“Can you believe those Catholics telling people how to vote?” That’s exactly what a woman said to her friends as she exited the elevator at the end of the workday. It was Election Day.
This anecdote wouldn’t amount to much if it were just that—an anecdote. But as pages 4-7 of this issue demonstrate, it reflected the sentiments of a large sector of our nation’s elite. Never before have we seen such an outburst of anti-Christian remarks aired in such a short period of time.
For example, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times said, “America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism.” But today, she maintained, “We’re entering a dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern.” We’re headed, she insisted, to “a scary, paranoid, regressive reality.” All because Christians won on many moral issues.
Dowd’s colleague, Paul Krugman, blamed Christians for wanting to “break down the barriers between church and state.” Similarly, civil rights attorney Mickey Wheatley wrote in the Los Angeles Times that we have become “a fundamentalist-leaning nation, increasingly hateful and hated.” What made these people crazy was the American electorate’s insistence that moral values are of utmost importance to them. And by that they meant the importance of being pro-life and pro-marriage.
For our part, we criticized Catholic politicians who broke from Catholic teachings on these subjects. This explains why we went after California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he backed public funding for embryonic stem-cell research, as well as Senator Kerry for being pro-abortion.
While our criticisms were measured, the remarks of the bigots were not. To demonstrate the depth of the hatred against Christians, consider that the Los Angeles Times printed the following letter on November 10: “So many Christians, so few lions.”
Not to be outdone, here’s how William Donohue replied: “The letter by Gerald S. Rellick that says, ‘So many Christians, so few lions,’ has a certain ring to it. But so does, ‘So many Jews, so few ovens,’ yet it is a sure bet that this newspaper would never publish such hate-filled bigotry. Get the point?”
In other words, reasoned discourse went out the window before and after the election. And most of the profoundly bigoted comments were made by secularists against people of faith.
