Anti-Catholic bigotry has a long and ugly history in the United States, but Bill Donohue and the Catholic League have been at the forefront – fighting for religious liberty for American Catholics for decades.
Fox Nation host Todd Starnes described Donohue as the guy you want “right next to you in the foxhole because he is tough as nails.”
Donohue was a guest on The Todd Starnes Radio Show Friday to discuss issues of religious liberty, most notably the recent ruling from the Washington State Supreme Court that declared a Southern Baptist florist had to administer flowers to a same-sex wedding.
He said the same people who are attacking Barronelle Stutzman are the same people trying to “shove their secular militant values down our Christian throats.”
“They’re not victims, they’re victimizing us by saying you have no conscience protections, you have no conscience rights no conscientious objector status,” Donohue said. “They’re simply saying now you’ve got to affirm our marriage.”
The president of the Catholic League added that it was “one thing not to discriminate against an individual,” but that it was entirely another to “force me to affirm an institutional arrangement of marriage which makes no sense whatsoever.”
Starnes piped in, noting that Stutzman has gay customers and gay employees, but is just unwilling to take part in a celebration of something she disagrees in.
“I’ve never found any Catholic, Protestant, anybody who’s ever said if you happen to be a homosexual I’m not going to sell a candy bar to you,” Donohue replied. “I’ve never heard of such a case. The only cases I know about which goes beyond the individual into the question of the institution of marriage.”
Donohue recently published a book, “Common Sense Catholicism,” which he says points out things “people need to hear,” and that he “doesn’t live in a world of fiction.”
“But a lot of people do, particularly in higher education,” he went on. “We need to stick to our guns and keep our feet on the ground and don’t listen to these wizards in the higher education.”
The conversation on religious liberty didn’t stop with the Stutzman case, Donohue also weighed in on a recent spat in the Senate Judiciary committee between Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Trump district judicial nominee Michael Bogren, who once compared a Catholic family’s opposition to same-sex marriage to the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.
The KKK is notorious for its racism, but it is also virulently anti-Catholic, making the comparison all the more offensive.
Donohue said that Bogren should have told the committee that “the Klan is a racist terrorist organization and the Catholic Church has done great wonders throughout Western civilization,” but “he never even had the decency to say that.”