When the anarchists captured a portion of Seattle, turning it into a haven for the deranged, its clueless mayor, Jenny Durkan, called it “The Summer of Love.” It didn’t take long before the love birds targeted her home. All of a sudden, she pivoted. Her office issued a statement denouncing the rioters for threatening “the safety and of the Mayor and her family.”

Two weeks earlier, another Washington state mayor, Cheryl Selby of Olympia, who previously celebrated Black Lives Matter, turned on the protesters accusing them of “domestic terrorism.” What changed? The thugs vandalized her home.

Bill Donohue dubbed it “The Summer of Hate.” The hate was directed not only at historic American figures—it was directed at the Catholic Church. We detailed the vitriol and the carnage, condemning every attack. Here is a small sample of what happened over the summer.

A statue of Our Blessed Mother was set on fire in Boston and another statue of the Virgin Mary was vandalized in Queens, New York. In Ocala, Florida a man crashed his minivan into a Catholic church while parishioners gathered for Mass; he then poured gasoline in the church’s foyer and set the church ablaze.

Assaults on Saint Junípero Serra were commonplace, especially in California. San Gabriel Mission Church in Los Angeles County was set on fire destroying parts of the 249-year-old iconic structure. It was founded by Father Serra in 1771, the priest who was a staunch defender of the rights of Indians (statues of him had already been smashed in many towns and cities).

Vandals were charged with a hate crime after they partially disfigured Mission San Jose, a church in Fremont, California. Swastikas and anti-Catholic comments were found on the graves of several Dominican friars on the campus of Providence College. Schools and Catholic statues were destroyed in New Mexico, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Kentucky, and Colorado.

In Portland, Oregon, protesters engaged in book burning. The book they chose was the Bible. This is what the Nazis did in 1933: They burned 25,000 books deemed inappropriate in Hitler’s Germany. The Communists under Mao did the same thing. All of this is done to erase the past, thereby ushering in a new day.

“The enemy of the Portland Hitlerians,” Donohue said, “is American society, which is why they burn the flag. They also hate the Judeo-Christian ethos upon which it is based, which is why they burn the Bible.”

The protesters resort to anarchy because they have no blueprint for the future. They are intellectually spent, morally bankrupt and culturally deracinated.

In the last week of its 2019-2020 term, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered two back-to-back victories for religious liberty; they were both 7-2 decisions. Catholic schools and agencies were the big winners.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that religious schools enjoyed a “ministerial exception” that protected them from lawsuits brought by teachers whom the school said were ministers. Now it has strengthened that decision by holding that lawsuits alleging employment discrimination—teachers at two Catholic schools claimed they were terminated for discriminatory reasons (age and disability)—are without merit.

“The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority, “and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission.”

The other case involved the right of the Trump administration to carve an exception for those with sincerely held moral or religious objections from complying with the Obamacare mandate that abortion-inducing drugs and contraception must be provided in all healthcare plans. The Trump administration and the Little Sisters of the Poor appealed to the high court to reverse an appeals court decision that denied the exemption.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the court’s ruling, said the Trump administration “had the authority to provide exemptions from the regulatory contraceptive requirements for employees with religious and conscientious objections.”

William A. Donohue

Over the summer, Raymond Arroyo interviewed me a couple of times on his EWTN show, “The World Over.” On one occasion he asked me what I thought about Black Lives Matter.

“There are people out there who say, ‘Well, I like the idea of black lives matter,’ and if they mean it in the innocent sense that black lives should matter to white people, I have no problem with that. If, however—and people need to get educated—you’re talking about the organization of Black Lives Matter, people should know that Black Lives Matter has the same policy agenda as the Ku Klux Klan.”

One person who needs to get educated is Gregg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. “People who don’t understand Black Lives Matter, or are offended by it, are just ignorant.” Really? It would be more accurate to say he has been duped. And that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 by three left-wing black women who previously worked for communist front groups. Patrisse Cullors is perhaps its most outspoken activist. She describes herself as a “working class, queer, black woman.” No wonder the organization boasts, “We are a queer-affirming network” bent on “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

Cullors has admitted that she, and co-founder Alicia Garza, are “trained Marxists.” The person who most influenced Cullors is Eric Mann, a former activist of the Weather Underground, the urban terrorist organization from the late 1960s and 1970s. He introduced her to an extremist left-wing outfit he once ran, one that openly endorsed the “pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.”

My comparison of Black Lives Matter to the Klan was no exaggeration. Here is a thought experiment. What if you were hired to devise a plan to keep blacks down, if not destroy them altogether? For starters, you might want to adopt the Klan’s mindset.

The most effective way to destroy any racial or ethnic group is to kill them. This explains why the Klan liked to lynch blacks. A more modern way would be to abort their babies. On the website of Black Lives Matter it says, “we demand reproductive justice that gives us autonomy over our bodies and identities.”

Another way to kill a demographic group would be to aid and abet the criminal element within its ranks. There is no surer way to do this than by getting rid of the cops. “We call for a national defunding of police.” That is also taken from the website of Black Lives Matter.

There are non-violent ways to keep blacks down, too, and one of them is to force black kids to attend public schools, denying them the opportunity to go to private schools. This is what the Klan did a century ago in Oregon, though their target was Roman Catholics, not blacks. In 1922, it succeeded in pushing for a state law that forced every child to attend a public school. Fortunately, it lost in the U.S. Supreme Court three years later in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

In 2016, Rashad Anthony Turner, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter in St. Paul, Minnesota, quit the organization. “Being that I am all for charter schools and ed reform, and as someone who is seeking educational justice for students and families, I could no longer be under that banner of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter has been co-opted. The movement’s been hijacked.”

No racial or ethnic group is going to advance if the family crumbles. Every study on educational achievement and upward mobility confirms that children from one-parent families do not perform as well in school, or in the workplace, as children from two-parent families. This is as true of white families as it is black families.

Unfortunately, one-parent families are the rule in the black community. Why is that? It has nothing to do with slavery or discrimination. The black family was far more intact in the first 100 years after slavery than it has been since the 1960s. The welfare state and the dependency it created—inviting the father to leave so his family could do better economically—is at the root of the problem.

Black Lives Matter wants to destroy the family, proudly saying, it strives to “disrupt” what it calls the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” In other words, it wants to finish the job started by the Great Society’s welfare state. The Klan would be proud.

John McWhorter is a black professor at Columbia University. Here is what he recently said about what’s going on. “In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise.” He hastens to add that his experience is hardly unique.

Beware of the propaganda about Black Lives Matter. Its motives may be different from the KKK, but its policies ensure the same results.

Bill Donohue

Collectivists and egalitarians, by which I mean those who embrace a left-wing ideology, have always hated the family. They see it as the source of inequality, a problem in dire need of a corrective. That corrective, of course, is the state.

Their analysis is correct. The family, the smallest cell in society, is the heart of inequality: men typically have held more power than women; parents have more power than children; older siblings have more rights than younger ones; and inheritance spawns wealth differentials.

To those who value parental rights, none of this is a problem. Indeed, it is no more of a problem than observing that men are typically taller than women. Therefore, no remedy is needed. But to collectivists and egalitarians, all manifestations of inequality are a problem. The only power strong enough to “fix” this problem is the state.

This is not a new phenomenon. Plato wanted children raised collectively, maintaining they were “common property.” Children do not belong to their parents—they belong to the state.

Today’s enemies of the family know they cannot literally take the kids away from their parents—though they would like to—so they settle for laws that weaken parental control. They are particularly incensed over parents who are devout Christians and who espouse conservative values. They are the enemy that must be defeated.

Enter Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law at Harvard Law School. Her recent article in the Arizona Law Review, “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection,” has garnered much attention. It should. She delights in making the case to crush homeschooling, and much more.

Currently, 3-4% (close to 2 million) children are being homeschooled. Moreover, as many as 10% of all students are homeschooled at some point; the numbers are growing. Bartholet wants this to end.

She deeply resents the “near-absolute” power that parents exercise. The legal argument upon which parental power rests, she says, “is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights—that those with enormous physical and other power over infants and children should be subject to virtually no check on that power.”

Of course, if children are to be reared by adults who are not their parents, those persons would, necessarily, have “enormous physical and other power” over them. But that kind of power imbalance is okay with her: it’s the child’s parents who are the problem. She objects to their “monopoly,” as though this were somehow unfair. She believes it is.

What is really angering Bartholet is the fact that conservative Christians do most of the homeschooling: they are at least a majority and may account for as much as 90%. She calls them “religious ideologues.” If the homeschoolers were secular left-wing ideologues, like her and her colleagues at Harvard, that would not be a problem.

She accuses these homeschooling Christian parents of “isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.” What they need, she contends, is “exposure to the values of tolerance and deliberative democracy.”

Her chutzpah is astonishing.

It is certainly true that many parents who homeschool their children seek to protect them from the rot that marks much of the dominant culture: internet pornography, violent video games, obscene lyrics, anti-Christian fare, and the like. They also seek to provide an alternative to school curricula that teach their children to disdain our Judeo-Christian heritage and lie about our nation’s historic fight for liberty. Moreover, it is not the parents who are promoting the sick idea that we can change our sex—it’s the nutty ones in academia.

As I pointed out in Common Sense Catholicism: How to Resolve Our Cultural Crisis, there are more bizarre ideas taught in the colleges and universities today than at any time in history. It is so crazy, in some quarters, that there is very little difference between the asylum and the academy. As for the need to teach tolerance, there is less of it on the average college campus today than there is in any institution in our society. That is why Bartholet’s interest in teaching tolerance to homeschoolers is risible.

Bartholet maintains that parents who homeschool their children are a threat to their safety. Parents can “subject them to abuse and neglect free from the scrutiny that helps protect children in regular schools.” She really needs to do her homework before sounding so sophomoric.

To those who have written about this subject, as I have, we know that the public schools not only tolerate unspeakably high rates of sexual abuse, they have resisted, via their unions, the establishment of a nationwide data bank. It is this which allows molesting teachers to be moved from one school district to another—it’s called “passing the trash”—ensuring even further abuse.

The Catholic Church went through this problem from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Fortunately, it has made enormous progress. But the public schools are still stuck in neutral. Bartholet seems oblivious to all this.

“Teachers and other education personnel have long been responsible for a significant percentage of all reports to CPS [child protective services], larger than any other group.” This flies in the face of all the evidence. She is apparently unaware of the U.S. Department of Education studies, and the reports by the Associated Press and USA Today on this subject.

Bartholet can get downright nasty. She says families that choose to homeschool their children do so “because it enables them to escape the attention of CPS.” In other words, not only do these vile Christian parents abuse their children, they choose homeschooling because they want to abuse them with impunity.

I say she is nasty because the source she cites does not support her outrageous claim. The source she names in a footnote says that “anecdotal evidence” shows that “some abusive parents…have taken advantage of lax homeschooling laws to hide their children from mandatory reporters.” That is very different from what she said. She said families deliberately choose to homeschool their children so they can escape scrutiny.

Bartholet really looks like an amateur when she cites New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg as a source showing that abuse and neglect in homeschooling is on-going. When Goldberg was in college, she advocated violence against innocent persons. To be specific, when she was at SUNY-Buffalo she wrote a piece for the campus newspaper urging readers to “do your part and spit at [pro-life students]. Kick them in the head.”

Bartholet also cites a book by Michael and Debi Pearl, homeschooling advocates, accusing them of promoting child abuse. For instance, their book recommends spanking. But they explicitly say this should never be done when a parent is angry. The fact that a few irresponsible homeschooling parents who read their book and abused their adopted children hardly proves Bartholet’s point. Not only that, the Pearls specifically recommend against adopting children from foreign countries. The abused children in question were from foreign countries.

The recommendations made by Bartholet are rich with hyperbole. We need to rid ourselves of homeschooling, she contends, because of what it allows. “Parents can choose to beat their children, starve them, or chain them up, free from scrutiny by any who are required to report suspected abuse and neglect.” Her hatred of Christians is palpable.

To top things off, it is striking to read a Harvard law professor rail against the U.S. Constitution. She calls it “outdated and inadequate by the standards of the rest of the world.” Most people worldwide, she fails to say, live under tyrannical regimes. What bothers her are negative rights, such as “Congress shall pass no law.” She wants this model supplanted by positive rights, such as “Everyone must.” A better prescription for tyranny could not be found—it’s why dictators love to dictate.

Bartholet wants to bestow children with positive rights. So when children are given rights, they can claim that their parents accede to their interests. This has always been the dream of radical egalitarians.

Her number-one recommendation is that there should be a “general presumption against homeschooling.” The burden, she says, must fall on parents who need to justify their request. She allows for “exceptions,” but in those instances the parents need to jump through an array of hoops, all of which are designed to weaken their status and enhance the power of the state.

Parents must submit their “intended curriculum and education plan”; offer proof of their credentials; submit to testing “on a regular basis”; allow “home visits by school authorities”; allow background checks, etc.

In other words, if they make the cut, parents who are permitted to homeschool must give up their parental rights and bow to the edicts of the state.

This is just the beginning. Bartholet wants to extend the reach of the state to police the private schools, singling out religious ones. “Religious and other groups with views and values far outside the mainstream operate private schools with very little regulation.” This means, she says, they are being deprived of “exposure to alternative perspectives.”

Translated this means that Christians who homeschool their children are not teaching the values Bartholet wants to instill in them.

This would surely mean, for example, that these children are being deprived of learning that it is a pregnant woman’s right to have her child killed in utero by someone who is not a doctor. The children would also learn that it is okay for boys and girls to rebel against their nature and switch their sex by adopting the services of someone who will mutilate their genitals.

Bartholet is upset because kids who are homeschooled are beyond the reach of the state and are being given values she abhors. She knows better than their parents what values they should have, and wants to subject them to her tutoring. This is the mindset of a despot.

This all boils down to one thing: In the mind of radical egalitarians, the number one enemy is the family. The family is the heart of inequality and the source of traditional values. It must therefore be weakened, if not annihilated.

Parents have every right to homeschool their children. To be sure, there is a role for the state to play, but it must be focused, reasonable, and limited. What Bartholet wants is to eliminate homeschooling and crush religious schools. The exceptions she offers are a ruse, designed to make her appear conventional. If she were the only one making this argument, it would not matter, but the fact is there are many like her walking the halls of academia.

Parents who do not homeschool need to vigorously support those who do. At stake is much more than the right of parents to homeschool their offspring—at stake are the rights of all parents.

Egalitarians seek a world run by social engineers. Indeed, they see themselves as possessing godly powers and brook no compromise. They need to be resisted and defeated at every turn.

One of the greatest threats to the health and safety of black Americans today is not the police. It is Black Lives Matter. The facts are incontrovertible.

Crime is a serious problem in many black inner-city neighborhoods, and that is why a recent Gallup survey found that most blacks—81 percent—want the police to spend the same amount of time (61 percent) or more time (20 percent) in their area. If most blacks thought the cops were the enemy, they would not want a police presence where they live.

Why is Black Lives Matter such a threat to the health and safety of black people? Because it wants to eliminate the police force and empty the prisons. If this were to happen, blacks would suffer the most.

On the website of Black Lives Matter there is a petition calling for “a national defunding of police.” While others are also calling to defund the police, Black Lives Matter is front and center.

Patrisse Cullors is one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter; she is also its most prominent spokesperson. She recently told Newsweek that “Policing and incarceration are part of a continuum,” and that her organization is committed to “getting rid of both systems.” She added that “When we’re thinking about defunding police, we need to be thinking about defunding the mass incarceration state.”

On its website, Black Lives Matter lists “prison abolition” as one of its objectives. In June, Black Lives Matter Chicago said this goal was urgent. “We say #Defund The Police and #Defund Dep Of Corrections because they work in tandem. The rise of mass incarceration occurred alongside the rise of militarized and mass policing. They must be abolished as a system.”

Chicago, of course, is where black lives matter the least: black-on-black shootings are routine, especially on weekends. Most Chicagoan blacks, like blacks everywhere, are peaceful, which explains why they want more arrests and more incarcerations, not less. So why is Black Lives Matter doing everything it can to subvert the aspirations of black people?

One reason why we have gotten to this absurd stage is because of the white “allies” of Black Lives Matter. To be specific, legions of young affluent white men and women have been intellectually seduced by their ideologically corrupt professors. They sincerely believe that the cops are the enemy and the prisons are evil. They need a reality check.

In truth, it is they, along with Black Lives Matter, who are the greatest threat to the health and safety of black people.

If we get rid of the police and the prisons, Black Lives Matter officials will be unaffected, as will their white allies; they live in comfortable neighborhoods. It will be innocent black men, women and children who will pay the price for their insanity. It doesn’t get any more perverse than this. Indeed, the Klan could not improve on their agenda.

If someone were running for president and said he was committed to destroying the nuclear family, we wouldn’t expect any practicing Catholic to support him. What if the same candidate said he was pro-abortion? What if he said he was against school choice? What if he said he wants to defund the police? No Catholic who follows Church teachings could ever support such a person.

These questions must be raised because an article endorsing a group that supports these four policy positions, Black Lives Matter, was just published by a man who used to work at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and now works for Faith in Public Life, a left-wing outfit. Moreover, it was published in a Catholic left-wing media outlet, Commonweal.

Worse, the author, John Gehring, slams the “white hierarchy” of the Catholic Church, and some Catholic organizations (including the Catholic League), for not supporting this agenda. Gehring is funded by George Soros, the atheist billionaire who funded the “Catholic spring,” a movement aimed at taking down the Catholic Church.

The bishops need to know who their foes are, as well as their friends. Gehring is working against them, and Commonweal is egging him on. Such is the state of Church politics in 2020.

Bill Donohue wrote the following letter to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) on August 3.

Hon. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
229 Cannon HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Rep. Ocasio-Cortez:

Without provocation, you recently exploded in a fit of rage when you condemned Father Damien, the 19th century priest who gave his life to serving lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Referring to a statue of him in the U.S. Capitol, you said, “This is what patriarchy and white supremacist culture looks like!”

Your remarks evince an offensive ethnocentrism. You disrespected the people of Hawaii: It is they who hold Father Damien in high regard. You should be careful not to judge a people’s culture and history through your own provincial lens.

Here is what the Britannica Online Encyclopedia says about Father Damien.

“Damien, known for his compassion, provided spiritual, physical, and emotional comfort to those suffering from the debilitating and incurable disease. He served as both pastor and physician to the [leper] colony and undertook many projects to better the conditions there. He improved water and food supplies and housing and founded two orphanages, receiving help from other priests for only 6 of his 16 years on Molokai.”

Even after Father Damien learned that he had contracted leprosy, he continued his charitable work. He died in 1889.

You expressed anger at the failure of the U.S. Capitol not to recognize a contemporary of Father Damien, Queen Liliuokalani. It is obvious that you know no more about the queen than the priest.

Queen Liliuokalani adored Father Damien, heralding his yeoman work. Indeed, she made the “white supremacist” a knight commander of the Royal Order of Kalākaua for his legendary work with lepers. In fact, as a public tribute to his efforts, she convinced government officials to build a hospital for lepers.

Your appalling ethnocentrism makes it impossible for you to appreciate why Father Damien is regarded as a hero by Hawaiians. That is why they made sure to have three statues of him: one in front of the State Capitol in downtown Honolulu; one in front of St. Joseph’s Church in Molokai; and one in National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C.

You need to apologize to the people of Hawaii for disrespecting their history and culture. You also need to apologize to Catholics for demonizing Father Damien (it matters not a whit that you identify as a Catholic—you have offended Catholics and that is all that counts).

Sincerely,

William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
President

This is Bill Donohue’s reply to Peter Schweizer

In August, conservative author Peter Schweizer alleged that when Kamala Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney she failed to pursue allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the San Francisco Archdiocese. He says she did so because she was beholden to Catholic donors to her 2003 campaign; she took over that post in 2004. He also claims she destroyed Church documents.

The accusations that Schweizer made are based on his chapter on Harris in his recent book, Profiles in Corruption. I accessed the sources he cited in the book and matched them up with what he said to the media. As it turns out, there are important inconsistencies and omissions. Most important, what he says about the Church’s response to law enforcement lacks context, providing the reader with a skewed account.

In an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Schweizer said that Harris did not prosecute a single case of sexual abuse involving Catholic Church priests. He is right: She did not prosecute priests. So? Did she prosecute teachers, or members of the clergy of other religions?

Harris’ predecessor, Terence Hallinan, was hot on the trail of priests, and was able to secure Church documents on 40 former or current priests. It is true that Hallinan, who lost to Harris in 2003, was building criminal cases. It is also true that in June 2003, six months before Harris took over as D.A., the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a California law from 1994 that retroactively eliminated the statute of limitations for crimes involving the sexual abuse of minors.

Instead of asking why Harris did not pursue criminal cases against molesting priests—when the high court said such offenses were time barred—perhaps Schweizer should ask why Hallinan was so aggressive in singling out priests for prosecution, even using a grand jury to bring indictments. He was on a tear, seeking 75 years of Church documents.

Why would a D.A. want to spend his resources seeking to obtain the files on priests extending back to the 1920s? The San Francisco Chronicle, not exactly a Catholic-friendly source, labeled Hallinan’s pursuit “a fishing expedition.” This was noted in several of the sources cited by Schweizer. His failure to mention this suggests he disagrees with the editorial.

Where did Hallinan get the documents on the 40 priests? The archdiocese voluntarily turned them over in May 2002. By the way, lay employees were among the 40 (this was not mentioned by Schweizer), and most of the priests were no doubt dead or out of ministry.

The fact that former California Governor Jerry Brown, and members of the Getty family, as well as Catholic lawyers, donated to Harris’ campaign for District Attorney tells Schweizer that a quid pro quo was operative. He has no proof, of course, but the innuendo is palpable. Moreover, what if foes of the Catholic Church were supporting Hallinan? Why didn’t Schweizer probe that issue?

While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Harris was asked why she would not make public those documents she possessed on priests. Linda Klee, her chief of administration and spokeswoman, told a reporter, “If we did it for you, we would have to do it for everybody. Where do you stop, and where do you start?”

I would go further. Why stop with Church documents? Why not make public every document on everyone who has had an allegation of sexual abuse made against him? The reason no district attorney does, of course, is because it is one thing to make public a conviction, quite another an allegation, and this is especially true of the deceased who cannot defend themselves.

In one of the articles cited by Schweizer, there is a quote from Elliot Beckelman, a former prosecutor in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office who dealt with clergy sexual abuse cases. Schweizer chose not to share it in his book. I will.

Beckelman defends Harris’ decision not to release Church documents. “I don’t think a district attorney should float that out there if a person can’t defend themselves. It’s a very serious charge, a sex crime. The Catholics, like other minorities, feel picked upon, and I thought for the integrity of the investigation that we don’t have running press conferences to make out that the Catholics are worse than the Jews—which I am—or worse than the Hindus. There’s always a balance that comes to sexual assault investigations.”

Finally, Schweizer told Carlson that Harris “actually deep-sixed” the documents. That is not what he said in his book. “So what happened to these abuse records? It is unclear.”

So are we to believe that in the last six months (his book was published in January), Schweizer now has proof that Harris destroyed the documents? Or is he now hyping his story to make a media splash?

What the Catholic Church did in not making public every accusation made against a member of the clergy in San Francisco was not only legal, it was commendable. If Schweizer can provide evidence that the Church’s response was atypical, I would love to see it.

Ideally, the public should follow the advice of public health experts in times of a pandemic. They should also listen to news reports, and abide by what their elected officials have to say. Court decisions also merit respect. But when doctors, journalists, politicians and judges act inconsistently, evincing a political bias, cynicism is not only predictable, it is warranted.

On July 29, President Trump and his supporters gathered in Midland, Texas for an event. Most wore masks and practiced social distancing, but some did not. Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, was upset with the few who ignored the advice of experts. “Why are they in that large group? They shouldn’t be gathering in groups.”

Schaffner should have been asked why some are not cooperating. Instead, he called them names, saying they were “dumb.”

A more rational response to what is going on was given two months ago by William A. Jacobson, a Cornell University professor. “The riots have ripped the mask off the mainstream media politicized coronavirus hysteria. When it was politically convenient, the media shamed and attacked people who wanted to reopen their stores or even gather at the beach. Now that rioters and looters are gathering in large numbers, the media no longer cares about social distancing, because the media sympathizes with them.”

Politicians also sympathize with the protesters. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy was unhappy with store owners for protesting his shutdown decree, however he said it was entirely legitimate to protest racism. He said it was “one thing to protest what day nail salons are opening, and it’s another to come out in peaceful protest.” In other words, if he likes the cause of the protest, people can take to the streets without following social distancing guidelines.

Murphy was outdone by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. He was asked why he was cracking down on religious gatherings while allowing anti-racism protesters the right to disregard social distancing norms. “We’re in the middle of a national crisis, a deep-seated national crisis. There is no comparison.” Again, it is not mass gatherings that matter, it is what the masses are gathering for that matters.

When asked if the spike in coronavirus cases following the protests was related to those who took to the streets, the mayor said, “I would be surprised if that’s what’s causing it.” He cited no evidence for his conviction. In any event, he instructed the contact-tracing task force not to ask those who tested positive for the virus if they recently attended a Black Lives Matter protest. But it was okay to ask if someone recently attended a church service.

Judges are looking just as bad. The U.S. Supreme Court recently said it was okay for Nevada to allow crowds to gather in the casinos but not the churches. Justice Neil Gorsuch called out the duplicity saying, “there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”

Many in the media want the protests to continue, but not church gatherings. No one likes this outcome better than New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse. She loved the Supreme Court 5-4 decision, going into a fury over the dissenters. She accused them of engaging in a “religious crusade,” decrying what she said was “the ferocity of the main dissenting opinion.” After reading her boilerplate commentary, it seems plain that she would not raise an eyebrow if the churches were ordered to shut down indefinitely.

Portland has been ravaged by left-wing activists for over two months. Obviously, social distancing does not apply to them. Oregonlive likes it that way. It ran a lengthy piece expressing great concern for outdoor gatherings in state parks, without ever mentioning the threat to public health caused by the anarchists.

Bars are being busted and shuttered all over the nation, and this is exactly what Dr. Anthony Fauci wants. At the end of June he said, “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really got to stop that right now.”

What if someone is seeking anonymous sex online? Would that be okay? Fauci said, “If you’re willing to take the risk—and you know, everybody has their own tolerance for risks—you could figure out if you want to meet somebody.” He concluded, “If you want to go a little bit more intimate, well, then that’s your choice regarding risk.” He did not explain how strangers can have sex while social distancing.

In other words, Fauci is telling those looking for online sex that the risk is on you, but when it comes to those who want to take the risk of going to their neighborhood bar for a beer, they need to be stopped.

We have come to this stage of cynicism precisely because of the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome. The politicians, judges, journalists, and doctors who send mixed messages are to blame. Only they can rectify the damage they have done to their reputations, never mind the damage they have done to public health.

It is now considered a truth of the highest order that the United States is irredeemably racist. This has been the steady drumbeat of reporters and commentators for months on end. The villains, of course, are white people. However, thanks to Robert P. Jones, we can rest assured knowing white Christians are the real devil.

Jones, who is the CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), is not alone. It has become fashionable these days for white liberals to partake in public mea culpa exercises. These mass confessionals are designed to purge the mind and soul of any vestige of white guilt and white privilege. In the case of Jones, he has assumed a different posture. He has decided to put himself on a moral perch. Sitting high above the deplorables, he delights in chastising white Christians for inventing and sustaining racism.

Jones argues that white Christians are more racist than non-Christians. How does he come to this conclusion? He does so on the basis of his “Racism Index,” a politically contrived measure predetermined to elicit the desired response. As it turns out, his formula is anything but scientific. Jones has a Ph.D. in religion. He should leave sociology to sociologists.

He cites research conducted by PRRI that convinces him that white Christians (evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics) “are nearly twice as likely as religiously unaffiliated whites to say the killings of Black men by police are isolated incidents rather than a pattern of how police treat African Americans.”

Regrettably for Jones, the white Christians are right.

Michael Tonry, a researcher whom no one would consider a conservative, came to a surprising conclusion in his book Malign Neglect. “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned.”

Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen, who have sterling liberal credentials, found that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites for longer terms.

In 2016, Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. led a team of researchers to study this issue. They examined more than 1,000 police shootings in 10 major police departments in three states. “On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” The black economist admitted, “It is the most surprising result of my career.”

In 2019, social scientists from Michigan State University and Arizona State University reported on the results of their two-year study. “When adjusting for crime, we find no systemic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects.”

In other words, the white Christians came to the right conclusion and the unaffiliated were wrong in their understanding of the way the police interact with blacks.

Here’s another one of the measures used by Jones to indict white Christians. “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” White Christians were more likely to disagree with this statement than the unaffiliated. This is considered to be further proof of their inherent racism.

The problem with this position—blaming slavery and discrimination for the existence of a large black lower class—is that it does not explain why, as far back as 1965, half of blacks in the United States had already made their way to the middle class. Those stuck at the bottom could not logically be explained by referencing slavery and discrimination when, in fact, the 1960s saw an explosion in civil rights legislation. Something else was going on.

That something else was the creation of the welfare state and the crackup of the black family. Dependency did more to harm blacks from becoming upwardly mobile than Jim Crow laws ever did. The refusal of white liberals to acknowledge this verity is alarming.

Why the reluctance to state the obvious? That’s easy. White liberals are the ones who crafted the welfare laws and lobbied hard to get blacks on the welfare rolls.

The raw truth is that white liberals, not white Christians, are responsible for the white-black divide. As Thomas Sowell points out in his new book, white liberals have resisted every school choice initiative, including charter schools.

Yet it is precisely in charter schools and Catholic schools where lower-class blacks have found a lever to ascend to the middle class. Similarly, the sight of white liberals, who live in tony neighborhoods, leading the charge to defund the police, is nauseating. This is the kind of effort we might expect from the Ku Klux Klan.

Blaming white Christians for the problems of black Americans is not only unsupported by the empirical evidence, it is a dodge. It is white liberals who have worked overtime to keep blacks down. They need to get out of the street, repent, and undo the damage they have done.