Religious liberty for everyone except the stupid, superstitious and wrong.

Juicy Ecumenism points out the the apparent irony of the liberal United Methodist Church supporting an illiberal restriction of liberty:

Many prominent evangelicals who approve of contraceptives still understand the assault on religious liberty by COMPELLING Roman Catholic institutions to fund them under Obamacare. Some evangelical schools have joined in litigation against the contraceptive/abortifacient mandate, understanding it poses a threat to all.

Sadly, the chief of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society enthusiastically endorses this attack on the First Amendment.

“Why is it that the liberty of those who are denied basic health-care services is not at issue?” asked Jim Winkler in his recent weekly email. “Contraception benefits society. It reduces the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, reduces the need for abortions, and assists families to plan the number and spacing of their children.”

Winkler argues for contraception, but he doesn’t really admit the debate is not about contraception but about the federal government FORCING religious institutions to violate their own beliefs. What other religious freedoms is Winkler willing to forego in favor of advancing the coercive federal Welfare & Entitlement State?

In typical fashion for many liberal Protestant elites, he claims that modernity makes traditional Roman Catholics and other believers morally irrelevant. “There were those who argued that racial segregation was biblically mandated, that keeping women out of church leadership was sanctioned by God, and that destruction of the environment is approved by God,” he recalls. “All of these notions were and are wrong.”

To me, what is interesting is the historical continuity of liberal intolerance between the Kulturkampf and today.  In the 1870's it was German liberals who promoted the German state's oppression of Catholics precisely on the ground that Catholics were superstitious, stood in the way of modernity, and ignorant. In my review of Michael B. Gross' s "The War against Catholicism," I observed:

As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)
 

The interesting thing, from a historical perspective, is how the liberal argument hasn't changed: it's as if "the intolerance of intolerance" meme is bred into liberalism's genetic source material.

Liberal Intolerance.

You. Must. Approve:

In 2008, Dr. Turek was hired by Cisco to design and conduct a leadership and teambuilding program for about fifty managers with your Remote Operations Services team. The program took about a year to conduct, during which he also conducted similar sessions for another business unit within Cisco. That training earned such high marks that in 2010 he was asked to design a similar program for about 200 managers within Global Technical Services. Ten separate eight-hour sessions were scheduled.


The morning after completing the seventh session earlier this year, a manager in that session —who was one of the better students in that class—phoned in a complaint. It had nothing to do with content of the course or how it was conducted. In fact, the manager commented that the course was “excellent” as did most who participated. His complaint regarded Dr. Turek’s political and religious views that were never mentioned during class, but that the manager learned by “googling” Dr. Turek after class.

The manager identified himself as gay and was upset that Dr. Turek had written this book providing evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for the country. Although the manager didn’t read the book, he said that the author’s view was inconsistent with “Cisco values” and could not be tolerated. (Dr. Turek is aware of this because he was in the room when his call came in.) The manager then contacted an experienced HR professional at Cisco who had Dr. Turek fired that day without ever speaking to him. The HR professional also commended the manager for “outing” Dr. Turek.

This firing had nothing to do with course content—the program earned very high marks from participants. It had nothing to do with budget constraints—the original contract was paid in full recently. A man was fired simply because of his personal political and religious beliefs—beliefs that are undoubtedly shared by thousands of your very large and diverse workforce.

I assume the intent of Cisco’s value of “inclusion and diversity” is to ensure that people in that diverse workforce will work together cordially and professionally even when they inevitably disagree on certain political, moral or religious questions. Please note that Dr. Turek agrees with that value and was demonstrating it. The manager and HR professional were not. Dr. Turek was being inclusive working with them. They were being exclusive by refusing to work with him, even though his viewpoint was never discussed during his work at Cisco. (Ironically, the people who say they are fighting for “tolerance” are often the most intolerant!).

This is story that demontrates Windthorst's "organizing principle of liberalism" - "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance"...."unfreedom" and "intolerance' being defined as "people who disagree with us."

Book Review: A distant mirror - Liberals versus Catholics in 19th Century Germany

The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)

Go here and vote for my review.

I read The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)as part of my project to explore the relationship of Adolf Hitler and Nazism to Catholicism and Christianity. The project has resulted in me going deeper into German religious history.


My reading started with The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigman-Gall, which discussed the Nazis attempt to draw German Protestantism into the Nazi system. The Nazis originally had a great deal of hope that this effort would work in that Protestantism and German Nationalism were not inherently at odds with each other. It was the Nazi view that to be a good German meant being a good Protestant, and vice versa. In order to accomplish this, the Nazis made efforts to remake Protestant Christianity in the image of Nazi anti-semitism by removing the Old Testament and reconstructing the image of Jesus as the original anti-semite. In their efforts, the Nazis were amazingly successful in that a majority of Protestant German churches joined the German Christian movement and agreed to Nazi theological concepts such as removing the Old Testament from the Christian canon and segregating Christians of Jewish ancestry from Christians of non-Jewish ancestry. [See also The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.] On the other hand, a minority of Christians were motivated by this fundamental betrayal of Christian tradition into opposing the Nazi's German Christian movement by forming the Confessing Church. At this time - in the mid-to-late 1930s - Hitler's religious attitudes were not Christian in any sense of the word in that his theology ripped the Jewish context out of Christianity. Further, as it became apparent that a large number of Christians were opposing the Nazi reconstruction of Christianity, Hitler soured on his belief that Protestantism and German Nationalism were complementary elements of the German identity. Steigman-Gall leaves no doubt that during this period, when the Nazis were in power, National Socialism was antithetical to Catholicism and that Nazi leaders and members who had come from a Catholic background were apostates and often bitterly opposed to Catholicism. By the time that the Nazis were in power, it was clear to them that institutional Catholicism was opposed to the National Socialism and that being a loyal Catholic meant being loyal to a power that was not German. This attitude contrasted with Nazis from a Protestant background who often remained members in good standing of their church.

Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism by Derek Hastings was the next in order. Hastings covered an earlier period of Nazi history, the brief moment before National Socialism became a truly national moment. During that short period of time - approximately 1919 to 1923 - National Socialism was a Catholic political party that had its origin in Catholic Bavaria. However, although it was a Catholic political party, it was not the Catholic political party. Bavarian Catholicism divided between Catholics who were "ultramontane," or whose self-identity involved an allegiance to the papacy, and non-ultramontane, or anti-ultramontane, Catholics, whose self-identity involved emphasizing their loyalty to Germany at the expense of the papacy. The source of National Socialism in its earl stage was not with the ultramontanes, but with those Catholics who were looking for a way to accommodate their Catholic identity with their German identity. National Socialism promised such an accommodation until Hitler decided to take his movement nation-wide in an alliance with the virulent Anti-Catholic former general Ludendorff.

The problem that bedeviled German politics for Hitler was how to negotiate around the fact that Germany was split between a majority Protestant population and a minority Catholic population that had a long history of antagonism. Hitler's attempted answer to that was the establishment of "Positive Christianity" - an initially vague notion that promised a way that Catholics and Protestants could cooperate in the reconstruction of German identity.

To anyone acquainted with the current moment, it seems pretty apparent that the Christian opponents of National Socialism would be what we today call "conservative," in their institutional allegiance to the papacy, in the case of Catholics, or to the traditional understanding of Jesus and the canon of the Bible, in the case of Protestants. On the other hand, the Christian supporters of Hitler were those who were willing to resist the papacy in favor of `local control' or radically reconstruct Christian theology in favor of a currently popular academic theory. In short, one can't help but notice that the Protestant and Catholic supporters of Hitler were those who came out of a liberal tradition of Christianity, which will surely come a surprise to those who take Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, with its fable that it was the "conservative" Pius XII who was responsible for Hitler's rise to power, as gospel truth.

Gross' The War against Catholicism is the next installment in this archeological approach to the issues presented by the history of the 1920s and 1930s. Gross' book is an analysis of the Kulturkampf, a period immediately after the formation of the German Empire in 1870 when the German state attempted to liquidate Catholicism. Gross' thesis is that the Kulturkampf was a project of German liberalism and represented a principled application of liberal principles as understood by mid-Nineteenth Century German liberals, rather than, as often asserted, a betrayal of those principles.

The Kulturkampf is a period that is often unjustly neglected by people who approach the issues of German religious identity under the Nazis. One might speculate that this fact is evidence of Gross' thesis concerning the antipathy of liberalism for religion in general and Catholicism in particular, in that most scholars view themselves as liberals, and don't seem to have much sympathy for Catholicism, and, therefore, haven't much interest in a period when Catholics were persecuted by liberals. The persecution was very real and included a number of moves that were typical of anti-clerical efforts before and after the Kulturkampf, including prohibiting Catholic religious orders from teaching, depriving the Catholic Church of title to its property, exiling foreign Catholic priests and brothers, and requiring the Catholic church to submit to state control with respect to the appointment of priests and bishops. By the end of the Kulturkampf vast sections of Germany had been deprived of Catholic priests, large numbers of Catholics had been arrested and virtually every bishop in Protestant areas of Germany had been forced into exile. Given that the Kulturkampf was something experienced by the parents and grandparents of Catholics during the 1920s and 1930s, one might think that the Catholic reaction to National Socialism, which raised the specter of a new Kulturkampf, might be of some interest to historians.

Gross points out that the Kulturkampf resulted from a coming together of a variety of cultural development during the Nineteenth Century. One of the important influences was the revival of Catholic culture and its re-orientation in an ultramontane direction by an energetic campaign of preaching and revivals, which began after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, and which were led by various religious orders including the Jesuits. The revival of Catholicism, particularly a papally oriented Catholicism, stirred a Protestant anti-Catholic backlash, which traded in conventional tropes about Catholic superstition and ignorance. The backlash also promoted the idea of the Jesuits as a conspiring threat to Germany. Often times in reading liberal descriptions of the Jesuits, I was put in mind of Hitler's descriptions of the Jews. [Gross points out that while the Nineteenth Century represented a zenith of anti-Catholic agitation and persecution in Germany, Jews were being freed from the traditional restrictions on their civil rights.] Interestingly, this anti-Jesuit attitude was rampant in America during essentially the same period. This was not entirely an accident when one considers that the famous Anti-Catholic picture of the "American Ganges" was drawn by the Protestant German-immigrant, Thomas Nast, who used tropes and images that would have been familiar to readers of German liberal magazines and newspapers.

Gross also argues that another cultural phenomenon that inspired the Kulturkampf was the involvement of Catholic women in public affairs. Gross spends a chapter discussing the issue of the "Women's Question." In Nineteenth Century Germany, the women's question was answered by liberals with the response that "a woman's place was in the home." Women - and men - were expected to respect the distinction between the public and the private. However, Catholic religious orders and lay movement gave women a prominent place in public, which upset liberal Germans. Further, liberal Germans identified Catholicism, and Catholic priests in particular, with "womanly traits," which further played into liberal Anti-Catholic propaganda.

As Gross documents in the writings of liberal politicians and liberal newspapers, liberals viewed the liquidation of Catholicism as a duty imposed on liberals in order to advance the health of German society by removing what liberals believed to be a retarding, regressive force for superstition and ignorance. Because liberals viewed Catholics as being superstitious and ignorant, and Catholicism as being an institution that fostered superstition and ignorance, liberals justified the persecution of Catholics on the grounds that Catholics were not entitled to the benefits of tolerance. Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst (who was the nephew of the Catholic faction leader, Ludwig Windthorst) that "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.)

The result of the Kulturkampf was to energize ultramontane Catholics to support the Catholic political party, which became the Catholic Center Party. For the next 50 years, until it disbanded itself under pressure from Hitler, the Catholic Center Party would invariably be one of the larger parties in the German parliament. It would outlast the liberal parties who had persecuted the Catholic Church. The existence of the Center Party confronted Catholics with a fundamental question as to whether they were primarily Catholic or primarily German. As Hastings points out, Hitler would run an effective campaign against "political Catholicism" and argue for the retirement of the Catholic Church from German politics. This was a theme that appealed to many Catholics who felt torn between their Catholic and German identities. Ultimately, the Concordat between Germany and the Vatican, so condemned by John Cornwell, was an effort to achieve this "liberal" goal.

I am glad that I came at Gross' book in the order I did. As with many academic books of this sort, including the books by Steigman-Gall and Hastings, there are a lot of unfamiliar names to keep track of. Gross' writing is clear and his thesis is engaging and well-supported. One of the interesting take-aways for me was the origin of the "Old Catholic Church." I knew that it had formed in opposition to Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility, but I did not understand why such an apparently "conservative" church should be so liberal in its modern form. The answer is that it was formed as a "liberal" reaction to the conservative or ultramontane direction that Catholicism took in the 19th Century.

This book is well worth the price and time spent in reading it for that kind of insight. Too often, we read the past through our modern lenses. This is the reason that people like John Cornwell and his readers can so misunderstand the history of National Socialism and the Catholic Church and draw the wrong lesson from their misunderstanding. John Cornwell would have been well served if he had had - and attempted to understand - the history set forth in this very worthwhile book.

The Continuing Kulturkampf - Remember the Self-Liquidating Cardinal Rule of Liberalism: "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." - Eduard Windthorst

Mark Shea links to this video of a couple of attacks on people protesting in favor of traditional marriage. What gets me is the casualness of the attacks as if the attackers were operating within the cognitive dissonance of Windthorst's dicta.




This video is useful for playing the "spot the idiot" game.



Clearly, the pro-homosexual side is more interested in intimidation; with the masked faces, shouts of "God is dead," flipping the bird and screaming, they sure aren't interested in convincing people that their side is the side of tolerance and reason.  Again, though, that behavior is entirely consistent with Windthorst's Self-liquidating Rule that "tolerance endures everything except intolerance."

Here is the "TFP" homepage.

"Hmmmmm. Blonde superhero. An evil rabbi before a baby, a glass and a bottle of wine."...

...A wild idea, but could there possibly be something...I don't know... anti-Semitic in San Francisco's anti-circumcision initiative?

Wesley J. Smith links to a post from the "Token Conservative" column at the S.F. Chronicle which demonstrates an exuberant usage of anti-semitic tropes that haven't been seen since the Nuremberg Trials.

For example:

                        

                                       

Wesley J. Smith observes:

This is really vile stuff, classic–and dangerous–anti Semitism. Or in the modern vernacular, it is unmitigated hate speech. Is it any wonder there were no religious exemptions allowed in the proposed law?

It is also worth noting the linking of the Foreskin Man Website from the main MGMbill Website isn’t an innocent mistake: Matthew Hess, the president of MGMbill, a non profit organization that pushes anti circumcision statutes nationwide, is also the author and prime mover behind the SF referendum, who also just happens to be the big cheese at the anti Semitic Foreskin Man site. There are other anti Semitic “trading cards” too. Awful. Just awful. This kind of advocacy has no place in a free and diverse society.

Also, as it isn't an accident as a matter of the historical dynamic of liberalism/progressivism.

In the words of German Liberal leader Eduard Windthorst, "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance."

Update:

Here are some more frames playing on clearly anti-semitic tropes.

And from Pajama Media:

A Post-Modern Kulturkampf.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstain considers the recent attempts to curb circumcision as an attack on religion generally, as opposed to a more restricted attack on Judaism. 

Why circumcision, and why now?


Circumcision was never challenged in 200 years of American history, including times when anti-Semitism was widespread. The proponents of the ban are not anti-Semites, and include many Jews.

What has changed is the antipathy of some people to religion. While the United States is still one of the most religious and religion-friendly countries on earth, people opposed to it are growing more contemptuous and more militant. To them, circumcision can be nothing more than an ancient pagan rite preserved by the superstition of religions that should have died centuries ago. Circumcision is abhorrent because it demonstrates how people can accept and defend what the critics believe to be the darkest nonsense.

People, they feel, ought to be enlightened enough to understand that the Bible may be decent literature, but as a guide to practice, it is a dismal failure. Enlightened people do not believe in G-d, and certainly not the one of the Bible. Those who know better ought to do whatever we can to slowly rid civilization of the evil of religion. (This is reminiscent of the similar campaign of communism to wipe out religion by force. Religious life was banned for the seventy years that Russia suffered under communist rule, but it could not be snuffed out. Today, Russian Orthodoxy and Judaism are blossoming in Russia. In 1958, Chairman Mao reported that China was religion-free. Today, more Chinese attend church on Sunday than are members of the Communist Party.)

In all likelihood, the measures will fail by large margins. If they would pass, Jewish parents would simply drive out of the city limits to fulfill the mandate of the Jewish faith. Passage of the measure, however, would be a blow to the standing and position of faith in those communities. It would declare that extreme anti-religious "enlightenment" must assert itself over and against the repressive forces of worthless religion.

What will suffer is the Judeo-Christian heritage that made this country strong.

Although Rabbi Adlerstein hasn't made the connection, his comment that "passage of the measure...would be a blow to the standing and position of faith in those communities" and that "it would declare that extreme anti-religious "enlightenment" must assert itself over and against the repressive forces of worthless religion" resonates with San Francisco's similar resolution defining Catholicism as an "alien" religion, which was upheld by the judicial system.

Is it "ironic" that liberal San Francisco should be so "illiberal" in its treatment of its citizens who hold to a religious faith?  Or is there, perhaps, something in the "genes" of liberalism that makes it "illiberal" when it comes to religious faith?

From a historical perspective it appears that the latter is probably the case. In "The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)", Dr. Michael Gross investigates the circumstances that led the German Liberal parties to make their first order of busines a broad scale attack on the Catholic Church.  According to Dr. Gross, the original Kulturkampf was not an aberration whereby liberals abandoned liberal principles, but rahter it was seen by 19th Century German liberals as a working out of the liberal principles of education and progress.  As Dr. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst, "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (id. at p. 259.) 
Another example of liberal "illiberalism" in action can be seen from the following passage of Pius XI's encyclical Dilectissima Nobis - written in the wake of the Spanish Republic's nationalization of all Church property.  Pius points out the contradiction of an ideology supposedly committed to equal treatment singling out one group for special restrictions:

8. The new Spanish legislators, indifferent to these lessons of history, wanted a form of separation hostile to the Faith professed by the great majority of citizens, - a separation so much more painful and unjust especially since it was advanced in the name of that liberty promised and assured to all without distinction. Thus they wished to subject the Church and her ministers to measures by which they sought to put her at the mercy of the civil power. In fact, while under the Constitution and successive laws all opinions, even the most erroneous, have wide fields in which to manifest themselves, the Catholic Religion alone, that of almost all of the citizens, see its teaching odiously watched, its schools and other institutions, so helpful for science and Spanish culture, restrained.


9. The very exercise of Catholic worship, in its most essential and traditional manifestations, is not exempt from limitations, since religious assistance in institutes is made dependent on the State, and religious processions are placed under the necessity of obtaining special authorization granted by the Government. Special clauses and restrictions apply even to administration of the Sacraments to the dying and funerals for the dead. Even more manifest is the contradiction regarding property. The Constitution recognizes in all citizens the legitimate faculty of possession and, as is proper in all legislation of civilized countries, guarantees safeguards for the exercise of such important rights arising from nature itself. Nevertheless, even on this point, an exception was created to the detriment of the Catholic Church, depriving her, with open injustice, of all property. No regard is paid to the wishes of those making donations in wills; no account is taken of the spiritual and holy ends connected with such properties, and no respect is shown in any way to rights long ago acquired and founded on indisputable juridical titles. All buildings, episcopal residences, parish houses, seminaries and monasteries no longer are recognized as the free property of the Catholic Church, but are declared - with words that badly hide the nature of the usurpation - public and national property.

And:

12. The usurpation does not stop at property. Chattles, also, are declared public property and are catalogued so that nothing may escape, even vestments, statues, pictures, vases, gems and similar objects expressly and permanently destined to Catholic worship, to its splendor and to necessities directly connected with such worship. While the Church is denied the right to dispose freely of what is hers by reason of having been legitimately purchased or donated by the pious faithful, to the State only is given to the power of disposing, for another purpose and without any limitation, of sacred objects - even those which with special consecration have been withdrawn from every profane use - removing every duty of the State to compensate the Church for such deplorable waste.


13. Nor was all this sufficient to appease the anti-religious whims of the present legislators. Not even the churches were spared. Temples - splendors of art, rare monuments of glorious history and decorum which have been the pride of the nation throughout centuries - Houses of God and prayer over which the Catholic Church always had enjoyed the full right of ownership and which the Church by her magnificent title of particular merit had always preserved, embellished and adorned with loving care - even temples not a few of which were destroyed (and again We deplore it) by the impious mania of burning - were declared to property of the nation and placed under the control of the civil authorities who today rule the public destinies without any respect for the religious sentiments of the good people of Spain.

Rabbi Adlerstein is complaining about something with a long and deeply imbedded pedigree.

Remember when dissent and diversity of opinion was a good thing?

That kind of thinking is so mid-2000s.

The hip meme is "group-think is good-think."

And let's not forget that equally popular slogan, "good-think is group-think."

Case in point, broadcaster is fired for "tweating" support for traditional marriage.

A Toronto broadcaster has been fired after he posted on Twitter about the debate surrounding New York Rangers forward Sean Avery's support of same-sex marriage.


Damian Goddard was a host on Rogers Sportsnet. On Tuesday, he tweeted his support for hockey agent Todd Reynolds, who used Twitter to voice his opposition to Avery's position.

Goddard wrote: "I completely and whole-heartedly support Todd Reynolds and his support for the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage."

The TV network then issued its own tweet, saying: "Today's tweet from Damian Goddard does not reflect the views of Rogers Sportsnet." On Wednesday, it severed ties with Goddard.

In a statement, Sportsnet spokesman Dave Rashford said: "Mr. Goddard was a freelance contractor and in recent weeks it had become clear that he is not the right fit for our organization."

Avery, an agitator who is no stranger to making headlines on and off the ice, stated his support for same-sex marriage in a video that is part of the New Yorkers for Marriage Equality campaign, organized by gay-rights organization Human Rights Campaign.

The "true meaning of marriage"?  What a whack.  Where does he get off thinking that he has the right to have an opinion about the "true meaning of marriage"?  Or express it to others?

We can't have people exposed to that kind of thing any more than we can have it exposed to a Mormon who was forced to resign from the Olympic Committee for publicly supporting the traditional meaning of marriage as part of his democratic rights of free speech and petition. 

It may appear anomalous that this kind of pressue to conform is coming from people identified with "liberalism" and "progressivism."  However, according to Dr. Michael Gross' extremely lucid and fascinating book, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany), the modern Kulturkampf in which liberals seem to abandon their principled support of individual conscience and rights to autonomy and free speech is nothing new.  During the 1870s, the liberals in Germany spearheaded a series of anti-Catholic legislation that outlawed monastic orders and the Jesuits, prohibited Catholic priests from teaching, required the State approval of Catholic priests prior to parish appointments.  As a result of this persecution, by 1878, every Catholic Bishop in Prussia had been arrested or expelled, over half of Catholic parishes were without priests, and the monasteries and the property of religious orders in Prussian and Protestant territories had been confiscated. 

Dr. Gross documents convincingly that this Kulturkampf - the original Kulturkampf - was not an aberration whereby liberals abandoned liberal principles, but rather it was seen by 19th Century German liberals as a working out of liberal principles of education and progress. Gross quotes the liberal leader Eduard Windthorst as saying "Freedom protects everything except unfreedom, and tolerance endures everything except intolerance." (p. 259.)

That last statement from a 19th Century German is identical to the apologetic offered by many 21st Century American liberals and progressives as to why it is acceptable for them to require everyone else to conform to their vision of the good.

Update:  Apparently, Damien Goddard is Catholic and tweeted his support for the Mormon Peter Vidmar who had been forced to resign as USOC Chief of Mission for his support for Prop 8.

Those 19th Century liberal German Kulturkampfers would have understood.