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Dear Catholic President

A fellow Catholic begs Joe Biden to call off the progressive anti-Catholic bigots
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We’ve seen lots of positive press on Joe Biden’s Catholicism. In this open letter, Mary Eberstadt, also a Catholic, appeals to Biden to stand up for fellow Catholics who are feeling the lash from liberals. Excerpts:

Mr. President, the election has emboldened your liberal and progressive allies to target for ostracism and punishment a new band of “deplorables”: your fellow Catholics.

Exhibit A: On January 24, 2021, Twitter locked the account of Catholic World Report, the online magazine of Ignatius Press. IP is the largest Catholic publishing house in the Anglosphere. It issues volumes by popes, cardinals, bishops and other men and women of the cloth, as well as lay authors (this one included). CWR is its news arm. Like other Ignatius Press publications, the site leans in toward history and scholarship. Its essay section recently featured one piece on the Gnostic heresy, another on the future of Western civilization and another comparing translations of St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Mr. President, the notion that cerebral CWR could run afoul of any “community standards” is prima facie risible. So how did this Catholic outlet find itself in the censorship crosshairs? Because of a news item reading as follows:

Biden plans to nominate Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological man identifying as a transgender woman who has served as Pennsylvania’s health secretary since 2017, to be HHS Assistant Secretary for Health. Levine is also a supporter of the contraceptive mandate.

Without further explanation, Twitter ruled that CWR had violated its rules “against hateful conduct.”

Days later, authorities relented and restored the account. But the message they sent was loud and menacing. If a cultural authority as established as Ignatius Press can be punished online for being Catholic, who will be spared?

More:

Exhibit F: Your election has not only emboldened progressive muscle-flexers on social media. It also appears to have encouraged what might be called anti-Catholic chic—the kind that emanates from your allies in liberal-Left journalism.

A recent essay in The New Republic about Catholic theologians and their supposedly nefarious influence over America’s judicial branch is a case in point. Its accompanying illustration features Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a bishop’s miter—an ugly visual trope that dates back to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings of the 1850s and beyond. The piece speaks darkly of a “50-year saga of Catholic intellectual and theological penetration of the halls of power.”

Replace “Catholics” with any other religious affiliation, or any identity group, in that sentence, and you will understand just how bigoted such fillips sound.

Mr. President, you are the most visible Catholic political leader in the world. You have a unique opportunity, once again, to demonstrate your stated commitment to being president for all. It’s the bully pulpit. Call off the woke online haters stalking your fellow Christians. Call out the ugly, un-American tradition of which they are part. Tell your progressive allies, and everyone else, that prejudice remains prejudice—even when it is aimed against people who did not vote for you.

Read it all. 

 

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