There is a game being played in this presidential campaign about religion, but the players are not the candidates—the culprits are the pundits and activists.

It started on May 3, when Chris Matthews asked Governor Mitt Romney during MSNBC’s Republican presidential debate, “What do you say to Roman Catholic bishops who would deny communion to elected officials who support abortion rights?” The question was designed to get Romney to inject himself—as a prospective president—into the internal matters of the Catholic Church. But it didn’t work. Romney made it clear that the bishops “can do whatever the heck they want.”

Then we had CNN’s Lou Dobbs trying to blame Romney for injecting religion into the campaign, simply because the Mormon candidate defended himself against the bigoted remarks by Rev. Al Sharpton. On May 9, Dobbs commented, “To hear a discussion, this early, in a presidential debate, about religion, one or the other, casting aspersions, or having aspersions cast against their faith when there are so many important issues. It is truly remarkable.” What is most remarkable is that the person responsible for making Romney’s religion an issue was sitting right in front of Dobbs—namely his atheist soul mate, Christopher Hitchens.

It was Hitchens who had attacked Romney’s religion, provoking Sharpton to say, “Those who really believe in God will defeat him [Romney] anyways.” Hitchens, following Dobbs, then tried to pretend that it was amazing to see “people of other faiths denouncing each other,” as if the ones leading the charge against Romney’s religion are Christians!

Now some are calling upon Romney to have “a JFK moment” and explain why the public should trust a Mormon as president. In 1960, Catholic presidential candidate John Kennedy had to answer to anti-Catholic Protestants.  Today, Romney is being asked to answer to anti-Mormon bigots, most of whom are secularists.

And these secularists call themselves enlightened, tolerant, inclusive and champions of diversity. They are anything but.

On May 7, Rev. Al Sharpton debated noted atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, at the New York Public Library on the question of God’s existence.

In the course of the debate, Hitchens made a snide reference to a Mormon candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Governor Mitt Romney. When Sharpton had an opportunity to respond, he said, “As for the Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don’t worry about that; that’s a temporary situation.”

Rev. Al Sharpton says he has been preaching for 48 of his 52 years and that he was ordained a minister at the ripe old age of nine. Therefore, he should know better than to insult people of faith, independent of religious affiliation. What he said about Romney was reprehensible.

Applying the same standard of justice Sharpton invoked against shock-jock Don Imus for his racist quip, this should finish Sharpton’s career. But will it? It is up to Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards to denounce Sharpton. After all, they all condemned Imus and all of them recently spoke at Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in New York City.

Sharpton is more than a man of the cloth. He is a former presidential contender who is integrally tied to the Democratic party. Therefore, it is incumbent that he be held accountable for his bigoted outburst.

On its May 10 front page, the New York Times offered the headline “In Large Immigrant Family, Religion Guided 3 Held in Fort Dix Plot” for an article about the men arrested for plotting a terror attack against soldiers based in New Jersey.

Inside the paper, another headline read, “Suspects Are Described as Working People for Whom Religion Was a Guide.”

It is curious that the Times used the word “religion” not just once, but twice, to describe what influenced the men, and didn’t use the term “radical Islam” in either headline.  One could wonder if  “Catholic” or “Christian” would have been there if either adjective could be applied to the men.

This fits the agenda of certain secularists who blame all religions for many of the world’s ills.

In a May 14 story on Pope Benedict XVI’s address to bishops in Brazil, the Associated Press reported that the pope “defended the church’s often bloody campaign to Christianize indigenous people….” The same day, a story by McClatchy newspapers said that the pope “defended the Roman Catholic Church’s often bloody campaign to Christianize indigenous people.”

There are several curious things about this matter. Did AP crib from McClatchy or vice versa? Or did they both rip a page from the same playbook? Secondly, it smacks of more than interpretive journalism to make such an accusation—it reads like propaganda. Thirdly, what exactly did the pope say that allowed these two media giants to come to such a fantastic conclusion? Did the pope really defend violence?

The Catholic League asked the two reporters, Alan Clendenning of AP and Jack Chang of McClatchy, to explain how they  wound up with identical language; they were also asked to pinpoint where the pope defended violence. Clendenning never spoke to the first issue; Chang said, “I came up with that line on my own, for better or for worse.” Neither reporter was able to pinpoint where the pope justified violence. That’s because he never did.

By contrast, the New York Times covered the pope’s speech and nowhere mentioned anything about him justifying violence against anyone. So how could the nation’s largest news organization (AP) and third-largest newspaper publisher (McClatchy) screw things up so badly?

AP subsequently released a revised story that amended the initial one.  Nonetheless, this was journalism at its worst. The Catholic League registered a complaint at both media outlets.

Eighteen Democratic members of Congress sent out a statement dated May 10 criticizing Pope Benedict XVI for his supposed stance on Catholic politicians and abortion.

The Democrats chided the pope for allegedly agreeing with Mexican bishops for invoking excommunication in dealing with Catholic lawmakers who voted to legalize abortion.

These Democrats are twice a disgrace. First, they have their facts wrong: no Mexican bishop ever invoked excommunication against any lawmaker for legalizing abortion. What happened was at first confusing, but was quickly clarified.

On May 9, speaking aboard a plane flying to Brazil, the pope initially gave the impression that he favored excommunication of the Mexican lawmakers. Later that same day his remarks were amended, making moot the idea that he favored such a penalty.

On May 10, the Vatican presented the pope’s official statement. That statement did not speak to excommunicating anyone—it simply restated Church teaching that Catholic legislators who advocate legalized abortion should refrain from taking Communion. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman on the scene, said that “if the bishops haven’t excommunicated anyone, it’s not that the pope wants to do so.”

The Catholic Democrats who signed the statement had plenty of time to get their facts straight. But in a defensive rush to judgment, they decided to take their game to the pope; thus did they disgrace themselves a second time.

“Advancing respect for life and for the dignity of every human being is, as our church has taught us, our own life’s mission,” the Democrats said. It’s not easy to reconcile that position with their voting record on abortion, which includes (in many instances) opposition to the partial-birth abortion ban. Evidently, respecting the life and dignity of every human being doesn’t extend to children who are 80 percent born.

These Catholic Democrats need to hire some fact checkers. And while they’re at it, it might be good for them to hire a practicing Catholic bioethicist.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, one of America’s most prominent religious leaders, passed away on May 15 at the age of 73.

Jerry Falwell did more to mobilize evangelicals than any other leader in the nation. He not only inspired them to become active politically, he encouraged them to rethink their positions on a host of issues, especially abortion and school choice.

In 1979, Falwell established the Moral Majority, welcoming Roman Catholics into the organization. He also founded Liberty University, an institution of higher education that quickly made its mark on American society.

Falwell was a great fighter in the culture wars. He was both an exemplary evangelical and a renowned social activist, always exuding the kind of moral courage so often lacking in religious leaders of all faiths. He will be sorely missed.

Hiding the truth about something is just as dishonest as telling a lie.  Last month, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) was guilty of both forms of dishonesty.

On May 1, Catholic League president Bill Donohue attended a private screening of “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center” and was impressed at how the film shows that most Muslims are not terrorists.  PBS officials consider the film to be “alarmist,” though, and have refused to air it.

The only thing alarmist about this film is PBS—a public entity that takes taxpayer money for an allegedly public service but spikes a documentary that does not accord with its politics. In the insular world in which PBS officials live, the real Muslims are Islamists—radical extremists who want to kill the infidel (read: mostly Jews and Christians). Yet this documentary demonstrates that most Muslims are not extremists. Which begs the question: Is PBS anti-Muslim for trying to censor this look at the way most Muslims live?

Pope Benedict XVI was unfairly criticized last year for citing Islam as a religion that too often allows reason to become unbuckled from faith. “Islam vs. Islamists” offers proof that he was right. It also shows, as the Holy Father understands, that most Muslims do not incline to violence.

 By casting extreme Islamists as unrepresentative of Muslims, “Islam vs. Islamists” is able to do more to generate positive relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Western world than anything PBS has previously aired. Yet so far PBS has kept it off the air, thus contributing to the ugly stereotype that most Muslims are machete-wielding thugs.

PBS had no qualms, however, about airing the docudrama, “The Secret Files of the Inquisition,” on May 9 and May 16.   What many people have heard or read about the Catholic Church during the Inquisition just isn’t true—that’s what honest historians say—but this mattered little to PBS.  It advertised “The Secret Files of the Inquisition” on its website with an eerie black background depicting all the “T’s” as crosses. All that was missing was Dracula’s voiceover.   “For over half a millennium a system of mass terror reigned,” the PBS website said.  “Thousands were subject to secret courts, torture and punishment.” This is plainly dishonest.

As British historian Henry Kamen has shown in his magisterial work, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, almost all the conventional wisdom about the Inquisition is wrong. By comparison with secular courts at the time, the Inquisition’s methods were more humane, e.g., defendants could be represented by an attorney. Edward Peters, another student of the period, says, “Modern historiography has completely blown the old Inquisition propaganda out of the water. No one seriously contends that hundreds of thousands or millions were killed, or that the Protestant countries were any more humane than Spain was.”

Indeed, scholars today refer to the old school mythology as “the Black Legend,” a tale of anti-Catholic lies spun by Elizabethan England. No wonder that in 1994, BBC/A&E aired “The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition.”

Of the approximately 125,000 cases tried by the Spanish Inquisition, 1 percent resulted in the death penalty. Of the so-called witch hunts, where women were burned at the stake, secular courts executed 50,000 (not all of whom were women); fewer than 100 were killed by the Inquisition.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once compared the killings that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937 and 1938 to those that took place during the Spanish Inquisition.  He found that 20,000 were killed per month in the U.S.S.R. and 10 were killed per month during the Inquisition. But don’t look for such comparisons on PBS. To do so might get in the way of the truth.

So there it is—PBS denies the public a positive glimpse into the lives of everyday Muslims, while airing an anti-Catholic smear flick.  It’s hard to miss the politics behind the programming decisions made at PBS.

Every organization has its bad apples and dirty laundry, but most people know that this alone doesn’t disqualify any group of people from exercising the freedoms of speech and religion.  Unless that group is the Catholic Church, that is—plenty of people use the sex abuse scandal to try to silence the Church, especially when the Church voices opinions that these people don’t like.

When asked on May 9 about the pope’s comments regarding possible excommunication of Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said, “I’ve always thought also that those bishops and archbishops who for decades hid pederasts and are now being protected by the Vatican should be indicted.”

If Senator Leahy’s comments reflect the new face of the religion-friendly Democratic Party, the party has a long way to go.

Literally thousands of incidents involving “creative liberties” with Catholic practices have come to the attention of the Catholic League over the years.  Many of them are minor in nature, if not entirely innocent.  However, the April 29 episode of the Fox TV show, “Family Guy,” definitely crossed a line.

The program assaulted and demeaned the Eucharist, with references such as “cookies” and “punch” being used when speaking about the Body and Blood of Christ.  Such language is unacceptable, even in a cartoon show.

Calling Catholics “wafer-munchers” was also insulting, but nothing was worse than a depiction of the Eucharist being vomited on the church floor.

Also featured was a portrayal of a priest threatening a baby with violence for crying during Mass; church members were shown thinking the baby needed an exorcism.

Innocent jokes about a religion are fine, but it’s out of bounds when a faith is demeaned as horrendously as Catholicism was on “Family Guy.”

This wasn’t the first time the Catholic League has had to deal with “Family Guy.”  An episode in December 2005, for instance, disparaged the sacrament of Baptism and the use of Holy Water.  An April 2000 episode featured an offensive remark about Holy Communion.

We contacted Peter Liguori, President of Entertainment at Fox Broadcasting, about the situation. We were awaiting a response at press time.

After the Supreme Court upheld the partial birth abortion ban on April 18, Bill Donohue predicted that anti-Catholic bigots would “go bonkers over the fact that all five of the justices who voted against infanticide are Roman Catholic.” Donohue’s prediction was right on target.

Most of the bigots expressed their anti-Catholicism orally or in print. But at least one, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Tony Auth, did so artistically. Auth’s contribution to the anti-Catholic bigotry that followed the Supreme Court decision appears above. His cartoon was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and in the online version of the New York Times on April 20.