EDITORIAL: A page-one hit piece reveals contempt for traditional faith-based values.

The New York Times, in a page-one hit piece published this week, went after Trump Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy for — of all things — having a large Catholic family and being happy about it, revealing the contempt the “Gray Lady” has for traditional faith-based values.

The profile takes aim at Duffy and his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy for celebrating life with nine children on their podcast, From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys, and daring to suggest that having lots of kids is a good thing.

The premise of the piece, titled “The MTV Reality Star in Trump’s Cabinet Who Wants You to Have More Kids,” is that the 53-year-old Duffy was not always a paragon of virtue and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously because of the way he behaved on three episodes of a reality show in the ’90s.

“Over three decades, Americans have watched him evolve from a sex-hungry 25-year-old on MTV’s ‘The Real World,’ gyrating with a woman on a pool table, to Secretary Duffy, a devoutly Catholic husband and father at the helm of President Trump’s Transportation Department, pushing young Americans to have families as large as his own,” the Times tut-tuts.

Of course, the real sin, according to The New York Times, was not Duffy’s misspent youth, but his evolution into a father of nine, raising his children in the Catholic faith.

Because old episodes of the MTV reality series are no longer streaming, the reporter dug deep, and “listened to many episodes of Mr. Duffy’s podcast and watched over 15 hours of MTV reality television for this article.”

That hard work was rewarded with a few very cringy and definitely not G-rated moments in which the 23-year-old Duffy “embraced his role as resident playboy, debuting a pattern of raunchy behavior that continued all season.”

While Register readers would be advised to refrain from indulging their curiosity and going down that rabbit hole, the Catholic faith and Christianity at large is nothing if not a home for sinners. That’s actually the point, as Jesus explains in Luke 5:31-32:

“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”

All of this digging into Duffy’s early TV career, though, is just there to set up what the writer clearly thinks is the real outrage: the secretary’s past statements recommending that couples consider having more children.

“‘If you make the decision of a big family, I think your kids are better, I think you’re better,’ Mr. Duffy, the 10th child in a family of 11, said in a 2023 episode of the Fox podcast he co-hosted with his wife,” the article reads.

It is surprising that someone could get so hot and bothered about being pro-family. Perhaps they view having children as a pitiable state. At the very least, the reporter clearly thinks the Duffys are “weird,” reminiscent of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s labeling of Vice President JD Vance as weird during the 2024 campaign.

That seems to be the reporter’s take on the Duffys’ marriage. The piece’s most personal attacks are saved for the couple’s relationship, in which Duffy is portrayed practically dragging his wife around by the hair, caveman-style.

Describing a 2017 Fox News appearance in which the two cook breakfast together on the set, the reporter, who sees no need to conceal her contempt for the family’s Catholic faith, writes:

“Mr. Duffy’s wife rattled off the kids’ names before mixing the batter, noting that two were away at Catholic camp, praying the Rosary. When it came time to fire up the burner, she stepped aside. In this all-American household, the roles were clear: Mom whisks and Dad mans the griddle.”

Campos-Duffy’s book Stay Home, Stay Happy is also fodder for a takedown: “… a 2009 book that advises women on family-friendly kitchen design and how to transition from ‘mommy mode’ to ‘woman mode’ by the time your husband gets home.”

The entire hit job seems overwrought and unnecessary but hangs on for dear life to one policy-related “offense” of Duffy’s, which the Times seems to think justifies this mistreatment.

Shortly after being sworn in as secretary of transportation, Duffy was the focus of a brief media feeding frenzy over a “memo” he wrote proposing handing out more federal transportation money to award states and municipalities with higher birth and marriage rates.

“We want to invest in growth,” Duffy responded to questions from the media about the memo.

It’s not that radical. And neither is Sean Duffy. And if families like the Duffys are weird, we say “Make America Weird Again.”