The Bigotry That Proudly Speaks Its Name From Dodger Stadium to Washington, indulging anti-Catholic sentiment is an elite pastime. By Gerard Baker
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he felt compelled, memorably, to make a declaration of political independence from the authorities of his Catholic faith.
His opponents had notoriously exploited anti-Catholic sentiment in key states to suggest that somehow a papist in the Oval Office would owe principal loyalty to the Vatican and would take instruction from the pope on critical questions of the presidency.
The issue had dogged him through Democratic primaries and threatened him in a close general election, so in remarks to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September, Mr. Kennedy sought to lay the calumny to rest: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”
Sixty years on, Joe Biden, the second Catholic president, hasn’t had to make a similar declaration. It would be nice to think that is because America is a more tolerant place than it was in 1960. But with each day of his presidency it seems the opposite is true. Anti-Catholic bigotry is entrenched among the left-wing elites who control the Democratic Party, and they have no fear that Mr. Biden in office would lift a finger to restrain it. Far from being a secret agent for the Vatican, the president seems content to be a very public agent for the continuous denigration of those who hold to traditional Catholic doctrine.
The grip this bigotry holds on our cultural life was on display last week in a revealing surrender by the Los Angeles Dodgers. As they planned for their annual Pride Night festivities next month, the Dodgers, the leading baseball franchise in a city that is one-third Catholic, initially thought it prudent to withdraw a plan to give an award to a famously ribald group whose signature is the mockery and vilification of traditional Catholic teaching on sexual mores.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence describe themselves facetiously as a “leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns.” They do community-service work but are most visible for their performative acts—frequently involving lewd depictions of sacred Catholic rituals that crudely lampoon the church’s precepts on homosexuality and transgenderism.
After an outcry over the disinvitation, the Dodgers reversed course and reinvited them last Monday. There is a wider political and cultural significance to the Dodgers’ craven genuflection to the powerful crowd who dominate our cultural conversation. The White House declined to comment on the matter, its press spokeswoman saying she wasn’t “going to get in the middle of who a sports team is going to honor or should honor or should not honor.” You don’t need a vivid imagination to ponder what the administration might have said if a sports team had invited an anti-trans or pro-life group to receive plaudits at a game.
And you don’t have to have any kind of imagination at all to recall that the administration of Barack Obama, with Joe Biden as its Catholic cheerleader, threw the book at the Little Sisters of the Poor, attempting to force them to offer contraceptive services mandated under an ObamaCare regulation. Nor to recall the Federal Bureau of Investigation memo earlier this year that called for the investigation of “radical-traditionalist” Catholics as a potential terrorist threat (a memo the bureau’s director disowned after a whistleblower made it public). Nor to remember the moment when Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Catholic Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, “The dogma lives loudly in you.”
The irony is that the traditions embodied in Catholic dogma have much less authority over the lives of Americans today than they did in 1960. The Dobbs decision, which Justice Barrett joined, didn’t impose religious doctrine, but handed decisions on abortion policy to the political authorities, where they belong. The church’s voice is often at least as loud these days on issues of social justice, immigration and climate change as it is on sex and marriage.
This is an age when political leaders, cultural elites and corporate leaders bleat endlessly about respect for the rights of all Americans. Catholics, however, are fair game—in a country whose president is a member of the church—for the mockery and derision of their most sacred beliefs.
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