Better in their words…

People of faith in the United States will increasingly be denegrated, demonized, marginalized… pick your word.
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WSJ 10/14/2016
It’s no secret that progressive elites despise religion, but it’s still striking to see their contempt expressed so bluntly as in the leaked email chains that include Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The source for these documents is WikiLeaks. The Clinton campaign won’t confirm or deny their authenticity, and Mr. Podesta is implying that Russian intelligence hacked his email to help Donald Trump. Maybe so, and these hacks should be met with a forceful U.S. response. But the emails are now in the public domain, and the left celebrated WikiLeaks that damaged the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

The emails show that in 2011 Mr. Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, who is now a senior Clinton campaign official, received a note from their Center for American Progress colleague John Halpin. Mr. Halpin notes a media report that our News Corp. superiors, Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch and CEO Robert Thomson, raise their kids Catholic. Mr. Halpin observes that many leading conservatives are Catholic and opines that they “must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.”

Ms. Palmieri responds, “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

This is a window into the intolerant secular soul of the Democratic establishment and perhaps explains why it has done so little to accommodate requests for religious liberty from the Little Sisters of the Poor. Team Clinton apparently views religion merely as a justification people adopt for their views on politics and gender. Don’t Clinton campaign advisers think it’s at least possible that a person might be motivated by sincere belief?

Mr. Halpin’s response to Ms. Palmieri was: “Excellent point. They can throw around ‘Thomistic’ thought and ‘subsidiarity’ and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.” We’ll leave Thomism to the theologians, but subsidiarity is a concept that the left would do well to consider. It is the idea that social problems are best addressed by the nearest and smallest competent authority, rather than by a faraway state. Individual acts of charity can be highly effective, but the Clinton platform sees virtue only in a centralized bureaucracy sending out welfare checks regardless of results.

Clinton advisers would also rather force the church to accept their teachings. In 2012 activist Sandy Newman emailed Mr. Podesta to say there “needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship.” As if people are forced to believe at the point of a gun. Mr. Podesta responds with an update on what he’s been doing to prepare “for a moment like this.”

This disdain for people of faith helps explain today’s political polarization and why so many people are willing to support a blunt, avenging force like Donald Trump. Religious Americans know that much of the political establishment detests them.

Imagine the media bonfire if emails surfaced from the Trump campaign with similar comments about Islam, but the anti-Catholic emails have received little media attention. To the progressives who dominate American culture and politics, anti-Christian views are the most socially acceptable form of bigotry.