My friend was one of 31 who became Catholic at that Mass, including plenty of newly baptized Christians, Protestants becoming Catholic, and cradle Catholics whose Catholic formation stopped after baptism.

My own parish, in Falls Church, Virginia, welcomed 25 adults into the church at Easter.

These massive numbers were rivaled in Catholic churches across the country.

The diocese of Duluth in Minnesota saw a 145% increase in new Catholics this Easter. More than 100 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison became Catholics. At Harvard University, 50 new Catholics joined.

The New York Times, after sampling a few American dioceses, estimated a 51% increase in new Catholics this year.

This doesn’t mean the number of Catholics is growing. No, America is still rapidly secularizing — more so, America is unaffiliating or deinstitutionalizing. Religion scholar Ryan Burge has repeatedly pointed out that the number of Catholics keeps falling, down at least 5% over the past 15 years.

Old Catholics are dying, many nominal Catholics are giving up the charade, and many Catholics are crossing the other way across the Tiber into Protestant denominations. But offsetting these losses, in the last couple of years at least, is a real wave of adult converts.

Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate has more granular but slightly older data, which suggest that the number of new adult Catholics every year steadily dropped from 2000 to 2020, but has since reversed. After bottoming out in the lockdown years of 2020 through 2022, the number of new Catholics climbed in 2023 and 2024.

The Pillar, a Catholic publication, crunched more recent numbers in select dioceses and found, for instance, a 50% increase in new Catholics in Washington from 2024 to 2026, a 37% increase in Brooklyn, New York, and massive increases in Newark, New Jersey, from 330 to 1,700, and Philadelphia, from 280 to 1,160.

In the 19th-century Great Awakening, upstate New York was called “the Burned-Over District” because the fire of the Holy Spirit seemed to burn extra hot there. For the 21st-century Catholic Great Awakening, the burned-over district is the Acela Corridor.

While the masses leave the Catholic Church, the elites, it seems, are flocking to it. The Catholic parish with the most buzz these days is St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village, where I was baptized last century. St. Joseph’s has been featured by the New York Times and a handful of other outlets.

What is it about Catholicism that would appeal to young, professional, college-educated adults in the mid-2020s?

Maybe it’s just a passing fashion among conservatives. Maybe becoming Catholic is just cool today, and becoming Orthodox will be cool in 2027. Then maybe in 2028, the Assemblies of God will be the new thing.

Alternatively, maybe the Catholic Church offers something that, while no different from what it has offered for millennia, is particularly needed today.

Consider 2020 and 2021 as the turning point in the trend of adult conversions. Many of the young adults becoming Catholic in the past two years were college or high school students during the pandemic. Some significant part of their formative years was conducted at a distance — isolated, alone, in a room in front of a screen.

This cohort is hungry for the tangible.

In our age of abstract rationalism, Christianity offers a tangible faith. Christianity, after all, tells us that God isn’t just a supreme system operator in the clouds, but He became flesh and came down to live among us.

Catholicism, in particular, is a meaty faith. In the Eucharist, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ are present in a wafer of bread. God is not merely something a Catholic can contemplate, obey, or study. God is Someone we can touch.

Catholics have also never fallen in for the iconoclasm that led some Christian sects to disregard the importance of beauty and art in worship. The Mass, at its best, includes Mozart, incense, and chant, and is held in beautifully built churches whose architecture points the eye and the mind toward Heaven.

Catholic worship is ultimately personal communion with God, but Catholics emphasize that human friendship, and visible, tangible, smellable created beauty can orient our hearts toward the divine.

In addition to being too abstract, our age is also too atomized. Today’s 20-somethings, like the millennials and Gen Xers, were indoctrinated by the Me Generation into a bad hyperindividualistic anthropology that worships autonomy, and tells us all we are the sole authors of ourselves.

The bitter fruits of this worldview have been around for decades, but for today’s young adults, especially the secular or weakly religious elites whose lives have been shaped around workism, mobility, and individual achievement, the error of this way is glaringly obvious.

The Catholic Church offers a different way.

The church tells us that while we are fallen, we are good — and we can be forgiven. It offers up a framework of marriage and parenthood that exalts sacrifice and celebrates mutual self-giving.

For young people who have come up in the world of individualistic and rationalistic transactions, the church offers deep and abiding relations.

Twenty years ago, the secular elites celebrated the decline of Christianity, especially the decline of the prominent and venerable Christian institutions. They saw this as enlightenment and emancipation from systems of oppression and superstition.

TRUMP AS JESUS

Last decade, shrewd observers began to realize that our deinstitutionalization and secularization weren’t making our culture healthier.

These days, as the bursting Easter vigils suggest, folks are seeking a sturdier rock to serve as their life’s foundation.

That is, babies are contagious.

We’ve long known that. As a culture of rational sophisticates, we try to laugh off “baby fever” as an old wives’ tale. As egalitarians and professionals, we aren’t supposed to admit how babies and hormones interact. But it’s all real.

“Where adults see more children, adults want more children,” the economists concluded. “Where the young population shrinks, so does the desire for parenthood.”

In other words, pregnancy is contagious, and Baby Busts are self-reinforcing. Low birth rates beget lower birth rates.

The infamous 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus believed the opposite. He thought birthrates would be self-correcting: “High birthrates make a people poorer, people respond to poverty by having fewer children, with fewer children among whom to divvy up the pie people become richer, and people respond to wealth by having more children.”

Underlying this system is the grim belief that children are a net cost, almost a luxury good.

Malthusianism was wrong. When birth rates get low, that tends to drive birth rates even lower. One reason: Cultures with fewer kids will be less kid-friendly, which increases the difficulty and social costs of having kids.

Another reason, just as important: Being near babies makes people want babies. That’s what Galiani and Sosa call “the empathy channel” for increasing the “demand” for babies.

“Infant exposure activates the brain’s reward circuitry, triggers oxytocin release promoting caregiving desire and extends to fathers,” the economists argue. “The mechanism operates through sensory contact rather than deliberation. Psychologists find that the affective component of fertility motivation is more than twice as strong as the cognitive one in predicting ‘baby fever’ intensity.”

And now that the number of young children is declining every single day, it becomes more and more difficult every day to reverse the Baby Bust.

Galiani and Sosa estimate that 13% of the collapse in birth rates over the past 18 years is due to the decline in Baby Fever, but it might be as high as 33%, they say.

Self-perpetuating cycles are tough to reverse, but this one might have an easy solution: Everyone with a baby should bring the baby everywhere and hand their bundle of joy off to a childless young adult — the human race depends on it.

So while some people yawned when Trump posted on social media an image of himself as Jesus, apparently raising a man from the dead, many people were shocked, and some were appalled. Because enough of Trump’s allies told him that this wasn’t cute, and was in fact, blasphemous, he took down the post. He later claimed, implausibly, that he didn’t think it was portraying himself as Jesus, but was instead portraying himself as a Red Cross doctor.

In this regard, it really was a new thing. When was the last time he backtracked on something?

But the yawners have a point: Our politics have been headed in this direction for a while.

The tacky paintings, and more recently AI-created drawings, of Trump as some sort of religious leader have been ubiquitous since Trump took over the political scene in 2015.

One way to understand Jan. 6, 2021, is as a religious riot. I say that because I was there, covering it, in person.

Multiple Trump supporters I met near the White House noted that it was the Christian feast of the Epiphany and that they were seeking an epiphany of sorts from Trump. They thought he would reveal his proof that the election was stolen and that Trump had actually won.

Right outside the White House, I saw a Trump supporter carrying a cross, which like the True Cross, had a sign hung from it. But instead of “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” this sign read “Trump Won.”

As I walked with the crowd from the White House to the Capitol, I spoke to a handful of Trump supporters. Every one of them said they did not attend church, and more than one spoke of Trump in spiritual terms.

I wrote at the time, “David, an auto mechanic from Colorado, told me how pleased he was with Trump’s first term. It wasn’t about tax cuts or border walls, either. ‘He brought some pride back into the country. … No more. I feel pride. I feel like there’s something that was missing that’s now been found.’

“His talk was spiritual, so I asked David about faith and church. ‘I don’t go to church. But I am religious. I do read the Bible. I do my own studies, online and stuff. But really, since Trump came in, I really have felt a shift in the power I feel. It’s definitely more positive than it was before.’”

This didn’t start with the 2020 election, either. If you covered a Trump rally, you may have noticed it had a lot in common with a religious revival. Trump rallies in 2016 weren’t dark and brooding as some of the liberal media portrayed them. They were upbeat. There was instant camaraderie. For many people, it was a rare communal event infused with meaning.

If you’ve been following Trump for the past decade, you know that he sees himself, and many of his followers see him, as a messianic figure.

More common than Trump-as-Messiah, but maybe more harmful, is the twisting of Christianity to fit into Trump’s personal tastes.

DOES IT MATTER THAT ERIC SWALWELL IS MARRIED?

Erick Erickson wrote about this:

So Trump kind of wants to be worshipped, and he at least wants religion to be twisted to his likings, which helps explain his anger at Pope Leo XIV. Trump’s unhinged online rant at the Holy Father is hard to understand unless you consider that Trump has been led, by sycophants, to believe that Christianity ought to serve him, rather than the other way around.

You could watch a lot of cable coverage, read a lot of articles, and listen to radio segments covering various women’s accusations against Swalwell and his defenses, without ever knowing that the man is married.

Swalwell’s defense is that he serially cheats on his wife, including with women who worked for him. This ought to disqualify him from being governor of California, before we even determine the truth of the accusations.

But Swalwell’s marriage and his infidelity are often totally ignored by the media.

CNN, to its credit, included his marriage in the original report, but has omitted that detail from nearly all subsequent stories: April 11, April 12, April 12 again, and April 13. Watch this five-minute MSNOW report that discusses his defense, but never mentions that he is basically admitting to serial philandering. Reuters omits the wife, marriage, and infidelity from its stories (here and here).

Because Swalwell apologized to his wife in his denials of the assault charge, you actually see some of these outlets mention his wife and his marital status. But look at another current alleged infidelity scandal, and you’ll see the typical media omission of marriage:

NFL coach Mike Vrabel was photographed being very cozy with NFL reporter Diana Russini of The Athletic, which is owned by the New York Times, and hanging out alone together in a hot tub. Vrabel and Russini say there was nothing inappropriate, and they were hanging out as part of a group.

When the Times covers this Vrabel story, and the questions of journalistic ethics involved, it totally omits that Vrabel and Russini are both married, a fact that casts the hot-tubbing and hand-holding while on the road in a different light.

The news media often omit the marital status of men and women accused of sexual impropriety. It’s an odd tic grounded in the morality of the news media: “Everything is okay as long as it is consensual.”

That simplistic and inadequate belief system forces newspapers to use very odd phrasing.

Does the news media think that being obscene is a problem? Do the editors of major outlets value marital fidelity?

Why do parents spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on private school? Is it selfish to do so? Does it help the child get ahead in life? Is it merely a social club?

Private school discourse has been ramping up in the press and on social media, bringing plenty of confusion, guilt, recriminations, and misunderstandings.

HEY, PARENTS, LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE

The discussion is confusing because education debates tend to skip over many unstated premises. And often, the different sides don’t agree on those premises.

Underlying this debate over private schools are deeper questions on which we may not agree. These are questions about gender, morality, family, and frankly, what the purpose of education is.

Is private school good?

Parents who send their kids to private schools are far happier with their children’s education than are parents who rely on public schools.

A new study by 50Can, a network of local education activists, found that nearly two-thirds of private-school parents (religious schools and secular) say they are “very satisfied” with the schools, compared to 42% of parents who send their children to traditional public schools (that is, not charter schools or virtual schools).

Also, private school students fare better on basically all measures.

At age 15, students who have been in private schools score better on standardized tests, are more psychologically adjusted, and exhibit less risky behavior (drugs, sleeping around, etc …) than public school kids do. Men and women educated in private schools are more likely to marry, less likely to divorce, and less likely to have a child out of wedlock.

These correlations hardly prove that private schools are better for kids, though. For starters, the selection effect here is huge: Private schools cost money, and so kids are private schools are from wealthier families, which gives them all sorts of non-school-related advantages. That is, maybe private school kids are better adjusted and more academically oriented before they enter school.

Also, peers have a great effect: Being around other skilled, intelligent, emotionally stable children being raised by married parents makes school more rewarding. Also, going to school with wealthy, successful people builds valuable networks. (See the Ivy Leagues, for an analogy.)

Indeed, teachers unions and liberal journalists contend that private school education has no positive effect outside these confounding factors. “After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage … vanished,” Vox.com writer Sigal Samuel noted, citing one recent study.

This was part of an article asking, “Is it wrong to send your kid to private school?” The piece responded to a parent who wrote in: “I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to the problem” of falling public school funding.

While this was a liberal letter-writer, this concern is adjacent to an occasional conservative objection to private schools: They potentially weaken a local community by detaching parents and children from a local institution that, in many places, is the strongest institution of civil society.

Yet, private schools remain popular. The obvious explanation is that religious parents want religious education. More to the point, they want an education that reinforces their values.

But that understates the problem private schools are solving today. The problem with public schools for many parents is not merely that they fail to teach the morality and the worldview many parents want for their children. No, public schools are not too secular. They are, in their own way, too religious.

In many U.S. cities and large suburban counties, the public schools impose their own extremist worldview, their own radical dogma. This includes left-wing teaching on race, faddish teachings on sexuality, and harmful new teachings on gender.

Public school systems don’t merely teach about these ideas, or try to increase acceptance of these ideas: They preach them as unerring truth that only a bigot would reject. If parents disagree, the schools see their job as liberating children from those backward parents.

California, Maryland, Virginia, and Minnesota provide some harrowing examples.

‘Mind your own damn business’

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), while running for vice president in 2024, proclaimed a new “Golden Rule: Mind your own damn business.”

What did Walz mean by the line? Specifically, he said, “mind your own damn business. I don’t need you telling me what books to read.”

Walz was referring to his so-called ban on book bans. This law prohibited parents, or even principals or local school boards, from having any say over which books went into school libraries. The “book bans” Walz objected to: parents asking schools to pull from shelves books like This Book is Gay, a perverted work of pornography.

Often, the “banned books” were so vulgar and obscene that parents who read passages aloud at school board or local government meetings were censored, or their comments were labeled with warnings for graphic language.

Walz’s view, then, is this: It is not your business whether a school librarian puts feces-eating porn before your middle-school child — it’s Walz’s business.

The broader story is that large liberal-run school systems see parents not as partners, but as rivals or enemies.

Montgomery County, Maryland, provides a stellar example.

The massive school district had 160,000 students before the COVID-19 pandemic. The school stayed closed (“held remote schooling”) for more than a year. The teachers protested against reopening even in spring 2021, with their keynote speaker at one rally declaring, “You will not sacrifice our lives, disrupt our communities, and endanger our students, for what? Test scores? Or a few folks to get their free babysitters back? … Keep the schools shut!”

The speaker even quoted Vietnam-era anti-war protester Mario Salvi: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart, you cannot take part. You can’t even passively take part. You’ve got to put your bodies on the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”

The “machine” against the teachers were raging, of course, was school. The forces so “odious” to the teachers union were parents and students who wanted to attend in person.

More recently, Montgomery County Public Schools fought all the way to the Supreme Court to deny parents the right to opt out of their left-wing sexuality and gender programming.

MCPS formerly allowed parents to opt-out of this sort of education, but then “MCPS decided to stop the opt-outs because it received too many requests” as SCOTUS Blog reported.

The ACLU, the school district’s ally in the fight, explained that these opt-outs undermined the purpose of the school system: “If the court rules that religious parents can micromanage the education of their children in public school even where the effect is to undermine the school’s ability to do the job it needs to do for all of its students, that will seriously undermine the ability of public schools to do the work they need to do.”

The clear implication: “The work” that public schools “need to do,” is to ply children with sexual content to which their parents object. The most charitable interpretation of this argument is that progressives see religion and traditional values as backward systems of oppression that need to be dismantled.

When county parents, many immigrants and Muslims, lobbied to restore the opt-out, the county refused. Parents protested. “Respect the right of families to share their culture and religion with their sons and daughters!” read one sign written in Spanish, carried by a South American immigrant mother.

The school board attacked parents, lamenting “Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” Another school board member, Lynne Harris, condescended to a student who objected to the sex- and gender material for “parroting dogma” — another crystal-clear statement that the school board sees the school system as a means of deprogramming children away from their family values.

Then the parents sued, and the school system fought them all the way to the Supreme Court, where the parents won.

Around the country, you can find stories every week of school districts working to “liberate” children from their parents’ beliefs. Liberal politicians and school officials are up front about their desire to transition boys into girls and girls into boys while keeping it secret from parents.

The Great Salt Bay Community School in Maine nudged Amber Lavigne’s daughter towards identifying as a boy, in part by retarding her natural development in puberty. They did this without Amber’s permission or knowledge. A counselor at the school provided a “chest binder” (to prevent breast growth) and started addressing her as a boy.

PRESSURE MOUNTS ON SUPREME COURT TO TAKE UP CASE THAT TESTS SECRET GENDER TRANSITIONS AT SCHOOLS

School districts, such as Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, have created policies of keeping such school-led transitions secret from the parents. California actually passed a law forcing schools to keep these transgender transitions secret from parents and lost in court trying to defend this law.

The pattern is this: School officials and progressive politicians see public schools as the means for indoctrinating children away from the beliefs of their families, communities, and religions.

The public schools, then, are not secular at all. They are religious institutions, preaching a radical new religion. Is it any wonder parents want to keep their kids out?

The most obvious way to bring down prices is to increase supply. If you’ve been following debates over housing and urbanism for the past decade or so, you know about the YIMBYs — instead of the “Not In My Back Yard” NIMBYism, the YIMBYs say “Yes In My Back Yard.”

The YIMBYs are mostly right, but sometimes they seem to have a fetish for high-rises and apartment buildings as opposed to single-family homes.

This is understandable for those who simply want to maximize housing density and supply. But if you see the housing crisis through the lens of the family-formation crisis, you will be a bit ambivalent about high-rises and even on six-story walkups.

Yes, increasing supply in general drives down the cost of homes, but it doesn’t always make it easier for people to start and grow their families. Dense urbanization does not seem to be pro-natal (Look at Tokyo).

For many Americans, the dream is a single-family detached home with a big, fenced-in yard. That’s great. We should have more of them. But massive yards also mean lower density. In a given area, lower density means lower supply, which means higher prices.

So if either the YIMBYs or the suburban-dreamers get their ideal, it’s sub-optimal for helping families.

Between these extremes, there lies an optimal density for families. I believe the optimum density for promoting families is dense suburbia. I’m not against raising children in the city (I lived in New York City growing up), but I like suburbia because it’s important for children to be able to safely just step out the door and run around outside. This points to an important consideration: Density is one factor when we’re trying to be family-friendly, but the design of the homes and the surrounding spaces probably matter just as much.

This is where townhouses — attached single-family homes — enter the conversation. Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias has a long essay on them today, again, saying that the design here matters. First, they shouldn’t be ugly and cheaply made. I agree with Yglesias on that. He also talks about walkability to coffee shops, which is nice and all.

But what’s more important to me is how child-friendly the immediate environment is: Each family should have its own private outdoor area, and that ideally should open up to a common play area. Imagine a small, 300-square-foot backyard, enough for the toddlers to run around or to have another family over for a picnic. But then there’s a gate in that small backyard (with a latch too high for a 4-year-old to reach), which opens onto a large, enclosed common green area with a playground. In this setting, the elementary-school-aged children can just let themselves out to play with the neighborhood kids on a Saturday morning without needing their parents to take them anywhere or supervise them.

This may not be your ideal family housing situation, but life is full of trade-offs. What I’ve described above is a potentially affordable way to get the most important stuff a family needs. One recent survey showed that families would be willing to give up a large private yard for other goods.

Pro-family developer Bobby Fijan of the Great American Housing Corporation adds another detail: Soundproofing.

TIM CARNEY: BABIES AND FAMILIES SHOULD NOT BE EXOTIC

A big reason parents want a single-family home is so that they don’t have to worry about their children crying (sometimes you need to let a baby cry itself to sleep), or about a neighbor waking up the sleeping baby, or about a neighbor hearing the children fight. Soundproofed townhouses are clutch here.

This is all to say that for getting more families, density is good, single-family homes are good, right-outside-the-door play areas are good, and close-by communal play areas are good. These things all blend nicely in well-designed rowhouses or townhouses.

During the 2013 murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, I got a front-row seat in the courthouse for the defense’s closing arguments. I didn’t get to the courthouse in Philadelphia terribly early. I got a prime spot in the press section because most of the news media didn’t want to touch the trial of a late-term abortionist.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” is a colorful, cynical, and generally true description of the media’s attraction to gore. Gosnell’s butcher shop was the exception to that rule. Karnamaya Mongar didn’t die from bleeding after Gosnell aborted her baby, but she did die thanks to Gosnell’s malpractice. And thousands of babies definitely bled after he snipped their necks.

SINS OF OMISSION: THE KERMIT GOSNELL DEFENSES THE PRESS DARED NOT MENTION

Despite the blood and the abuse of power by a longtime doctor and former pillar of the community, neither Gosnell nor his victims led the news.

For years after Gosnell’s license was suspended and his business raided in February 2010, national media ignored the story.

In the end, Gosnell was convicted of aborting some of his patients’ babies after they passed through the mother’s cervix. His defense was that he killed the babies — injecting them with digoxin or snipping their spinal cord with scissors — just before they passed through the cervix.

You can see why the media couldn’t discuss his case.

Gosnell’s record

Kermit Gosnell’s medical practice first appeared in the news media in 1969, when he launched a health clinic for poor Philadelphians. As he put it in one glowing Philadelphia Inquirer profile, “delivering babies and taking out wombs was not my schtick.”

Where did he get the money for this? From running an abortion business in New York City, he said. “He told me he had a ‘gut reaction’ to this work,” the Inquirer columnist wrote, “but did it because the center had to have the proceeds to survive.”

While charging these women to abort their children, Gosnell told a different local columnist that he would never allow the mother of his children to get an abortion.

Gosnell made the news again in 1972 when his clinic was home to a ballyhooed and ultimately gruesome demonstration of third-trimester abortions. This mass abortion featured a new device, “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball” and covered in gel, which was inserted into a pregnant woman. As Gosnell’s assistant described it: “After several hours of body temperature … the gel would melt, and these 97 things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus, and the fetus would be expelled.”

Most of the mothers in this abortion demonstration developed complications. One ended up in critical condition. The abortions were timed for Mother’s Day.

Gosnell avoided public attention for decades while running his Philly abortion clinic that cut costs by disregarding the sort of standards of care that an actual health-care provider would be expected to follow.

Officials stumbled upon the clinic in 2010 only during a raid for illegal drug purchases by Gosnell. Prosecutors called the case a “complete regulatory collapse.”

Why did no health inspectors ever look inside Gosnell’s abortion business, which reportedly reeked of animal urine, because pets walked around relieving themselves? Why did the hospitals to which Gosnell sent many suffering post-abortive mothers, never call in an investigation?

We can guess: The people in charge in Philadelphia wanted to protect abortion from scrutiny more than they wanted to protect poor mothers from Gosnell.

Eventually Gosnell’s malpractice led to the death of Mongar, a 41-year-old immigrant, who was given excessive pain-killers and anesthesia by untrained staff to deal with the pain of her abortion.

Of course Gosnell didn’t mean to kill Mongar. The hundreds of infants, in contrast, he killed on purpose.

One of Gosnell’s victims, named Baby Boy A by the grand jury, was so big that Gosnell allegedly joked “he could have walked me to the bus station.”

Ashley Baldwin worked at Gosnell’s clinic. She told a Grand Jury that she took part in many abortions where the babies were delivered crying, and then their necks slit. She said about ten babies were delivered (and aborted) big enough that she could have brought them home and cared for them.

The following dialogue between Baldwin and the prosecutor is from the Grand Jury report:

Q. And what happened to those ten babies that came out from their mother, that were big enough that you could put clothes on and take home and take care of, that moved around, what did you see happen to them?

A. He killed them.

Q. Who killed them?

A. Doc.

Q. How did he kill them?

A. He cut the back of the neck.

The Associated Press reported on testimony during the trial: “Unlicensed doctor Steven Massof of Pittsburgh told the grand jury that he used scissors to snip the spines of more than 100 babies born alive. He worked for Gosnell for a few hundred dollars a week. He pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in the deaths of two babies allegedly stabbed by Gosnell while Massof assisted with the abortions….”

In the 2010 raid, “agents found fetal body parts in glass jars and staff refrigerators,” the AP reported.

Gosnell was charged with eight counts of murder. There were hundreds more cases where he probably did the same thing, but these were the cases for which they had evidence.

In the end, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for Mongar’s death, and for murdering three babies. He was sentenced to life in prison, and died on March 1.

Media malpractice

Not everyone in the media ignored the case, but some very prominent publications did — most notably the Washington Post.

The Post, as a rule, avoids stories that could feed a social conservative narrative or undermine a socially liberal narrative, whether it’s homosexuality, gender ideology, or abortion. It’s not surprising then, that the Post didn’t jump all over the Gosnell story. The extent of the Post’s Gosnell-avoidance, though — and their justification — was astounding.

Philadelphia press reported on Gosnell’s license suspension and the FBI investigation in February 2010. He was arrested and charged in January 2011. His employees were charged later that year, and federal drug charges followed in December. Check the Post’s archives. You won’t find any mention of Gosnell anywhere in 2010 or 2011.

Throughout 2012, there were multiple pre-trial proceedings, and again the Washington Post pretended it wasn’t happening: Zero mentions of Gosnell that year.

Gosnell’s trial began March 18, 2013. For the first three weeks of the trial, as clinic workers such as Baldwin and Manoff testified to the horrors they saw, the Post carried zero stories about the trial. Finally, on April 8, the name Kermit Gosnell appeared in the Washington Post — in an op-ed piece by pro-life conservative commentator Marc Thiessen.

The Post news pages first mentioned Gosnell in the trial’s fourth week, in paragraph 11 of an April 11 article about rising anti-abortion activism. “Antiabortion measures gain momentum in the states,” was the headline, and Gosnell was mentioned only the 11th paragraph, as something of a “conservatives pounce” story.

That day, conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway asked the Post’s health-policy reporter Sarah Kliff why she hadn’t covered the story.

Kliff’s answer: “I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime.”

The implication: An abortionist’s mass-murder trial was not parallel to, say the shooting of abortionist George Tiller in Wichita (which of course got blanket coverage from the Post) but was more like some north Philly addict stabbing his drug dealer on the Kensington streets at 2 am.

It wasn’t until April 12 that the Post actually ran a news story about Gosnell.

No other major outlet was as blatant in ignoring the story, but in general, the major outlets were allergic to Gosnell reporting. The reason is simple, and was made clear by Gosnell’s closing argument.

“Every one of those babies died in utero,” defense attorney John McMahon stated.

McMahon told the jury not to consider “whether he was an abortion doctor,” or “is abortion bloody and ugly?” The only relevant question was whether his snipping and injecting happened before or after the babies passed through the cervix.

KERMIT GOSNELL’S DEFENSE: THIS IS JUST ABORTION

“They have no case” regarding Baby A, he said, “because it was killed in utero. Of course Gosnell killed the Baby,” his lawyer said. “That was his job. That was the goal of Dr. Gosnell with [the mother’s] consent: to kill the baby in utero,” the attorney said.

No other reporter besides me quoted this argument, for obvious reasons.

It’s not that they thought Gosnell was a good guy. They didn’t. The problem was that describing Gosnell’s crimes required describing abortion and trying to explain why abortion was any different from murder.

“I’m so sorry,” Kathy wrote back, “but I am in the midst of shutting down.”

I settle for an Airbnb above a shop on Market Street, and during my stay, I walk three blocks and visit Kathy, age 80, who is at work selling off the contents of the immaculately decorated inn.

It’s a magnificent place: pressed tin ceilings, carved hardwood archways, pocket doors, and a million exquisite touches that she is selling off in small batches. She particularly notes her collection of porcelain figurines made in occupied Japan, a collection she poured her heart into, but for which there is now basically no demand.

“Your generation and younger don’t even know what World War II was all about,” she gently scolds me, gesturing towards a table full of figurines. “So what we thought was an investment at the time is now junk.”

While we’re on the topic of profitability, I ask Kathy how she kept a bed and breakfast afloat in an outer suburb of Fort Wayne, where the biggest tourism draw might be the Ouabache State Park, which about 10 bison call home, three miles down the road.

“I didn’t run it in a big way,” Kathy says of the Inn, “because I didn’t care about the income.” Her voice drops a bit when she says this — as if it’s an admission, a former secret she’s just now revealing.

Kathy bought the place 20 years ago, which makes her the most senior small-businesswoman in town, by my calculations.

“Business owner.” “Entrepreneur.” These titles carry honor and convey importance, and they are very capitalistic terms. That’s why it’s something of a confession that Kathy wasn’t in it for the money. “I never spent a cent on advertising.”

The meticulous curation of decorations, the beautiful touches, the gardening, the cooking, the cleaning: It wasn’t a calculated exchange of labor for profit. No, this was a labor of love.

In that way, the Washington Street Inn is a microcosm of Bluffton, where dozens of dedicated residents give everything to keep this place going. And looking around at other small towns all around Middle America (including a few nearby), you understand the unspoken fear that all of Bluffton could one day go the way of the Inn.

The battle to keep a small town alive is fought in every corner of this country these days. The forces arrayed against Market Street are many. “When Kmart came,” Kathy recalls, “things just changed. Then Walmart came. Then Lowe’s came…. These bigger stores just forced out the local.”

Kathy saw the vibrant “uptown” Bluffton lose most of its retail — smaller retailers that couldn’t compete on price with the big box stores. She sees today’s Market Street as a pale reflection of the past. But compared to most of small-town Middle America, Bluffton is thriving.

The town has at least three bars, and more depending on how you count. It has a Chinese restaurant and a library. Jamie’s Cafe has opened in the old diner spot, Hugh’s coffee is a block away. And there’s a surprising amount of retail, and relatively few vacant storefronts on Market Street.

Mayor Scott Mentzer uses the term “third places” to describe these businesses, thus making them more than businesses.

Everyone seems to love Hugh’s coffee shop. That’s where a group of six men meet before dawn Wednesday morning for a pre-work Bible study. I visit Hugh’s three times in my 40 hours in Bluffton, and every time I see scheduled meet-ups like the Bible study. More importantly, I see impromptu meetings: old friends seeing one another, strangers meeting and chatting.

These unplanned serendipitous encounters may seem a picayune topic for an urban planning discussion, but they are in fact valuable beyond words. Modern life is very planned and very isolated. That makes running into friends and neighbors without needing to plan it a true joy. Creating a town where this happens more and more is a true service. It’s always at the front of Mentzer’s mind.

Much of these social needs of the people and the town are provided by capitalism, but many aren’t. That’s why Wells County Foundation works with governments to subsidize businesses such as Hugh’s with special tax breaks.

That’s why Bluffton funds the library and the riverfront concert series at Kehoe Park and Parlor City Plaza. The Plaza sits on the former site of a J.C. Penney. Right across from the park is the American Salvage Company. It’s an antique store, but that title doesn’t do the shop justice. It feels like a museum, filled with antique bicycles, vintage signs, beautiful oak bureaus, and a million old, beautiful knick-knacks on which to feast your eyes.

And to some extent, it is a museum more than a store. Pam, the owner, sells basically everything online.

So why does she run this storefront? There are some minor practical reasons, but mostly, I suspect Pam wants to spend her day amid her magnificent items. Visitors, like me, get the pleasure of walking around, too. And Market Street gets one more attraction to keep people hanging around.

The Inn, the bars, the antique stores: They’re all for-profit businesses, but they’re also not entirely for-profit. The community leaders of Bluffton are the furthest things from socialists, but they see capitalism is a tool for creating economic value, which is not always the same thing as — and is less important than — fostering the good life.

The government’s heavy hand often crushes when it tries to create, but the market’s invisible hand often smothers, they argue. See what Walmart has done to Main Streets. See what free trade has done to steel towns.

Milton Friedman once wrote an article with the headline “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Kathy, Pam, and others I meet in Bluffton don’t see it that way. They are capitalists, but they are also community builders. Their businesses are not mere nodes of exchange, but are or were, true third places.

SINS OF OMISSION: THE KERMIT GOSNELL DEFENSES THE PRESS DARED NOT MENTION

Kathy hosted Ladies’ bridge games, Christmas parties, and teas. Bourbon MD, the new bar downtown, hosts a speaker series. The bar brought me in to speak — they paid me and picked up my tab for the night — about how to build community. The folks I met were all conservative Republicans, but they all happily worked closely with government at the town, county, and state levels.

The conservatives here know that by giving capitalism only two cheers, rather than three, they are deviating from orthodoxy. Some talk of this as a new thing: post-liberalism. Maybe Bluffton really is a post-liberal town in the prairie. But it strikes me, in my two days here, as not something new, but something older: A conservatism about conserving.

For continental Europeans, gray squirrels, the most quotidian of mammals, are exotic, confusing, and even scary.

Babies and families are just as scary and odd in many corners of our world. The unfortunately famous internet-poster Laura Loomer usually deals in anti-Islam content, but babies were the target of one of her recent two-minute hates.

“Is there anything worse than a crying baby on a plane?” (You would think someone so obsessed with the misdeeds of Islamic extremists would be able to think of at least 19 things worse than a baby to find on your flight.)

“I wish parents would control their children,” she continued. “It’s so disruptive. I refuse to believe a baby cries for 10 hours. At some point this is just bad parenting, right?”

Do some parents neglect their kids in ways that inconvenience others? Sure. But Loomer’s premise is that babies are “controllable.” This is not something believed by anyone who has ever met a baby. And every day, there are more and more people who have never met a baby.

The birth rate is at record lows in basically every country in the world. The number of children in the U.S. ticks down every day. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco metro areas have all seen their under-5 child population drop by double-digit percentages just since 2020. Many neighborhoods are basically childless.

In these swaths of America where a baby’s cry, or kids’ playing-screetches are rarely heard, the adult population becomes unaccustomed to these sounds and increasingly annoyed by them.

Likewise, the very idea of a regular family doing regular-family stuff is inscrutable to many.

“How do people in the suburbs genuinely look forward to Friday night on the couch, Saturday morning at Costco, and call that a weekend?” asked a podcaster who goes by Murray Hill Guy, named after the Manhattan neighborhood where the median 1-bedroom rents for $4,783. “Like you really moved out of the city just to LARP as your parents at 34?”

CAN WASHINGTON DELIVER HOUSING FOR FAMILIES?

The idea of coaching Little League, cooking pancakes with your kids, just playing in the yard with a toddler, going to church, and getting together at a neighbor’s for a barbecue was foreign — he calls it a “LARP,” or live-action role-playing. What’s foreign, or some imaginary game, is a life built around family and community.

Italy and Poland do not suffer great consequences from their dearth of squirrels. But if babies and families become exotic in the United States, that’s a bad thing.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously tossed that verdict, ruling that Cox wasn’t liable for not cutting off customers who used its networks to pirate digital content. The company wasn’t doing anything wrong, Clarence Thomas stated in the court’s opinion, by “merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

“This opinion affirms that internet service providers are not copyright police and should not be held liable for the actions of their customers,” Cox trumpeted in a press release.

The statement gets at the key problem: Who should be copyright police?

I believe that copyright enforcement should generally be the responsibility of copyright holders.

Yes, taking people’s intellectual property is wrong, but at some point it’s not the public’s problem — it’s the problem of the owners.

As an analogy, imagine someone who likes to leave his keys in his car and his car door unlocked. That’s great, it’s convenient. Lots of people in high-trust neighborhoods do this. It would be stupid to say this person is “asking for his car to be stolen.”

But if his car repeatedly gets stolen and he repeatedly calls the police, thereby repeatedly drawing on public resources to recover his car, it’s reasonable for the police to say, “Look, pal, you need to start bringing your car keys inside the house.” It would also be reasonable for the police to eventually say, “We have enough other things to do. We’re not going to hunt down your car when it gets stolen if you won’t take basic steps to prevent its theft.”

What’s more, I believe intellectual property does not deserve protection as much as real property does. If you steal my car, I’ll be without it. If you steal the recording of my original song, “My Dog is Brown,” I don’t lose that song, and neither do the people who paid for it.

Intellectual property, for the most part, is not really a natural right, but an instrumental, contingent right. The Constitution states it well: “The Congress shall have power to … promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Intellectual property, to some extent, is a government-granted privilege more than a natural right.

For these reasons, there’s a real limit to the duty of the government or third-party private actors to protect Sony’s intellectual property. If Sony has serious trouble protecting its IP, it should find new ways to make a profit.

What basic things could movie or music studios do to prevent theft of intellectual property or maintain the profitability of music distribution?

I don’t exactly know, because I’m not a tech, movie, or music expert. But here are some ideas from a paper that libertarian policy analyst Jamie Plummer put out 20 years ago:

1. Build loyalty so that customers want the artist or producer to succeed and would feel bad stealing the IP.
2. Innovate to offer physical forms of the product.
3. Put advertising inline so that “stolen” copies add to the value.
4. Pay to create high-tech keys that make it harder for non-payers to get the content

Interestingly, since this issue first became live 20 years ago, the biggest change has been streaming services, which allow listeners to get songs for free. This innovation drastically diminished the demand for pirated songs.

I’d add some other examples: Hasbro owns the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, along with numerous trademarks and copyrights. But it’s basically just a set of rules and some stories. It would be trivially easy to learn, adopt, and use the rules and stories that Hasbro publishes without paying them.

GET MORE MONEY TO NEW PARENTS

But guess what Hasbro does: It packages the rules and stories in a handy, convenient, physically attractive way — plus offers useful, innovative online versions — to induce players to pay Hasbro for the product.

Sony wasted a lot of money and time on this case, money and time they could have spent innovating new business models.