For Democrats, no Catholic guilt

Carr: For Democrats, no Catholic guilt

Hatred of Christians is not new

Howie Carr Sunday, September 10, 2017

 Credit: AP photo

UNITED STATES - JUNE 8: Sen. Dianne Feinstein

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By now it’s hardly a surprise that so many national Democrats have nothing but contempt for Roman Catholics. But what is surprising is that they no longer even bother to hide their distaste for devout Christians.

Last week, at a Senate confirmation hearing for a Roman Catholic woman up for an federal appellate court judgeship in Indiana, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the Catholic nominee this: “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for, for years in this country.”

Three words: abortion, abortion, abortion.

Is it even remotely possible that Feinstein would have asked, say, a Muslim, if he believed any of the more militant, shall we say, passages in the Koran?

Of course not. Any Democrat who questions the Religion of Peace would be drummed out of the party and forever shunned in polite society. But Catholics — hey, anything goes.

But Democrats have always had an obsession about Catholics. They were the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and separate but equal. As late as 2010, a former exalted cyclops of the Klan was a ranking Democratic member of the Senate. Hillary Clinton proudly described Catholic-hating bigot Robert Byrd as her “mentor.”

But go back further. FDR, the Democratic president who presided over sending tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II, put Hugo Black on the Supreme Court.

Black, an Alabama Democrat, had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926 after delivering a series of 146 rabidly anti-Catholic speeches to his fellow Klansmen across the state.

The more things change ...

As appalling as Feinstein’s bigotry was, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) may have been even worse, if only because he claims to be a Catholic. Durbin asked this question of his fellow Catholic, Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor: “Do you consider yourself an ‘orthodox Catholic’?”

Sounds like something out of the early 1950s: “Are you now, or have you ever been … ?”

Durbin, a shameless machine hack, is the No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. Senate. The only group he despises more than Catholics is the American military, whom in 2005 he compared on the floor of the Senate to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime, Pol Pot or others, that had no concern for human beings.”

Speaking of Pol Pot, at this same Senate hearing last week another Democrat brain surgeon named Al Franken decided to get in on the cross burning. He mentioned a speech Barrett made to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that defends religious liberty for Christians. Naturally, Franken called it a “hate group” and compared those Christians to ... Pol Pot.

This hate speech at Professor Barrett’s confirmation hearing is probably the greatest outburst of anti-Catholicism among Democrats since ... October 2016. Just 11 months ago, Wiki­Leaks released a batch of emails among Hillary’s top campaign aides.

In them, they sneered that devout Catholics are “severely backwards.” They ridiculed media executives who had converted, and mocked parents who sent their children to Catholic schools. As for Catholic Hispanics — the Clintons described them as “needy Latinos.”

Shortly afterward, both Hillary and Donald Trump appeared together at the New York Archdiocese’s annual Al Smith dinner, named after the first Catholic nominee for president, against whom millions of pre-Feinstein Democrats voted because he was a ... well, you know.

Those emails showcased such appalling bigotry that Trump mentioned how incongruous it was for Hillary to appear before people she sneeringly called “deplorables” and “irredeemables.”

“Here she is tonight, in public,” Trump said, “pretending not to hate Catholics.”

Pretending is right. Same with the rest of them. But much to the chagrin of the modern Democratic party, Catholics are protected by the Constitution.

In September 1960, then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy spoke to a group of Protestant ministers in Houston.

“Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you,” he said. “While this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist.”

Sadly, today’s national Democrats don’t care how prescient JFK was. He was, after all, an orthodox Catholic.

Buy Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.