From the editor’s desk:
From the editor’s desk
New York City-based Orthodox Jewish university, reversed its decision to permit an LGBTQ club, Hareni, from operating on campus. In March, the university, with campuses in Manhattan and the Bronx, agreed to official club status for Hareni. However, on May 9, in a letter to the school community, the university said that the club’s values were antithetical to the values of the Torah: “there is no place for such a club in yeshiva.” Rabbi Hershel Schachter said he “emphatically rejects the ideology, lifestyle, and behaviours which the LGBTQ term represents.” Rabbi Mayer Twersky said the “LGBTQ acronym” represents “a heretical, nihilistic philosophy which champions and celebrates all forms of sexual deviance.” Formally, the basis of the university ceasing to recognize the club status of the group was its objection to Hareni using pride flag emojis and the word “pride” in its social media posts, and their assertion that Hareni was simply a rebranding of the banned Pride Alliance club. Hareni also planned to hold social events that it had agreed in its settlement with the school not to host.
I wish there were Christian leaders who spoke with the same clarity and force about the dangers of the LGBQT ideology and its incompatibility with the Christian faith as rabbis Schachter and Twersky did about the incongruousness of homosexuality and Judaism.
Speaking of Christians leaders who speak clearly and forcefully: San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone released, “Before I Formed You in the Womb: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life.” The May 3 letter said that when Catholic politicians are obstinate in their support for legal abortion and other avenues are exhausted to correct the recalcitrant politician, a pastor must deny the Eucharist as a “public medicine.” “Those who do not seek to live in accordance with (the teaching of the church on the sanctity of human life), should not receive the Eucharist.” This is not merely a matter for the soul of the sinning politician, but the pastor. Archbishop Cordileone wrote, “I tremble that if I do not forthrightly challenge Catholics under my pastoral care who advocate for abortion, both they and I will have to answer to God for innocent blood.”
Is there nothing untouched by LGBQT zealots? The question answers itself. Juno News reported last month that the Canada Border Service Agency’s (CBSA) “candidate information package shows a section highlighting a number of initiatives designed to promote an ‘inclusive and diverse organization’,” including permitting uniformed officers to “mix and match gender-specific uniforms” and unisex restrooms. Of course, employees are also encouraged to list their preferred pronouns in their email signatures. LifeSiteNews’s Jonathan Van Maren commented that “one of the most significant unreported stories of the past decade of the Canadian government is the extent to which federal policy has been shaped through partnerships with LGBT activist NGOs.” The CBSA partnered with Serving with Pride, which works with policing, corrections, and criminal justice professionals to “build bridges to better understand and serve” the “2SLGBTQ+ community.” Van Maren remarks that Serving with Pride “encourages law enforcement to view the world through rainbow-coloured glasses.” He adds: “It isn’t just the big pieces of legislation that change a country. It is the top-down imposition of gender ideology on every single government institution that impacts the daily lives of Canadians.” R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, calls the regime’s official adoption of the symbols of the LGBQT ideology “the Rainbow Reich,” with all the required obedience that term suggests, with dissenters punished severely. One wonders whether a Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre would put an end to the state working hand-in-hand with activist NGOs like Serving with Pride?
I like to read old magazines and journals. I am making my way through Modern Age, a conservative review of arts, literature, history, and philosophy, founded by Russell Kirk in the 1950s. In an editorial from the Fall 1984 edition, the editors noted: “Without Christian culture and Christian hope, the modern world would come to resemble a half-derelict fun-fair, gone nasty and poverty-racked, one enormous Atlantic City.” The “managers of that dismal world,” they wrote, “do their best to make sure no person or institution rises conspicuously above mediocrity, or seriously challenges the assumptions of mechanism, materialism, and ‘reductionism’.” While admitting that the entanglement of church and state presents certain challenges, the authors said “there is something worse than entanglement; and that is the total separation of religion from the civil social order, so that – in the phrase of Dr. Philip Phenix – church and state would rot separately, in separate tombs.” Without religion – religious concepts about order, justice, and liberty – a population is “exposed to the merciless politics of ideology, and parties would become fanatic ideological factions.” Written 41 years ago, was Modern Age diagnosing or prognosticating?
On page two of The Interim, we report on a new Ethics and Public Policy Center report on the dangers of the abortion pill that finds mifepristone to be 22 times more dangerous than the Food and Drug Administration and its manufacturer, Danco admit. The authors found that nearly 11 per cent of women who kill their babies through chemical abortions suffer a severe adverse effect, not the 0.5 per cent claimed by the government and manufacturer. Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney wrote about the report and noted that Danco, a privately owned company, “keeps its financial backing a secret.” This is strange because “the only drug the company sells is the abortion pill.” Danco is “an entity with a single purpose: peddling abortion pills,” so its claims to safety are hardly to be taken as gospel.”
Danco has a commercial interest in mispresenting the safety of its product. What is the Washington Post’s excuse for carrying Danco’s water. Glenn Kessler, a Post “fact-checker,” pooh-poohed the study as a “report” that did not “undergo a formal external peer review before publication.” The authors stated publicly that considering the gravity of their findings, it was more important to make them public and challenge the FDA and other researchers to replicate their results rather than go through a time-consuming peer-review process that can take years. Not that peer-reviewed medical science is free of political interference. Over the last few years, the Charlotte Lozier Institute had three of its peer-reviewed studies on the danger of the abortion pill retracted by medical journals after pro-abortion advocates complained about the findings. Anyway, Kessler claimed that the adverse events reported by the authors were “vague.” Kessler said that an “emergency room visit by itself does not count as a severe adverse event.” Yet even if you exclude all emergency room visits, the serious adverse effect rate was ten times larger than the FDA and Danco claim. Kessler dismissed the “most serious problems … such as sepsis and infection, rank rather low” – casting aside the complications of approximately 12,500 women who suffered those effects. Is Kessler reporting in good faith when he claims that “normal bleeding occurs with a medication abortion,” even though the EPPC report focuses on “abnormal bleeding,” which includes extended periods of blood loss. But most bizarrely, Kessler says that those who suffer serious adverse effects but recover fully should not be counted as suffering a “serious adverse event.” The suffering of women, who were misleadingly told that the abortion pill was safe, is dismissed because the physical complications were only temporary, gives lie to the notion that abortion is good for women.
One last word about the EPPC study and the abortion pill. Jordan Boyd of The Federalist said of mifepristone’s supposed safety: “By definition, a pill that ends at least one human life nearly every time it is ingested and potentially harms more is not ‘safe and effective’.”
On page three, we report on the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood in the United States. After the story was filed, this quote from Florida state Rep. Jennifer Canady came across my desk (in a story by The Daily Signal): “With over 1 million abortions in our country over the last year, the American taxpayer is subsidizing the leading cause of death.”
Planned Parenthood of America released its annual report and we have the story on page three. Not reported in our story about it was the title of said document: “A Force for Hope.” As Carol Tobias, national president of National Right to Life, said, there is nothing hopeful about “offering only a dead baby for a woman seeking help.” When I saw the title “A Force for Hope,” my first thought was that the document was a joke by the Christian satirical website Babylon Bee. Alas, as the literary critic Harold Bloom used to say, we live in an age in which satire is not possible. Or perhaps satire is superfluous.
Regarding the Canadian election, I have much to say, but in this space I will only make a single comment: we know not what Providence has planned.
We report on the new head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV, on page three. We do not get into the politics of the Conclave for the simple reason that we do not know what goes on behind the closed doors when the College of Cardinals meet. What was interesting, though, is how few media stories before Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost became pope mentioned him as a likely candidate to be selected by his colleagues. (Kudos to The Pillar for having a feature story on him as one of the possible cardinals to be elected pope.) Oddsmakers – yes, you can bet on who becomes pope – either listed him as a longshot (one had him 150:1), while some did not even include him on their lists. In fact, Nate Silver, a political prognosticator, reported that Polymarket took about $30 million USD in wagering on the next pope, with that betting site’s implied odds of Cardinal Prevost winning at between one and two per cent. Putting aside the morality of betting on who becomes pope, the exercise is interesting in that it shows that the conventional wisdom entering the Conclave was wrong. So-called “leading candidates” such as Italy’s Cardinal Pietro Parolin or the Philippines’ Luis Antonio Tagle had implied odds of 30 per cent chances of winning, although once the white smoke was sighted after the fourth ballot, betting markets moved quickly to Cardinal Parolin with his likelihood of winning rising to 68 per cent, followed by Cardinal Tagle at 21 per cent, and two other Italian cardinals, Pierbattista Pizzaballa and Matteo Zuppi with odds of 6.5 and 2.1 per cent respectively at Polymarket. Notice that Cardinal Prevost did not even have a one in 50 chance of emerging on the balcony as pope. The point is that as interesting and fun as speculation about who might become pope, no one knows. Part of the problem is that the conventional wisdom, as articulated in the media, treats papal elections like political elections, with commentary about conservatives and progressives, geographic splits, and other earthly factors. Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley wrote “efforts to cover the Conclave as if it were a U.S. primary were misleading” because “the most fire-and-brimstone cardinal is far to Trump’s left on economics; the trendiest Francis fan is way to Joe Biden’s right on sex.” That might oversimplify the matter, but it does suggest that religion doesn’t scan as well as politics.
And now, for the second time in a row – Jorge Mario Bergoglio was hardly mentioned as pope-material prior to emerging as Pope Francis – a so-called longshot candidate has been elected pope. I am not one to counsel ignoring other media, but when it comes to covering religion, most legacy media outlets are unreliable at the best of times and when it comes to once-in-a-decade events like the Conclave, they are woefully out of their element. Better for Catholics specifically, and all those looking for Christian leadership on the world stage, to wait it out, and not bet on the outcome.
The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley wrote: “I do sense – in Leo’s early symbols and tone – that the hoopla of the 1960s is finally on the wane.” My guess is that it’s too early to tell, but not too early to hope and pray that the constant cultural revolutionizing of the past six decades may come to an end.
Writing in The Lamp Magazine, Michael Hamill summarized my feeling on talking about the pope – any pope: “I think Catholics should be free to say what they really think. We can tell each other what we think is true, but I don’t think Catholics should talk about the pope the way people mad at Trump talk about him. I don’t like Catholics talking about the Holy Father in a contemptuous way – the way liberal Catholics usually talked about the pope more or less continuously from 1968 until the election of Pope Francis.” Yet, I am mindful of the words of Fr. Paul Nicholson, a priest who was once a fixture at Toronto pro-life events: “The devil wants us separated from our Holy Father.”
As we report in this issue on page three, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a 409-page review, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” which found that so-called gender-affirming interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries are not supported by high-quality evidence. The implication is that medicalized interventions in support of people’s delusions that they are of the opposite sex lack any rigorous scientific and medical justification, especially considering the potential for irreversible substantial harms following these interventions. The U.S. report is similar to the Cass Report in the United Kingdom which came to the same conclusion in 2023-2024, and although the American systemic review of the evidence does include any recommendations, it relies on much of the same evidence that the Council for Choices in Health Care in Finland (2020), Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (2022), and National Institute for Health in the U.K. (2024) considered when they recommended against medical for youth experiencing gender dysphoria.
The corporate media and transgender activists insist that there is a medical and scientific consensus supporting “gender-affirming care.” As the U.S. review noted, many such studies are tainted, provided by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which the HHS review argues bases their analysis less on science than ideology. Many studies refer to each other, a closed circle of so-called experts supporting predetermined conclusions about the benefits of providing dangerous, often irreversible courses of medical action. Many medical and professional associations depend on WPATH’s tainted findings; the consensus, to the degree that it exists is an ideological consensus.
While some of the most “progressive countries” in Europe, along with the United States, have begun to question the science behind this ideology and at least pause the medical transitioning of minors, Canada continues apace with damaging and mutilating its youth under the guise of gender medicine. These kids, as the U.S. report notes, need talk therapy, not chemicals, hormones, and surgery. On this, Canada is increasingly an outlier.
