Every honest person knows how truly inferior most urban public schools are. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel knows this as well as anyone, which is why he decided to send his kids to a private school this fall. Not just any private school—the most prestigious, expensive school he could find—the University of Chicago Lab Schools.

He is in good company. When the Obamas lived in Chicago, they too sent their children to the same elitist school. Chicago’s previous mayor, Richard Daley, also refused to expose his children to the public schools. Nor were public schools good enough for Rev. Jesse Jackson’s kids.

Who can blame them? Fully 40 percent of Chicago’s public school teachers elect to send their own children to private schools.

None of this would matter if these same rich people who think the public schools are inferior to private ones would support school vouchers for the poor. But they don’t.

Emanuel said that if he sent his kids to a public school, his “unbelievably smart” kids would figure it out. “They know if they become instruments or second priorities,” he said. Newsflash: even kids not as “unbelievably smart” as his know when they are not a top priority, and none know it better than those forced to go to schools shunned by the rich.

This begs the question: if urban public schools aren’t good enough for rich kids, whose kids are they fit for?

In August, there was a day-long symposium in Baltimore held by practitioners in the field of mental health who made the case that society unfairly stigmatizes “Minor-Attracted Persons,” a.k.a. adults who are sexually attracted to kids. Run by a non-profit group, B4U-ACT, psychiatrists and others from places like Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the London School of Economics argued that the American Psychiatric Association is wrong to consider pedophilia a mental illness.

A week before the event was held, ABC’s “Primetime Live” did an interview with actor Corey Feldman, who exclaimed, “I can tell you that the number-one problem in Hollywood was, and is, and always will be, pedophilia.” He said that when he was 14, he was “surrounded” by child molesters who acted like “vultures.” Feldman blames “a Hollywood mogul” for the premature death of one of his friends and fellow former child actor, Corey Haim, who died last year.

Want to know how many newspapers in the United States carried a story on the nest of child abusers in Hollywood? One—the International Business Times. The others were too busy looking for cases where a priest “inappropriately touched” a male adolescent in the 1950s.

On the website of B4U-ACT, there is a question, “If I seek mental health services, does that mean I’m saying that my attraction to minors is a sickness?” Here’s the answer: “No. We are trying to make services available to minor-attracted people who want them to work through issues unrelated to their sexuality, to deal with society’s response to their sexual feelings…. We are not advocating treatment to change sexual feelings.” Of course not: society is the problem, not the psychologically disturbed adults who fantasize about raping kids.

So we have professionals who seek to normalize pedophilia, and a Hollywood milieu in which it thrives, and few seem to care. In other words, when the secular elite promote, or otherwise engage in, child molestation, it really doesn’t matter. It only matters if the sicko is Fr. Murphy.

“Minor-attracted Persons.” Sounds so innocuous, so thoroughly normal. That’s the whole point: by playing fast and loose with the language, they seek to welcome those who incline toward pederasty. That’s why they oppose such neighborhood preventative measure like Meagan’s law. They know exactly what they are doing, and what they are doing is making palatable the most debased expressions of deviance.

“Having Standard & Poor’s downgrade the creditworthiness of the U.S., and warn the country about further downgrades, is a little like having the Catholic Church lecture Scout leaders on the proper behavior toward boys.”

The above quote was the first sentence in an article recently published online at the Curious Capitalist blog by Bill Saporito, assistant managing editor at Time; it was titled, “Why Congress and S&P Deserve Each Other.”

In response, Bill Donohue offered this statement:

“This vicious, and wholly gratuitous, smear of the entire Catholic Church demands an apology. Vicious analogies citing other demographic groups—on this same subject—could have been made, but they would never have been published. Which means that persons other than Saporito should also issue an apology to Roman Catholics. We might expect this kind of cruel remark from some no-name angry blogger, but not from a high-ranking person at Time.”

We immediately contacted our members and asked them to e-mail Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor. We are confident that they flooded his inbox and that Stengel heard our voice loud and clear.

A young Muslim woman recently sued Abercrombie & Fitch after she was fired for violating the clothier’s “look policy,” which the company interpreted as not permitting Muslim headscarfs.

As a private company, Abercrombie & Fitch has a legal right to determine its own policies. But from a moral perspective, what it did to this woman is a joke. This is the same company that directs its models not to wear clothes while selling its line of clothing. Indeed, it can’t even sell men’s cologne these days without dabbling in soft porn.

In 2003, we addressed Abercrombie & Fitch’s Christmas catalog saying, “The photos more closely resemble an ad for a nudist colony.” Two years earlier, the clothier released a catalog titled, “A&F XXX Adventure: Get Wet Set & Go on Spring Break.” It was so replete with male and female nudity that a “Warning Label” had to be placed on the cover.

At bottom, Abercrombie & Fitch has a religion problem. In the aforementioned 2001 “Spring Break” catalog, it advised readers to adorn their spring break hotel rooms with “palm fronds” that can be taken “for free if you crash a Catholic mass [sic] on Palm Sunday.” In the same issue, a creepy cult movie was reviewed, and to the utter delight of the reviewer, readers were instructed to learn how to “make wry comments after bashing a dead nun’s head to a pulp.”

So it’s not just Muslims that Abercrombie & Fitch likes to bash. Our guess is that if some smart-aleck woman wore nothing but a loincloth—using a hijab to cover her genitals—she would pass the company’s “look policy” with flying colors. They really are a sick bunch.

The Vatican released documents on August 17 showing that the Holy See never had any knowledge that a priest allegedly molested a young man in Oregon in 1965. The case, Doe v. Holy See, involves the late Rev. Andrew Ronan, a Servite priest, who was moved from Ireland to Chicago to Portland, Oregon; the specific lawsuit relates to what allegedly happened in Portland. The case has yet to be decided.

Jeffrey Anderson’s 2002 lawsuit claims that Ronan was an employee of the Vatican and that the Holy See is guilty of negligence for allowing the transfers. But the documents show that the Holy See never knew of this case until 1966 when Ronan asked to be laicized; his petition was quickly granted.

Bill Donohue told the media, “Anderson knew all along that this lawsuit, like so many others he has filed, would never win in court. But to him, winning is not defined by a judge; rather, it is defined in the court of public opinion. That is why he continues to cast aspersions on the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, throwing up as much mud as he can muster, hoping some will stick.”

Jeffrey Lena, the attorney for the Holy See, knows that Anderson is a hard-core ideologue. Speaking of the Minnesota lawyer, Lena said, “The plaintiff’s lawyers never had support for their calumnious accusations against the Holy See. They have nonetheless chosen to misuse the legal system as a vehicle to pursue a broader agenda—a decision that has misled the public and wasted considerable resources.” This is totally accurate.

“There is one other issue in this case that no one else will raise, so I will,” said Donohue. “The documents say that Ronan was removed ‘because of his homosexuality with the students.’ In other words, like most abusing priests, Ronan was not a pedophile—he was a homosexual. More important, how do we know the sex wasn’t consensual? After all, the alleged ‘victim’ was 17-years-old. If someone tried to hit on me when I was 17, I would have flattened him. Why didn’t Doe?”

It was hardly a surprise to learn that Barbara Blaine of SNAP weighed in with another remarkable comment. “It’s clear that this is a desperate, last minute Vatican ploy to seem ever-so-slightly less recalcitrant than it has been for decades with clergy sex crimes and cover ups,” she offered.

For SNAP, it’s always a “ploy” orchestrated by clever Vatican operatives. Such irrationality has become a staple in the thinking of these professional victims’ activists.

One of the few TV shows on the broadcast networks to treat Catholicism fairly is the CBS hit, “Blue Bloods,” starring Tom Selleck. Set in New York City, the show depicts how an Irish family deals with various law enforcement issues.

The family-oriented program often casts a good light on Catholicism, and is fortunately returning for a second season on September 23. Grammy Award winners Carrie Underwood and Tony Bennett will make cameo appearances and sing a duet.

Glad the Catholic-friendly show is being renewed.