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Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief helped to create campaign groups to press for a “revolution” in the Catholic Church, according to leaked emails. John Podesta, head of Clinton’s campaign, says he helped to found two Catholic organisations to press for change in the Church. In emails from 2011 released by Wikileaks and alleged to be by Podesta, he responds to an email from Barack Obama’s friend and former boss, Sandy Newman, about an “opening for a Catholic Spring”. Newman suggests that “Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for...

Oh anti-Catholicism. You’re always in vogue. And just what we needed to add to this wonderful election journey. Today, the anti-secrecy and disclosure site WikiLeaks released more than 1,000 emails as part of an ongoing leak of the hacked emails of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Previously, Podesta worked as the President for the Center for American Progress, or CAP, and the Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton. Within these leaked emails was a 2011 email thread titled “Conservative Catholicism” sent by CAP Senior Fellow John Halpin to Podesta and to Hillary for America Communications Director Jennifer...

Fifty years ago, the angry brats of campus leftism waged called the cry of cultural jihad against "The Establishment." Our schools and colleges, our television networks and Hollywood, big corporations and large organizations, our churches, even our government and all other parts of organized America were the enemy of our happy future. "The Establishment" was to blame for everything. Even then, all this sounded silly to conservatives. Colleges had long been the hothouse of every form of totalitarianism, and even fifty years ago, conservative professors and students were hounded and mocked. Public schools were descending along the same predictable path....

There isn’t a word—not one single word—in the short, open letter signed by hundreds of British Catholic priests to the Catholic Herald (London) defending Church teaching on marriage and sacraments that any Catholic could not, and should not be proud to, personally profess and publicly proclaim. The priests’ letter is a model of accuracy, balance, brevity, and pastoral respect for persons. It fortifies the soul to know it exists. It gladdens the heart to actually read it. I am at a loss, therefore, to understand why Vincent Cardinal Nichols seems to chastise priests who signed the letter for their allegedly...

I wish to offer some reflections on the Synod, given as “bullet points” in no particular priority order. I would also encourage readers to refer to my May/June editorial, in which I anticipated some of the problems that I thought might emerge and which, unfortunately, have emerged. • The shroud of secrecy surrounding the presentations by the bishops and various lay presenters was most regrettable and most unnecessary. Never before in the modern history of synods have the media and the Catholic faithful been shut off from the conversations occurring in the Synod Hall. It is passing strange that this...

... There was one constant for Obama throughout this process, and it wasn’t Bowe Bergdahl’s freedom. It was the freedom of five of the most deadly Taliban terrorists. Obama couldn’t solve a problem like Guantanamo without first dealing with its most notorious and dangerous residents. The president couldn’t just free the terrorists, though; he needed a sympathetic reason. Enter Bowe Bergdahl. The White House couldn’t just come out and say Bergdahl was a deserter, otherwise people might focus on the true cost of the deal rather than its stated benefit. Obama couldn’t just inform Congress and set a precedent for...

...This is not the article I set out to write. The facts – or at least my recollection of the facts – changed and I had to change with them. My original thesis was that several years ago LGBQT activists gave assurances that their agenda did not have to conflict with religious liberty rights and that they rejected any claims that opposing homosexual rights was akin to racial discrimination. I thought they too had once claimed, as law scholar Doug Kmiec said nine years ago, that it was “inconceivable” that “a successful analogy will be drawn in the public mind...

This is a bad morning. I was greeted by a headline in the New York Times that said Defense Secretary “Chuck Mullet” Hagel was planning to submit a budget to Congress to cut the size of the military to a level not seen since 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II. The article went on to say that the Pentagon realized that this would be an inadequate force for even very small wars and certainly would not allow the U.S. to police the world and keep control of contingencies like a North Korean attack on the South or a...

Does Rachel Maddow work for a homophobe? Is the boss of MSNBC — that would be NBC Universal’s chief executive officer and Comcast Executive Vice President Stephen B. Burke — next on the “Gay Gestapo’s” hit list? For donating to the traditional marriage-supporting former senator Rick Santorum? Was columnist and commentator Pat Buchanan fired from his MSNBC job for views that Santorum holds — and held when Comcast’s Burke was giving money to Santorum? Is entertainment mogul Barry Diller — the boss of Inter Active Corp, which owns the site OkCupid that urged the firing of Mozilla’s Brendan Eich over...

Let’s face it. Brendan Eich is large, white, and rich, and a computer geek — not the kind of profile that automatically elicited sympathy last week when the CEO of Mozilla was forced to step down for contributing $1,000 in support of Proposition 8, a 2008 measure stipulating that marriage in California could be only between a man and a woman. But all of us should care about the political orthodoxy that forced out Eich and that is taking hold in our country. “I don’t believe this is a question of suppressing free speech,” Fred Sainz of the Human Rights...

Much of the shock following the removal of Brendan Eich from the position of Mozilla CEO came from the realization that, in a manner of speaking, America was now at war. True it’s a culture war, not a physical conflict. But if you were waiting for the moment when the Cold Civil War actually begins, this might be it. Not that anyone should have been taken aback. After all, Larry Summers was sacked as president of Harvard following his criticism of Cornell West’s rap album and as a result of a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation...

Dear gay rights militants, dear progressive tyrants, dear liberal fascists, dear haters of free speech, dear crusaders for ideological conformity, dear left wing bullies: You will lose. I know you’ve got legions of sycophants kowtowing to you these days, and the rest you’ve set out to destroy — but you will lose. So, you’ve tracked another dissident and skinned him alive. You’ve made an example of Brendan Eich, and now you dance joyously around his disemboweled carcass. You have his head on a spike, and you consider this a conquest in your eternal crusade to eradicate diversity and punish differing...

Dear gay rights militants, dear progressive tyrants, dear liberal fascists, dear haters of free speech, dear crusaders for ideological conformity, dear left wing bullies: You will lose. I know you’ve got legions of sycophants kowtowing to you these days, and the rest you’ve set out to destroy — but you will lose. So, you’ve tracked another dissident and skinned him alive. You’ve made an example of Brendan Eich, and now you dance joyously around his disemboweled carcass. You have his head on a spike, and you consider this a conquest in your eternal crusade to eradicate diversity and punish differing...

In 2008, Barack Obama and Brendan Eich both were against gay marriage. Senator Obama averred his support for the one-man/one-woman view of marriage, while Mr. Eich, a cofounder of the Mozilla web-browser company, donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 — a California ballot initiative that had the effect of making Senator Obama’s avowed marriage policy the law in California, at least until a federal court overturned it on the theory that California’s constitution is unconstitutional. Barack Obama inexplicably remains, as of this writing, president of the United States of America, but Mr. Eich has just been forced out as CEO...

Under the heading “Brendan Eich steps down as CEO,” Mozilla has posted the following statement in the name of executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker. Eich has “stepped down” from his position at Mozilla days after his appointment, following the revelation that he contributed $1,000 to the campaign supporting the passage of Prop 8 in California six years ago. The Wall Street Journal covers the story here. Baker’s statement is must reading, though it requires some translation. It is not exactly straightforward. Using the mandatory shibboleths, the statement refers to a corporate culture of “diversity and inclusiveness.” If you’ve read 1984, you...

To Our Spiritual Fathers, Please forgive the public nature of this letter. In a sense, it goes against my personal rule of not criticizing priests or bishops in print. But only in a sense. You see, this letter isn’t meant as criticism, although I know some will take it that way. It’s more a cry for help, a plea or a prayer. After the Supreme Court rulings on marriage, I don’t know what else to do. Or where else to go. So I’m coming to you, here, in the only way I know how. Let me begin by telling you...

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses. Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds. He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years. What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al-Qaida was on the run. The global war on terror...

From the New York Times: Mr. Obama does not like debates to begin with, aides have long said, viewing them as media-driven gamesmanship. He did not do all that well in 2008 but benefited from Senator John McCain’s grumpy performances. Mr. Obama made clear to advisers that he was not happy about debating Mr. Romney, whom he views with disdain. It was something to endure, rather than an opportunity, aides said.

President Obama’s weakness in foreign policy is a contributor to the events of the last several days in the Middle East. Though he gave the order to take out bin Laden — who wouldn’t? — and though he attacks suspected terrorists with drones, this president has nevertheless conveyed to the world that he believes in a diminished world role for the United States. He believes in a more modest United States — remember those bows — because he comes from an intellectual tradition that is hostile to American power. His pastor and mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, expressed a common...

There was nothing inappropriate about Mitt Romney’s statement on the Libyan attacks this morning. If anything, his remarks were strikingly limited in scope. (The inane, narrative-obsessed, and apparently coordinated questions from the press didn’t help generate a substantive discussion.) The events of the past twenty-four hours spotlight at least three major policy decisions by the Obama administration that are deserving of scrutiny in this election season: 1) So the Obama administration disavowed the statement released by the U.S. embassy in Cairo declaring that the embassy “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” That’s...