JFK Weeps: NBC Host Smears Catholics

“MSNBC Host: Catholics Cannot Be Fair Supreme Court Judges,” as spotted by Jeff Dunetz today:

On her Monday program, MSNBC’s Joy Reid tried to give an overview of the issues surrounding the Hobby Lobby/Conestoga Wood Specialties case being argued before the Supreme Court the next day. She began with an explanation of how corporations gained peoplehood, but ended by implying six observant Catholic Judges could not rule fairly on the case.

Dunetz spots Reid ever so joyfully smearing the religion of the Supreme Court:

The court that will decide includes six Catholic justices, some of whom have not been shy about asserting their religion. And all of this is taking place as the country becomes more secular. Even as the fervently religious fight even harder than ever to push creationism in taxpayer funded schools, and on science TV shows. And where the question of corporate personhood has gone from whether the railroad has to pay its taxes to whether corporations can be religious people. The question is do you trust this court to make those decisions?

For some expert commentary on Reid’s smear, let’s go to a famous Catholic Democrat:

For 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. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

—John F. Kennedy, running for the White House on September 12, 1960, in a speech on his Catholic faith, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers.

Just a reminder of how much further to the left Kennedy’s Democrat successors have traveled since his death at the hands of a Communist during the Cold War.