The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has announced that it is launching a massive campaign directed at undermining the Vatican’s role in the United Nations. The IPPF, which is headquartered in London, is urging “governmental, non-governmental and other institutions to endorse existing appeals for a review of the Vatican’s status with the United Nations.” To counter this move, the Catholic League is embarking on a project that will make public the anti-Catholic element in Planned Parenthood’s history.

The decision to target the Vatican is being led by IPPF Director-General Ingar Brueggemann. It comes in the wake of protests by the Vatican to Planned Parenthood’s response to the refugee problem in Kosovo. The Vatican has objected to the IPPF policy of distributing condoms and abortion-inducing pills to the refugees fleeing Kosovo.

In an amazing example of spin control, Brueggemann accused the Vatican of being “indifferent” to the “human suffering” that it is causing by opposing the IPPF’s pro-abortion policies. That innocent children are being killed by the IPPF’s “humanitarian” efforts is apparently lost on them.

In a release to the press, the Catholic League made plain its counter-strategy:

“Only an organization driven by fanaticism would think that the men, women and children in Yugoslavia who are being victimized by Slobodan Milosevic are in dire need of condoms. What these people need is precisely what Catholic Relief Services offers, namely food, clothing, shelter and medicinal supplies.

“Drunk with ideology, the IPPF now seeks to punish the Holy See by challenging the Vatican’s non-member state permanent observer status in the U.N. In defense of the Vatican, the Catholic League is contacting U.N. officials informing them of the anti-Catholic strain that has marked Planned Parenthood’s record. To that end, the Catholic League is compiling evidence of this bigotry, and will make public its findings in the not-too-distant future. Our objective is to inform government officials in the U.S., and at the U.N., of the bigoted legacy of Planned Parenthood. The record will show that this organization has no legitimate place at the public policy table in any nation.”

Members are urged to write to Mrs. Gillian Sorensen, Assistant Secretary General for External Relations, Room S-3840A, United Nations, New York 10017. Tell her it is high time that it is anti-Catholicism that is driving the IPPF’s efforts to oust the Holy See from the U.N. We’ll supply her with the evidence.

On February 17, Ted Turner apologized to the Catholic League for the bigoted comments he made about the pope and the Polish people. The league quickly accepted his apology but then sought his suspension from professional baseball. After all, we said, Marge Schott, the owner of the Cincinnati Redlegs, was suspended for making bigoted remarks about blacks and Jews.

The analogy between Turner and Schott, however, is not without problems. Schott was the sole owner of the Cincinnati team. It is Time Warner that owns the Atlanta Braves. While it is true that Turner is a large shareholder in Time Warner (he owns 11%), the analogy between him and Schott is not exact. Moreover, Time Warner also owns the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, yet no one has asked professional basketball to suspend Turner.

What has just been described represents the basis of a conversation between William Donohue and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig. On May 3, Selig called Donohue after the Catholic League president called his office to press the issue further. After listening to Selig’s account, Donohue said “fair is fair” and thus ended the matter.

Donohue was impressed with Selig’s forthrightness and conceded that the Schott-Turner analogy was not as tight as previously believed; he also conceded the point about the Atlanta Hawks. Selig said his investigation would continue and pledged to stay in touch until it is completed.

William A. Donohue

(Note: The following is a short excerpt of Donohue’s Commencement Day address at Christendom College, given on May 15.)

When I was growing up, there was a very popular game show on TV called “Truth or Consequences.” In the real world, of course, telling the truth has as many consequences as lying, the difference being, however, that the consequences of not telling the truth are frequently pernicious. This explains why our culture is in so much trouble today—we have come to devalue truth. Indeed, in some quarters, particularly in the academy, we deny that there is such a thing as truth altogether.

Attacks on truth are commonplace. The attacks come in three forms: in the acceptance of moral neutrality; in the rejection of logic and evidence; and in lying.

To believe that all values are relative, that there is no such thing as truth, is to treat morality as if it were comprised of tastes and opinions. But morality is not an individual property, it is a social construct.

When Monica said that truth is what you feel it to be, she spoke like a real child of our age. In her world, truth is reduced to feeling, which means that it has no independent status. Truth, in this view, is not something we come to know, it is something we experience. And one experience is just as good as another. This is something that certainly would have resonated well with Jeffrey Dahmer. The trench coat mafia definitely believed that truth is whatever you want it to be.

It is fashionable these days to teach that “all knowledge is a social construct.” For this we can thank the French. It was one of their learned men who gave us deconstructionism, the belief that a text has no meaning of its own, that what matters is the ancestry and anatomy of the author, not his or her thoughts. That the person responsible for this intellectual heist was a fan of Adolf Hitler is not hard to believe.

The rejection of logic and evidence is the second assault on truth that is so commonplace today.

One of the most popular multicultural books is I, Rigoberta Menchu, the story of an indigenous Guatemalan revolutionary. The gist of the book is that the Menchus were a poor Mayan family who were exploited by the rich landowning class. Rigoberta was supposedly an illiterate girl. Her father organized a peasant movement to fight the landowners and Rigoberta herself joined with native Marxist guerrillas who came to save them.

The problem with this account is that there is no evidence to support it. Rigoberta was not illiterate and she was not denied the opportunity to go to school. She spoke two languages and attended a private boarding school. Her father was not a poor peasant but a rich landowner: he owned 6,800 acres of land. Finally, the Marxists guerrillas were not indigenous to the area and were, in fact, the ones responsible for terrorizing Rigoberta’s relatives, most of whom they killed.

Rigoberta Menchu, we now know, was a Marxist terrorist who perpetuated an intellectual hoax. But she is still revered on many campuses and no one has dared say that she should be forced to give back her Nobel Prize for Peace. When confronted with the evidence against Rigoberta, Wellesley professor Marjorie Agosin said, “Whether the book is true or not, I don’t care.”

Sheer lying is the third assault on truth these days.

We could fill a huge university library with all the lies that have been told, and are still being told, about Communism. The left simply doesn’t want to hear it and that is why a lying traitor like Alger Hiss can have a chair named after him at Bard College.

As we have seen, the consequences of lying can mean death. In 1995, on “Nightline,” Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, said that partial birth abortion was “rarely used”; it was used “only on women whose lives were in danger,” he said. Two years later, he admitted, “I lied through my teeth.” “It made me physically ill.”

Lying is so acceptable these days that some get paid to do only that. I’m talking about the spinmeisters, those ladies and gentlemen who are hired to lie for public officials. They take the truth and stand it on its head. This is what the Clinton apologists did night after night. Chris Matthews recently said that he was amazed by the number of men and women who would come on his show defending Clinton to the hilt, only to bash the president as a liar when they were off the air.

This, then, is what happens when truth doesn’t matter. The result is moral nihilism, pure and simple. In such an environment, intellectual death is followed by physical death. Truth, then, has consequences, and so does the rejection of it.

We would be lying if we said that we didn’t think we’d get much of a reaction to our New York Times op-ed page ad of April 23. We knew we would, which is precisely why we ran it. But never did we think that we’d be answered with an op-ed page by one of our critics.

On May 12, Jack P. Eisner, founder of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, ran an ad entitled, “A Warsaw Ghetto Survivor”; it was subtitled, “Responds to ‘Remembering the Holocaust’s 5 Million Others.’” Below this it said, “Catholic League N.Y. Times, April 23, 1999 advertisement.”

The point of the ad was that Jews have an exclusive monopoly on suffering. Here is how it ended: “I hope and pray that we [Jews] will remain unique forever and that no other nation or religion will ever be ‘fortunate’ to join our exclusive club.”

The ad will also be remembered for its bigotry. “It [the Holocaust] was unique because it was perpetrated and organized not by an ignorant tribe in Uganda or Afghanistan, but by a leading Western Christian nation, a direct consequence of more than 1000 years of religious persecution.” Here’s another example: “We [Jews] were not as lucky as today’s Albanians and Croatians whose fathers were notorious Jew-killers.”

We’re not sure who was behind this ad but one thing is for sure: it proves that we succeeded in triggering a discussion. That’s why we call our journal Catalyst—our goal is to change the culture.

We will not be dragged into a tit-for-tat with anyone, but neither will we stop doing what we’re doing. We will continue to challenge the conventional wisdom on the Holocaust and we will take our message directly to the op-ed page of the New York Times: there is simply no better vehicle available—it provides us with the target audience, the educated men and women who shape our culture.

Much of the reaction to our ad was motivated by sheer hate, and it came from both extremes. On one side, we heard from Hans Schmidt, chairman of the German American National Political Affairs Committee. He ended his diatribe to us with this: “Once the ‘six million’ claim; the gas chambers’ story; Hitler’s order to kill all the Jews; his plans to conquer the world, and the alleged misuse of Zyklon-B are exposed as a hoax, no Christian needs to feel guilty.”

On the other extreme, we have Dr. Otward Mueller. After he takes issue with many of the points made in our ad, he closes with this: “No documentation exists proving the ‘5 Million Others.’”

So there we have it: the Holocaust deniers are located in the camps of anti-Semitic Christians and anti-Christian Jews.

No amount of evidence will ever convince these people of the suffering that Jews and Catholics endured in the Holocaust. Or that it was Nazis—not Christians—who killed Jews. Similarly, when we hear from anonymous sources that European Catholics are “barbaric animals,” we are reminded once again that reason has its limits. And this says nothing of the vulgarities that the Catholic League staff has had to put up with in fielding the hate calls.

Turn to the middle section of this issue for a sample of the response. Some of the worst responses are not suitable for print, but you’ll get the point.

At least it can be said that we weren’t ignored. This issue will return–bet on it.

“The John and Ken Show” is a syndicated radio show whose hosts apparently think that cheap shots at the Catholic Church are an adequate substitute for a lack of creative humor.

Last January, listeners at KFI in Los Angeles, where the show originates, let us know that the duo had used the Pope’s visit to the United States to launch into an attack on Catholic teachings regarding papal infallibility, sex, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, and capital punishment. Several weeks ago, a listener to KSCO in Santa Cruz alerted us to remarks they had made mocking Catholic teachings on sexuality and accusing the Church of being anti-woman.

Then a KSCO listener sent us a tape of their April 27 show, in which they used discussion of a vocations day at a New Hampshire Catholic high school to ridicule Catholic priests and nuns. With Ken playing straight man, John took to the attack.

It would “be sad if my sons became priests,” he remarked, because it would “mean an absence of critical thinking.” It would also cause him to “wonder what’s up with his sexuality here,” whether “he were gay” and “just going to run into the priesthood to cover it up.

“It’s hard for me to understand,” he added, “anyone wanting to give up sex for the rest of their life.” He also wondered why anyone would want to “walk around” in the “weird costume” of a priest.

As for nuns, “The nuns I knew were narrow…there wasn’t much to talk to them about…the same preachy stuff…I found nuns boring to talk to”—but not to talk about, apparently, because derogatory talk about priests and nuns seems to be about all you’ll hear on “The John and Ken Show” these days. And we find that pretty boring.

Why not make your thoughts known by writing to Mr. David Hall, Program Director, KFI Radio, 610 South Ardmore Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90005. If this show is carried locally by a station in your area, let them hear from you as well.

The American Business Women’s Association (ABWA) was founded in 1949 to support the educational and career goals of women. It is a big organization, with chapters across the U.S., all of which sponsor a myriad of events. There was one event that took place this spring that the Catholic League objected to, the result of which was the extension of a sincere apology.

The event in question took place in Altavista, Virginia, at the local armory. Located some 30 minutes south of Lynchburg, in a Christian community, the ABWA chapter in Altavista-Gret threw a Womanless Beauty Pageant that raised money for college scholarships. Unfortunately, some people’s idea of humor meant taking liberties with Catholic sensibilities.

According to the local newspaper, News and Advocate, the audience at the event was treated to “a man dressed as a pregnant nun” who “danced provocatively on stage” to the tune of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”

The Catholic League obviously let the head of the ABWA know how it felt about this brand of humor. It was heartened to learn that a sincere apology was immediately forthcoming, not only from executive director Carolyn B. Elman, but from the six woman officers who form the executive board of the Alta-Gret Chapter. We were only too happy to accept this apology.

Too bad other offenders aren’t as honest as the ABWA.

A bill has been introduced by Louisiana state Representative Tony Perkins that would give “right of conscience” protection to pro-life pharmacists. The bill is designed to protect pharmacists who are opposed to filling certain prescriptions from disciplinary measures. For Catholic pharmacists, this would mean that they would not be forced to dispense contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs, as well as drugs intended to administer euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide or capital punishment.

The Catholic League praised the bill with the following statement to the press:

“We have written to all members of the Health and Welfare Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives asking them to support House Bill 1064. This legislation would provide a conscience clause for pharmacists, protecting them against the prospect of being forced to dispense drugs for purposes that would violate their religious beliefs. As such, this is a straight First Amendment religious liberty issue.

“It is the position of the Catholic League that such legislation is needed throughout the nation. Those who are truly pro-choice should have no problem joining with us.”

Voices of the Millennium is a series of short clips that CNN has been running during commercial breaks on featured programs. On April 21, during the “Larry King Live” show, a two-minute segment was run on “Women in the Pulpit.” In it, a female minister, a male author and a Harvard feminist offered their thoughts on women clergy. The latter two criticized the Roman Catholic Church for not ordaining women.

Swanee Hunt, who heads the Women’s Leadership Institute at Harvard University, said that if the Catholic Church was to “live, grow and thrive,” it will have to ordain women. She further stated that “As long as God looks like Michelangelo’s image of the Sistine Chapel with a long, flowing white beard, we will continue to worship maleness.”

The Catholic League sent the following statement to the media:

“CNN has a problem with Catholicism and the problem begins at the top. Two months ago, CNN owner Ted Turner sent an apology to the Catholic League after we criticized him for making anti-Catholic remarks at a pro-abortion conference in Washington, D.C.; he is currently being investigated by Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig for his behavior. In 1990, Turner apologized for stating that ‘Christianity is the religion of losers.’ In 1994, CNN apologized to Cardinal Bernardin for running an unsubstantiated story about him, accusing him of sexual abuse. And now it has the audacity to offend Catholics by lecturing them on the wisdom of their doctrinal prerogatives.

“Here’s the Catholic League’s Voice of the Millennium: It is no more the business of CNN to criticize the Catholic Church’s house rules than it is the business of the Church to criticize CNN’s house rules.

“As for the Harvard feminist, we have news for her: only a sexist like her would equate worshipping God with worshipping maleness.”

William Donohue called the Atlanta headquarters of CNN to lodge a complaint. The person he spoke to initially took the position that the offensive spot was really supposed to be about the lack of opportunities for women in the 20^th century. Donohue responded by saying that if that were the case, then CNN should have done a spot on women in broadcasting.

Donohue continued to press the CNN spokesman, questioning whether CNN was planning to do a segment that criticized the dietary laws of Orthodox Jews. The CNN staffer got the point. Donohue was told that this segment of the Voices of the Millennium would no longer be run on TV.

On May 9, the CBS show, “60 Minutes,” aired a story about a Jesuit seminarian who claimed he was the victim of 12 instances of sexual harassment while in the seminary. When he tried to sue the order, the case was thrown out on the grounds that it would abridge the separation of church and state that marks the First Amendment.

The Catholic League has no way to judge the veracity of the ex-seminarian’s charges. But given the treatment typically afforded the Catholic Church by “60 Minutes,” we can say a few words about the program.

All the way through this episode, “60 Minutes” interviewer Morley Safer greeted with great chagrin the principle of separation of church and state. Were it not for this principle, he opined, the case could have been settled in court. This First Amendment principle, then, was reduced to an obstacle, an impediment to justice. The implication was clear: we need to revisit the historical immunity that religious institutions have had from the reach of government.

It has long been the goal of those who are anti-religious to bring religious institutions under the tutelage of the state. What they want is the right to sue religious institutions that do not ordain women as priests and Catholic hospitals that do not provide for abortion. They are not interested in religious liberty and their only interest in separation of church and state is to keep the state free from religious influence. In short, they are bigots disguised as objective observers. And make no mistake about it, the “they” certainly includes “60 Minutes.”

Gannett Newspapers just can’t get over Iona College’s determination to stand firm for its Catholic principles.

Last October, Gannett editorialized against Iona for “censoring” an obscenity-laden student poem from appearing in the school’s magazine. Now, six months later, the Gannett-owned Journal News (White Plains, NY) has raised the issue again, with reporter Caren Halbfinger accusing Iona of “censoring the free verse of student poets.”

In a letter-to-the-editor, we noted the irony: while Ms. Halbfinger described the offending passages as “sexually explicit” and “an expletive,” she did not quote them in her article—”no doubt,” we said, “because printing such language violates the policy of Gannett newspapers, as it would most mainstream newspapers.

“If newspapers have the right to maintain certain ethical standards in deciding what is printed in their names,” we asked, “why shouldn’t Catholic colleges have the same right?”