Reply #15: I remember truly foul anti-Catholic flyers circulating during the 1960 campaign.

[Peace Patriot]

Really filthy stuff. It shocked me and I didn't understand it at 16. I know now that it is a classic Puke/corpo-fascist strategy to pit one group of poor people against another and to promote scapegoats, to distract people from who is stealing all the resources and money. Then it was Catholics; not it's gays and brown people. And of course blacks have often been the favorite scapegoat, to this day. It was the most unforgivable thing that Daddy Bush did as president, in my view, playing the race card with the "Willy Horton" ads against Michael Dukakis. It is the most irresponsible, reprehensible, low-minded, dirty rotten tactic to scapegoat a racial group that has suffered slavery, lynchings, beatings, rapes and every kind of oppression for hundreds of years of our history. It is as cynical as it can get. And it is furthermore TRAITOROUS to our best qualities as a people--our sense of justice and fairness, our desire that everyone have a chance, our religious and racial tolerance in the most multi-cultural, multi-racial country that ever existed, and the only one that has existed by deliberate policy. America, the "melting pot." For a political leader to pander to racism in THIS country is a particularly onerous and unforgivable crime.

That anti-Catholic bigotry taught me a lot. It sensitized me to other forms of bigotry.