Bloomberg: Michael Kinsley, “Catholic Bishops Issue Hollow Plea for Sympathy”

Bill’s rejoinder:

Mike,

The fact that most of Americans are Christian hardly vetoes the idea that anti-Christian sentiment isn’t alive and well. Most of the people in South Africa during apartheid were black. Were they not oppressed? Numbers don’t count: what counts is the profile of those who are at the command posts of the culture, and in this country, they are decidedly anti-Christian, especially anti-Catholic. By the way, the most notorious Catholic bashers these days are ex-Catholics (you know about self-hating Jews—well, there are more self-hating Catholics).

The fact that six of nine SCOTUS judges are Catholic is an indicator that Catholic individuals are not subjected to the kinds of discriminatory treatment they once were. But there is another genre of anti-Catholicism, one which you pass over: the unrelieved bashing of the institutional Church (and I am not talking about fair criticism of the Church). See the Catholic League website if you have any doubts. Besides, Sotomayer, to take one example, is a non-practicing Catholic, and her constitutional jurisprudence hardly indicates a generous understanding of religious liberty.

I would rather have nine agnostic Jews who are not unfriendly to religious liberty on the bench than nine Nancy Pelosis.

One more thing. Notice how the New York Times discussed religious liberty in the article this week that touched on what Archbishop Dolan had to say. It put religious liberty in quotation marks.

All the best,

Bill Donohue