A theme of the next few years will be the persecution of Catholic schools, Jewish schools, and all other religious schools that blend even a trace of traditional morality with their faith.

Democratic legislators, the legacy media, left-wing non-profits, and liberal prosecutors will attack, sue, defund, and ultimately try to quash all conservative religious schools that do not adopt their version of morality.

The latest aggression by the anti-religion warriors is in New York, and the Archbishop of New York is sounding the siren.

New York lawmakers recently proposed an “anti-discrimination” bill, the Nonpublic Dignity for All Students Act. The bill would force private schools to embrace gender ideology — the new belief system positing that a boy becomes a girl by identifying as one and vice-versa.

It underlies all Catholic teaching that men are men and women are women — that the two sexes are complementary, totally equal, and crucially different. Legislation to force gender ideology on all schools is legislation to ban the exercise of Catholicism.

Cardinal Theodore Dolan, the Catholic Archbishop of New York, is sounding the alarm. The bill could punish Catholic schools for using masculine pronouns for a boy who identifies as a girl, requiring students to wear the uniform of their actual sex, or barring boys from the girl’s locker room and from girls’ sports.

Cardinal Dolan writes: “Essentially, they are telling our families: If you won’t toe the line and enroll your children in our government schools, we will force the policies of the government schools onto your schools.”

The “anti-discrimination” measures didn’t pass in Albany in 2024, but as Dolan writes in Compact, “Something tells me, though, that the threat of this unjust intrusion won’t be going away anytime soon.”

He’s correct. The secular liberal establishment will only increase the frequency and intensity of their attacks on religious schools.

Sometimes these attackers will claim to be enforcing the “Separation of Church and State,” but this is a cover story for anti-religious bigotry. They will come after schools that don’t receive government money or indirectly receive even a dime of government money.

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Typically, the attackers will claim that they’re not going after Catholicism or Christianity, but only after some extremist subset of Catholics, Christians, Jews, or whatever. This is also a lie, as we see with journalists saying they only target Christians who believe their rights come from God and Catholics who are devoted to the Blessed Mother.

The non-religious in the news media and in government need to stand up for the religious schools in the face of this coming crusade.