly this issue.

When Sister Monica Clare climbs the social ladder to Rev. (it makes no sense for a woman to call herself “Father,” unless, of course, she wants to self-identity as such), she may be asked to save TikTok from Washington. The pivotal question is whether she is more likely to side with the Communists than the Congress.

Bill Donohue

March 12 is Detransition Awareness Day, the most important LGBT day of the year. Those who are responsible for transgenderism, the pernicious ideology that holds that the sexes are not binary and are interchangeable, will never call attention to this day, and that is because it seriously undercuts their crusade. But we at the Catholic League are not afraid to celebrate it.

The tide is turning. The insane idea that biology doesn’t matter—we can self-identify our sex—has peaked. It is true that the Biden administration continues to promote transgenderism. It is also true that elite American institutions in the behavioral sciences and the medical community continue to misinform the public. But the good news is that, even there, many are rethinking their position, coming over to our side.

Our side is the side of science. Their side is the side of politics.

Jamie Reed is a middle-age woman who calls herself a queer and says she is politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. She is married to a woman who thinks he is a man, a so-called transman. She took a job in 2018 at a transgender center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and saw how children with gender dysphoria are treated. She left last November because of what she witnessed.

“By the time I departed,” she wrote, “I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’ Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”

To those who think this is just anecdote, they’re wrong.

The American College of Pediatricians recently did a review of more than 60 studies on the issue of adolescents who have transitioned. They  concluded that “There are no long-term studies demonstrating benefits nor studies evaluating risks associated with the medical and surgical interventions provided to these adolescents.” Similarly, there is “no long-term evidence that mental health concerns are decreased or alleviated after ‘gender-affirming therapy.’”

The same organization found that “there is strong evidence that children and adolescents who identify as transgender have experienced significant psychological trauma leading to their gender dysphoria.” Therefore, they said, they “cannot condone the social affirmation, medical intervention, or surgical mutilation of children and adolescents identifying as transgender or gender nonconforming.”

By all accounts, the Europeans are way ahead of the Americans. The medical profession there has woken up and begun to realize that transgenderism should not be promoted. Even the Dutch, who were the first to tout its benefits in 2011, have concluded their enthusiasm for transitioning was not based on strong data.

The Economist, an influential British liberal weekly, wants desperately to believe in transgenderism, but has to admit that the medical evidence in support of it is “worryingly weak.” It cites a review of this subject conducted by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. “The academic evidence it found was weak, discouraging and sometimes contradictory….”

Tavistock, the English institute, is the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic. It was closed last year after an independent review. According to the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, the clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option.” This is because their work was  “based on poor evidence and its model of care leaves young people ‘at considerable risk’ of poor mental health.”

The authors of an article published last year in the journal of the Danish Medical Association found their initial well-meaning intentions were based on insufficient evidence—they encouraged transitioning—but came to realize that they were doing more harm than good and sharply reversed course.

Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish-born psychiatrist who heads the department of adolescent psychiatry at Finland’s Tampere University Hospital, was among the first physicians in the world to head a gender identity clinic for minors. She, too, has reversed course.

In a statement she wrote that was signed by 20 clinicians from nine countries, she said, “Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the evidence for mental health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty.” She knows why so many professionals have been snookered. “Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm.”

Last year, a group of five professionals in Norway examined what the medical community was promoting and took them to task for not following the science. Sex-affirming treatment with hormones and surgery, they said, was “not correct.” They explained why. “Such treatment methods, which have irreversible and significant consequences, have a weak knowledge base.”

In a lengthy piece published in February by the New York Times, it found that young people who have detransitioned, and medical professionals who no longer support transgenderism, are often stigmatized for doing so.

Those who have detransitioned, or are contemplating it, deserve our widespread support. They do not need to be marginalized by bullies who are too ideologically corrupt, or greedy, to realize that transgenderism is a monumental fraud.

Bill Donohue

It is time for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to award an Oscar for Best Performance of Religiophobia. It would prove to be a very competitive field, and would have the benefit of raising awareness about Hollywood’s long suffering malady.

From all accounts, the movie with the most overtly religious theme that was nominated for an Oscar this year is “Poor Things”; it is in the running for Best Picture. It tells the story of a woman who was “created” by a scientist—its Frankenstein appeal is palpable—who raises her as his child. She refers to him as her father and as “my God.” Eventually, she turns on him, ultimately rejecting authority of any kind.

Movieguide, published by the Christian Film & Television Commission (I serve on its board of advisors), called “Poor Things” a “Marxist, humanist, socialist, feminist brand of hedonism and one of the most obscene, blasphemous, abhorrent, and disgusting movies ever released by a major Hollywood studio.”

This explains why the Academy nominated it for Best Picture.

Rob Reiner, more commonly known as “Meathead,” released a movie last month that demonstrates the pervasiveness of religiophobia in Hollywood.

“God and Country” is about an alleged threat to American democracy posed by so-called Christian nationalists. The Meathead would have the audience believe that we are on the verge of a theocratic takeover, though few outside of Hollywood and other secular subcultures pay any attention to this fable.

The film is based on the work of Katherine Stewart, an author who harbors a deep phobia about Christianity.

In 2021, she cited as evidence that Christian nationalists are “running the country” a quip by President Trump. He mentioned that the Covid crisis would wane by Easter. Because he didn’t say by “mid-April”—but instead dropped the nefarious “E-word”—this was all the proof this sage needed to declare this a Christian nationalist moment. I’m not making this up.

The Hollywood Reporter was so exercised by the movie that it said that Christian nationalism “bears an unfortunate similarity to the rise of Nazi Germany.” Thus does this noted publication trivialize what happened to Jews under Hitler. Shameless is too kind a word to describe this characterization.

As for the Meathead, he says Christian nationalism is out to make us a Christian nation, something the Founders rejected. It is true that the Founders did not want the establishment of a Christian nation, but it is also true that they recognized, and indeed applauded, the founding of a Christian-inspired nation. That is why there are four references to God in the Declaration of Independence.

Here’s the good news. “God and Country” is a bomb. It took in a whopping $38,415 in its first weekend—over four-days—playing in 85 theaters. As one movie critic put it, this means it averaged $451 per theater, a stunning achievement, even for the Meathead.

Time for Hollywood to award an Oscar for Best Performance for Religiophobia. Call it reparations to the faithful, especially Christians.

Bill Donohue

The diversity industry functions more like a religious cult than a group of professional associations. It has a rigid core set of beliefs, and deviations from them are not welcome. Worse, the application of those beliefs often results in discrimination. It may strive for some degree of demographic diversity, but the most important expression of diversity of them all, namely diversity of thought, is not countenanced. Indeed, it is subject to punitive measures.

Disney is one of the nation’s premier exponents of diversity. As such, it is not a coincidence that it has been hit with a federal civil rights complaint alleging discrimination.

America First Legal, ably led by former Trump administration official Stephen Miller, contends that Disney “knowingly and intentionally” discriminates in its diversity, equity and inclusion policy.

“Disney maintains multiple programs that facilitate the limiting, segregating, or classifying of employees or applicants for employment and new business in ways that would deprive or tend to deprive, white, male, or heterosexual individuals of employment, training, or promotions because of their race, color, sex, or national origin.”

Disney says it bases its policy on norms adopted by the Academy of  Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Institute. These organizations focus on what they call “underrepresented groups.” Who are they?

• African American/Black/African and/or Caribbean descent
• East Asian (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian)
• Hispanic or Latina/e/o/x
• Indigenous Peoples (including Native American/Alaskan Native)
• Middle Easterner/North African
• Pacific Islander
• South Asian (including Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan)
• Southeast Asian (including Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Laotian, Malaysian, Mien, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese)
• LGBTQ+
• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

There was no mention of the blind or dwarfs.

Nor was there any mention of Catholics or Protestants, yet everyone knows that, beginning in the late 1960s, Hollywood has produced a slew of Christian bashing movies, many of which have been chronicled by the Catholic League (prior to the late 1960s, Hollywood showed no signs of bigotry against Christians).

Why, then, in the name of diversity, does Hollywood—and Disney, in particular—not mention Christians?

Disney has a post on its website called “Belong.” Under the banner of “Our Diversity & Inclusion Journey,” it says, “Our focus and intent encourages people from every nation, race/ethnicity, belief, gender, sexual identity, disability and culture to feel respected and valued for their unique contributions to our businesses (my italics).”

Why was the term “belief” used and not “religion”? By saying people from every “culture” are to be respected, wouldn’t that mean religious people—religion is the heart of any culture—and wouldn’t that include  Christians? Why the reticence?

In its “Community—Disney Social Responsibility” Statement, it lauds the Muslim Public Affairs Council Hollywood Bureau and the ADL, a Jewish anti-defamation organization. Why are no Catholic or Protestant civil rights groups mentioned?

Disney also aligns itself with Tanenbaum; it is a consulting group that deals with religious discrimination. Tanenbaum says its mission, in part, is to tackle “religious bullying of students [and] harassment” in the workplace. What about religious students who are bullied? There is no shortage of examples. Why are they treated as if they are only the victimizers?

In the name of inclusion, Disney practices some of the most exclusionary policies imaginable. There seems to be a place at the table for just about everyone, save for Christians. Not until it breaks out of its cult-like cocoon, will Disney mature and stop excluding Catholics and Protestants (especially evangelicals).

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

Bill Donohue

The more states legalize drugs, the more crowded hospital ER’s become. But the liberal elites in charge of dealing with this issue are unable to connect the dots. Their policies are downright incoherent. Indeed, they are schizophrenic.

Connecticut lawmakers have sounded the alarms over drinking and driving and will soon decide whether to lower the state’s blood alcohol level from .08 to .05. The national norm is .08; only Utah pins it at .05.

Yet when it comes to marijuana, Connecticut goes easy. It fully legalized marijuana on January 10, 2023. Adults age 21 and over can legally buy seven grams for recreational use.

The government is so proud of its new policy that it hypes it on its “Visit Connecticut” webpage. It not only tells stoners where to buy weed, it advises them to buy “Munchies,” featuring chocolate. This is not an accident: brownies are a popular pot edible.

Are Connecticut officials aware that it takes a much longer time for edible users to experience a high, resulting in greater intake and greater risks? Those who take edibles are more likely to wind up in the ER than smokers.

Ever responsible, the webpage closes with a promo for gambling, exclaiming, “it’s worth letting loose in a casino.” Assuming the stoner is capable of standing up.

Ask any cop who pulls drivers over for reckless driving and he will tell you that driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana is increasingly common. The problem is there is no reliable test for marijuana. Breathalyzers can be used to nail beer drinkers but are useless for nailing pot smokers.

There is a blood test for alcohol, as well as for marijuana, but the problem with the latter is that even if a driver smoked weed two days earlier (even weeks earlier in some cases), the test will come back positive, thus undercutting successful prosecution.

Many states, not just Connecticut, are treating marijuana as a relatively safe drug.

At the federal level, the Biden administration is pushing hard to deemphasize its negative effects. The Department of Health and Human Services wants marijuana use to be treated as a Schedule III drug, which would put it in the same class as Tylenol with codeine; currently weed is classified as Schedule I, meaning it is treated as a serious drug.

If the Biden administration is right to say that marijuana poses no major risk, then why did psychologists recently conclude that a California woman who stabbed to death her boyfriend 108 times—after taking one hit of marijuana—was suffering from “cannabis-induced psychosis”? Consequently, the judge set her free on probation.

Some people learn the hard way. In 2020, 58 percent of Oregon voters decided the time had come to decriminalize all drugs, including fentanyl, heroin, oxycodone and meth. They treated them like chewing gum. The result? One in five quickly became addicted and death due to opiod overdose skyrocketed. So did homelessness and crime. Now a majority of Oregonians (56%) want to repeal this insane policy.

No matter, the sages who run the editorial page at the Boston Globe still believe that banning drugs is not the answer. Yet they readily admit that because of decriminalization in some states, and relaxed enforcement in most of the other states, marijuana use has increased dramatically. More important, the medical professionals they interviewed admit that matters are out of control.

Dr. A. Eden Evins is the founding director of the Mass General Hospital Center for Addiction Medicine. Here is how he describes the changes. “Cannabis use is now the number one reason why young people present for addiction, which wasn’t the case before.”

Sharon Levy is chief of the Division of Addiction Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. When she started practicing addiction medicine around 2000, the editors note, “she hadn’t heard of hyperemesis—severe vomiting caused by repeated cannabis use. Now she hears cases where adolescents are hospitalized repeatedly because they cannot keep food down (my emphasis).”

“Levy said she is also seeing more teens with psychotic symptoms like hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, and paranoia. This is particularly troubling, she said, because a teenager with cannabis-induced psychosis is more likely to develop mental illness as an adult (my italics).”

In other words, what these doctors are saying is that relaxed sanctions for  marijuana use have resulted in a crisis condition. But the editors at the Boston Globe still don’t get it. What do they recommend? Education. We need more “consistent and accurate labeling.” Yeah, that’ll do it.

Liberals are a tortured people. They hate the effects of drug use yet they don’t want to do anything about it. They hate homelessness yet their only answer is to build more tents. They hate migrants overburdening towns across the country yet they love sanctuary cities and don’t want to prosecute illegals.

But it is not as though liberals are against using the law to punish all lawbreakers. They are very much in favor of locking up non-violent protesters who pray outside abortion clinics—they are an existential threat to the social order.

Bill Donohue

Most Americans are conflicted about abortion, and most are reluctant to condemn a woman who has had one. But they are also reluctant to honor those who have. Not the Bidens.

At the State of the Union on March 7, the Bidens will showcase Kate Cox, a woman who left Texas in December to have her baby aborted. The First Lady and the president spoke to her in January after the abortion.

Cox’s child was diagnosed as having Trisomy 18, more popularly known as Edwards syndrome. It is a severe genetic disorder that typically results in a miscarriage during the first three months of pregnancy; 95 percent of these babies do not make it to term. Cox was 20 weeks pregnant when she had her abortion.

We first learned of the decision to honor Cox on January 24. That is  when Kelly O’Donnell of NBC asked White House Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if the Biden administration had plans to personalize the issue of abortion. Three days earlier, Jean-Pierre said, “The First Lady invited Kate to join her as a guest at the State of the Union, and Kate accepted.”

According to Jean-Pierre, Cox was “forced to go to court to seek permission for the care she needed for a non-viable pregnancy that threatened the life—that threatened her life.” But the justices in Texas who ruled on this case did not all see eye to eye on this issue.

It is true that the District Court of Travis County said that Cox’s doctor, Damla Karsan, concluded that her patient’s life was threatened and merited a D&E abortion. But the Texas Supreme Court noted that “Dr. Karsan did not assert that Ms. Cox has a ‘life-threatening physical condition’ or that, in Dr. Karsan’s reasonable medical judgment, an abortion is necessary because Ms. Cox has the type of condition the exception requires.”

Turning to the medical community, a study published in the America Journal of Perinatology in 2017 concluded there was no increased maternal risk involved in Trisomy 18 pregnancies.

Whether Cox’s condition met the criteria for an abortion is an important matter, but it has nothing to do with the decision to glamorize her.  To say it is in bad taste is an understatement.

Cheering Cox on is the Center for Reproductive Rights who, with Cox, sued Texas. It is one of the most well-funded pro-abortion institutions in the world. It is disturbed that so many disabilities organizations are decidedly pro-life. “At times,” it says, “the disability rights movement has in fact alienated feminists by forging strategic alliances with anti-abortion groups to advance shared priorities, or by remaining silent on the abortion issue in order to avoid controversy within their own movement.”

The history of the eugenics movement, in this country with its racist agenda, and in Nazi Germany with its genocidal agenda, should be enough to give all disabled persons and organizations pause. They are always one step removed from experiencing the “compassion” of the population control crowd.

In a poll taken last month, 58 percent of Americans believe that babies born with Down syndrome should not be aborted. Among Republicans, 75 percent are against aborting these babies; 58 percent of independents are opposed; but the figure for Democrats is only 42 percent—56 percent support such abortions. Count Jill and Joe among the latter.

It is bad enough that the Bidens are flagging Kate Cox’s decision to abort her baby. It is worse that they deliberately chose a woman to be honored who was carrying a baby with disabilities. Quite frankly, Jill Biden is exploiting this woman to enhance the political capital of her husband.

Contact the White House Secretary: Karine.Jean-Pierre@who.eop.gov