The decision for the New York Times to publish the op-ed by Daniel A. Olivas in early February was malicious. Here’s why.

Olivas says he once knew a priest in California who was a molester (the priest, who is dead, was suspended from ministry in the 1990s). Point taken: Olivas is angry. But what was the purpose of publishing this article? And why the decision by the Times to run the obscene drawing of a priest whose head resembles a creature from Hell?

There is almost no sexual abuse being committed by priests in the U.S. today: when reports surface, they’re almost always about old cases. But now, given the latest documents gathered by the authorities involving the Archdiocese of Los Angeles under Cardinal Roger Mahony, we are being treated to more stories.

The Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn is ablaze with stories of rabbis who rape minors. Even more pernicious is the way those who cooperate with the authorities are treated. Indeed, the punitive actions taken against innocent persons are shocking—there is no Catholic analogue.

So what has the Times said about all of this? In the year before Olivas’ op-ed, the Times ran 11 news stories and one editorial on sex abuse by Orthodox Jewish rabbis; there were no op-eds. Over two weeks in January and February, the Times ran 7 news stories, one editorial and three op-eds on the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Most of the cases in the Jewish community involve current or recent instances; none of the cases in Los Angeles did.

Moreover, there has never been a depiction of a rabbi with his head resembling a creature from Hell.

Recently the Boy Scouts of America were expected to make a decision rescinding its ban on homosexuals; after some deliberation, the group postponed its decision to May.

The issue of allowing homosexuals to join the Boy Scouts is second only to the most important issue: the autonomy of the organization to craft its own strictures absent outside pressure. Unfortunately, outside pressure is what has forced the need for a vote.

Edmund Burke called them “the little platoons.” Tocqueville called them “voluntary associations.” Political scientists speak of “civil society.” Sociologists refer to them as “mediating institutions.” They all mean the same thing: the critical role played by social institutions that intervene between the state and the individual; it is in these nooks and crannies that freedom is born.

Regrettably, the intermediate strata are today in jeopardy, the worst culprit being the federal government. Indeed, even on this issue, President Obama unwisely decided to interject himself. And there is also the role of well-funded gay groups that have sought to pressure the board members of the Boy Scouts. None of this is acceptable.

The Boy Scouts have already won the constitutional issue. Whether they now want to change their rules is their business. It is not our business. Which is why the Catholic League takes no stand on this matter.

The week before Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, Andrew Sullivan was on a rampage saying that the pope “enabled and abetted the rape of children.” A day later, with regard to the revelations of old cases of priestly sexual abuse in Los Angeles, he asked, “How much did the Pope know? And who did he allow to rape and rape again.”

Sullivan may not know anything about rape, but he sure knows about prostitution and lethal sex acts. In 2001, he was outed for selling his body on the Internet. Hiding under the name RawMuscleGlutes, Sullivan posted his interest in having sex with men who did not wear condoms. That’s right, his preference was to practice oral and anal sex with “bare back” men (guys who hate “safe sex”). It was ever so kind of him to disclose that he was HIV-positive.

Sullivan is a sexual acrobat who loves to practice “diversity.” Consider that he posted two pictures of himself on the Internet that showed only his torso, saying he wanted “bi-scenes, one-on-ones, three-ways, groups, parties, orgies and gang bangs.” But those who say he is not discerning are wrong: he explicitly ruled out “fats and fems.” Good choice.

We know all this because some of his gay partners recognized Mr. Headless when the pictures of his torso surfaced (how these fellows are able to do this is positively amazing).

To be sure, Mr. Headless will no doubt protest that his sick behavior was “consensual”—the favorite moral cop-out invoked by every sexual deviant who has ever walked the face of the earth. What we need to know is whether he ever had sex with an unsuspecting man, i.e., with some poor soul who had no idea that Mr. Headless was HIV-positive. And we need to know it now, before he takes another obscene shot at the pope.

Ian Buruma is not exactly a household name, but he is a hero to readers of the New York Review of Books. His fan base was obviously warm to his piece in the Beirut newspaper, The Daily Star, taking a shot at Pope Benedict XVI in the most ridiculous fashion.

Buruma began by recounting the brutal rape of a young woman by six men on a New Delhi bus in December. His quick segue to Pope Benedict XVI’s speech on gay marriage, which was given a few days before Christmas, was not only awkward, it was a dead give-away: the pope was responsible for the gang rape.

Buruma admitted that the pope does not advocate violence against homosexuals, but in the end it doesn’t matter. “I would argue that his speech [the pope’s] actually encourages the kind of sexual aggression that can result in the savagery that took place in New Delhi.”

Now if this were just the scribbling of another wingnut, it would matter little. But Buruma teaches at Bard College and has won several awards from prestigious institutions in the U.S. and Europe.

Curiously, he is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard. What is curious about his post is that he is a strong opponent of human rights. To be specific, though he has written at length about Tariq Ramadan, he cannot bring himself to denounce the Muslim philosopher for refusing to condemn the Muslim practice of stoning adulterous women to death. Even more perverse, Buruma has trashed one of the most courageous defenders of human rights in the world, ex-Muslim and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In other words, Buruma is a fraud. He cares not a whit about human rights, and is so in bed with the gay rights movement that he is utterly incapable of making critical distinctions. Moreover, his idea of cause and effect is so debased that it would allow his critics to accuse him of driving Christian persecution in Muslim-run nations.

On February 4, HBO debuted Alex Gibney’s movie, “Mea Maxima Culpa.” Before the propaganda was even aired, we accused the filmaker of libel.

It’s too bad that Pope Benedict XVI doesn’t sue Alex Gibney for libel. In an interview posted recently on The Daily Beast, he called the pope “a criminal.” He accused the pope (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) of covering up the deeds of Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest who molested deaf boys in Milwaukee in the 1950s. Indeed, the February 4 New York Times advertised the HBO show by saying there was a “cover-up from rural America to the Vatican.”

The charge that Ratzinger was involved in a cover up is libelous. The fact of the matter is that no one contacted the civil authorities about Murphy until the mid-1970s (following a probe, the case was dropped), and it wasn’t until 1996 that the Vatican was contacted. Instead of dropping an investigation—the statute of limitations had long expired—the Vatican ordered a trial. Not only was Cardinal Ratzinger not at the trial, his name was never even mentioned. We know this because of the presiding judge’s testimony.

Moreover, it wasn’t until 2001 that Pope John Paul II asked Cardinal Ratzinger to police these matters, and when he did, he moved expeditiously and fairly. An honest rendering of these events would conclude that no one at the Vatican has ever taken these cases with greater seriousness than Joseph Ratzinger.

Gibney says he was inspired to do the film after reading an article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times. That being the case, Gibney should tell us where in Goodstein’s reporting she said that “Vatican delegates” (whatever that means) were aware of Murphy’s abuse “as early as 1958.” That’s what the film says, and it is pure bunk.

The mark of a Catholic hater is to take dirty laundry and then add to it by offering a conspiratorial account. That’s what Gibney has done.

At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards in January, Michael Moore presented the Best First Film to David France for his documentary, “How to Survive a Plague.” The movie is a celebration of gay activism.

The documentary honors the day when homosexual terrorists from ACT-UP invaded St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on December 10, 1989. They interrupted the Mass by shouting and waving their fists; they tossed condoms in the air; they spat the Eucharist on the floor; they chained themselves to pews; they stopped Catholics from going to Holy Communion.

In an editorial at the time, the New York Times called what happened, “an act of desecration.” At the awards ceremony, Moore said, “I personally like that one.”

Moore’s endorsement of ACT-UP’s fascistic tactics is nothing new. To be exact, Moore gave money to ACT-UP right after they pulled their Nazi-like invasion in 1989. So his outburst was not an anomaly—it’s a clear demonstration of who Michael Moore really is.

When news broke on February 1 that former New York City Mayor Ed Koch had passed away, Bill Donohue issued the following statement:

“In the early 1970s, when I was having a problem with the Veterans Bureau obtaining my GI Bill money, I contacted my congressman, Rep. Ed Koch. The next week, the check was sent. When I taught in Spanish Harlem in a Catholic elementary school in the 1970s, at my behest, my students wrote to Rep. Koch about some issues. They were shocked when they received a speedy and thoughtful reply.

“I got to know Ed Koch on a personal level 20 years ago. We met and corresponded many times over the years, and he was always cordial, courageous, and totally honest. Ed was not only a man of conviction, he was the number-one person in the Jewish community that Catholics could count on to speak out against anti-Catholicism. Indeed, he hated anti-Catholicism as much as he did anti-Semitism, or any other kind of bigotry. His relationship with the late John Cardinal O’Connor was special, and their mutual affection was palpable.”

A few days later, Donohue wrote a piece for the National Catholic Register that detailed his relationship with the former New York City Mayor ever further. Despite being known as a liberal Democrat, Donohue said, Koch was a “truly independent thinker, a man who had some clearly conservative convictions.”

Donohue also noted that “As soon as Ed received his copy of the Catholic League’s annual report on anti-Catholicism, he wrote me a letter extending his congratulations. The last letter he wrote to me was a statement of his support for the Catholic League’s battle with an anti-Catholic Jewish lawyer. He was totally on our side.”

Ed Koch was loved by many and will surely be missed. There was no one like him.

Recently ABC News broke the story of an Ohio Catholic high school dean of students who was fired for supporting gay marriage on his blog. Unsurprisingly, Catholic bashers began foaming at the mouth.

This issue had nothing to do with the firing of the Cincinnati administrator—the Left would have applauded if he were fired for making anti-gay remarks—it had everything to do with offending liberal sensibilities.

When it comes to firing employees for making statements liberals don’t like, the Left has no rival. Consider the following:

• In 2010, Juan Williams was fired from National Public Radio (NPR) because his employer objected to comments he made about Muslims on a television station unaffiliated with NPR.
•  In 2012, Pat Buchanan was fired from MSNBC because he wrote a book his employer didn’t like.
•  In 2010, Octavia Nasr was fired from CNN because she praised a radical imam on Twitter.
•  In 2012, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle was fired for posting on her blog that she was a part-time stripper.
• In 2012, an African American female meteorologist was fired for replying to a racist on her Facebook page, even though her comments were inoffensive.

By the way, the station that fired the black woman for responding to a racist was KTBS. It is an ABC affiliate.

In short, Catholics don’t need to be lectured by hypocrites about workplace strictures.

“Jimmy Savile beat and raped a 12-year-old girl during a secret satanic ritual in a hospital.” This was the opening line in a recent English newspaper’s story about BBC child rapist Jimmy Savile. The BBC icon, who died in 2011, is believed to be responsible for abusing at least 450 males and females, aged eight to 47.

Dr. Valerie Sinason, president of the Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability in the U.K., revealed that the aforementioned girl told her in 1992 what happened to her in 1975. Savile wore a robe and a mask while he abused the girl in the basement of a hospital; during the rape, Savile and his cohorts (also pedophiles) chanted, “Hail Satan” in the candle-lit room. Five years later, Dr. Sinason says, Savile abused another girl during a Black Mass ceremony; she, too, heard Latin chanting and witnessed a group of men wearing Satanist regalia. Neither girl knew one another and lived in different parts of the country.

Trevor L. Todd was a classmate of Adam Lanza, the Newtown, Connecticut mass killer. He said Lanza was a devil worshipper who had his own website on the Internet. Indeed, he said the website “had the word ‘Devil’ on it in red Gothic-style letters against a black background. It gave me the chills. It was just so weird.”

Is there a Satanic connection that helps explain the serial rapes of Jimmy Savile and the serial killings of Adam Lanza? There isn’t enough evidence to say so with certainty, but we do know that the media have shown very little interest in exploring this line of inquiry.

While issues like gun control, mental illness and violent video games are worthy of serious discussion, not to research the role that Satanism may have played is simply irresponsible. It is worth recalling that Charles Manson once told the press, “I am the Devil.” It begs the question: What exactly are the media afraid of?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein recently invited Rev. Canon Gary Hall, Dean of the National Cathedral, to open her comments on gun control with a prayer.

Had Sen. Feinstein invited a member of the clergy to open her press conference with a non-partisan prayer, it not only would have been unobjectionable, it would have been commendable. There are so many issues involved in the rash of gun violence that we have witnessed, and so many people of goodwill on all sides, that a prayer asking the Lord for guidance and wisdom would have been much appreciated. But that is not what happened.

What happened was nothing less than the religious exploitation of a serious public policy issue. When Rev. Hall condemned the “terror of the gun lobby,” he politicized the issue just as badly had the NRA invited a clergyman to condemn gun control advocates. There is no place for such rank partisanship by a clergyman on this complicated issue.