The New York Times got into the game this week with an unsigned editorial claiming the Holy See, Iran and Russia are “trying to eliminate language in a draft communiqué asserting that the familiar excuses—religion, custom, tradition—cannot be used by governments to duck their obligations to eliminate violence.”

The Times accuses this “Unholy Alliance” of being indifferent to violence against women and of using religion to protect wife-beaters, reminding us that, “The efforts by the Vatican and Iran to control women are well known.”

Yet the claim that these groups are seeking to strip protections from women “is a flat-out lie,” as one person close to the negotiations told me. In fact what is happening is the Holy See and her allies are blocking proposals by the U.S. and E.U. that would be used to promote a right to abortion.

The U.S. and E.U. also are pushing language calling for comprehensive sexuality education covering the farthest frontiers of sexuality. Another of their goals is striking down sovereignty language that protects governments from marauding Western lawyers seeking to impose their views on traditional peoples.

If there is no document this year, blame falls squarely on the U.S., the E.U., and their allies, who are trying to use this process to advance their objectionable ideas.

The UN committee has summoned the Vatican to report on its record of ensuring children are protected from sexual violence and safeguarding children’s well-being and dignity, the first time the Holy See will have been called to account for its actions on these issues before an international body with authority. The first meeting will take place in Geneva in June.

There is little doubt that enemies of the Church will repeat these charges exactly as this group has made them. The problem is that they are false.

It may be true that SNAP issued what’s called a “Shadow Report” to the Committee making their views known and asking the Committee to take action. But, the truth of the matter is that the Holy See is a State Party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and therefore reports regularly to the Committee. Any upcoming appearance before the Committee was scheduled anyway. There is no way the SNAP report in any way caused the Committee to call the Vatican before it. The Committee does not work that way.

The press release also calls the Committee an “international body with authority.” That is also false. The Committee has no authority whatsoever. States Parties don’t even have to appear before it and States Parties do not have to answer to it or even do what the Committee suggests. And that is all the Committee may do anyway, make suggestions.

It is possible the Committee could go beyond the authority given to it by the treaty and by the signatories to the treaty. This happens with such frequency that UN Member States are as we speak undergoing a process of treaty body reform that will likely clip the wings of these kangaroo committees.

The news that the Vatican has been called before a UN Committee to answer charges should be stopped in its tracks.

Operation Rescue of old was the movement that massively blocked abortion clinics, with the most famous one taking place in Wichita, Kansas, in 1991 led by Randall Terry, who has faded from the scene. It has been taken over in recent years by Troy Newman, a fearless and creative pro-life leader.

No longer do they block clinics. Among many other things, what they do is stake out abortion clinics with cameras and take video footage of that increasingly familiar sight of ambulances taking away yet another victim of a botched abortion.

Newman announced just today the tragic death of a young woman in the grisly abortion chamber of Leroy Carhart in Germantown, Maryland.

A 29-year old woman died yesterday as the result of fatal complications suffered during an abortion at 33 weeks that was done by LeRoy Carhart at Germantown Reproductive Health Center in Germantown, Maryland. Information about the incident comes from an extremely credible anonymous source.

Note that crafty mention of an anonymous source. Newman has found a donor willing to pay $25,000 to any whistle-blower who provides information that leads to a conviction. Such an offer not only encourages people to come forward but also sows worry and perhaps even panic among abortion workers wondering if there’s a rat in their midst. Often, it seems, there is.

The most recent Carhart massacre is already up on Drudge and could receive national coverage.

Check out the new Operation Rescue.

Ryan Bomberger is an African-American pro-lifer who runs the Radiance Foundation. He said this, “The Center for Reproductive Rights, like Planned Parenthood, certainly understands its main demographic. Happy 40th Anniversary Baby ironically uses a man (who is normally treated as persona non grata) to pitch abortion. The fact that they use a black man just screams irony . . . with the black abortion rate as high as it is and black fathers as absent as they are, it’s just sick to see Mehcad Brooks shill for the number one killer in the black community, and the killer of 55 million plus since ’73.”

One of the most effective groups on the pro-life and pro-family scene in Ireland is the Iona Institute run by David Quinn who is one of our side’s most effective spokesman on national television. Of course, David and his colleagues are in the thick of the current battles over legal abortion and on homosexual marriage. Here is their latest video on marriage.

Some are serious, like the one to exempt Hobby Lobby from the HHS contraceptive mandate. Some are silly, like the one asking for Joe Biden to be in a reality show. There is a petition for the arrest of NBC’s David Gregory for showing a magazine clip on his Sunday morning show, something that is illegal in Washington DC.

A new petition has gone up, on Christmas Day no less, asking for the Catholic Church to be labeled a hate group.

In his annual Christmas address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Benedict XVI, the global leader of the Roman Catholic Church, demeaned and belittled homosexual people around the world. Using hateful language and discriminatory remarks, the Pope painted a portrait in which gay people are second-class global citizens. Pope Benedict said that gay people starting families are threatening to society, and that gay parents objectify and take away the dignity of children. The Pope also implied that gay families are sub-human, as they are not dignified in the eyes of God.

Upon these remarks, the Roman Catholic Church fits the definition of a hate group as defined by both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.

As of this writing, only 1700 have signed.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”

My wife rose early on several cold mornings and stood along Georgetown Pike in Great Falls, Virginia, waving a “Women for Romney” sign. We took weekend days and went door to door for him. After the election our four-year-old daughter Gigi kept her mother from taking off her “Romney for President” bumper sticker “so people will know we still love Womney (sic).”

Romney had all of us work so hard, spending billions of hours and billions of dollars and he didn’t really want it?

If this is true, do we still love Womney? Did we ever?

In Showtime’s first pilot order for 2013, the pay cable network has greenlighted a high-profile drama from Oscar nominees Paul Attanasio and Ridley Scott. Titled The Vatican, the project is described as a provocative contemporary genre thriller about spirituality, power and politics set against the modern-day political machinations within the Catholic church. Said to evoke The Sopranos and Upstairs Downstairs, the series will explore the relationships and rivalries as well as the mysteries and miracles behind one of the world’s most hidden institutions.

Not long after the shooting in Newtown, I happened to be reading a biography of Neal Cassady, who was muse to both Jack Kerouac in On the Road and Visions of Cody and several poems by Allen Ginsberg.

The book tells one story of Cassady and Ginsberg visiting writer William Burroughs at his ramshackle ranch in Texas. Burroughs was growing pot that he intended to sell in New York City. Present at the ranch was Burroughs’ wife Joan Vollmer.

When the crop was harvested, the group decamped for New York City, the men driving and Joan taking the train.

When Joan Vollmer arrived from Texas by train, her dazed and drugged condition got her promptly admitted to Bellevue.

I lived in New York City for twenty years and probably the last thing that got you admitted to Bellevue was being “dazed and drugged.” Any New Yorker can tell you the story of the crazy man they’ve seen every day for years on their block or on their way to work, the man babbling and sometimes frightening who nonetheless is always there, though perhaps with terribly brief institutional stays.

Melinda Henneberger captures this phenomenon well in today’s Washington Post about her time covering mental health issues in Texas. She says the mental health services were “reserved for dangerously ill, involved brief, groggy hospital stays followed up with a handshake, a script for enough pills to stun a moose and all the best wishes, see you soon!”

Phillip Terzian at the Weekly Standard reminds us that the emptying out of mental institutions starting in the 1960′s has wreaked havoc on our streets and has likely played a role in some of the mass killings since that time.

And yet, in the midst of our national hand wringing, one pertinent fact is persistently unmentioned. Since the passage of the Community Mental Health Act (1963) during the Kennedy administration, which mandated the closing of state mental institutions in favor of “community health centers” and outpatient care, and the massive and progressive “deinstitutionalization” of the mentally ill during the 1960s and ’70s, the residents of those old state hospitals have been transferred, almost totally, from the wards to the streets, and with predictable results.

Few “community health centers” were ever built, of course, and psychotics off their meds aren’t good outpatients. But the sudden emergence of mass populations of “homeless” people in cities during the 1970s and ’80s seems to have caught Americans off guard. It also afforded a political opportunity: The existence of homeless people—ordinary folks just a paycheck away from disaster—was conveniently blamed on the domestic policies of the Reagan (or any subsequent Republican) administration. No attention was paid, no attention was invited, to the mental health of those who lounge, sleep, urinate, defecate, scream, or beg for food on the nation’s sidewalks, stab the occasional passerby, or push bystanders onto subway tracks.

Putting aside the danger these people sometimes present, it does seem profoundly heartless to leave them on the streets to fend for themselves. I would think a great liberal initiative, one that would be applauded at least by some conservatives, would be to create new institutions, better than the ghastly places from mid-century, where these hopeless cases could be committed, yes committed, and find real help and maybe a little love.