Word: nativists
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...Klux Klansmen have paraded around Florida lately, dispensing their old nativist bile and giving a bad name to an argument (AMERICA FOR AMERICANS, the picket signs say) that has more thoughtful and respectable proponents. The New Republic's columnist, TRB, a voice of intelligent liberalism, writes with some truculence: "Sooner or later, America must face reality. It is going to be painful ... The trouble is that huddled masses need jobs. The American frontier (worse luck) is gone." The American ideal of endless hospitality and refuge presupposed perpetually expanding resources. Now, says the argument, an emerging order of scarcity mandates...
...exuberance that the Pope excited, he came to the U.S. at a moment when the deeply rooted issue of anti-Catholicism had been stirring with signs of life. Some Catholics detect a new wave of the old bigotry. They see it not so much in America's residual nativist sentiment as in a certain liberal, intellectual contempt for the church's conservative approach to certain issues: birth control, homosexuality and, above all, the morally painful matter of abortion...
...could not survive such hordes of the ignorant and illiterate with their allegiances to a sinister wizard who dwelled in Rome surrounded by the skeletons of Borgias. (The Catholic immigrants, flocking together in a consciousness of their own differences, and with some desire to preserve them, seemed to confirm nativist fears.) When Pope Pius IX in the 1840s followed the example of European monarchs and sent a block of marble for the Washington Monument, a mob threw it into the Potomac. Through the 1850s, the violently antipapist Know-Nothing Party flourished, to be supplanted in succeeding generations...
...there persist in America two vestigial strains of anti-Catholicism. One is the old and somewhat fading nativist variety -the sort that led the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod in the past year to reaffirm its opinion that the Pope is the Antichrist. The second strain, considerably more disturbing be cause it is so much more "respectable," is the bigotry practiced by certain intellectuals, liberals, humanists and elitists...
Political Scientist Virgil Blum, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, considers the suit "the most serious challenge to the constitutional rights of American Catholics since the Nativist campaign of the 1850s." Even some liberal Catholics who disagree with their church's teaching on abortion are enraged by McRae. The Christian Action Council, a Protestant antiabortion lobby, is also upset. Significantly, the McRae alliance does not include the National Council of Churches, which is often part of church-state suits. Indeed, the N.C.C.'s theology commission pointedly declared this month that political activity on abortion...