The Catholic League has joined two lawsuits in an amicus brief. One case deals with abortion; the other with religious discrimination.

The abortion case involves support for the ban on partial-birth abortion and a challenge to the euphemistic language used by the pro-abortion industry. “The language used by the pro-abortion movement to describe partial-birth abortion skews the perception of what the procedure entails and obscures the fact that Congress passed a constitutional law when it passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,” says the brief. Lead counsel in this case is being provided by the Thomas More Law Center; the case is Gonzalez v. Carhart.

The other case is being fought by the Washington, D.C. law firm of Winston & Strawn. At issue is a New York statute that effectively requires that religious charities’ prescription drug plans cover contraceptives. While an exemption is provided for “religious employers,” it is written so narrowly as to render it useless in most instances. The implications for religious liberty are enormous, and that explains why the league is involved.

Both cases are important; we are happy to be party to both lawsuits.

The intolerance continues at the University of Oregon.

The student senate at the university met in May to discuss the March issue of the student newspaper the Insurgent in which pornographic depictions of Jesus were shown. Student senator Dallas Brown proposed a resolution condemning theInsurgent’s offending publication on the grounds that it was intended to offend and not educate. He had also planned to ask the Senate to freeze the Insurgent’s funds for the remainder of this year or next year unless the newspaper apologized.

During a five-minute recess, seven student senators, including the senate’s president and vice-president, left the meeting. Catholic League president Bill Donohue blamed the university’s president Dave Frohnmayer for the turmoil.

Donohue, in a press release, referred to an incident at the university on April 1, 1996 in which some white students yelled racial slurs to black students. In the April 15, 1996 edition of News & Views, the campus newsletter, President Frohnmayer declared, “We do not tolerate racism.” Frohnmayer followed that by asking for reports on racially based incidents, a joint meeting of the university’s Race Issue Task Force and Racial Advisory Council, and drew a parallel between the racist incident and the Holocaust.

Donohue said, “if Frohnmayer had treated the Catholic-bashing incident the way he treated the racist incident, he would have drawn another parallel to the Holocaust. So as not to be misunderstood, it was irresponsible of him to make the Holocaust analogy in 1996 and it would have been equally irresponsible had he done so now. But the essential point remains: Had he acted quickly to morally condemn the Insurgent, this matter would have been closed by now.”

Donohue said Frohnmayer “cannot dismiss outraged Catholics, public officials and the taxpayers. He needs to commence a campus-wide discussion on two subjects: anti-Catholicism and the relationship between rights and responsibilities.”

On June 1, the University hosted a panel discussion on the Insurgent issue. Michael Tarascio of the group Students of Faith was the only person on the five-person panel who supported the University taking action. He said in an e-mail that the university appointed attorney, also on the panel, referred to the 2000 Supreme Court case Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin v. Southworth. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his opinion that all university students were required to pay student fees regardless of the type of speech that the fees eventually financed. Tarascio said Justice Kennedy’s decision prohibits the university from taking back funds in this case, but does not prohibit the university from taking other action.

Tarascio also said that some people in the audience at the panel discussion shouted out statements attacking Jesus, saying Jesus was gay and had erections.

It seems offensive speech is not tolerated at the University of Oregon, unless it is directed at Jesus and Christians.

One of the artists whose drawing appeared in the March issue of the University of Oregon’s the Insurgent defended his work.

John Correa, in the Oregon Daily Emerald, defended his drawing of Jesus crucified, kissing a red-skinned demon. Correa began by stating that he did not create the work “specifically for the March issue,” but rather for an art class at the University.

Correa, among other things, said there is a “clear message of eros” in Jesus’s sacrificial act of being crucified. Correa said if the body of Christ is a human body, “it is subject to the same erotic gaze as all human bodies.” In talking about Jesus’s body, he referred to the “tasteless wafers given out in churches during Communion.” Correa said, “You cannot have your wafer and eat it too.”

Correa also said by depicting Jesus kissing a red demon, he was challenging the homophobia of Christian doctrine. Correa identified himself as “queer,” and said in his view, “queerness is a natural part of the human experience.” He said Christ “could just as easily have experienced queerness as any other human being.”

Both statements don’t take into account what the Catholic Church, and other Christian churches have been teaching for more than 2,000 years. Correa’s statements simply support the argument conscientious Christians have been making: Jesus and his Church, Christians and their beliefs are not being shown the proper respect. It’s this lack of respect that has Christians upset.

Correa also wrote in his editorial that the March issue of the Insurgent has led to “one of the most intellectually and culturally engaging conversations that has happened at the University” in the 10 years that he’s lived in Eugene. Would Correa support a school newspaper printing offensive material about homosexuals in order to intellectually and culturally engage the University community? He, and the University, would probably be up in arms. They should be over the March issue of the Insurgentas well.

On June 7, the Senate voted not to advance the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would have defined marriage in the U.S. as between a man and a woman only.

Those in favor of advancing the amendment fell one vote short of a majority, 49-48, although 60 votes were needed to send the amendment to an up-or-down vote in the Senate. Sixty-seven votes were needed for the Senate to approve the constitutional amendment.

Debate was heated on both sides, but Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts provided the most outrageous remark. “A vote for this amendment is a vote for bigotry pure and simple.”

Bill Donohue responded to the Senator’s statement.

“A vote for the Marriage Protection Amendment is a vote to maintain the traditional understanding of marriage as it has been accepted for thousands of years all over the world. To brand those who support this amendment as bigots is mud slinging: it is analogous to those who would call foes of the amendment ‘gay lovers.’

“In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. It denies federal recognition to same-sex marriages and allows states the right to deny recognition of gay marriages that have been performed in other states. Only 14 senators voted against this bill, and Senator Kennedy was one of them. Thus, his proclaimed opposition to gay marriage is nothing but an empty gesture: he refuses to do anything that would protect the institution of marriage from legislative or judicial tinkering.

“In the last election, all 11 states that had same-sex marriage on the ballot voted against it, including states with a ‘progressive’ reputation like Oregon. Moreover, more than 80 percent of the states have passed Defense of Marriage Acts. Mr. Kennedy, who is Catholic, should know that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is in favor of a constitutional amendment. And Black ministers, like Bishop Harry Jackson of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, have rallied in favor of the amendment. Even in New York City, surveys show the people don’t want same-sex marriage. Are all these people bigots, Mr. Kennedy?

“Reasonable people may disagree whether a constitutional amendment is the right remedy, buy only fanatics will call those who support it bigots.”

A federal judge in Oregon ruled that a lawsuit against the Vatican over a priest accused of sexual abuse can move forward. Normally foreign countries are immune from jurisdiction in U.S. courts as per the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.

A Seattle-area man, in a lawsuit, accuses the Vatican of conspiring to protect a priest who was a known child molester by moving him from Ireland to Chicago to Portland in the 1950s and 1960s.
Attorney Jeffrey Anderson, lawyer for the plaintiff, reportedly felt “giddy” when he heard the judge’s ruling.

Bill Donohue, in a press release, commented on Anderson’s motivations.

“A former SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] radical who hates the Catholic Church, Anderson has made literally tens of millions of dollars suing the Church in sexual abuse cases. His hatred stems, in part, from the fact that his eight-year-old daughter was once abused by a former priest. I say ‘in part’ because the abuser was a psychotherapist: as Newsweek’s Ken Woodward once said, Anderson never decided to target the American Psychological Association, and that’s because the big bucks lay in suing the Catholic Church. Hate, mixed with greed, is a sick stew.”

The priest in question did admit to sexual abuse in both Ireland and Chicago, but the most recent abuse allegations in Oregon occurred at least 40 years ago. He left the priesthood in 1966 and died in 1992.

Bill Donohue said the judge’s ruling in this case goes against a precedent previously set in Oregon.

“Four years ago, sexual abuse charges were dropped against a former superintendent of the Oregon School for the Deaf because it was ruled that the alleged abuse against two girls occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and thus were too old to prosecute under state law. ‘What stupefied me was that this [the abuse] was common knowledge’ in the school, said a disability counselor who investigated the matter. Yet the school did nothing about it. To its credit, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a story at that time on sexual abuse of deaf students nationwide and found that not only is sexual abuse commonplace in schools for the deaf, the states and the federal government do virtually nothing about it.

“Rightly or wrongly, up until recently the sexual abuse of youngsters was uniformly handled by private and public institutions as an in-house matter. What’s really going on here is an attempt to fleece the Vatican by a multi-millionaire with an agenda—it has nothing to do with justice. Look for Anderson to lose in the Supreme Court.”

Jeffrey Lena, the Holy See’s attorney, said that the decision by the judge “does not establish jurisdiction over the Holy See, let alone establish liability.”

A&E television network broadcast a documentary in May replete with lies about the Catholic Church.

The documentary was based on the book Illuminating Angels and Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the Facts Behind the Fiction by Simon Cox. The book discusses the “facts” on which Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons is based.

Bill Donohue responded by pointing out some of the errors contained in the documentary. One of the “experts” interviewed falsely stated that the Church teaches that Peter was the first person to see Jesus when Christ rose from the dead, and that’s why he’s the first Pope. That is not, in fact, what the Church teaches.

Some other claims made in the documentary: the Vatican existed in the fourth century (it didn’t exist until 1,000 years later); there are ‘hidden gospels’ buried in the Vatican that could be used to destroy the Church (the innocuous books can be found online); Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist (he’s got it backwards); the Church is anti-science (no institution has contributed more to science than the Catholic Church); the Church ‘would still kill Galileo today’ (no one—not even an albino monk—killed him); and so on.

They are just some of what is contained in the documentary. The people interviewed are identified as “experts.” They clearly display not even a rudimentary knowledge about the Catholic Church. At no point are there any refutations to the statements they make. The documentary uses the work of these “experts” to slander the Catholic Church.

The author on whose book the documentary is based raises suspicions. Simon Cox is the Editor in Chief of a magazine that covers “alternative history and ancient mysteries.” The BBC has described him as a “historian of the obscure.”

Catholic League President Bill Donohue responded, “Had A&E accessed serious scholars, these embarrassing errors would have been avoided. Instead they relied on amateurs and charlatans. While we can’t be exactly sure what’s possessing A&E these days, the signs are ominous. Better call on the services of an exorcist, just to be sure.”

On June 8, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene launched a program called the “Healthy Teens Initiative.” This program provides young people with easier access to condoms, birth control pills, and morning-after pills. Adolescents are also offered confidential counseling sessions.

When asked by the media for his take on this plan, Bill Donohue had this to say: “It’s hard to say what’s worse—the stupidity or the moral irresponsibility of these clueless health professionals.

He elaborated: “The ‘Healthy Teens Initiative’ is both morally challenged and practically ineffective.

“Giving young people brochures about chlamydia and handing out condoms will do little if anything to alleviate the problems of teen pregnancy and STDs. Condoms are more readily available now than ever before, yet kids are still getting pregnant, and they are still getting sick.

“If those in charge at the Department of Health were serious about protecting New York’s youths, they would treat casual sex the way they treat cigarette smoking. But instead of hammering home the health risks and urging abstinence, our good public servants are handing out contraceptives with warm smiles.

“The education the ‘Healthy Teens Initiative’ will provide the city’s children will not help them to make moral choices. Rather, it will encourage libertinism. When fifteen year-olds are turning to city health counselors instead of their parents for advice about sex, we have a serious problem. Parents should be outraged that their minor children will be provided birth control pills and even morning-after pills (which are in some cases abortifacients) without their knowledge or permission.”

Sister Margherita Marchione, author, scholar and long-time friend of the Catholic League, has exerted much time and effort to honoring the memory of Pope Pius XII. Now she needs your help.

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ remembrance authority, bestows the title “Just Among the Nations” on non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In order for Pope Pius XII to receive this honor, Yad Vashem needs two testimonials from people of Jewish extraction who knew Jews, or knew of Jews, who were saved by the pope.

If you, or someone you know, can help in any way, please write to Sister Margherita at 455 Western Avenue, Morristown, NJ 07960, or fax 973-539-9327.