Bill Donohue

Every survey over the past few decades shows that the Democratic Party is overrepresented by secularists, many of whom are anti-religion, especially anti-Christian. That is why its leaders are attracted to someone who might be able to resonate with Christians, yet appeal to their base. They think they have found one in James Talarico.

Rep. Talarico serves in the Texas legislature, and after a lengthy interview with podcast superstar Joe Rogan, he is the talk of the town in Democratic circles. “You need to run for president,” Rogan said. The 36-year-old might just do that, but now he is contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate.

Two years ago, Talarico caught the eye of Politico, the influential news website. The title of the article tells why: “James Talarico is a Deeply Religious Democrat Who Just Might Be the Next Big Thing in Texas.”

It is not every day that Politico finds someone who is “uniquely positioned to actually be the Democrat who wins statewide.” An “aspiring preacher,” he has been attending the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary; he is in the Masters of Divinity program.

All of this is music to the ears of Democrats looking for someone other than a socialist to save them. But the more we know about him, the more the music sounds discordant.

As it turns out, Talarico is a die-hard secularist dressed in religious garb. In many ways, he is just like that “devout Catholic,” Joe Biden, only worse—he is a preacher man.

Talarico’s mentor is Rev. Jim Rigby. His pastor not only supports the whole panoply of gay rights, he loves ordaining gay and lesbian clergy. When Talarico was invited to give his first sermon in Rigby’s church in 2023, he chose to discuss abortion. He asked the parishioners, “Did they teach you in Sunday school that Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist?”

In 2022, Talarico wrote to Biden asking him to issue three executive orders: 1) lease federal property to abortion clinics on federal lands or in federal offices 2) prohibit states from imposing restrictions on abortion medication through the Food and Drug Administration, and 3) hire abortion providers as federal employees. It is for reasons like this that in 2019 Texas Right to Life awarded him a score of 0%.

To an increasing number of Americans, allowing minors to undergo sex-reassignment surgery is child abuse. Allowing boys and men to compete against girls and women, and to shower together, is considered unjust.  But not to Talarico—he’s all in. Indeed, he tells his fans that those who oppose genital mutilation, chemical castration and puberty blockers are  “pushing us to waste time on these culture war issues.” He accuses his critics of wanting to “hurt trans kids.”

Talarico is so far gone that he actually believes there are sexes beyond male and female. He told one of his colleagues, “In fact, there are six.” He did not have a name for these creatures or share pictures of them. He should also be asked to explain why he chose six and not seven.

The “aspiring preacher” wants to ban the display of the Ten Commandments in the schools, but not “sexually explicit materials.”

When a bill to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments surfaced in the Texas legislature, Talarico, who explicitly called himself a “devout Christian,” said it was “deeply un-Christian.” He even branded it “idolatrous” and “un-American.” But some were ecstatic about what he said. Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod and California Governor Gavin Newsom were blown away, casting him as their new savior.

Talarico says he wants to help the poor, but his policies suggest he wants to keep them in their place. He strongly opposes school choice measures, calling them “welfare for the wealthy.” But it is the poor, not the wealthy, who cannot afford to place their children in a private or parochial school. No matter, he wants to consign them to failing public schools.

Perversely, Talarico is actually an advocate of “welfare for the wealthy.” He places no income limit on giving away a whole range of services. He supports medical debt forgiveness, baby bonds, subsidized marriage counseling, and what he calls “Medicaid for Y’All.”

Given his passion for radical transgenderism and abortion, it is hardly surprising to learn that he has won the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood. He’s their kind of guy.

Obama and Biden both said they believed in religious liberty. Obama declared war on the Little Sisters of the Poor and Biden’s FBI spied on Catholics. Talarcio is cut from the same cloth.

If he is regarded as a “deeply religious Democrat,” we’d hate to meet those who aren’t.

Contact: james.talarico@house.texas.gov

Bill Donohue

On July 17, we issued a news release, “Georgetown’s Muslim Problem,” that addressed the legacy of one of its professors, Jonathan Brown. To say he has an animus against Jews and Israel would be a gross understatement: he exhibits a greater affinity to Hamas than to Catholicism.

Our response came two days after Brown drew the ire of a congressional committee. The interim president, Robert Groves, took the heat. He told the panel that after it was revealed last month that Brown expressed hope that Iran would bomb U.S. military bases in the Middle East, he was relieved from his post as chairman of the university’s department of Arabic and Islamic studies; he is currently on leave, pending an investigation.

Brown may be the most conspicuous anti-Jewish professor at Georgetown, but he is hardly alone. Mobashra Tazamal also teaches there and his specialty is “Islamophobia.” He is known for comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. Nothing phobic about that—it’s simply a malicious lie.

To understand why Georgetown has a Muslim problem, all we need do is follow the money.

In 1977, Libya bought an endowed chair for $750,000. This was done under the auspices of Muammar Gaddafi, the brutal dictator and ally of the Soviet Union. In 2005, Saudi Arabia gave $20 million to establish a Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. It is known for banning Christianity and oppressing women, two issues that are a flagrant violation of the mission of this Jesuit-run institution. But this is chicken feed compared to what Qatar has given.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy recently issued a lengthy report that is eye-opening. “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood.” It documents the incestuous relationship between the government and the university. To be exact, “it lays bare how Qatari money is systematically used to buy influence, compromise academic integrity, and embed Islamist ideologies at the heart of American education.”

Qatar has greased Georgetown to the tune of over $1 billion. These include funds to operate Georgetown’s Qatar campus. This has real-life consequences: everything from research to faculty hiring and curriculum development reflect the priorities of the Qatari regime. As a result, the report concludes that this is a campus where censorship is extant and academic freedom is severely compromised.

Georgetown professes to be a school that prizes liberty and equality, so why didn’t anyone object to the establishment of a Georgetown campus in Doha? Actually, some did. The Georgetown Voice registered a complaint in 2018. But this is a student newspaper and the administration and faculty simply ignored their plea to close the Qatar campus. Money talks.

It is not just at the Qatar campus where free speech is squashed. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) monitors free speech at American colleges and universities. In its 2025 report on 251 institutes of higher education, Georgetown ranked near the bottom; it was number 240. The majority of its students say they self-censor at least once or twice a month. This is no doubt due to many factors, but surely the Islamic connection is one of them.

At the D.C. campus, Brown was a beneficiary of Qatar generosity. The regime funded a post he occupied, the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service. But the real damage done by the Qatar-Georgetown nexus is not Brown’s chairmanship—it is the damage done by those who graduate from the university’s School of Foreign Service.

The report does not exaggerate when it says that this school “has produced more U.S. diplomats and ambassadors than any other institute. Many alumni have been shaped by ideologically slanted curricula and faculty with close ties to foreign leaders. These graduates go on to shape policy—often in ways aligned with the worldview of their financial backers.”

In short, Georgetown’s Muslim problem is a direct result of being bought by those whose values are about as anti-American and anti-Catholic as it gets. We will have more to say about this subject in due course.

Bill Donohue

July 17, 2025

Georgetown University, which identifies as Catholic, has a Muslim problem. There is nothing new about this, but now that it is front and center, it can no longer be ignored.

On July 15, Robert Groves, the interim president of Georgetown, testified before the House Committee on Education and Workplace. He told the panel that one of his tenured professors, Jonathan Brown, is no longer chairman of the university’s department of Arabic and Islamic studies.

Brown, who is a convert to Islam, is stridently anti-Jewish, and he is quite open about it. He also defends slavery and rape. I wrote about this in my 2019 book, Common Sense Catholicism. I will address his enthusiasm for slavery shortly, but the reason why Groves was grilled by the congressional committee has to do with an X post that Brown made last month.

Iran is the primary source of terrorism in the Middle East, and a potential nuclear threat to Israel and the U.S. It was due to the escalating attacks on Israel that the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities in June. Brown, who holds an endowed chair at Georgetown, responded by saying Iran should attack U.S. military bases in the Middle East. “I am not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops.”

The Georgetown interim president told federal lawmakers that “Within minutes of our learning of that tweet, the dean contacted Professor Brown. The tweet was removed. We issued a statement condemning the tweet. Professor Brown is no longer chair of his department. He’s on leave, and we’re beginning a process of reviewing the case.”

Brown’s hatred of the Jewish state was made plain after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. In an unprovoked barrage, the Iranian-backed terrorists killed 1,200 men, women and children, leaving 3,000 injured. Brown, the son-in-law of convicted terrorist supporter Sami Al-Arian, defended Hamas. More than that, he said, “Israel has been engaged in a genocidal project for decades.”

This is vintage Brown. He is such an extremist that he claims Israel has a Nazi-like history. “Israel will go down in history as a country whose main claims to fame are genocide, racial fanaticism on the level of the Third Reich and religious fanaticism that makes ISIS look mellow.”

Similarly, Brown wonders why so many Jews have “embraced genocide as a core tenet.” Indeed, he contends that this is “an inalienable part of their faith.” Just as obscene, he portrays the Israeli army as evil, saying it is “objectively the most effective child-killing machine in modern history.”

That any professor would tell such an outrageous lie is mindboggling. That it is said by a professor at one of the nation’s most prestigious Catholic universities is all the more astounding.

Georgetown has known for years that Brown is a radical activist, not a scholar. As I previously documented, he has publicly maintained that slavery is okay, provided it is grounded in Islam. In 2017, he spoke at the Institute for Islamic Thought. He informed the crowd that “there is no such thing as slavery in Islam until you realize that there is no such thing as slavery.” This was not a throw-away line.

In a classic expression of moral relativism, Brown contended that “Slavery cannot just be treated as a moral evil in and of itself.” In fact, he flatly said, “I don’t think it’s morally evil to own somebody because we own lots of people all around us.” As I said when I first read this, “He did not say whom he owns, though it if he does, he should be reported to the police.”

Perhaps Brown feels guilty about the fact that his hero, Muhammad, was a slaveowner. During the Q&A that followed his talk, he said the following about the Islamic prophet: “He had slaves, there is no denying that.” But so what? Brown quickly berated the audience, saying, “Are you more morally mature than the prophet of God? No, you’re not.”

It should not come as a surprise that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is standing by their man, even after Brown’s admission that he hopes Iran strikes U.S. military installations. In 2014, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) designated CAIR a terrorist organization. And on July 15, Rep. Elise Stefanik said that CAIR was a co-conspirator in a terrorist-financing case and has ties to Hamas.

In a letter to Groves, CAIR pleaded its case for Brown.

“We urge Georgetown University to immediately cease any investigation or disciplinary action related to Dr. Brown’s tweet. Instead, the university should affirm its commitment to protecting academic freedom, resisting political intimidation, and standing with faculty members who have dedicated their careers to the pursuit of knowledge, justice, and dialogue. Dr. Brown should be fully reinstated as chair and no further action should be taken against him.”

I wrote to Groves as well, but my recommendation is very different from the one CAIR made.

Contact Robert Groves: presidentsoffice@georgetown.edu

Bill Donohue

July 15, 2025

The Catholic League welcomes the announcement that the IRS has altered its policy on non-profit organizations and their participation in political campaigns. We know from our own experience that the 1954 stricture, known as the Johnson Amendment, prohibiting 501 (c) (3) organizations from campaign activity, is both rife for mischief and impractical. But the changes will not have any substantial impact on the way we have been operating for decades.

On July 7, the National Religious Broadcasters, an association of Christian communications, and the IRS reached a settlement regarding their dispute over the IRS’s authority to stifle the political speech of religious non-profits.

“When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith, it neither ‘participate(s)’ nor ‘intervenes’ in a ‘political campaign,’ within the ordinary meaning of those words.”

The motion said “this interpretation of the Johnson Amendment is in keeping with the IRS’s treatment of the Johnson Amendment in practice.”

That conclusion is way too generous. The IRS did in fact break new ground with its settlement agreement. Here’s the evidence.

Just weeks after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I was notified by the IRS that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating the IRS Code on political activities as it relates to 501 (c) (3) organizations. What the IRS did not realize is that I knew who triggered the investigation: Catholics United (now defunct), a George Soros-funded phony Catholic organization. We know it was a dummy Catholic group because of the 2016 Wikileaks files on John Podesta (former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign). He admitted to doing this.

When I received the November 24, 2008 IRS letter notifying me of a probe, I recognized how strikingly similar it was to a leaked copy of the Catholics United complaint. Just before I was scheduled to go on CNN on October 23 (three days after I wrote a news release, “George Soros Funds Catholic Left”), a CNN staffer leaked the complaint to me. She did so because the head of Catholics United, Chris Korzen, tried to stop me from being interviewed—he suggested that one of his allies take my place, claiming I was not “an authentic Catholic commentator.” CNN knew better and I went on TV that night.

The “evidence” against me was nothing more than news releases and reports that I had written during the presidential campaign on various issues. In other words, the IRS would not have taken action against the Catholic League if it were faithful to the rules that it now claims were always operative. In short, the new wording is welcome precisely because it alters its long-standing policy on religious non-profits.

What we went through—it lasted for about a year and a half before we were given a slap on the wrist—proves what I said about the IRS rule being rife for mischief: It allowed the Soros-funded “Catholic” group to persuade the IRS to start its investigation.

Another example of the mischief that the initial rule entailed was the disparate treatment given to African American churches. Not a campaign season goes by without political candidates speaking at black churches. In some cases, they have been endorsed by pastors; there are instances when collections have been taken up for them. If this happened at a Catholic church, the whole world would know about it.

I also said this stricture was impractical. What made it impractical was the enforcement mechanism.

How can a religious non-profit like the Catholic League be expected to combat anti-Catholicism, and fight for religious liberty, without addressing political figures who are responsible for these matters? We have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, so any encroachment on those rights is unconstitutional.

The IRS concluded that although the Catholic League had “intervened in a political campaign,” it was “unintentional, isolated, non-egregious and non-recurring,” and therefore our tax exempt status remained in tact. I told the IRS agent who contacted me that they were twice wrong: (a) we did not intervene in a political campaign and (b) what we did was intentional. Therefore, I said, we were not going to change course.

It is now indisputable: the Catholic League did not change—the IRS did.

We will continue to address policy issues that arise during a political campaign that are of interest to our mission. While we have no plans to endorse candidates for public office, we will not hesitate to call out candidates who trespass on religious liberty. Quite frankly, once either the Republicans or the Democrats think they own you, they are free to throw you to the curb. We are happily independent.

So while we will not substantially change our stance, we are glad to know that we won’t have the IRS looking over our shoulder for simply doing our job.

Bill Donohue

July 14, 2025

We’ve all dealt with scolds, highly judgmental finger-pointing people who are quick to call us out for some alleged moral outrage. They are annoying, to put it mildly. The corrective, however, is not to become the polar opposite, which is to be non-judgmental about practically everything. The extremes, as usual, are no good.

It is not the scolds who are the big problem these days; it’s the non-judgmental types. Their smugness is sickening—they like to lord over us as the high priests of tolerance and open-mindedness. More important, there are times when to withhold judgment is not only not virtuous, it is morally offensive. To cite one example: If we can’t summon the moral courage to unequivocally denounce genocide, then we need to reset our moral compass.

Artificial intelligence tells us that “Being non-judgmental fosters understanding and improves relationships.” To be sure, this is true in some cases. But if the issue is incest, then fostering an understanding  may actually impede our ability to condemn. More to the point, it is absurd to think that being non-judgmental about mother-son sexual relationships is virtuous.

Other internet sites imply that making judgments suggests a character disorder. “Why do you feel the need to judge? It’s time for some introspection. You need to be honest with yourself and unwrap why you feel the need to judge other people.”

So when parents tell their children it’s time to retire their phone, or turn off the TV, and start doing their homework, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they feel the need to judge? The truth is parents who are not judgmental about such things are delinquent in their duties. And by the way, is not the decision not to judge a judgment call?

In some Catholic quarters, it is fashionable to cite Pope Francis as a beacon of non-judgmentalism. After all, they say, it was he who famously said about homosexuality, “Who am I to judge?”

Wrong. He never said that about homosexuality. Homosexuality is  conduct, a behavior proscribed by the Bible and the Catholic Catechism, and the pope never said it wasn’t sinful. But being a homosexual is morally neutral—it is no more sinful than being a heterosexual.

Pope Francis was referring to the status of someone who is a homosexual, and in this particular case it was about a priest who had been accused, but not found guilty, of a sexual offense. To his credit, the pope chose his words very carefully. What he said before, and after, those five words, “Who am I to judge?”, matters greatly.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge him?” (My italics.) The qualifiers, and the object of his remark, provide a very different picture than the one falsely promoted by “non-judgmental” savants.

When non-judgmentalism becomes a crusade, it carries the seeds of moral relativism, one of the most destructive, indeed lethal, ideas in history.

In his classic book, Modern Times, Paul Johnson, the great English Catholic historian, argued that the astounding violence and cultural corruption that marked the twentieth century was a function of moral relativism, the notion that there are no moral absolutes, just opinions. It was after World War I, he said, that moral relativism triumphed. Notions of right and wrong were no longer seen as a cultural expression, grounded in our Judeo-Christian heritage. No, they were merely a matter of whim.

Hitler said, “There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense.” He made good on his ethics. He killed with abandon, never flinching from his convictions. In this regard, he was following the wisdom of Nietzsche, who opined, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Once truth and facts are seen as mere opinions, it allows some to think that putting Jews into ovens is the right thing to do. After all, “Who are we to judge”?

The Institute for Historical Review (IHR) is a contemporary example of this view. It spends most of its time trying to belittle, if not deny, the Holocaust. It maintains that this is not an accurate account, but anyone who has read its work knows better. “The IHR does not ‘deny’ the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no ‘position’ on any specific event or chapter of history, except to promote greater awareness and understanding, and to encourage more objective investigation.”

Why lie? Why the need to put the word deny in quotes, as if it were debatable? Similarly, any organization that takes no position on the Holocaust means it would not object if another Hitler emerged with his Final Solution plans.

The intentional killing of millions of innocent people is morally abhorrent. If that is being judgmental, so be it. There are times when being non-judgmental makes sense, but as a universal rule it is morally debased. Even deadly.

Bill Donohue

July 11, 2025

Anyone who has been following the ordeal of Father Gordon MacRae, the falsely accused priest who has been imprisoned since 1994, is aware of the injustice he has had to endure. One of the persons who has contributed to this injustice is U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante.

He is back in the news for halting President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. He has given the president one week to appeal his decision.

To understand why the Catholic League believes this judge is morally delinquent, read the account by Detective Ryan MacDonald on how Laplante put the screws to Father MacRae.

Bill Donohue

July 10, 2025

Black Lives Matter Day is July 13. BLM was founded in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin but did not become a national force until 2020. Today it is nothing but a shell of an organization. It not only ripped off corporate donors, its legacy is one of blood.

In July 2020, Patrisse Cullors became BLM’s executive director. Less than a year later she resigned after it was reported that she “used her position as the charity’s leader to funnel business to an art company led by the father of her only child.” Before she left in May 2021, she announced that BLM had raised over $90 million. CharityWatch subsequently said BLM is “a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction.”

It was such a mess that ten states had to close its chapters once it was revealed that BLM was not in compliance with state registration laws. In September 2022, one of its board members, Shalomyah Bowers, and his consulting firm, was accused of stealing more than $10 million in donations from the BLM Global Foundation, using it as its own “piggy bank.”

Bad as this is, nothing is worse than the violence that BLM protesters  engaged in, and the way it exploited black-police encounters. It planted the seed in the minds of millions of Americans that the cops are the enemy of black people, thus aggravating racial relations.

The late David Horowitz closely tracked the damage that BLM had done. “All the outrage against police racism, and all the mayhem fueled by that outrage, was based on no evidence whatsoever. It was based on a lie.” He concluded that the lie “inspired over 600 attacks on 220 American cities.”

To read our report on BLM’s lies and their consequences, click here.

Bill Donohue

July 8, 2025

Catholic dissidents are a motley crew. They include ex-Catholics, Catholics in name only, and some who attend Mass. They are lay men and women, nuns and priests; more than a few are ex-nuns and ex-priests. What they have in common is anger: they are very angry at the Catholic Church. What do they want? They want to gut its moral theology and Protestantize it.

Practicing Catholics do not fund Catholic dissident organizations, so where do they get their cash? From elite foundations bent on undermining Catholicism. There are many of them, but the number-one contributor to these “organizations” (they are more like letterheads with an email address and a website) is the Arcus Foundation.

Arcus funds We Are Church, DignityUSA, New Ways Ministry, Catholics for Choice and the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual. All reject the Church’s teachings on marriage, the family, sexuality and ordination, yet claim to be Catholic.

Jon Stryker created the Arcus Foundation in 2000 to focus on queer causes and the preservation of the great apes. We are not sure how well he has done on the latter goal, but we are certain that he has succeeded in funding anti-Catholicism. A homosexual billionaire, in 2023 he gave a total of more than $42 million in grants and operating expenses to various organizations, some of which are dissident Catholic groups.

We Are Church is an umbrella group of ex-Catholics and Catholic malcontents. It is a member of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, a pro-homosexual outfit. Its leaders have tried very hard to mobilize everyday Catholics to join their efforts to radically change the Church from top to bottom. They have failed repeatedly, but they still try to tear it apart.

New Ways Ministry was founded in 1977 by Father Robert Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick. Their goal is to normalize homosexuality and to get the Church to change its teachings on sodomy. For decades this outfit has been roundly condemned by cardinals and bishops in Rome and the U.S., but in 2021 Pope Francis spoke positively of Gramick. Indeed, he warmly embraced her.

DignityUSA is another pro-homosexual entity. At one time its New York chaplain was Father Paul Shanley, the Boston child rapist who was thrown out of the priesthood after many clerics covered up for him.

Catholics for Choice is a pro-abortion and anti-Catholic letterhead. Frances Kissling, an ex-nun, succeeded in putting it on the map decades ago. The media love them, and no elite donor has been a steadier supporter of its policies more than the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation is so ideologically corrupt that Henry Ford II quit in protest in the 1970s.

Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) wants a  woman to be pope, provided it is a woman who rejects the teachings of the Church on sexuality; it will settle for women priests right now.

Other dissident groups that are funded by the establishment include the National Coalition of American Nuns—it is openly pro-abortion—the Women’s Ordination Conference and NETWORK; the latter was run for many years by Sister Simone—Nuns-on-the-Bus—Campbell (the Democratic operative thinks abortion should be legal).

Arcus and the Ford Foundation are not alone in keeping these rogue groups alive. As expected, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations are donors to these anti-Catholic causes, as are the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (Warren is a big abortion fan), the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Huber Foundation.

We know of no organized effort to effectively assault the beliefs and practices of Jews, Muslims or Protestants. Just Catholics.

So while conservatives are rightly happy that there are some needed cultural shifts going on, they would be foolish to think that the enemies of Christianity, especially Catholicism, will go quietly into the night. Termites have a way of hanging around.

Michael P. McDonald

July 7, 2025

Otto von Bismarck once commented that “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.” This maxim is even more applicable for large-scale bills that have come to dominate the political landscape of Washington in recent years. After all, in all of these bills, there will be things you love, there will be things you can live with, and there will be things you hate. It all really comes down to what you choose to emphasize.

With President Trump’s signature spending bill, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” becoming law, the talking heads have already begun spewing their narrative about this legislation. While we will leave it to the chattering class to cheer and jeer at this bill that Trump has rightfully touted as critical in unleashing America’s potential, there is a major component of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that is of keen interest to the Catholic League: namely, this legislation is the single greatest victory for school choice on the national level.

The bill provides a full tax credit for Americans who donate to third-party scholarship granting organizations. These generous people will be eligible to take off $1,700 from their taxes each year. In turn, these donations will be used as scholarships that families can put towards paying for tuition or other educational expenses.

For the first time in American history, the federal government is providing a real alternative to families plagued by failing public schools that refuse to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic so that they can indoctrinate young minds turning them into woke activists.

Of course, as with every other aspect of these massive spending packages, the school choice provision was subjected to the usual procedural measures and horse trading that impacted its final shape. While the Senate Parliamentarian watered-down the more robust version that allowed for more funding for this critical measure, a bigger concern was the inclusion of an opt-out clause allowing blue states, who need alternatives the most, the option of not participating in the scholarship programs.

While this will lessen the impact of this program, it is a step in the right direction and illustrates that there is always more to do on the critical issue of school choice. For our part, the Catholic League will continue to lead in this critical fight.

As our longtime members will know, when Fr. Virgil C. Blum founded the Catholic League in 1973, school choice was a primary concern of his. After all, a high quality Catholic education is critical to the formation of the next generation of Catholics. It will lead to more people deeply committed to the Church who will spend the rest of their lives ensuring our faith is vigorously represented in the public square.

And the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will bolster Catholic schools across America. This will help struggling families access high quality Catholic education, help in forming faithful Catholics for generations to come, and ensure Catholics have a strong presence in the public square. For all of these reasons, we are bullish about this key provision in Trump’s signature bill.

It truly is one big beautiful win for school choice.

Bill Donohue

July 3, 2025

Fourth of July festivities are loved by most Americans, and this year is no different. There are exceptions, of course, the most noticeable being celebrities, many of whom are more at home condemning America than celebrating it. Too many of them have a hard time flexing their patriotic muscles.

The Hollywood elite are often seen supporting radical anti-American conferences and demonstrations. Today, they are quick to say they don’t hate America, just its president. The distinction is valid, but it still raises serious questions about the extent of their patriotism. For example, those who despised Biden were rarely, if ever, seen cheering, or participating in, events where the American flag was burned. The same is not true of the anti-Trump crowd.

When hatred of the president becomes so extreme that its proponents suggest, or flatly support, violence, they are a threat to our country.

Broadway star Patti LuPone is so angry at Trump that she recently said she wanted to blow up the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Who can forget Kathy Griffin holding a bloody, decapitated Trump head? Marilyn Manson did something similar when he released a video that showed a Trump-like figure decapitated. Mickey Rourke said he would “love 30 seconds in a room” with Trump, and also expressed an interest in smashing him with a baseball bat.

Larry Wilmore said, “I don’t want to give him [Trump] any more oxygen. That’s not a euphemism, by the way. I mean it literally.” Rosie O’Donnell, who has fled the country, opined that it would be great to have a game called, “Push Trump Off a Cliff Again.” Madonna hated Trump so much she told a huge anti-Trump crowd that she had “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

If the celebrities are not preaching violence, they are sounding the alarm over Trump tearing the country apart.

During the presidential campaign last year, Robert De Niro told the press that Trump “wants to destroy” the world. Stephen King warned how fragile democracy is, saying, “LOVELY TO LOOK AT. DELIGHTFUL TO HOLD, BUT ONCE YOU BREAK IT, THEN IT’S SOLD.”

Mia Farrow, another victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome, recently proclaimed, “If we have 6 months of democracy left i’ll [sic] be surprised. I’m guessing 3-4 months.”

I marked my calendar the day she said that. It was March 4. Well, four months have gone by and we are on the eve of July 4th. If she thinks democracy has crashed, she needs to follow Rosie’s lead and get out of town.

Happy Fourth of July to all those patriotic Americans who love our country, and who are not at war with our president.