The Catholic League documentary on Disney was scheduled to be released by now but it has been delayed until early next year because of some timing issues associated with its distribution. It will be available on various streaming services. The trailer will be posted on our website in mid-December.

Salem Media is slated to pick it up, and we are hopeful that many other prominent platforms will also roll it out.

We have an all-star cast.

Jason Meath is the Executive Producer and CEO of Meath Television Media LLC. He did the planning, the interviews and the editing. Without his active engagement, the film would not have been made.

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council and one of the nation’s leading evangelical leaders. Bill Donohue has been working with him for decades.

Mercedes Schlapp is a Cuban-American and a distinguished commentator on contemporary political issues. She and her husband, Matt, are well known in the conservative community. She is the host of the film.

Dr. Ben Carson served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Trump. He is an outspoken African American whose pro-life record is second to none.

Miranda Devine hails from Australia and is a committed Catholic and author. She writes a column for the New York Post and frequently appears on TV.

Brent Bozell is president of the Media Research Center and an advocate for all the right causes. He serves on our board of advisors; we have worked cooperatively together for many years.

Vivek Ramaswamy is an Indian-American entrepreneur. A Hindu (he attended a Catholic high school), he is best known for trying to steer big corporations in the right direction.

David Horowitz is a Jewish activist who spent his early years promoting radical causes. But he had “second thoughts” about his political leanings and has been an important conservative voice for decades.

Christian Toto is a film critic at the Washington Times and author of a book on how Hollywood became a partisan of left-wing politics.

It is obviously too early for us to know the impact of this movie. We anticipate it will be well received by a big audience. Many in the cast are in a position of influence themselves to bring it to their followers.

Our culture is in crisis, and what is driving much of it is a callous disregard for the innocence of children. Too many activists, celebrities and educators are bent on indoctrinating young boys and girls with some very sick ideas. Regrettably, Disney is one of the most guilty players.

Check out our website for the most current information on the film’s release.

At the start of the holiday season, we sent emails to over 350 Catholics who are associated with the Cardinal Newman chapters on their campus. These ministries were asked to contact us in the event they learned of anti-Catholic rhetoric or behavior. We told them we would take it from there.

Cardinal Newman societies are nicely positioned to help us. They are the eyes and ears of practicing Catholics on secular campuses nationwide.

Whether the issue is an anti-Catholic play, or the censoring of Christmas events, we need to know of it at the Catholic League so we can respond with vigor. It is a sad commentary on our society that this needs to be done, but it would be even sadder if our side did nothing about it.

We did this because of a rash of anti-Catholic incidents in recent months.

We have previously documented many violent anti-Catholic incidents that have taken place in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We have also documented our appeals to the U.S. Attorney General and the FBI to conduct a probe of these crimes. With the Christmas season upon us, we decided to do more.

Much of the hostility against Catholics, and Christians in general, is fueled on college campuses. They are the intellectual seedbed of hate speech. It is with this in mind that we alerted Catholics on campus to beware of acts of bigotry this Christmas season.

We will not be passive.

William A. Donohue

When I was in the 7th grade, I was asked by one of my nun teachers who was the person I most admired. I said Walt Disney. When asked why, I simply said it is because he makes so many people happy.

That was then. Over the years, beginning in large measure in the 1990s, Disney turned against its family-friendly image, making and distributing fare that sharply broke with its moorings. I know because one of the first big victories I had was in 1995 when I confronted Disney senior officials, ordering them out of the headquarters of the New York Archdiocese, where we were located at that time.

The occasion was the movie “Priest,” a diabolical film that featured totally dysfunctional priests, all of whose problems were a function of their priesthood. Miramax, owned by Harvey and Bob Weinstein (Harvey is in prison for his sexual escapades) was the distributor of the film, and it had just been bought by Disney.

I held a press conference denouncing the movie, and when I learned that some of the Disney top brass were in the audience, I told them to get out. They did, much to the delight of the TV crew who were looking for a good story. Disney/Miramax did one anti-Catholic movie after another, leading to more confrontations.

Disney acquired Capital Cities/ABC in 1995, and in short order they produced several Catholic-bashing shows, the most prominent of which was “Nothing Sacred.” We killed that one, too.

Fast forward to this year. On March 28, Disney released a statement condemning a Florida bill that barred teaching students K-3 about sexuality and gender identity. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill, arguing that children that young should not be subject to such content.

I was taken aback by what the “family-friendly” giant did. Walt would never sanction this form of child abuse. I figured that evangelicals would be aghast at Disney’s stance as well, so I called my friend Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, asking if he would join me in requesting a meeting with Bob Chapek, the CEO of Walt Disney Company. If Chapek stiffed us, I said, we would respond with vigor.

When Chapek never responded, I decided something must be done to register our outrage. If the Catholic League were to produce a documentary on how Disney has changed from its beginnings—it has joined forces with the most radical elements of the gay and transgender movement—that could have a significant cultural impact.

So what’s going on at Disney these days? Disney Corporate President Karey Burke boasts that she has “one transgender child and one pansexual child,” and that Disney has “many, many, many LBGTQIA characters.” She said her goal is to have a minimum of 50% of characters being of an “LGBT” orientation and racial minority. Roy P. Disney, grand nephew of Walt, has a transgender child.

Former writers tell how Disney is sexualizing children. One of them said the company has “a history of exposing its young actors to convicted child molesters,” and is bent on grooming kids with gay and transgender messaging.

In fact, its latest animated feature film, “Strange World,” includes the first openly gay teen romance in a children’s movie. Its upcoming “Baymax!” features a transgender man buying tampons, and floats the idea that men can have periods, too. They are targeting kids as young as two-years-old. They even have a line of queer clothing.

Disney is bent on normalizing aberrant sexual behavior, but not everywhere. It knows that the Communist Chinese don’t buy into this insanity, and neither do Muslim-run nations in the Middle East. So guess what? Disney, ever the unethical capitalist, has decided to respect their wishes and not send them their slimy fare.

There are signs that Disney is in over its head. Hundreds of Christians showed up at a rally in the spring pushing back against its morally debased presentations and activities. Similarly, it has been warned by investors not to push their sexual agenda too far. Not only that, but a “silent majority” of Disney employees have had it with the company’s radical politics.

Last year, noted transgender clinical psychologist Erica Anderson, who helped to promote this movement, stunned liberals when she said, “I think it’s gone too far.” She noted that they’ve gone beyond asking for tolerance. She is not alone. In a recent poll, nearly 75% of American voters said the targeting of underage minors in the transgender movement has gone too far.

The participants in the movie were chosen by Jason Meath, the film maker, and me. We have a star-studded cast. Jason has done a magnificent job with the documentary and has been a joy to work with.

“Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom: How Disney is Losing its Way” is a film I never envisioned producing. But if we lose Disney to the radical left that is at war with our Judeo-Christian heritage, that is a very bad sign. Our goal is to help turn things around.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has issued the most vacuous report, “Diocese of Marquette: A Complete Accounting,” on clergy sexual abuse ever written. We know she has been out to get the Catholic Church, but this effort makes her look incompetent, as well as unethical.

The probe of Catholic dioceses searching for instances of clergy sexual abuse began in 2018 under her predecessor, Bill Schuette; she took the reins in 2019. There has been no attempt to investigate the sexual abuse of minors by ministers, rabbis, imams or school teachers. Just Catholic priests.

This amounts to Catholic profiling. Make no mistake, this is no less invidious than a probe of violent crime would be if it only targeted African Americans. Such a selective approach smacks of bigotry.

After spending a massive amount of the taxpayer’s money, here is what Nessel found.

Her report details alleged cases of priestly sexual abuse that began in 1950. That’s when Harry Truman was president and the Korean War began.

After receiving 52 tips, 16 of which came from the Diocese of Marquette, lawyers combed through 74,000 documents related to the Diocese. Additionally, they went through nearly 862,000 electronic documents looking for dirt.

What they found was scratch. A grand total of 44 priests had allegations made against them since 1950. While one molesting priest is too many, how many religious or secular institutions—where adults regularly interact with minors—and are roughly the size of the Marquette Diocese, could honestly say they have a better record than this? We don’t know because Nessel has no interest in finding out.

It is important to note the limitations of this report as even acknowledged by its authors. [The emphasis is in the original.]

“The allegations are summarized here, and their inclusion does not reflect a determination by the Department [of the Attorney General] that the allegations are credible or otherwise substantiated.”

In other words, the accused did not have a chance to rebut the charges. There’s a good reason for this—32 of the 44 priests are “known or presumed to be dead.” Moreover only 6 of the 44 cases have been substantiated by the Diocese. We cannot assume that all the others involve guilty priests.

Nessel knew long ago that this was a fishing expedition. She knew full well that most of the bad guys were dead, yet she persisted in her mad search for guilty priests.

In 2002, the U.S. bishops instituted the Dallas Charter, a comprehensive effort to monitor and report on instances of clergy sexual abuse in every diocese and eparchy in the country. It has been a smashing success. As Bill Donohue recounted in his book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes, the number of substantiated cases against the clergy has dropped to the single digits each year.

Further proof that the Church has reformed itself can be seen in reading Nessel’s report. It says, “the vast majority of sexual misconduct was alleged to have occurred before 2002.” Indeed, the last alleged case took place in 1997. Importantly, Nessel’s team could find not a single case where miscreant priests are being protected today.

In our evaluation of the report, we found something else that is consistent with previous studies on clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Approximately 80% of the victims were male, proving once again that this has been a homosexual-driven problem all along. Yet Nessel never mentions this, thus extending the nationwide cover-up. We cannot correct a problem unless we have an accurate diagnosis.

If Nessel were really interested in combating sexual abuse, she would pursue cases of sexual misconduct in the Michigan government with the same kind of doggedness she has shown in hunting down old cases of priestly abuse.

On December 24, 2019, Nessel suspended an investigation into Michigan State University after the college said it would not waive attorney-client privilege regarding her investigation into Larry Nassar, the notorious serial abuser of USA gymnasts and school athletes. When a probe was warranted of similar cases at the University of Michigan in 2020, the school played the same card and she dropped her investigation again.

Moreover, if Nessel were even-handed, she would launch an investigation into the public schools. In 2016, USA Today did a 50-state study of this issue, grading each state on how well they handled this problem. Michigan received an “F” for its failure to adequately address the crisis of sexual abuse in its public schools.

Why hasn’t Nessel done a probe? Is it because she is wedded to the teacher unions? What else could be it?

Nessel’s report makes plain the need to stop her never-ending probe of the Catholic Church (she wants to investigate the other six dioceses in Michigan). It’s time she started going after institutions that have long gotten away with sexual misconduct. She can begin with those on the Michigan payroll.

Christmas carols were being sung when a woman walked into Mass, ascended to the altar, naked from the waist up, with pro-abortion slogans all over her body. She then proceeded to “abort” Jesus, holding up pieces of calf liver to symbolize an aborted baby. She completed her blasphemous act by urinating on the altar in front of parishioners.

This 2013 stunt occurred in France. Now the European Court of Human Rights has taken her side, saying she was unjustly found guilty by a French court for an unlawful “sexual display.” The high court said she was merely engaged in freedom of expression, and should never have been prosecuted. Indeed, it ordered the French courts to pay her more than $9,500 in damages, costs, and expenses.

No one has more fully understood this kind of moral depravity better than Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. He spoke eloquently about the “dictatorship of relativism” taking place in the West, a reference to the absence of objective moral truths. What better example than this high court ruling?

He also warned of the dangerous aspects of multiculturalism. It is not, as some have contended, a way of appreciating cultural diversity. No, from the get-go it has been used as a club to destroy our Judeo-Christian heritage.

The European Court of Human Rights proved its hatred for our heritage when it called this vicious act a “performance.”

If this same woman walked into their court, half naked, ascended to the bench, with obscene slogans on her body condemning the judges by name, and then proceeded to defecate on pictures of their mother, would these open-minded wizards call this freedom of expression?

Here’s more proof of their animus against Catholicism. Four years ago it upheld the conviction of a lecturer in Austria who called Mohammad a pedophile for having a sexual relationship with a 9-year-old girl named Aisha.

This court has no legitimacy. It should be disbanded.

In the wake of the midterm elections, some politicians who oppose the rights of the unborn, and who oppose parental rights, are trying to shift the terms of the debate. It’s a clever but ultimately failed tactic.

There are political, economic, social and cultural dimensions to practically every domestic and foreign issue. But that doesn’t mean there is no primary dimension. It depends on the issue.

War is primarily a political issue. The stock market is primarily an economic issue. The family is primarily a social issue. Religion is primarily a cultural issue.

In November, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that “It’s so out of touch to imply that abortion isn’t an economic issue.” She added, “Few things impact one’s finances more than having a child.”

It appears she took her talking points from Planned Parenthood. On October 27, the Action Fund arm of Planned Parenthood issued what it calls “The Quickie,” which declared, “Abortion Is An Economic Issue.”

This is a losing strategy. No one denies that abortion has economic ramifications, but it is, and always will be, primarily a matter of science, of biology, in particular. Our DNA, which defines our unique personhood, is present at conception, not a day later.

It is true that this does not settle the debate. Ineluctably, there is the moral question: Should society recognize the rights of the unborn? But this, too, is not a matter of economics.

Rep. Eric Swalwell chose the same tactic—he tried to shift the terms of the debate—but he chose a different subject. He chose parental rights.

He said it was “so stupid” for parents to maintain that they should have a say in their child’s education. “Please tell me what I’m missing here. What are we doing next? Putting parents in charge of their surgeries? Clients in charge of their trials. When did we stop trusting the experts? This is so stupid.”

We haven’t stopped trusting the experts. It’s just that when it comes to children, their parents are the experts, not anyone else.

Parents are not demanding they have a say in teaching algebra. They are saying they have a role in determining their child’s character formation. They also object when teachers move from education to indoctrination.

To be specific, when teachers overstep their boundaries by seeking to indoctrinate children with radical ideas about sexuality, they need to be called out about it. Children do not belong to the state. And teachers work for the taxpayers.

Debates about public policy and pedagogy assume a certain measure of intellectual honesty. When the terms of the debate are shifted for entirely political reasons, no meaningful exchange is possible.

Those who play this game—and it is a game—know they cannot persuade the public on the merits of their argument, which is why they seek to change the subject. No one should fall for it.

Most Americans are worried these days about inflation, their life savings, crime, open borders and education. But for some, the issue of abortion looms large.
“Hysteria” is the only word that accurately describes what some champions of abortion are saying. Why the sky hasn’t fallen is a mystery. Here are some examples.

During a conference this fall, Vice President Kamala Harris opened her remarks at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles by noting “when I’m traveling around the country, one of the feelings that I hear most is fear. It’s fear.” She later said, “there’s a lot of fear.”

The fear she was talking about was not the fear of being killed, raped or mugged. Nor was it the fear of families not being able to pay their bills. It was the fear that in some places elected officials have placed restrictions on abortion.

Around the same time, President Biden held a political rally on abortion saying, “Patients are being denied prescriptions that they’ve been taking for years for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, you know, because pharmacies are concerned that those drugs could also be used to terminate a pregnancy so they’re not giving them their prescriptions.”

No evidence was given.

After the overturning of Roe v. Wade Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “People will die because of this decision.”

She was not referring to children being killed by abortion but to some hypothetical case involving what she calls pregnant “menstruating people.”

A television ad launched by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quoted a doctor saying he thought the days of “back-alley abortions” were over. “Too often, women died. I thought those days were long behind us.”

Fact Check: According to the CDC, the number of women who died of an illegal abortion in 1972 (the year before Roe) was not some astronomical figure, as pro-abortion activists have alleged. The number was 39.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “MAGA” Republicans have “pledged to ban abortion in all 50 states and sentence doctors for 5 years in prison.” Similarly, Kamala Harris is on record saying their goal is to criminalize doctors and nurses “with up to five years in prison.”

This is patently untrue. The fact of the matter is that some pro-life Republicans have said that healthcare providers who intentionally allow a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion could serve up to 5 years in prison if they failed to attend to the child. The issue is infanticide, not abortion, which apparently makes no difference to these women.

Rep. Eric Swalwell ran a TV ad showing cops with guns drawn showing up at a house handcuffing a woman in front of her screaming husband and children because she had an unlawful abortion.

This is simply not true. The only people who are being subjected to SWAT Teams showing up at their homes with guns drawn are pro-life activists.

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams charged in August that her opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, wants to “investigate and punish women for having miscarriages.” PolitiFact, hardly a right-wing source, said her accusation was completely false. She lost to Kemp in the midterm elections.

One of the most demagogic attempts to drum up hysteria about abortion rights being lost was done by National Public Radio (NPR). In November, before the voters went to the polls, it aired an audio of a woman undergoing an abortion. It was a graphic depiction that recorded her crying and moaning with the sound of the suction abortion in the background. NPR is paid for by the taxpayers.

Does the hysteria work? With some it does. Those who are already strong abortion-rights advocates are the most likely to go into orbit. Alarmists know this, which is why they make incendiary statements and concoct morbid audios of an abortion.

The midterm elections did not go well for the pro-life side, perhaps because these fever pitches proved attractive. All five states which had abortion on the ballot chose to side with the pro-abortion camp.

It must be acknowledged the pro-life initiatives which sought to ban abortion in virtually every instance proved to be too extreme. Most Americans are against abortion for any reason, and at any time of gestation, but they are also against proposals that don’t leave the door open in some extreme cases.

Pro-life Americans did have something to brag about with the defeat of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney from the Hudson Valley area of New York. As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the Party, he was one of the most vocal supporters of abortion-on-demand anywhere in the nation. He lost to Republican Michael Lawler, shocking most analysts.

Science and ethics are on the pro-life side, so there is reason for optimism. But it is not easy to combat hysteria. It is a sign of desperation that so many prominent pro-abortion politicians are distorting, and indeed lying, about abortion, just to get votes. Their tactics are reflective of their ethics, or lack thereof.

A recent CBS poll shows that 8-in-10 (79%) voters say things are “out of control.” This is alarming. It is wholly out of character for the American people to register such a high degree of consternation with the contemporary state of affairs. Historically, it is in times of dire distress—a war or economic crisis—when sentiments are this extreme.

What’s going on? We get some idea of what’s driving this condition when we consider that the survey found that Republicans are winning those who say things are “out of control” by more than 20 points. It suggests that Americans trace our situation to decisions reached by Democrats.

It’s not hard to rattle off some contributing factors:

• high rates of inflation
• dwindling retirement portfolios
• the energy crisis
• a violent crime wave
• a surge in fentanyl deaths
• the supply chain monster
• illegal aliens crashing our borders
• a spike in the homeless population
• a record number of mentally ill people walking the streets
• the near universal embrace of critical race theory
• a woke military
• left-wing indoctrination in the classroom
• high rates of anxiety, depression and suicides among youth
• near total distrust of the media
• parental rights under fire
• children encouraged to question their sex
• an emboldened and aggressive China

We’ve had many of these problems before, or problems similar to them, but what’s different this time is that many of these outcomes are a function of will: they have been intentionally generated. They are a matter of policy.

The pandemic proved to be costly, but few now think that shutting down businesses and schools, for as long as we did, was a smart move. When billions of dollars are suddenly added to the economy, high rates of inflation are unavoidable. The war on fossil fuels and the contrived demand for electric vehicles has also taken its toll.

Never before have we witnessed such a rash of pro-criminal legislation, the result being a predictable jump in violent crimes. Our southern border problem could be drastically relieved if some very commonsensical remedies were employed, but it is obvious that this problem—like so many others—is by design. This is what the ruling class wants.

There is no legitimate reason why children should be told to question whether they are happy being a boy or a girl. A new poll reveals that 60% of Americans now say that encouraging children to “change their gender” is child abuse. Yet no one is held accountable. The medical profession has disgracefully endorsed this sick agenda.

Accountability is lacking across the board.

The average American works hard and cannot understand why this is happening. It is happening because our elites in government, the corporations, education, activist organizations, the entertainment industry and the media have decided to launch the “Great Reset.” In other words, they have decided the country needs a radical overhaul. This explains why they are bent on shoving their radical agenda down our throats.

They are the ones responsible for creating this “out of control” environment. Not until the vast majority of Americans stand up to this madness will matters change.

An editorial in the November 13 edition of the Washington Post claimed that “high-level sexual misconduct and coverup in France shattered illusions of progress by the church toward establishing a culture of transparency and accountability in its hierarchy.”

The evidence? A retired cardinal and archbishop in France admitted to sexual misconduct with a teenage girl 35 years ago. Oh, yes, it was recently disclosed that allegations of abuse extending back decades were made about another French bishop; he was removed from his post.

There are over 5,000 bishops in the world and the Washington Post found two of them who were involved in sexual misconduct decades ago. The paper argues that this shatters “illusions of progress.”

What is really shattered is the credibility of its editorial board.

As Bill Donohue recounted in The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse, no institution has made greater progress in combating sexual misconduct than the Catholic Church.

In 2018, Jeff Fager of 60 Minutes was fired after CBS learned that the executive producer was a sexual predator. He would have been fired sooner had Washington Post editor Marty Baron not killed a story about his behavior.

The paper’s reporter, Irin Carmon, wrote about this in New York magazine. “The close relationship between the paper and 60 Minutes had something to do with it,” he said.

Prior to this, Carmon and Amy Brittain, the Post’s investigative reporter, spent four months doing a story on Fager, detailing how several women alleged that he sexually abused them. But Baron kept delaying the story and refused to speak with them.

Thus, it is galling to read the Washington Post accusing the Catholic Church of lacking transparency and accountability.

Sexual abuse should always be condemned, but when those doing the condemnation come to the table with dirty hands, they ought to shut their mouth.