Garland, Texas was home to an anti-Islam cartoon event last month that left two gunmen dead and one security guard wounded.

Minutes before Elton Simpson started shooting, one of his supporters tweeted, “If there is no check on the freedom of your speech, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.” Simpson was shot dead quickly thereafter. Neither he nor his ilk ever realized that this plainly irresponsible position—no limits on speech means no limits on conduct—was the proximate cause of his death.

Bill Donohue made it clear that “there is no role for absolutism in a free society.” He criticized the staged event orchestrated by Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative for unnecessarily taunting Muslims. It is one thing to condemn ISIS, he said, but it is quite another to deliberately insult people of faith.

In January, Donohue was blasted for saying that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons could not be defended morally, even if they were entirely legal. He objected to those cartoons not because they depicted Muhammad but because some were pornographic. When Pope Francis took his side, it effectively ended the debate.

The Garland event split members of the PEN American Center, an elite organization that says it defends artistic freedoms: some defended Geller’s stunt and others did not. Donohue pointed out how hypocritical both sides were.

On May 5, PEN honored Charlie Hebdo in New York City, even though the French magazine was tied to the Paris murders. Officials from the publication received an award for “freedom of expression courage.” But other PEN members objected, saying that freedom of expression has limits: by depicting Muslims as savages, they said, Charlie Hebdo was promoting bigotry.

Both factions of PEN, Donohue said, were phonies. In October 1998, he led 2,000 demonstrators in the street outside the theater that featured “Corpus Christi,” a play that depicted Christ having sex with the apostles. “From the beginning,” he wrote in the November 1998 issue of Catalyst “the league has argued that the play should not be censored by the government but that the producers of the play should have cancelled it in the name of common decency.” On that same rainy night there were 300 counter-demonstrators: they came to protest the league’s constitutional right to freedom of speech. Among them was a contingent from the PEN American Center.

The other PEN phonies were the ones who didn’t want to honor Charlie Hebdo. They have no problem offending Christians, Donohue noted, but when it comes to bashing Muslims, they are horrified. The entire organization, he concluded, was corrupt.

David Letterman’s last appearance on “The Late Show” was May 20. We were delighted to see him exit.

Letterman’s departure was treated by the Hollywood crowd as a signature moment in television history. But no fair-minded person could ever come to that conclusion. Quite simply, the man is an anti-Catholic bigot. If anyone doubts this to be true then let him read p. 13 of this issue.

If this isn’t persuasive enough, question whether Letterman would be regarded as an icon if his “jokes” had been about one of the protected classes of people. This is exactly the problem: among elites, anti-Catholicism is acceptable, but bigotry aimed at others is seen as offensive. We’re different at the Catholic League—we condemn all expressions of bigotry. Just read the lead story on Islamic cartoons.

Letterman’s gall is limitless. Consider his obsession ridiculing predatory priests. Yet he is an admitted predator—he preyed on his female staffers. He was also involved in an extortion scandal. To top things off, his own pathologies are what drove him to secure weekly sessions with a psychiatrist.

When the hosts of the “Opie and Anthony” radio show staged an event in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2002—a couple had sex in the pews during the day—Letterman took the occasion to mock Catholicism again. In fact, he joked about a priest molesting an altar boy.

Letterman was no Johnny Carson, and he is no American hero.

William A. Donohue

We hear it all the time: the Catholic Church discriminates against women. As compared to which institutions? The Congress? Women comprise 18 percent of its members. Fortune 500 companies? Women account for only 5 percent of the chief financial officers.

What about the Catholic Church? Of the top three diocesan positions—chancellor, chief financial officer, and schools superintendent—32 percent of these positions (there are 571 of them) across the nation are filled by women. Moreover, the three largest social service agencies in the nation—Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, and the Catholic Health Association—are all run by women.

These facts notwithstanding, don’t expect fair treatment by the media. This issue takes on special significance when we consider the record of the nation’s premier newspaper, the New York Times. That it has solid liberal credentials is denied by no one. So let’s see how it stacks up.

“Catholic Church Undervalues Women” was the title of a recent article in the Times by columnist Frank Bruni. He should be careful about throwing the first stone: the Times has a notorious record of undervaluing women. Indeed, it worked hard to deny women the right to vote in 1920, a bit of history its everyday readers would find hard to believe.

There are 29 senior positions listed on the masthead of the Times, and men control 19, or 66 percent, of them. There are six top jobs: publisher and chairman; executive editor; editorial page editor; chief executive editor; and chief information officer. Men control all of them. The lowest on the totem pole, secretary, is occupied by a woman.

Hiring is incestuous at the Times. Two powerful families, the Ochses and Sulzbergers, have run the newspaper since the late 19th century. Adolph S. Ochs took over in 1896 and made sure to put his daughter, Iphigene, on the board of directors. However, he denied her the right to work at the newspaper. Why? Because she was a woman.

Iphigene married Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and he conveniently succeeded her father. They had one son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known as Punch, and he managed to take over the reins in 1963; his three sisters also sat on the board with him. The dynasty continued when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. took over as publisher in 1992; he was joined by his five cousins at the paper. The concentration of power hit new heights when Junior became chairman of the newspaper in 1997.

In 2011, the Times hired the first woman to run the newspaper, Jill Abramson. She was fired a year ago; a man took her place. It soon came to light that she was discriminated against because she was a woman. Indeed, she was paid considerably less than the male editor who preceded her, Bill Keller. This was no fluke: when she succeeded Keller as managing editor, she also received less than him in pay and pension benefits.

None of this sat well with females at the Times. Then it was learned that a former managing editor of news operations, John Geddes, was also making more money than Abramson. When her lawyer inquired about the disparity, the alarms went off.

It must be noted that Abramson was not the first senior female executive to be fired by Sulzberger. Janet Robinson, a friend of Abramson, was hired in 2004 to run the Times company, and she did a fine job for many years. Moreover, she and Sulzberger worked closely together. But their relationship soured once his new girlfriend, Claudia Gonzalez, entered the picture.

From all accounts, Gonzalez, a stately Mexican executive, wasn’t too keen on Robinson. It didn’t take long before the Sulzberger-Robinson bond began to break, and in December 2011 he canned her. She exited with a good-bye package worth $24 million.

Robinson was replaced by a man. Mark Thompson is the former BBC official who still claims he knew nothing about the behavior of Jimmy Savile, the serial pedophile rapist who worked at the company for decades. The evidence, as I have recounted elsewhere (see our website), is not supportive of Thompson’s claim.

These are not mere anecdotes. Just one year ago, the Women’s Media Center rated the nation’s top ten newspapers on gender hiring and the New York Times was dead last: it had the biggest gender gap—69 percent of the bylines went to men. In the 1970s, the paper was sued for sex discrimination, and had to settle with 560 women employees. It took that to get the Times to launch an affirmative action hiring plan.

The New York Times likes to look down its nose at middle America, a.k.a fly-over country. Yet Wyoming was the first state to allow women the right to vote. At that time, the newspaper of record was fighting hard to maintain the all-male vote. In 1915, when the suffrage amendment was defeated in New York State, no one was happier than Adolph Ochs, the paper’s owner.

The Catholic Church has Biblical reasons, beginning with Jesus, for its teachings on ordination. What reason, other than prejudice, does the New York Times have for undervaluing women?

The oral arguments that were recently heard by the U.S. Supreme Court proved why the gay marriage issue is before the highest court in the nation: radical individualism and radical egalitarianism are the driving ideologies.

In the second set of oral arguments, the word “dad” was never mentioned, and the word “father” was cited only once. “Mom” was mentioned once, and “mother” was never cited. There was zero discussion of religion. The words “right” and “rights,” however, were cited 24 times, but the words “responsibility” and “responsibilities” were never mentioned. Neither were the words “kin” and “kinship.”

In the first set of oral arguments, there was also no mention of “kin” or “kinship.” The words “right” and “rights” were cited 91 times, but the words “responsibility” and “responsibilities” were mentioned only thrice.

It is not easy to discuss marriage and the family without mentioning kinship, or the responsibilities of mothers and fathers, but they managed to do so. With the exception of John Bursch, who argued the case for traditional marriage, words such as “biological father and mother” were avoided. “Rights,” of course, rolled off everyone’s lips.

In the first oral arguments, Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia raised the issue of religious liberty in relation to gay marriage. The answers were not reassuring. They were told that the states could provide protections, but Scalia kept reminding them that state laws won’t matter if gay marriage is recognized as a constitutional right. He was questioning whether ministers would be required to perform gay marriages.

Alito asked if a religious school would be forced to provide married housing to a gay couple. After Solicitor General Donald Verrilli dodged it, Alito asked if the school could lose its tax-exempt status. Verrilli said he didn’t know but conceded, “it is going to be an issue.”

The radical agenda will not stop with gay marriage: The goal is to crush the churches. This is totalitarianism with a soft face.

In the run-up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s oral arguments on same-sex marriage, a popular refrain voiced by its proponents sounded very much like the Beatles song, “Love Is All You Need.” But in real life, there is a whole lot more to marriage than love.

Not only is love as a basis for marriage a relatively recent phenomenon—most marriages throughout history were arranged or based on duty—it is profoundly detached from the historical purpose of marriage, which is procreation. Once love is given primary status as a condition for marriage, the institution itself is no longer recognizable.

It was love that motivated three men to “marry” in Thailand on Valentine’s Day. As one of the “spouses” said, “Love occurs unconditionally and is not limited to only two people.” Ten years ago, two women and a man “married” in the Netherlands. The man said, “I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I am marrying them both.” Allen and Patricia Muth tried to marry in Wisconsin in 1997 but were blocked by the courts (they lost again in 2005), even though they have four children together. Allen and Patricia are brother and sister.

If “Love Is All You Need,” then the Muths have been treated unjustly and should be released from prison.

Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, chairman of the bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty has accurately identified the problem. He notes that “when you redefine marriage as many people want to do today it becomes more a relationship of affection, an emotional relationship.” He understands that marriage is about families, and that children need a mother and a father—not two mothers or two fathers. Just ask Heather Barwick, who was party to a brief against gay marriage a couple of weeks ago. She was raised by two mothers, who, though loving, could not give her something she needed, namely, “the need for a father.” Heather is living testimony that “Love Is Not All You Need.”

We know that President Obama is infinitely more sensitive to the concerns of Muslims than Christians. He cites Christians by name when he wants to blame them for some historical event, but he never mentions Muslims by name for their current slaughter of innocent Christians. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, is at one with him.

Nine months ago, the Congress created a special envoy for religious minorities in the Middle East and South Central Asia. The State Department job remains unfilled, and no one has been named to assume the post. By contrast, three months ago the State Department named Randy Berry, a homosexual who claims to be married, to the spanking new job as special envoy for the human rights of LGBT persons. Randy started a couple of weeks ago.

So why is it that the Middle East, which is home to the 21st century’s first genocide, commands less attention than the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender persons? Because the “religious minorities” that the special envoy post is supposed to address are mostly Christians.

Too bad all Christians weren’t gay—then they would have a voice in the State Department.

Recently, the Pew Research Center released a survey on religion. The bad news has already dominated media reports: more Americans are religiously unaffiliated than ever before. The ranks of Protestants and Catholics are declining, and the percentage of atheists and agnostics are increasing. This is true across age groups, though it is most pronounced among young people. But not all the data were discouraging.

While it is true that the Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, some quick arithmetic shows that more than 92 percent of Americans who identify with a religion are Christian (76.5 percent are religiously affiliated and 70.6 percent of them are Christian). To that extent, we are still a Christian nation.

Also, those raised without a religious affiliation have a low retention rate. Indeed, nearly half of them, 47 percent, are not content to stay unaffiliated; they join a religion at some point. In other words, while those with no affiliation are growing, the increase is attributable to those who were raised in a religious household and have decided to leave. Some of those who exit come back when they get married and have children, though apparently not as many as in previous decades.

Only 21 percent of those who are currently unaffiliated were raised that way, so they depend largely on alienated Christians to bolster their numbers. At the other extreme are Catholics: 90 percent of those who identify as Catholic today were raised Catholic. But among those who have no religious affiliation, 28 percent are former Catholics. This suggests that while Catholicism does a better job holding its own (as compared to other religions), the ranks of the disaffected are a serious issue.

Most of those with no religious affiliation are neither atheist or agnostic: the majority of them identify as “nothing in particular” (some of whom are believers). They might best be called the “Whatever” generation. Look for many of the “Whatevers” to eventually get anchored, though a large number of them are lost souls.

During a recent episode of “The O’Reilly Factor” on the Fox News Channel, host Bill O’Reilly commented on the Pew Research Center survey of religion that came out last month.

Here is what O’Reilly said: “The main reason Christianity is on the decline is poor leadership and corruption within the Catholic Church. The priest scandal devastated the Catholic landscape in America.”

O’Reilly is not a scholar, and has written nothing on this subject, so he may be forgiven for his misunderstandings. But one does not have to be a social scientist to know that Catholicism is not dispositive of Christianity: In fact, Protestants outnumber Catholics by more than 2-1.

More important, the decline in the mainline Protestant denominations has been going on for a half-century. They are the ones who have been devastated, not the Catholic Church. So blaming the priest scandal for the precipitous drop in the Protestant community is simply absurd. Also, as Bill Donohue recently pointed out, the Pew survey showed that Catholicism has the highest retention rate of any religion: 90 percent of those who identify as Catholics today were raised Catholic. Looks like “poor leadership and corruption” didn’t act as a catalyst to bolt.

There are many reasons why Americans are less inclined to be religiously affiliated these days, but not among them are the sources cited by O’Reilly. It is more complex than he realized.

George Will’s atheism got the best of him—not for the first time—when he recently unloaded on presidential hopeful Gov. Mike Huckabee. Among the several things that bother Will about Huckabee was his remark, “We are moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.”

One does not have to be a Southern Baptist minister to understand that Huckabee’s fears are not unfounded. Here is what the late Cardinal Francis George said a few years ago: “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

We document anti-Catholicism, and the evidence supports the concerns of both men. Here’s a quick look at the situation; it has worsened dramatically in recent years.

At the federal level, the Obama administration is trying to force Catholic non-profits to pay for abortion-inducing drugs. It barred some priests from saying Mass during the partial-government shutdown. It refuses to grant the same religious exemptions in matters of employment and social services that every previous administration has respected. It abuses its regulatory powers to police personnel decisions at Catholic institutions. It punishes the most elementary “Christian” speech on military installations, particularly on U.S. Air Force bases.

At the state and local level, lawmakers in San Francisco and Sacramento are seeking to force the Archdiocese of San Francisco to change Church teachings on sexuality. In California, Catholic colleges must pay for “elective abortion” in their health plans. Two lawmakers in Connecticut sought to take over the administrative affairs of the Church. There was an attempt to wrest control from the bishops in Minnesota. There have been many campaigns forcing Catholic adoption agencies to approve gay parents, effectively shutting them down when they object. Caterers, photographers, and others who have a religious objection to gay marriage are being sued, and some are forced to close because of threats.

Will has it wrong. Huckabee is not an alarmist.

A few weeks ago, Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Renald Luzier, more popularly known as Luz, revealed that he would not be drawing Muhammad anymore. Soon after making this announcement, he also revealed that he is leaving the publication. His resignation will take effect this Septemer.

Luz became a Hall of Fame cartoonist when he put his portrayal of Muhammad on the cover of Charlie Hebdo in January. Just recently he called it quits: he pledged never to draw the Islamic prophet again, saying “it no longer interests me.”

The man is a coward, a bigot, a pornographer, and a liar.

Luz is a coward because he doesn’t have the guts to follow through on his 15 minutes of fame. He is a bigot because he delights in offending people of faith. He is a pornographer because much of his work has been patently obscene. And he is a liar because everyone knows why he really quit.

Had Luz been content to lampoon Muhammad in a conventional way, Bill Donohue would never have condemned him. But he had to get down and dirty and intentionally insult Muslims with his pornographic images. That is why Donohue jumped all over him. Now Donohue has lost respect for him again: he quit for the wrong reason.