The Genteel Bigotry Of the Fashionable Leftish Libertarains Is In Line With The Ass End of American History

Liberalish blogger Duncan Black's anti-Catholic scribble was the topic of a post I tossed off yesterday on my non-serious blog, but it needs to be gone into a bit more than I did.  Here's his post, verbatim.

Freedum

It takes an atheist, or perhaps even a Protestant, to get why this stuff matters.

There are no Protestant supremos. In my experience even hard core US Protestants tend to have a greater understanding that even Christianity, let alone religion generally, isn't all the same thing.

I can't account for what Duncan Black's experience is but his idea of Catholicism is a throw back to the 19th century Knownothings  and, as I pointed out yesterday,  the Klu Klux Klan of the 1920s.   I noted how the future justice Hugo Black participated in anti-Catholic activities as a member of the Klan,  being paid by them to get off Edwin Roscoe Stephenson (a species of Episcopalian minister) for murdering Father James Coyle, whose great crime was officiating at the marriage of his daughter to a Puerto Rican man who she had fallen in love with.   It being the Klan ridden Alabama of the 1920s, as anti-Catholic as the comment threads on Duncan's blog, you won't be anymore surprised to hear that Stephenson got off than you have been if he'd murdered Coyle for being black.   

Or, if you want to talk about the proud history of anti-Catholicism on the Supreme Court, you could go right back to the start with John Jay, who advocated banning Catholics in New York from holding public office but had to settle for a provision that deprived Catholics from citizenship unless they renounced the authority of the Pope in, not only civil matters, but ecclesiastical matters, as well.  That law stayed on the books until the 1820s.   

I doubt Black has ever read much about the deeply embedded history of Protestant anti-Catholicism in the British colonies and the American states created out of them but it is a history full of murder, violence, attacks on institutions and even mob burning of churches and even convents and girl's schools by protestant nativists whose water he is still carrying as an atheist today.   Here's a brief description of one of the better known incidents, the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown Massachusetts.  

August 11th was an oppressively hot night. An unruly, drunken mob of laborers, sailors, apprentices, and hoodlums gathered at the gates of the convent. They demanded to see one of the sisters who figured in a number of the rumors. When the Mother Superior refused, the men began to tear down the convent's fence and used the wood to feed a roaring bonfire. The fire alarm was sounded, but Charlestown's Protestant firefighters did nothing to fight the blaze.

The rioters shattered the convent's windows, broke down the front door, and burst into the building. They went on a rampage, destroying furniture, musical instruments, books, and religious items, and then set the building on fire. The nuns gathered their terrified students and barely escaped out the back, fleeing through a hole that the Mother Superior ripped in the back fence. Dressed only in their nightclothes, they ran through the fields to a farmhouse a half-mile away, where they watched the convent burning. By daybreak, it lay in smoldering ruins.

The next day, a committee of respected citizens was formed to investigate the rumors and the riot. The nuns were cleared of any illicit activities; 13 men were arrested for rioting. When the case came to trial, the jury convicted only one man, and the governor later pardoned him.

The convent was never rebuilt. Its charred remains stood for the next 40 years as a reminder of the virulent prejudice against Catholics. The site was leveled in 1875, and the bricks were incorporated into Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Perhaps Duncan could rouse himself from his stylish ennui to look into another famous incident in the city he lives in, Philidelphia, where an anti-Catholic riot included the burning of St. Augustine's church.  

A number of historians, including Arthur Schlesinger Sr. have noted that anti-Catholicism is one of the deepest entrenched and most potent of the bigotries that have afflicted the United States,  “Anti-Catholicism is the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.”   While I'm not entirely in agreement that it is any deeper than the hatred of black people or the native population, it certainly runs deep.   It can even survive and thrive when the nativist Protestantism, one of the diseases the new nation inherited from the British establishment, is abandoned for the fashionable atheism that Black tried to inoculate himself with.   As I noted, he seemed to get cold feet in the comments.

i'm not asserting that protestants are more tolerant, just that they (broad brush) tend to have greater awarenesss that not all christianity is the same.

i wasn't raised with any religion. it's all weird to me.

I would recommend that  the boy would like to do a tiny little bit of research into the topic of Catholicism, which contains a number of separate churches with quite distinct traditions and which recognizes the apostolic succession of any number of non-Catholic denominations, even some of those quite anti-Catholic in their history.  But he doesn't seem to be able to be bothered to do much in the way of background research.   

Maybe he could have noticed that in those dissenting to the ruling he complained about Justice Sotomayor is listed.  As I recall some of his Eschatots complained that they were putting another Catholic on the court when Barack Obama nominated her.   He might even discover previous rulings in the same line in which the quite protestant Rehnquist and O'Connor proposed that such prayer isn't really religious but constitutes some bizarre form of "civic religion".   Which is an idea that my Catholic childhood would lead me to think was an institutionalized practice of taking God's name in vain.   Or he might want to see how various protestant groups came down in the amicus briefs filed in the case.   But that would be something like work, the results of which would not run up his flagging hit counts and which I'm sure his remaining readers would ignore as booorrrrring!.