Campaigns no place for religious bigotry

To the editor:

In our checkered past, Americans have been responsible for too much religious bigotry in our election campaigns.

A generation ago, JFK had to deliver a speech denying he was at the beck and call of the Catholic church and promised instead to defend and protect the Constitution. Read about it in Theodore White's 'Making of the president 1960.” Remember that? I was 18 at the time and felt a little embarrassed by my land of the free and the brave. Religious bigotry was far from dead way back then.

But there was even more of this in the years before JFK. Irish immigrants fresh off the boat found employers' windows telling them 'No Mick Need Apply.” Country clubs around the country routinely excluded Catholics and Jews from membership, unless perhaps there was a fat membership fee to be harvested.

In my predominantly Catholic Iowa town, Protestants gave back as good they got, in one memorable instance refusing Coca-Cola to thirsty high school kids. In my father's day, German-Americans found dead cattle in their pastures, victims of Catholic lightning.

And who could ignore our 400-year-old racist legacy. Ben Carson, irony of ironies, gave us a bitter taste of it when he opined that a Muslim should not be elected president.

Ron Sundermann

Cedar Rapids