The administration and the Board of Trustees of Rollins College, a liberal arts institution outside Orlando, Florida, recently stood by a professor who violated the religious liberty and free speech rights of one of her students. In a showdown with the Catholic League, it yielded within a week, and reinstated the suspended student.

This was a big victory, but it should never have gotten to the point that it did. An intolerant Muslim professor tried to run roughshod over an innocent Christian student and almost got away with it. The details of this story can be found on pp. 4-5.

It started when we learned that a Christian student confronted his Muslim professor about her contention that Jesus was not crucified. She further said his apostles did not believe he was divine. That is the Islamic interpretation. When the student challenged her, she got vindictive, failing him for “disrupting” her class.

This was just the beginning. Bill Donohue wrote a letter to the college president, Dr. Grant H. Cornwell (see p. 4) outlining his concerns. He called Donohue to defend himself, getting defensive and contentious. Donohue peppered him with questions, which he could not answer.

Then the media got involved, both locally and nationally. This was followed by a couple of emails sent by Allan E. Keen, chairman of the Board of Trustees. He proved to be just as evasive as Cornwell.

We didn’t back down. Donohue issued a pointed refutation of Keen’s argument, citing a news story in the Orlando Sentinel. He was told that the student wasn’t suspended for any altercation he had with his professor, but for making threats. Threats against whom? Donohue wanted to know.

The professor then accused the student of stalking her. Next, she  contacted the public safety office about him. But when pressured to be specific—citing evidence of a threat—no one involved was able to do so.

Finally, after being pounded by critics, and beaten up in the press, Rollins decided to reinstate the student.

The Orlando Sentinel quoted what the president had to say about it. “Cornwell said he, the trustees and deans had received 10,000 emails,” most of which he said were “filled with hate.”

We have no pity on anyone who defends an indefensible assault on someone’s religious liberties and free speech rights, and is then called out for it. Those emails, we are proud to say, were a direct response to our plea: we listed Cornwell’s email address on our news releases, asking everyone to contact him. Our side exploded and the administration backed off. Justice was done. Hallelujah!

Disney/ABC won’t come right out and say it, so we will: The obituary for “The Real O’Neals” has been written, and will soon be announced.

On January 18, we noted that over one million viewers who watched the ABC show which precedes the “O’Neals”—”Fresh Off the Boat”—turned to another channel. Thus did we declare, “It’s toast.”

On March 21, we noted that “Fresh Off the Boat” was slated for 23 episodes, but the plug had been pulled on “O’Neals” after 16 shows: “O’Neals” was replaced with “Blackish.” Then it was replaced with a new show, “Imaginary Mary.”

If more proof is needed to show that the handwriting is on the wall, consider that two of the “O’Neals” stars, Matt Shively and Jay R. Ferguson, have been cast for a new series; the former in a NBC pilot and the latter in a CBS pilot.

The obit for the Dan Savage-inspired show is looming, and we are delighted. It would be hard to find a more obscene anti-Catholic in America than Dan Savage, so we can’t wait to witness the final nail in this show’s coffin. We’ve seen worse shows, but the fact that “O’Neals” was based on a bigot’s life is disturbing enough.

We hope that in the next issue of Catalyst we will be able to make it official. We are convinced that Disney/ABC kept the show alive because it didn’t want to appear to be giving in to the Catholic League. But now the jig is about up.

William A. Donohue

To the media in Ireland and England, and to some outlets in the United States, Catherine Corless is an Irish hero, a brave woman who uncovered a “mass grave” outside a Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland. But the facts are otherwise.

The first myth concerns her expertise. Contrary to what virtually all news reports have said, Corless is not a historian: she not only does not have a Ph.D. in history, she doesn’t have an undergraduate degree. She is a typist. Her part-time course on historical research may impress some, but to those who know better, a high school equivalency diploma carries more weight.

It was in 2014 when Corless first received media attention about her alleged discovery of a “mass grave.” At that time she was referred to by most media outlets as a “local historian.” That’s a new one on me.

I have a Ph.D. in sociology. No one has ever called me a “local sociologist.” For that matter, I have never heard of a “local biologist” or a “local mathematician.” Moreover, I have worked with many historians, and none has ever called himself a “local,” “regional,” or “national” historian. He’s just a historian, by virtue of his credentials.

Corless has no credentials, yet that hasn’t stopped the media from recently inflating her status again. To wit: She went from being a “local historian” in 2014 to being a full-blown “historian” in 2017. The following media outlets now call her a “historian”: Daily Mirror, Irish Daily Mail, Irish Independent, Irish Times, Newstalk and The Journal. In the United States, Irish Central and Irish Voice have followed suit.

Those who think I am being too harsh should consider what happened when Corless tried to obtain information from the Galway County Council to facilitate her research. She was told to take a hike—she was denied access because she lacked a university degree.

Corless initially impressed even me when I learned that she wrote an article published in 2012 titled, “The Home.” It appeared in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society.

Sounds impressive. In the United States, journal articles are typically published by a noted academic publisher, and all submissions are vetted by “referees,” specialists who have expertise in the area.

The publisher of the Corless article is the Old Tuam Society. It publishes once a year, and makes its articles available in local stores in the Galway area. The Society is run by volunteers. Quaint, but not exactly a reliable source of scholarship.

Talking about scholarship, not only are there no referees at the “journal” who must approve submitted articles, they obviously have no editors on staff at the Old Tuam Society.

For example, on the inside cover of the Corless article, “The Home,” it spells “Committee” “Commitee”: Committee member Caroline Canny is listed as the “Secrtary” (yet David Collins was accurately described as the “Vice Secretary”); and Anne Creaven is listed as the “Tresurer.”

Now none of this would matter much if Corless were just another curious amateur digging around for local news. But she is more than that: She has been elevated to near saintly status by an obliging media on both sides of the Atlantic. Her claim to fame—the nuns made a “mass grave” for children in their care—has never been proven.

The 2012 article Corless wrote makes no mention of a “mass grave.” When I debated her on Irish radio, I asked her when she came to that conclusion. She said it was in 2013. Fine. So I asked her where she published her extraordinary findings. She never did. I then asked her why she took the time to publish her first article—which didn’t capture any headlines—but never got around to publishing her big “finding” about a mass grave. She brushed me off.

It is worth noting that when Corless made her “mass grave” accusation in 2014, Ireland’s Minister for Education said her account was “simply not true.” The local police added that “there is no confirmation from any source that there are between 750 and 800 bodies present.”

On May 25, 2014, Corless told Alison O’Reilly of the Irish Mail that she was “certain there are 796 children in the mass grave.” That was the beginning of the hoax.

Now here is something that the media will never ask her: In an interview posted on YouTube on June 26, 2014, Corless said she was told by locals from Tuam that before the Home was knocked down in the 1970s, there was a graveyard outside the Home, one with “tiny markers there.” There were “bits of stones left to indicate graves.” The area subsequently evolved into “an absolute wilderness.”

Those “tiny markers” suggest that this was a cillin graveyard, or a graveyard for children.

A “mass grave” is not dotted with “tiny markers” or “bits of stones.” Even a “local historian” with no credentials should be able to figure that one out.

Deal W. Hudson

Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer (Regnery Publishing, 2017)

This is the most difficult book I’ve ever read, which has nothing to do with how it’s written, organized, or argued. The difficulty arises, in part, from the ease of reading the prose of Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAllen and, perhaps, more importantly, the horrific details the authors uncovered through their exhaustive research and documentation.

Gosnell tells the story of a monster, but as a reader I often had to remind myself that this monster was real, not a character imagined by a writer of fiction. But in reading the book, I became constantly aware of another distinction: between his monstrous actions, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies born alive, and the person who wielded his scissors so casually on breathing newborns, without regret or hesitation, because murder had made him a wealthy man.

No one who knew Dr. Kermit Gosnell could believe he was such a monster: the African American physician was admired in his community of East Philadelphia for his exuberant charm, enveloping personality, and his obvious success.  Dr. Gosnell and those who worked inside his clinic, however, “joked and laughed amidst the carnage.” That carnage included “forty-seven dead babies . . . their remains stuffed into old milk cartons and kitty litter containers,” all found on the night when the clinic was raided on suspicions of illegal drug peddling.

Yes, the horrors committed by Kermit Gosnell for over thirty-five years at his clinic were accidentally uncovered. Philadelphia detective Jim Wood, “Woody,” did not begin his investigation of “Women’s Medical Society” abortion clinic to corroborate the long list of illegal procedures committed by Gosnell and his staff on a daily basis, but to “bust” Gosnell for supplying drug dealers with massive quantities of addictive drugs by trading fake prescriptions for cash. “On a typical night, Gosnell would sell two hundred scripts” of Percocet, Oxy-Contin, etc.

The tip-of-iceberg appeared when Woody was interrogating an informant, Tosha Lewis, who worked the front desk of Gosnell’s clinic, handing out prescriptions and receiving the cash in return. Tosha inadvertently revealed some alarming details about the conditions inside the clinic, including piles of medical waste, flea infestation, and general filth, but then she mentioned the death of an Asian woman, Karna-maya Mongar, after an abortion.

When Woody went looking for a police report of Mongar’s death, he couldn’t find one. He did find the report of her autopsy that ruled her death accidental. “But Woody didn’t buy that for a moment—not after he had heard Tosha describe how patients were being treated by unqualified staff.”

When Wood began investigating a possible homicide, he experienced resistance inside the Philadelphia Police Department. At first it seemed to him a matter of one department protecting its turf from another, but as he found out, and McElhinney and McAllen show in meticulous detail: there was institutional unwillingness at every level.

Those whose professional job it was to insure the public safety of citizens from substandard medical care and fraud not only ignored the obvious conditions inside the clinic but also provided cover for Gosnell’s serial crimes to continue over decades. What they should have reported, they did not. For example, in 1992, the state health inspector, Janice Staloski, visited the clinic and reported “no deficiencies.” Even on the night of the raid, which Staloski took part in, she allowed Gosnell to perform abortions after seeing a “filthy flea-infested excrement-covered clinic with expired medicine, broken machinery, and unsanitary instruments—staffed by unlicensed, untrained employees.”

And one thing more was found that night: when Detective Wood opened a cupboard he found five shelves of glass jars containing babies feet. As it turned out, Gosnell kept these feet as kind of trophies for his work well done—there was no medical reason to chop off the feet and bottle them, though he claimed there was.

When complaints were sent to state officials, they were ignored. Under Pennsylvania law, any abortion clinic was required to have one person on the staff who had completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology. Gosnell never completed his, but kept a doctor who did complete his residency on staff until 1989. After that, Gosnell was on his own, a fact noted by two health inspectors shortly afterward, but recommended that Gosnell’s license be approved for another year! The fact is, Gosnell’s clinic should have been closed decades before his license was suspended in 2010.

Even more sickening, a Gosnell employee, Marcella Choung, wrote a detailed letter of complaint to the Department of State about the conditions in the Women’s Medical Society clinic, which amounted to a summary of all the information the grand jury would hear much later. Choung listed everything, the untrained staff doing ultrasounds and administering anaesthesia, the filthy conditions, “and the two flea-infested cats [who] roamed around the procedure rooms, where Gosnell would eat sandwiches.”

The entire bureaucracy of the State of Pennsylvania did not want to put an abortionist out of business and create a larger problem for the abortion industry in general. Indeed, when the pro-abortion Tom Ridge was elected governor in 1995, he changed the law by putting an end to all regular inspections of abortion clinics, thus giving “Gosnell carte blanche for the next seventeen years.” No one from the Department of State ever visited the clinic to investigate the claims. Two attorneys from the Pennsylvania State Board of Medicine declared the case file, “Prosecution Not Warranted.”

When the Department of Health’s chief counsel, Christine Dutton, testified before the grand jury she defended the inaction of her subordinate, Janice Staloski, ending with the comment, “People die.” Her callousness incensed the grand jury and stunned attorneys prosecuting the case. Dutton, along with Staloski and many others who ignored Gosnell’s crimes, would be fired by Governor Tom Corbett who took office in 2011, just as the grand jury released its report on January 11 of that year.

In addition to Jim Wood, these two attorneys are bona fide heroes of this tale. They were willing to sacrifice their careers to bring Gosnell to justice. Christine Wechsler, who was to give birth to two children during the investigation and trial, dealt with the emotional strain by watching reruns of I Love Lucy and reading “99-cent novellas” late at night. Working with her colleague Joanne Pescatore, Wechsler encountered the same institutional resistance met by Woody—she could not find physicians who would talk about the abortion procedure: “Medical professionals did not want to contribute to any official proceeding that might shine a negative light on abortion.”

Wechsler, before going to trial, was interrogated by a new supervisor in the District Attorney’s office, who asked, “You tell me why I should give a damn about these dead babies.” She did give up the case before the trial, but not because of intimidation—she got a job offer from Governor Corbett in Harrisburg. Fortunately, her colleague Ed Cameron took over the case with the same commitment and determination evinced by Wechsler and Pescatore.

With the exception of Marcella Choung, Steve Massof had the typical attitude of the many staff who assisted Gosnell, except that Massof was educated, a medical school graduate, but unlicensed as a physician. He would operate the ultrasound for Gosnell when he tried to kill the baby by injecting Demerol into the heart. When Gosnell was successful, and the heart immediately stopped beating, Massof would describe it as a “good shot.” He felt no compunction at “snipping” the neck of the babies born alive, often seeing patients on his own. He helped Gosnell manipulate ultrasounds to falsify the age of the unborn child. Abortions in Pennsylvania were illegal after twenty-three weeks and six days.  His testimony at the trial was vivid, and he evidently enjoyed himself giving it:

“‘Literally. . . it would rain fetuses,’ he said. ‘Some days I would come up, I’d be called—a scream, and I would go running, and fetuses all over the place and blood.'”

But no one was more merciless than Kermit Gosnell himself.  Kareema Cross, who worked as a receptionist, testified about the abortion of “Baby A,” whose mother was Shayquana Abrams. After drugging her into complete submission during an eight hour wait, she awoke only after the abortion was done. When Abrams had been brought in for the procedure, “the baby just came out.” Gosnell did not immediately snip the baby’s neck, he “put the baby boy in a Tupperware container. He was still breathing.” But the container wasn’t big enough for the eighteen-inch child, so Gosnell tried a shoebox which was also too small. Only then did Gosnell use his scissors to cut the baby’s neck, who was lying in fetal position. Cross and another employee, Adrienne Moton, took pictures of the child in the shoebox, “pictures that ensured Gosnell’s conviction five years later.”

When Kermit Gosnell went to trial on March 18, 2013, over three years after Jim Wood lead the raid on his clinic, he pleaded innocent. The media section of the large Room 304 in Philadelphia Justice Center was empty, symbolizing their complicity in the determination of the state bureaucracy and the medical profession to protect the abortion industry from official scrutiny and negative publicity.  Only the efforts on social media to cover the trial, and particularly of journalist Kirsten Powers, shamed the mainstream media into the courtroom. Yet, even so, the Gosnell story did not penetrate very far into public awareness. When I was telling my twenty-year old son about what Gosnell had done, he asked, “Why didn’t we hear about it on the news?”

The two-month trial pitted Jim Cameron against Philadelphia’s top defense lawyer, Jack McMahon. It was quite a duel, with McMahon not only playing the race card but also picking apart any of the prosecution’s evidence that did not completely support the charges against his client. But in the end, it was the power of the images, such as the pictures taken by Cross and Moton, and Cameron’s methodical reiteration of the basic inhumanity, illegality, and avarice of Gosnell’s actions that led to his conviction on three counts of first degree murder. Gosnell is now spending the rest of his life at the state Correctional Institute in Huntington, PA.

Deal W. Hudson, the former publisher of Crisis Magazine, presently publishes The Christian Review; hosts a weekly one-hour radio show, “Church and Culture,” on the Ave Maria Radio Network; and writes a weekly column, “On Religion,” for Newsmax.

The following is the text of a letter sent by Bill Donohue to Rollins College president Grant H. Cornwell regarding a violation of a student’s rights on his campus.

I am requesting your intervention in a serious matter that has arisen on your campus involving the abridgement of free speech. My interests are twofold: (a) as president of the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization, I take issues of religious discrimination seriously, and (b) I served on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars for 20 years, during which time I was a college professor.

From news reports that I have read, a sophomore at Rollins, Marshall Polston, was suspended for allegedly creating a “threat of disruption within the operations of the College,” and for jeopardizing “the safety and well-being of members of the College community and yourself.”

Those are strong charges. Yet the incident that gave rise to this incendiary situation was apparently a classroom disagreement that Mr. Polston had with professor Areej Zufari. She asserted that the Biblical story of the crucifixion was not true, and that Jesus’ apostles did not believe he was divine.

Professor Zufari is entitled to her belief, and so is Mr. Polston. What she is not entitled to do is punish him for disagreeing with her: he is a straight-A student and she failed him for his “disruption.” Worse, college officials have now deemed him to be a threat to campus safety. This is absurd, outrageous, and indefensible.

You have served as a Director of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and previously served on the National Advisory Board for Liberal Education and Global Citizenship. You therefore know the value of free speech and the unfettered right to pursue truth. That is why I am asking you to intervene in this matter.

Thank you for your consideration.

The day after Bill Donohue spoke to the student, Marshall Polston, and the president of Rollins, Dr. Grant H. Cornwell, we received an email from Allan E. Keen, chairman of the Board of Trustees. Bill Donohue offered the following pointed rejoinder to Keen; he also commented on a  news story in the Orlando Sentinel by Gabrielle Russon. The italics are Donohue’s response to cited remarks.

• In his email, Keen said Polston “was suspended because of a matter related to another student.” No details were given.
• In his letter to the Trustees, Keen contended this issue was not a recent development, saying that “there were actions and concerns going back for several months, and even after some intervention, the student continued to act somewhat unusual….” No details were given.
• Keen said the student was not suspended for his “disagreements with the professor, or these classroom activities.” Rather, “it was related to a ‘different’ incident with a student.” No details were given.
• In her story in the Orlando Sentinel, Russon said the professor “filed a ‘protection against stalking’ request” against the student last Friday. Rollins then suspended him. No one questioned the filing or the injunction. But was there evidence that he actually stalked her? Or did she file the complaint believing he might stalk her?
• The injunction, Russon said, listed the nature of the professor’s problems with the student. “He has disrupted class twice (we’ve only had two classes) with antagonizing interjections, contradicting me and monopolizing class time.” As a former professor, this complaint read as an indictment of the professor, not the student. “Antagonizing interjections”? Meaning he sharply disagreed? More important, since when has it been regarded as inappropriate student behavior to “contradict” a professor? Why isn’t this simply a matter of free speech? Similarly, did he not allow other students to speak—did he filibuster?—or was he overly talkative?
• Russon said of the professor, “She wanted him out of her class.” Precisely—this says it all.
• Russon wrote that “School officials intervened to meet with Polston and his behavior improved over the next few weeks.” But what exactly did he do wrong to merit this intervention? Did he violate campus policy in some way? And how did his “behavior” change? Or was the intervention meant to have a chilling effect on his free speech? If so, this is a very serious matter.
• The professor failed Polston (a straight-A student) for an essay he submitted on March 8. Russon said the professor “was concerned about his reaction” and wrote to a public safety official about it. “The next day, Polston emailed her.” He accused her of “extreme bias.” In other words, the professor contacted the public safety office in anticipation of a threat, one that never happened!
• Russon quoted an associate dean saying, “At no point did he threaten anyone openly.” This seals it: Her complaint to the public safety office was not based on any threat by the student.
• Russon wrote, “Zufari was so concerned that she canceled class.” About a non-existent threat? This is posturing, a gambit designed to indict the student on charges that are false, by her own admission.

“There is more free speech in pubs than on the typical college campus.” That is what Bill Donohue told Rollins College president Grant Cornwell on March 28, the day he first addressed the suspension of student Marshall Polston. Rollins has now reinstated the student.

This issue may be over for Polston—he courageously stood up to those who sought to abridge his freedom of speech—but it should not be over for the professor, Areej Zufari, or the administration. There are too many serious issues left unaddressed.

When Donohue spoke to Cornwell, he said Polston was not being suspended for anything he did in the classroom, but for his threats. He asked if he carried a gun. He said no. He asked if he carried a knife. He said no. He asked if he verbally threatened Zufari. He said no. “Then who did he threaten?” He said he was told by lawyers not to divulge who it was.

Cornwell also told Donohue that the entire story was nothing more than “fake news.” He said he was “calling me [Donohue] out” on this. That was a mistake. Donohue responded by saying, “I am calling you [Cornwell] out,” and then proceeded to tell him how badly he was handling this matter.

If Donohue were the president of Rollins, he told Cornwell, and he had evidence that a student was threatening someone, Donohue would call the police. But he didn’t. Similarly, Donohue said, if he were in his shoes, and  he was convinced that this story was “fake news,” he would hold a press conference and offer evidence to support his claim. But he didn’t.

We now know why Cornwell didn’t call the cops or hold a presser: there was no evidence that Polston had done anything wrong.

Zufari is the issue, not Polston. She does not belong teaching in any college or university in America. Her contempt for the free speech rights of her students is appalling, and her vindictiveness is obscene. It’s actually worse than this.

Zufari called the public safety office to lodge a complaint against Polston. On what basis? No one, not Cornwell or Zufari, has claimed that Polston threatened her. So why didn’t the administration put her on the carpet? After all, a student’s reputation was damaged and nothing was done about it. Zufari also accused Polston of “stalking her.” But there is no evidence that he did.

By reinstating Polston, it suggests there never was any stalking, or threats against anyone.

The administration is also the issue. Why was the administration so upset with Polston for arguing with Zufari in the classroom that it intervened to change his behavior, but it did not intervene when a Muslim student recommended beheading gays and adulterers? Why did Zufari treat this comment as if it were uncontroversial? We would love to know why.

Why did the administration not question the propriety of Zufari telling her students that Jesus was not crucified, and that his apostles did not believe he was divine? Would the administration be okay with a Christian professor for proselytizing in the classroom?

The Orlando Sentinel story in the March 31 newspaper ended by saying, “Students and Rollins employees held a private meeting on diversity Thursday to discuss what happened.”

Diversity on college campuses never means diversity of thought—the most important diversity a college should foster—it means demographic diversity. If Rollins were serious about making real reforms, it would not be talking about the diversity that a Muslim professor brings to the campus; rather, it would be talking about the right of students to question their professors.

The case against Polston was ideologically charged from the beginning. Zufari violated every tenet of academic freedom, and the administration engaged in a cover up on her behalf, sundering the rights of an innocent student in the process. There is nothing “fake” about that account.

Below is the text of a letter sent by Bill Donohue on March 22 to every member of the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees in support of President Trump’s budget proposal to include no funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting Service. 

Below the letter is Donohue’s statement to the media, detailing our conflicts with these agencies over their repeated use of taxpayer dollars for attacks on Christianity.

The proposed budget by President Trump allows for no funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting Service. In weighing your decision, I urge you to consider the assaults on Christianity that these agencies have engaged in for decades.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. Our primary mission is to combat discrimination against Catholics and defamation against the institutional Church. More broadly, we seek to combat all assaults on Christianity.

The enclosed news release offers explicit information detailing the kinds of attacks the Catholic League has had with these organizations. It is indefensible to maintain that Christians must pay for artistic expressions that insult, degrade, and trash their religion, yet at the same time are not permitted to adorn the public square with symbols that celebrate their religion. The duplicity must end.

In the interest of fairness, I appeal to your good will in putting an end to these unprovoked attacks on Christianity in general, and Catholicism, in particular. Thank you for your consideration.

WHY FUNDS SHOULD BE CUT

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Public Radio (NPR), and the Public Broad-casting Service (PBS), are all subsidized by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The Trump administration is right to propose a budget that completely guts these entities of federal funding.

That is why we asked members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to honor the president’s request. Justice demands that these agencies should be eliminated: Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for assaults on their religion.

Christians constitute roughly 75 percent of the population; Catholics are approximately 25 percent of the total. In the name of “art,” these Americans are expected to pay for irreverent exhibits, but depictions that are reverential—such as a nativity scene outside City Hall—are denied a dime. It’s time we stopped giving the arts a privileged position and cut their funding. The same is true for publicly funded radio and TV programming that has a history of insulting the majority of Americans.

The CPB was founded in the 1960s, and it has been plagued with problems ever since. In the late 1980s, the NEA funded Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment.” Serrano took a crucifix and dropped it into a jar of his own urine, branding it art. The NEA gave a Philadelphia museum $30,000 to display graphic homosexual S&M photos taken by Mapplethorpe.

In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional prohibition against Congress setting decency standards for the NEA. But attempts by the NEA to enforce grant recipients to sign an anti-obscenity pledge went nowhere. This is why Congress must act.

To show how perverse things have become, President Barack Obama not only approved generous grants to the NEA, he actually included $50 million for the arts as part of his “federal stimulus package.” One of the first beneficiaries was a San Fran-cisco outfit, CounterPULSE. It received $25,000 to pay for employees’ salaries. What did the public get from it? The group hosted “a long-running pansexual performance series” called “Perverts Put Out”; it asked the audience to “Join your fellow pervs for some explicit twisted fun.”

Catholic League Conflicts with the NEA

• 1995: Ron Athey abused Catholic imagery by indulging in several sexually explicit and vulgar statements, so much so that we wrote a letter to the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee asking for his support in defunding the NEA.
• 1998: We led a demonstration of 3,000 protesters outside the Manhattan Theatre Club, funded by the NEA, for hosting a play, “Corpus Christi,” that depicted Jesus having sex with his apostles.
• 1999: We led a demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which received funding from the NEA and the NEH, for its “Sensation” exhibit. It showed a huge portrait of Our Blessed Mother smeared with elephant dung, adorned with pictures of vaginas.
• 2000: The Whitney Museum, an NEA-funded institution, hosted “Sanitation,” a vile attack on Mayor Rudy Giuliani for opposing the anti-Catholic “Sensation” exhibit. The Whitney had previously displayed “Abject Art”; it featured depictions of excrement and hard-core pornography.
• 2000: The Theater for the New City Foundation, which received NEA funds, was host to a play, “The Pope and the Witch,” written by Dario Fo, a Stalinist and a vicious anti-Catholic. It depicted Pope John Paul II as a heroin-addicted, paranoid schemer. We wrote to the Appropriations Committee asking members to reconsider funding the NEA.
• 2010: The Smithsonian, which receives 70 cents of every dollar from the taxpayers (via the NEA and NEH), hosted an exhibit, “Hide/Seek,” that featured a video showing huge ants crawling all over Jesus on the Cross. We contacted the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and the video was pulled.
• 2013: The Oklahoma City Theatre Company, an NEA recipient, hosted “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” a foul homosexual play that featured homoerotic performances, including simulated sex acts. It also mocked the Bible.
• 2015: The NEA’s support for the Milwaukee Art Museum resulted in an exhibition that showcased a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made up of condoms.

Catholic League Conflicts with NPR

• 1997: On July 5, the Weekend Edition aired a segment with host Scott Simon and musical satirist Tom Lehrer that featured Lehrer singing “The Vatican Rag.” It disparaged Catholicism and the Eucharist, including the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
• 2005: NPR questioned the religion of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. NPR’s Lynn Neary wondered that since he is a Catholic whether “that might affect the way he views an issue like abortion, for instance.” Nina Totenberg of NPR even went so far as to say that his wife was “a high officer of a pro-life organization. He’s got adopted children. I mean, he’s a conservative Catholic.”
• 2006: During the Easter season, NPR twice took aim at the divinity of Jesus.
• 2006: Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey was used by NPR as an occasion to lecture the pope on being sensitive to Muslims by not making any overtly Catholic comments or gestures. It cited prayer and kneeling as examples.
• 2007: When Samuel Alito was nominated to the high court, NPR’s Dahlia Lithwick said, “People are very, very much talking about the fact that Alito would be the fifth Catholic in the Supreme Court if confirmed.”
• 2008: Utah’s NPR station, KCPW, featured a skit, “Fair Game with Faith Salie,” that mocked Jesus and the Eucharist.
• 2012: Barbara Bradley Hagerty did a piece that was posted on NPR’s website that said a Philadelphia priest accused of raping a minor was “not that unusual” for a member of the Catholic clergy.
• 2013: A movie, “Paradise: Faith,” depicted a “devout” Catholic woman who masturbates with a crucifix as she is making love to Jesus. It was highly recommended by NPR.
• 2014: An NPR game show, “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!”, made fun of Jesus dying on the Cross. Sexual references to Jesus were also made.

Catholic League Conflicts with PBS

• 1996: FRONTLINE blamed Catholicism for the killings of a Catholic maniac, John Salvi. He killed two abortionists from Brookline, Massachusetts. The program functioned as a promo for Planned Parenthood and a hit job on the Catholic Church.
• 2006: It aired a show on Jesus during Lent implying that Christian beliefs are a hoax.
• 2007: “The Secret Files of the Inquisition” was a four-part docudrama that gave voice to Black Legend propaganda. The horrors it attributed to the Catholic Church have been wholly discredited by scholars such as Henry Kamen.
• 2009: PBS banned member stations from carrying new religious programs. It said, without foundation, that such shows might imply official endorsement. It did not say why only sectarian shows might imply endorsement.
• 2014: PBS aired “Secrets of the Vatican.” It was the 48th time that PBS addressed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. By contrast, it has a history of ignoring this problem in other religions, never mind its widespread existence today in the public schools.

The NEA, NEH, NPR, and PBS have had decades to clean up their act, but they refuse to do so. The time to cut funding is now.

President Donald Trump recently signed a bill that allows the states to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion mill in the nation. He did so following a Senate vote in late March where Vice President Mike Pence was called in to cast the deciding vote.

One of President Barack Obama’s last acts was to sign a rule that helped Planned Parenthood. It stopped states from disqualifying any entity that received federal funds if they provided abortions. Trump eviscerated that ruling today.

This shows how deeply sincere President Trump is in his pledge to those of us in the pro-life community. We also commend Vice President Pence for breaking the tie in the Senate, essentially teeing it up for his boss.

We could not help but notice that in a day when the lead story on the websites of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC was “U.S. Drops ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on ISIS Forces in Afghanistan,” the Huffington Post led with “Trump Opens Floodgates On Planned Parenthood.”

The Huffington Post, and those of its ilk, is positively obsessed with defending the legalized killing of innocent children at any age of gestation, and for any reason whatsoever. Even on a day when a huge national security story was trumping all other news, the wild-eyed abortion zealots at the Huffington Post couldn’t take their bloodshot eyes off of Planned Parenthood.

The pro-abortion industry is in trouble—President Trump has them on the run.

Catherine Corless, the local typist from Galway behind the “mass grave” hoax, must be furious. She has every right to be. Just recently she spent two hours listening to Ireland’s Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, wax emotional about the Mother and Baby Homes. Corless was all jacked up awaiting the release of the second interim report on this subject. But now she has nothing to chew on.

The report is a dud. Zappone’s commission examined the Homes over the period 1922-1998, issuing its first interim report in July 2015. The second interim report, which was recently released, has been sitting on Zappone’s desk since last September.

It sat because the government was scared to death of its own liabilities. The Attorney General and others were weighing all of the nitty-gritty legal and financial problems connected to this matter. They prudently concluded that the government would be deeply implicated in any alleged wrongdoing. To top things off, there was no finding of abuse.

“The Government examined the matter very carefully. It is conscious that the Commission has made no finding to date about abuse or neglect in these homes.” Not much left on the table after that, save, of course, for accusations about a “mass grave.” It is nowhere mentioned in the report.

It should be pointed out that these children were not “unaccompanied.” In fact, they were dumped on the doorsteps of the “evil” nuns by their mother or their father: They did not just walk down the street at the age of three looking for Sister Margaret Mary to offer them room and board.

The report owns up to the role of the Irish government, saying, “the fact of financing [the Homes] did give the State the ultimate regulatory power—that is, the power to close the institutions.” It was not lost on the officials how consequential this was.

The Irish Times quoted an official who knew what was at stake. “One Minister said that if the Government were to accept the redress recommendation from the commission, then the ‘sky’ would be the limit for potential future liabilities for the State. This would be a whole new level.” The reporter, Fiach Kelly, said the Minister added that “there were no findings of negligence or wrongdoing and the mother and baby homes were not Government regulated.”

So what is lawmaker Catherine Connolly going to say about this? In March she blasted Zappone for sitting on the report. Indeed, she smelled a rat. “What is in it that is so frightening? What is in it that prevents it from being published?”

What is really frightening is people like her who anxiously await condemnatory news about nuns, and are then livid when the probe ends with a whimper. Others, according to the Irish Independent, called the absence of a redress scheme “devastating” and “shameful.” Paul Redmond, poster boy for victims, has demanded a meeting with Kenny. If they meet, perhaps he can tell the prime minister where the shoeboxes are: he is on record saying the nuns buried kids in shoeboxes.

How much loot these activists were looking for is uncertain, but it is a sure bet that if the government wasn’t on the hook—and only the nuns stood to being fleeced—there would be a really fat redress package.

The hunt for shoeboxes and a “mass grave” will continue. But sooner or later this game of “hide and seek” will end, and most will realize that this entire war on the nuns has more to do with discrediting the moral voice of the Catholic Church than it has to do with justice.

What is driving the effort to smear the nuns is a full-throated push for abortion rights. By sullying the Church’s past, they weaken its influence today. Give them an “A” for strategy, but an “F” for ethics.