To talk about "discrimination" against Roman Catholics implies institutional bias, something that long existed in an overwhelmingly Protestant United States (and certainly affected other groups as well, Jews and Mormons to name but two).
But few would argue such a condition afflicts Catholics today. Instead, what gets called discrimination is much more likely a matter of individual bias. That doesn't make it less easy to bear--after all, we're talking about insults here. But it does make it considerably less dangerous socially.
Let's not forget how outright discrimination manifested itself against American Catholics--in mob attacks on people and property in the 19th century, in real limits on educational and employment opportunities in the early and mid-20th, and throughout these periods in a pervasive though unfounded suspicion that members of a heirarchical church could never quite accommodate themselves to living in a democracy.
We live in a vastly different time--and have for close to half a century--thanks in no small part to the often unsung work of uncounted people (ordained and lay alike) who have sought to break down the barriers of bigotry and to cultivate common social and ethical ground across enduring religious lines. Some of these individuals can be called downright heroic--Catholics like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin; Protestants like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and Jews like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. By and large, we're less religiously at odds with each other in the United States for their efforts and for those of many others, far less well-known.
Does that mean that individuals left and right aren't going to swing away at some aspect of Catholic (or Muslim or Jewish or Mormon) teaching that they don't like, or that some particularly militant group isn't going to declare everyone beyond its own boundaries to be morally doomed? Of course not.
In a democracy that encodes freedom of speech alongside free exercise of religion in its first, fundamental statement of liberty, some people are just going to act on their urge to sneer at another's faith. That's their freedom.
But when such attacks become truly venomous, and especially when they take place out in the open, in public venues, it's really up to the rest of us to condemn them for what they are and to do so in the name of a civil society whose health we all should value.
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