Last week Catholic League president William Donohue listed the anti-religious commentary that many cultural elites offered in the aftermath of the election.  Here are some new ones:

*In today’s New York Times, Gary Hart proclaims, “There is a disturbing tendency to insert theocratic principles into the vision of America’s role in the world.”

*DeWayne Wickham of USA Today frets, “Putting God in the public square runs the risk of turning our democracy into a theocracy.”

*Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts Jr. warns that social conservatives are “the soldiers of the new American theocracy.”

*Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe, always fearful of morality, says people like her “don’t want their country racked by the fundamentalist religious wars we see across the world.”

*Another worried soul, author Barbara Ehrenreich, argues we are polarized because of “Christian fundamentalism.”

*Syndicated columnist Byron Williams sounds the alarms by noting we are moving “closer to a theocracy.”

*Tony Kushner, the anti-Catholic playwright, believes we now have “a kind of unholy alliance between theocracy and plutocracy.”

*Cynthia Tucker, an editorialist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, blames “black churchgoers” for using the Bible “as a bludgeon” against gays, saying “homophobia” now “oozes across lines of color.”

*Similarly, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial says the rejection of gay marriage means “the old bigotry against homosexuals has not abated.”

NOTE: Thus do our cultural elites prove once again why they are known as “a herd of independent thinkers.”

 Catholic League president William Donohue says the following examples, taken from today’s newspapers and Internet sites, prove we need to build more asylums:

*In the Wichita Eagle, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press wonders if President Bush understands that “he was not chosen god, bishop, rabbi or high priest?”

*The publisher of Harper’s magazine, John R. MacArthur, blasts both President Bush and Senator Kerry for advertising “their subservience to Jesus Christ and the Christian god, without the least concern about whether it might offend me” and others like him.

*Ex-seminarian Garry Wills writes in the New York Times, “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?”  He ends by saying that “moral zealots” will scare moderate Republicans with their “jihads.”

*Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who hates Bush, says the President “ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq.”

*Dowd’s colleague, Thomas Friedman, accuses Bush’s base of wanting “to extend the boundaries of religion” and of promoting “intolerance.”

*Without providing one example, Margaret Carlson opines in the Los Angeles Times that Catholic bishops “demonized” Kerry’s supporters by warning them “they could go to hell just for voting for him.”

*Sheryl McCarthy of Newsday accuses Bush of “pandering to people’s fears, petty interests and prejudices” against gays and others.

*Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Salon.com, nervously observes that the new senate majority is “more theocratic than Republican.”

*In the same spot, Sean Wilentz embarrasses his fellow Princeton faculty by saying, “religious fanaticism” has “seized control of the federal government.”

The New York Post reported today that an anti-Christian poster was featured at a polling place in Manhattan’s SoHo district.  The poster showed a soldier pointing a gun alongside the words, “Say it, one nation under God.  Say it, you love Jesus.  Say it.”

The poster was on a wall in the Puffin Room art gallery on Broome Street; it was in clear view of citizens waiting on line to vote.  There was another poster that depicted Attorney General John Ashcroft as a Nazi.  Ed Skyler, the press secretary to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, denounced the posters as “totally inappropriate.”

Catholic League president William Donohue is issuing a formal complaint to the Board of Elections today, and released the following comment to the media:

“I am writing to John Ravitz, executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, registering a complaint about the anti-Christian poster in the Puffin Room gallery polling site.  I want him to investigate the veracity of the remark made by Carl Rosenstein, the owner of the gallery, who said that the Board of Elections found no problem with the posters.

“No Catholic or Protestant should be expected to endure this kind of harassment while waiting on line to vote.  We will be looking to Mr. Ravitz to discipline those officials who gave the okay to this polling place.  His response will determine whether we will commence litigation.

“That the New Yorkers who witnessed this hate speech were apparently not disturbed by it does not speak well for them, and it certainly does not speak well for Mr. Rosenstein that he allowed it.  Apparently, some New Yorkers have an infinite tolerance for intolerance, just so long as it is aimed at Christians.”