Why Evangelicals Love Santorum, Hated JFK

CNN ^ | 3/1/12 | Michael Wolraich

[marshmallow]

(CNN) -- Sen. Rick Santorum, who is campaigning to become America's second Catholic president, disagrees from the bottom of his gut with the first Catholic to hold the office.

In October, he told a Catholic university audience that when he read the 1960 speech in which John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he "almost threw up." More recently, he elaborated on his dyspeptic condition in an ABC television interview, calling JFK's credo "an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960."

But the Baptist ministers who witnessed Kennedy's speech surely felt differently. In the 1960s, evangelical leaders were not concerned that Kennedy was too secular; they were concerned that he was too Catholic.

For most of American history, the Protestant majority has regarded Catholics with deep suspicion. Many of the 13 colonies banned Catholics from public office and prohibited Catholic rituals. Priests were banished and sometimes executed.

After independence, the Constitution protected Catholics from the worst persecutions of the Colonial period, but discrimination persisted, and anti-Catholic paranoia raged with an intensity that would have made Glenn Beck blush. One popular book, "Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States," warned of a secret Jesuit plot to deliver America to the Austrian empire. Its author was Samuel Morse, co-inventor of the telegraph.

[RobbyS]

Pro-immigration? Well, until the 1020s, immigration was open, and there was always a disquiet about the numbers and kinds of people coming in. Ben Franklin did not think we would reach 100 million for several centuries. Thought it would take that long to span the continent. Had not a clue about the rapidity of industrial development. and he was the most far-sighted of the founders. The driving force of immigration has always been the economy, since 1607. Never enough hands to do the work. That’s why no limitation until the 1920s. Myself I would love to see a pause like we had then. If we had had an extra ten million Europeans to handle in 1930, no telling what might have happened.