Bill Donohue

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani likes to hire anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic bigots. This is incontestable: click here for the proof.

Everyone on the list was either on his transition team or served in an advisory capacity. Some are now working in his administration.

Many hate Israel and are trying to weaken its economy through their BDS efforts (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions). Some have defended Al Queda terrorists while others have organized pro-Hamas demonstrations. Anti-Semitic comments abound. Anti-Catholic remarks have also been voiced, and one hire organized an obscene demonstration during Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

None of this is surprising. Mamdani hates Israel and blames it—not Hamas—for the Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023. Anyone who harbors that much hostility to Jews obviously wants to surround himself with people just like himself. Moreover, his decision to reward a vile anti-Catholic organizer tells us that he wants people like that working for him, not practicing Catholics.

Spellcheck does not recognize the word Mamdani, offering as a substitute the word “Madman.” Looks like it is a lot smarter than the people who voted for him.

Bill Donohue

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today on whether boys can compete in girls’ sports. The very idea that this has to occupy the time of the high court is testimony to the sexual confusion that is widespread not only in America, but in western civilization; the rest of the world is a lot smarter. Adding to the confusion is the Supreme Court itself.

In 2020, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County. He held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employees from being fired on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, even though the law only addressed sex. “An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions,” he said.

As I said at the time, “This sweeping statement, which will be cited in every lawsuit on this subject, is manifestly false.” I gave the following example. “If a man volunteers to be a Big Brother, working with fatherless boys, and desires to ‘transition’ to a woman, he cannot reasonably be expected to do the job he was hired to do. He deliberately changed the required profile. This should clearly be grounds for termination.”

The problem with Gorsuch’s position is that it is based on a flawed anthropology. As such, it makes for bad law and bad public policy. “Had it been a more narrow ruling,” I said, “tailored to the specific instances of workplace discrimination, there would be no tidal wave of lawsuits. But now that the moral order has been further diced and spliced by the courts—thanks to this classic case of judicial overreach—it is a sure bet there will be.”

What is before the court today is a clear demonstration of the validity of my concerns.

If guys can compete against gals in sports, there is no reason why they can’t share the same locker rooms, bathroom facilities and showers. This is exactly what happened. Gorsuch was not unaware that this was a real possibility when he rendered his decision, he simply said that was an issue for another day. He wrote, “we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of this kind.” He explicitly said such matters are “questions for future cases,” and left it at that. Now that day is upon him.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent in Bostock, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. He did not take kindly to Gorsuch’s dismissive comments. “The Court’s brusque refusal to consider the consequences of its reasoning is irresponsible.” Indeed, he said, “Before issuing today’s radical decision, the Court should have given some thought to where its decision would lead.” He got specific.

“The Court may wish to avoid this subject, but it is a matter of concern to many people who are reticent about disrobing or using toilet facilities in the presence of individuals whom they regard as members of the opposite sex. For some, this may simply be a question of modesty, but for others, there is more at stake. For women who have been victimized by sexual assault or abuse, the experience of seeing an unclothed person with the anatomy of a male in a confined and sensitive location such as a bathroom or locker room can cause serious psychological harm.”

Again, the fact that such a commonsensical understanding of human nature has to be articulated before the United States Supreme Court shows how ideologically corrupt we have been become. It is not the ordinary American who is the problem—it is elite decision makers.

The high court needs to speak with clarity. They can begin by simply stating that there is no objective human category as a transgender person. This means (a) all human beings are either male or female and, (b) we cannot change our sex. It’s time for a dramatic reset: we need to respect women’s rights—not the rights of men who falsely claim to be a woman.

Bill Donohue

Orwell warned us about elites who manipulate the masses by manipulating the language, and subsequent events have proven him to be more accurate than previously believed. It is our secular elites, in particular, who seek to control language so as to abet thought control. Before examining some recent examples, it is important to recognize that changes in our lexicon are not always the result of some sinister scheme.

For many years, those with low mental attributes were mostly called “imbeciles,” “morons,” and “idiots,” but in 1895 a new term was introduced that was considered less stigmatizing, “mental retardation.” But the shorthand, calling someone a “retard,” was later seen as patently offensive, so by the 1960s terms like “intellectual disability” became more acceptable. There was nothing nefarious about these linguistic transitions.

The same is true for describing the races.

“Colored people” was such a customary term in the early twentieth century that black Americans of African ancestry decided to call a newly established civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, it goes by the same name today. The United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944, also goes by the same name today, even though “negro,” like “colored people,” has fallen out of favor.

In the 1960s, “black” became the popular racial descriptive, and in the early 1990s it was replaced by “African American,” even though polls showed that the preferred term was still “black.” Again, this transition was not done to serve some political agenda.

The politicization of language today is most evident in the way we think about immigrants who have come to the United States illegally. Virtually everyone called such people “illegal aliens,” and that is because they were foreigners who entered the country by breaking the law. But in 2010, a “Drop the I-Word” campaign was launched to get rid of “illegal aliens” and replace it with “undocumented immigrant.” In 2013, the Associated Press dropped “illegal immigrant” from its stylebook after liberal scholars protested.

In 2014, under Obama, the government adopted more “inclusive” language. But it wasn’t until the Biden administration that “illegal aliens” was summarily rejected; this was in keeping with its “open borders” approach to immigration. Now that Trump is back in the White House, “illegal aliens” is also back. Unfazed, the New York Times likes to talk about “noncitizens.”

The best examples of twisting the language to accommodate the politics of elites are found by studying matters sexual.

Anyone doing research on violence committed by people who falsely claim to belong to the opposite sex will notice that what we call today “transgender” people were either called “transsexuals” or “transvestites” in the late 1990s. This can get really confusing. Before this century, reporters accurately referred to Jim, who chose Jane as his “transition” name, as Jim. Today he is called Jane and is falsely referred to as “she/her.”

Megyn Kelly created a firestorm in November when she said it was inaccurate to call Jeffrey Epstein a “pedophile.” She was not dismissing his monstrous acts, only pointing out that most of his victims were not prepubescent. I defended her, pointing out that when homosexual priests were being outed for abusing minors, they were falsely called “pedophiles,” so as to avoid calling them homosexuals. Yet only 3.8 percent of the victims of clergy sexual abuse met the clinical definition of pedophilia. The reaction against me was voluminous and vicious.

Another lexicon game is being played by those who refer to men who have sex with adolescents as “ephebophiles.” It’s a game because heterosexuals who abuse minors are never called “ephebophiles”—it’s selectively invoked to avoid referring to homosexuals when adult men molest teenage males.

Homosexuals began referring to themselves as “gay” in the 1920s, a decade of decadence in the West, and it became routine in the 1960s, another morally debased decade. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press ended their usage of “homosexual” in the 2010s and started using “LGBT,” which by now has taken on a never-ending alphabet of “persons.”

It was left to a New Zealand psychologist, Dr. John Money, to scrap our vocabulary of the term “sexual preference,” substituting “sexual orientation” instead. The Johns Hopkins professor was active in the mid-twentieth century manipulating the language to serve his sexual agenda. “Sexual preference” indicated that our attraction was a matter of choice, and that was taboo; “sexual orientation” accomplished his goal.

Money was not some disinterested “scientist.” He was a pedophile who sought to normalize man-boy sex, lobbied to eliminate the age of consent, and wanted to legalize father-daughter and mother-son sex.

When language is used to obfuscate, to confuse, and to manipulate, it is done to serve a cause, and should be condemned as such. When innocent people are hurt as a result, we are dealing with evil. Such persons—always the elites—do not want to elucidate, they want to dominate.

Language evolves, sometimes for noble purposes. Beware of instances when the motive is corrupt. When the end result is thought control, we are dealing with totalitarians.

Bill Donohue

In 1998, a Gallup poll asked respondents if they thought the state of moral values would be better or worse in 2025. It found that 62 percent predicted it would be worse. Were they right? The data show they were.

In 2022, a Gallup poll found that “a record-high 50 percent of Americans rated the overall state of moral values as ‘poor,’ and another 37 percent said it was ‘only fair.’ The public was pessimistic about the future: 78 percent say morals are getting worse.” But why? Consider the results of a 2024 survey by Pew Research Center.

It found that 80 percent of Americans say that religion’s role in American life is shrinking, and most concluded that it was not a good thing. This is significant given that this was the highest percentage ever recorded in a Pew survey on this issue. It was also found that 57 percent of Americans expressed a positive view of religion’s influence in American life.

To summarize, the public predicted more than a quarter century ago that the moral state of affairs would trend south, and subsequently they have been proven right. Moreover, they identified the decreasing role of religion as an important source of that decline. So where does that leave us?

We learned a few months ago from a Gallup poll that Americans are divided on what is considered moral. It cuts primarily along religious-secular lines. For example, Democrats and young people tend to be secularists, and they prize animal rights over the rights of unborn human babies. Those who are religious—they tend to be Republicans and older people—sharply disagree with them.

A Pew survey taken around the same time last year, found that the more religious a person is, the more likely he is to say there are “clear and absolute standards for what is right and wrong.” On the other hand, secularists are moral relativists, sizing up moral issues on the basis of their own moral compass.

Now it makes sense that if one rejects the idea that there are absolute standards for what is right and wrong, e.g. as found in the Ten Commandments, then the natural guide to moral issues is one’s own conscience. The problem with that view is that every genocidal maniac and serial rapist who ever lived also had a conscience, so on what basis can moral relativists say they are wrong? Religious folks have no such dilemma.

To be sure, there are religious people who hold to clear moral standards who are extremists, and many are hypocrites. But to judge the efficacy of any ethical standard as exercised by extremists is obviously a non-starter—it makes as much sense as judging those on a diet by those who are starving themselves to death.  And to point to hypocrites is also a non-starter—it has no bearing on whether the moral standard itself is sound or not.

We need to have a national conversation about this issue. If our collective  moral house is in trouble, and the public also believes it is not a good thing that religion is losing influence, then ways to enhance religious beliefs and practices must be found. The alternative is more radical autonomy, the very condition that is driving our moral crisis.

Bill Donohue

Media coverage of the person who is accused of vandalizing the home of Vice President J.D. Vance failed to report that the suspect, William D. DeFoor, may have been transgender and requested the police call him “Julia.”

A search of TV news coverage found that none of the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS) mentioned that DeFoor wanted to be called “Julia,” and instead simply chose to refer to him as a man. In addition, CNN and MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) failed to mention these facts.

A search of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and USA Today found that all of them referred to the suspect as a man, without any mention of him being called “Julia.” Similarly, the major news services (Associated Press and Reuters) also failed to mention this.

The only major mainstream media outlet that mentioned the suspect’s name was Newsweek. They hastened to say that it is “unclear whether DeFoor is transgender, non-binary or just using a different name.”

While the mainstream media failed to cover the suspect’s name change, several conservative news outlets made mention of it. Stories in the New York Post, Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, the Daily Mail and The Telegraph all mentioned the name change to “Julia.”

One media source, gbnews.com, reports that the suspect “appears to have transitioned and now identifies on social media as a transgender woman named Julia.” Also, “A Facebook profile reflecting this new identity was established in December, with the first profile picture uploaded on 15 December.”

If reporters in Great Britian can figure this out, what is wrong with the American media?

This is hardly the first time the media have decided to downplay or ignore the role that transgender persons play in violent crimes. Yet if the suspect is a former altar boy, everyone learns of it. This is politics, plain and simple—the politics that is sympathetic to the LGBT crowd.

Bill Donohue

Russell Shaw, a prolific Catholic spokesman and author, has died at the age of 90. He was the former Secretary for Public Affairs of the National Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference.

Last year he told me he was not doing well, and asked if I would still promote his latest book, Turning Points: How Thirteen Remarkable Men and Women Heard God’s Call and Responded to It. I was only too happy to endorse it, and to feature it in the July/August edition of Catalyst, the Catholic League’s journal.

Russ served on the board of directors of the Catholic League in the 1990s, and then moved to our board of advisors. I used to joke with him that he is a “walking encyclopedia of Catholicism.” It wasn’t much of a stretch.

Russ had a reserved manner, but it belied a fierce devotion to his calling, namely to accurately and passionately discuss the affairs of the Catholic Church, past and present. His commitment to the mission of the Catholic League—fighting anti-Catholicism—was never in question.

When the notorious ABC-TV show, “Nothing Sacred,” aired in the late 1990s, some on our board of directors questioned whether we should be hammering away at it. Not Russ. He stood by my side, knowing how pernicious this dissident-happy portrait of Catholicism was. ABC, a Disney product, tried to stop our attacks on the show, but did not prevail. We eventually won and the show was withdrawn.

Russell Shaw will be missed. His legacy is secure and the Catholic Church is its beneficiary.

Bill Donohue

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasted no time sending a message to the city’s faith communities: on his first day in office, he said they would not be afforded heightened protection at their houses of worship. Indeed, he rescinded an executive order to this effect signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams.*

Most of the news stories on Mamdani’s decisions affecting religious liberty focused on his rulings overturning Adams’ executive orders on Israel, but too many neglected to cite his policy on houses of worship.

It is true that he has scratched a definition of anti-Semitism that includes opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, a definition accepted by 40 nations, including the European Union and Canada. It is also true that he has given the green light to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is designed to cripple Israel’s economy. Scurrilous as these two decisions are, his executive order affecting churches, synagogues, mosques and temples hit a wider section of New Yorkers.

Adams did not overreact last month when he directed the New York City Police Department to provide stronger protection for houses of worship. His executive order of December 2, which authorized enhanced protection “of both houses of worship and persons exercising their rights to free assembly and free speech near houses of worship,” was occasioned by what happened on November 19.

It was on that evening that a crowd of 200 anti-Jewish protesters assembled outside Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue screaming, “Death, death to the IDF” [Israel Defense Forces], “globalize the intifada,” and “take the settler out.” Others yelled, “We need to make them scared.” And what was Mamdani’s response? A spokesman slammed the synagogue for abusing “these sacred spaces” by “promot[ing] activities in violation of international law.”

This should concern all New Yorkers, not simply Jews. Catholics should be particularly troubled, given all the protests that have taken place during Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in recent years; the cathedral has also been vandalized.

In August 2025, I wrote an 18-page report, “The Inauthenticity of Zohran Mamdani.” Regarding his position on religious liberty, I noted that “a Lexis-Nexis search reveals he has never addressed this subject.” I also mentioned that “He is very protective of Islam, but a search of his remarks objecting to anti-Catholicism, or anti-Christian words or deeds, failed to turn up one comment.”

It should be noted that at his inauguration, clergy from the Muslim, Protestant, Hindu, Jewish and Sikh communities were invited on stage, but there was no Catholic priest in attendance. Typically, the archbishop of New York is in attendance, but Cardinal Timothy Dolan was not invited. This speaks volumes about Mamdani’s purported interest in “diversity.” His idea of “inclusion” apparently stops at the door of Catholics.

Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee introduced a bill that directs $5 million in federal funding to protect religious sites and fight hate crimes against people of faith. It is outrageous that New York City has a mayor who finds such a policy morally objectionable.

Contact Mamdani’s press office: pressoffice@cityhall.nyc.gov

Be sure to read our “Mamdani Watch” file, regularly updated, that is posted on the front page of our website, www.catholicleague.org

*It was subsequently reported that Mamdani, bowing to pressure, quietly reinstated Adams’ executive order on this issue.

Bill Donohue

Last year before we erected our nativity scene in Central Park, I told the staff that this was the first time in 30 years that we have displayed our crèche that I was concerned it may not be safe. Regrettably, I was right.

On December 26, a video was posted on Instagram showing a man (assisted by two others) draping a large keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, on the shoulders of the statue of Our Blessed Mother; he tried to place a Palestinian flag in the hands of Joseph, but failed.

We contacted the New York City Parks Department, which granted us the permit. We are asking the police to follow through. We did not make a public statement until today, January 5, the day our crèche was taken down. We did not address this incident earlier because we did not want to encourage others to finish the job.

New York City is a hotbed of left-wing radicals who despise religious liberty, and it does not lack for government officials for leadership. We expect to be very busy in 2026, defending our First Amendment rights.