Wendy Kaminer pens an essay on "In Birth Control Debate, Religious Beliefs Don't Trump Rights."
Because, obviously, religious beliefs are not a "right" and, as a Constitutional scholar, she knows that the Constitution is really all about "abortion" and has nothing at all to say about the free exercise of religion.
But she really tosses the red-meat out for anti-Catholic bigots with her first paragraph:
You might expect the Catholic Bishops to recognize an Inquisition when they see one. But listening to their laments about the administration's "unprecedented assaults" on religious liberty, you'd think Barack Obama was the second coming of Torquemada.
Because, you know, Catholics are evil, evil people who were always launching Inquisitions and what-not.
Except that the "Inquisition" that Kaminer is an anti-Catholic myth. The reality is that the actual Inquisition provided procedural protections unheard of in secular courts, and the reach of the Inquisition never extended as far as Kaminer suggests. Moreover, in terms of death tolls, the Inquisition was a "piker" compared to liberals and "liberals in a hurry." Over its 450 year history only around 3,000 individual were executed as a result of the Inquisition; the French Revolution and Russian and Chinese Communists would exceed that number in a busy afternoon.
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