Email leak shows Clinton advisers ridiculing Catholics

Newly disclosed emails from WikiLeaks show Hillary Clinton campaign staff mocking Catholics for conservative beliefs.

The email exchange from 2011, released Tuesday, took place between Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Clinton’s communications director Jen Palmieri, and John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which Podesta used to run. Halpin sent an email to Palmieri and Podesta titled “Conservative Catholicism” to mock Catholics for their “backwards” beliefs.

“It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith,” Halpin wrote. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”

Palmieri agreed, adding that influential conservatives hid behind their Catholic faith to justify their views.

“I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” Palmieri said. “Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

The conversation refers to a 2011 New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta about the relationship between News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and former Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson.

Haplin chastised Murdoch and Thomson for raising their children Catholic and noted many others in the conservative movement were Catholic or converted to Catholicism.

The email chain was part of the more than 1,000 messages WikiLeaks released as part of an ongoing disclosure of Podesta’s hacked account. Haplin copied Podesta in the exchange, but the campaign chairman did not comment on the conversation.

Today, many Catholics expressed outrage after learning what the Clinton campaign thought about them.

The website CatholicVote wrote the leaked emails showed blatant bigotry toward Catholics and continued a pattern of hatred for anyone who disagrees with the Clinton campaign.

“Hillary has already called half of her opponents’ supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’ and ‘irredeemable.’ Now we get a glimpse of what her staff and friends think about Catholics in particular,” CatholicVote stated. “Make no mistake, had Clinton staff and allies spoken this way about other groups, they would be dismissed. Just imagine if Clinton’s spokesperson was caught calling prominent Muslims or Jewish converts frauds for embracing their faith and mocking them for doing so because it was socially acceptable.”

CatholicVote president Brian Burch later released a statement calling for Palmieri to resign her position in the Clinton campaign.

John Zmirak, senior editor of The Stream and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, wrote today that Clinton accepts Catholics, but only if they fit into her agenda.

Catholics such as her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Vice President Joe Biden have disregarded Catholic instruction on protecting the sanctity of life.

“Hillary’s people don’t despise all Catholics. That wouldn’t be fair,” Zmirak wrote. “[She likes] those good Democrats [who] had the decency not to ‘bastardize’ the Catholic faith by believing in its central teachings.”

The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to the email leaks or the comments about Catholics. But late Tuesday night Podesta said, according to the Los Angeles Times, he thought it was not a coincidence his emails got hacked days after Republican nominee Donald Trump got into hot water after a leaked video showed him making disparaging comments about women.

Trump has not said whether he was behind the Podesta email hack, but did use the fresh material to attack Clinton.

“While this is offensive, it’s just the latest evidence of the hatred the Clinton campaign has, really, for everyday Americans,” Trump said at a rally in Panama City, Fla., Tuesday night.