On March 14, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black issued a preliminary injunction blocking an Ohio law that would have banned abortions performed solely due to a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

It made the ACLU and Planned Parenthood happy: they both support killing babies who are 80 percent born (partial-birth abortion), so it’s easy to see why they were delighted with this outcome.

Judge Black explained his reasoning by saying, “The State’s attempt to carve out exceptions to a categorical right where none exist fails as a matter of law.” He’s wrong. In some states it is illegal to abort a child on the basis of sex. Pennsylvania is one of those states.

Pennsylvania is currently considering legislation similar to the one struck down in Ohio (North Dakota has a law, which has not been challenged in the courts, that bans aborting children with Down syndrome).

On March 12, Karen Gaffney spoke at the Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg in favor of the ban in Pennsylvania. She has Down syndrome. She is also a champion swimmer who has traversed the Boston Harbor, the San Francisco Bay, and Lake Tahoe; she also participated in a relay that crossed the English Channel. Perhaps the ACLU and Planned Parenthood could explain to her why she has no right to live.

In Iceland, as George Will wrote in his March 15 column for the Washington Post, “upward of 85 percent of pregnant women opt for prenatal testing, which has produced a Down syndrome-elimination rate approaching 100 percent.” He calls that genocide. “It is simply the deliberate, systematic attempt to erase a category of people.”

Will quotes an Icelandic counselor who consoles mothers about to abort their Down syndrome baby. She says, “We don’t look at abortion as a murder.” Then what is it? “We look at it as a thing that we ended.” (My italic.)

A “thing.” This kind of sanitization of the language is not merely troublesome, it is demonic.

In the latter part of February, within the space of one week, Comedy Central managed to assault Christ and the Catholic Church on three occasions.

“Corporate” is a show most Americans have never heard of. They are not missing anything. The February 14 show was its idea of a Valentine’s gift to Catholics: it portrayed a lay person dressed like a nun who gives an advertising executive the finger.

She works for a group of mega-churches, the Glorious Salvation Ministries, and is interested in hiring the ad company to do a marketing campaign. An employee of the ad firm shows up wearing an oversized rosary, suggesting that both characters are Catholic.

Of course, in real life, mega-churches, and groups with a name like Glorious Salvation Ministries, are Protestant entities, not Catholic. But if the goal is to take liberties with Christian iconography, it makes sense to rip off Catholicism; the mainline churches offer little to exploit.

None of this is worth getting too excited about, but knowing that Comedy Central hires a large number of anti-Catholic bigots, we knew they would not stop there.

At the end, the nun-like character is shown sucking a cross-shaped popsicle seductively. She smiles, saying, “My favorite flavor—the blood of Christ.”

The writers, directors, producers, and actors are sick people. We thought that would be the last of it, but then Jake Weisman reared his ugly head.

Who is this guy? Weisman is the co-creator and writer of “Corporate” (he also stars in the show). He blew up after reading what Bill Donohue said about the show. Weisman even went so far as to threaten to “bring the whole system down.” He was referring to the Roman Catholic Church.

Weisman made his threat on Twitter. His incendiary comment was in response to Donohue’s statement about the February 14th episode of “Corporate.” To show how debased our culture has become, there was a flood of filthy responses on the Internet supporting Weisman. They cannot be reprinted here; some were aimed directly at Donohue.

“In one sense,” Donohue replied, “I am happy Weisman made this threat. While Hollywood was not always a bastion of anti-Catholicism, in the past half-century it has certainly evolved into one. Let’s be honest: If Jews were portrayed the way Hollywood portrays Catholics, it would be labeled the premier anti-Semitic industry in America.”

Donohue wrote to Robert Bakish, president of Viacom, about Weisman’s public admission of anti-Catholic bigotry. “If anti-Catholicism were treated as seriously as sexual harassment is these days,” Donohue told the press, “Hollywood would become a ghost town. In the meantime, Bakish has a hotheaded bigot on his hands. This calls for a serious response.”

Weisman was so incensed by Donohue’s decision to report him to Bakish that he went on an obscene Twitter rampage against him. “Personally,” Donohue said, “I really don’t care what he says about me, but I do care about his filthy tirade against Jesus Christ.”

The worst of Weisman’s tweets was a remark he made about Christ that was so patently vulgar that we will not even use asterisks to describe it (we did in the online version of the news release, where adults access our work).

We live in a time when Hollywood is engulfed in one sexual scandal after another, and while this has provoked a responsible pushback, stars like Weisman continue to defile Christ with impunity.

“If someone spoke about his mother the way he does about Jesus, he would go ballistic,” said Donohue. “But maybe I overestimate him—he is so crude that he may not care.”

Bakish needs to have someone call this guy in and hold him accountable. To do nothing is to say that when it comes to vile hate speech directed at Christianity, Hollywood is incapable of being shamed.

You can write to Bakish at Viacom, 1515 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

On February 12, Unilever, the worldwide consumer goods giant—it sells Lipton, Dove, Hellmans, and over 400 other products—announced that it was pressuring Facebook and Google to act socially responsible.

“Unilever will not invest in platforms or environments that do not protect our children or which create division in society, and promote anger or hate.” Facebook and Google immediately said they would cooperate.

On the day this story broke, CNN reported that Unilever would stop advertising on platforms that promoted racism and sexism.

However, there is more to this than meets the eye. Unilever is not the gold standard of citizenship—its interest in protecting children does not extend to the unborn. Moreover, it has a history of racist and sexist practices. Furthermore, its idea of what constitutes “division in society” is dangerous: it includes the exercise of religious liberty.

Even worse, pressuring Facebook and Google to be more restrictive is the last thing they need to do: both social media platforms have an ugly record censoring religious speech. To read a representative sample of their rulings, click here.

The man who is driving Unilever’s agenda is Paul Polman. Born in the Netherlands, he has been at the helm of Unilever, a British-Dutch company, since 2009. An article in Forbes last year referred to him as “a CEO gone rogue.” Reporter Tom Borelli said that “Polman’s problem is his eagerness to put superficial feel good policies ahead of sound business decisions and he is not shy about touting his twisted priorities.”

What are those priorities? Suffice it to say that Polman has emerged as one of the most influential corporate voices of left-wing politics. When asked why he spends as much time on political matters as he does running the company, he does not mince words. “To me, it is the same.” This helps to explain why some are already calling him the next George Soros, the left-wing billionaire who funds virtually every radical cause.

Like so many other major figures on the left, Polman is riddled with contradictions.

Unilever’s Code of Business Principles says it will “recruit, employ and promote employees on the sole basis of the qualifications and abilities needed for the work to be performed.” Not true. Polman has gone out of his way to pressure American and European companies to follow his lead by recruiting refugees. He even begged the European Union to hire workers simply because they are asylum seekers.

Unilever says it does not promote political parties, but this does not mean it is politically disengaged. Quite the opposite. Its pro-abortion activities are so rabid that it has been subjected to a boycott by Life Decisions International; its contributions to Planned Parenthood are significant.

Staunchly pro-gay, Unilever is the darling of the Human Rights Campaign, the prominent homosexual rights group. This alone should raise eyebrows, but what should concern Christians most is how Unilever’s passion for gay rights has positioned it against religious liberty. It sees some religious objections to the gay rights agenda as an expression of bigotry.

In Georgia, when reasonable religious liberty concerns were voiced by Christians—they refused to accede to every gay objective—Unilever sided with gay activists against them. This is why its plea to Facebook and Google to end “division in society” has such a pernicious ring to it. Are Christians who practice their faith by defending marriage, properly understood, being “divisive”?

Ben & Jerry’s is perhaps the most aggressive Unilever product pushing the gay agenda. It has sold an array of “gay” ice cream, ranging from “Chubby Hubby” to “Hubby Hubby.” (By the way, in 2010, it had to admit that its ice cream is not “all natural.”) In Australia, Ben & Jerry’s supported gay marriage by contributing to the “Vote4love” campaign. It hit a brick wall, however, when Muslims in Indonesia objected to its “Golden Gaytime” ice cream.

Unilever’s gay agenda hit another snag in South Africa when it ran an advertisement suggesting that a child who came out gay was in effect putting a bullet into the heart of his father. It apologized for the ad.

To its credit, Unilever’s “Code of Business Principles and Code Policies” sets the bar high for all business practices. To its discredit, its record of compliance with these objectives is poor. For example, it admonishes employees to “Take care that participation in industry or trade associations events and related contacts are not used for anti-competitive purposes.”

Yet as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Unilever has come under fire for colluding with another company “to drive up the spreads market in South Africa.” Specifically, it has been accused of driving up prices for edible oils and margarines. It is looking at fines of up to 10 percent of annual turnover.

Unilever markets itself as environment-friendly, and can be rather strident in its condemnation of those who don’t share its position. Yet in 2016 it settled with 600 workers in India over mercury exposure. The settlement was in response to a 2006 lawsuit; it was launched after workers were exposed to the dangerous substance in a thermometer plant.

No corporation wants to be labeled racist, and few have denounced racism as vigorously as Unilever. Yet it has been involved in one controversy after another involving cosmetic products that promise “lighter-looking” skin. For example, women were told that if their skin is too dark, they can improve it by purchasing Pond’s “Pinkish White” or the “Fair & Lovely” product. Unilever has had to pull some products, offering an apology to women of color. Also, Dove has had to apologize to black women for some of its marketing gimmicks.

Unilever is so aggressive that it will go to no end trying to come up with a new way to hawk its products. For example, after Lipton was exposed for testing its tea by conducting experiments on animals that critics said amounted to torture, it had to end this practice.

Human rights is one of Unilever’s much vaunted principles, and no one has been more outspoken about it than Polman. Yet it has often been on the defensive given all the charges of sexual harassment made against it. This is especially true of its African companies.

The Kenyan Kericho tea plantation has been the subject of much controversy. Allegations of sexual abuse have been made by its female workers; they have been sustained by the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations, a Dutch non-profit investigatory agency. Sexual coercion and forced pregnancy tests were among the allegations.

The Kenyan Human Rights Commission also made a probe of Unilever’s practices. It said that sexual harassment was “rampant” and reflected a corrupt corporate culture. Unilever denied the accusations. No matter, it is not just in Kenya where such charges have surfaced. Women who work in the Jordan plant have made similar accusations.

This is not the profile we would expect of a corporation that brags about its dedication to social responsibility. That many of these heinous acts have taken place under Polman’s watch does not speak well for him.

Facebook and Google already lean left and have not won the favor of practicing Christians. For these two social media giants to be pushed further left by Unilever is something that needs to be monitored and responded to accordingly.

Facebook and Google have a long history of unevenly applied censorship, targeting those on the political right and those espousing Judeo-Christian values.
In September 2011, for example, the National Religious Broadcasters released a 43-page report on the anti-Christian bias exhibited by the most influential Internet platforms and service providers, including Google and Facebook.
Here are some examples of this biased treatment:

FACEBOOK

• In 2015, Facebook locked Catholic Online out of its Facebook pages, blocking the administrators as well. Although the account was eventually restored, no explanation was ever given for the months-long outage.
• In May 2016, the Wall Street Journal published a study which indicated that Facebook manipulates the news seen by users depending on their political views—resulting in ideological “echo chambers” in which users see only or mostly what news aligns with their views.
• In July 2017, Facebook removed two dozen popular Catholic Facebook pages, across several countries and languages, with no explanation. Many of these pages had millions of followers. Some pages included Fr. Rocky at Relevant Radio, with 4 million followers, “Catholic and Proud,” with 6 million followers, and “Jesus and Mary,” with 1.7 million followers. A day later, Facebook unblocked the pages and blamed it on “spam detection.” However, many speculate that anti-Catholicism was behind the shutdown, as only certain popular Catholic pages were targeted.
• In January 2018, Facebook removed paid ads and blocked the sharing of ads crowdfunding a pro-life documentary, Roe v. Wade, produced by Alveda King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece. Actor Nick Loeb, who stars in the film, called the move “stealing or fraud,” since the film had paid Facebook to distribute inoffensive, non-graphic ads about the film, including a short trailer. The block was reported initially on January 11th, and by January 18th, Facebook issued a statement indicating that the ban had been lifted, blaming it on an “error” for “spam behavior.”

GOOGLE (YOUTUBE IS OWNED BY GOOGLE)

• From 2008 to present, Catholic Online has published several reports of YouTube removing, blocking, or demonetizing videos that support a pro-life or Biblical message. In 2008, pro-life activist Carlos Polo had one of his videos, which was produced by the Catholic News Service and uncovered truths about the abortion movement, removed by the platform; in August 2017, Catholic Online reported that “at least as far back as 2014,” YouTube has censored videos of Bible readings and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch; in September 2017, Catholic Online reported its own Scriptural reflection videos and saint biographies had been removed or demonetized.
• In September 2011, the Christian Post reported that Google removed “orthodox Christian viewpoints” on “hot button issues.” It also cited Google’s refusing to allow the English Christian Institute to purchase anti-abortion advertising. Google also removed an anti-Scientology page after that “church” pressured Google to do so.
• A September 2011 report by the National Religious Broadcasters found that the Google for Non-Profits tool had a policy that excluded churches and faith groups which consider religion or sexuality in their hiring processes. The report also said that Google had blocked a Massachusetts pro-family, conservative Christian website.
• In January 2018, former Google employee James Damore filed a lawsuit against Google after he published an internal memo criticizing the company’s “ideological echo chamber” and suggested the gender gap in technology is due to personal choices, not sexism. A study by The Stream indicated that Google, at the time of Damore’s employment, held events celebrating polygamy and gender identity politics, but fired Damore for his stances.