One message resounding loudly and clearly from the latest televised Democrat debate is how hostile the party has become toward people of faith, Catholic League President Bill Donohue said on Friday.

According to Dr. Donohue, the Democrat candidates “fail the religion test” for falling over themselves trying to prove who is the most severe in dealing with religious freedom issues.

“To be specific, it is clear that none of the Democratic candidates wants to be tagged as religion-friendly,” he states.

While not long ago people of faith “felt equally at home with the Republican and Democratic Parties,” with Protestants leaning Republican and Catholics and Jews leaning Democrat, that is no longer the case, Donohue laments.

The Democrats’ growing antipathy toward religion is most evident in their attacks on “traditional religious exemptions in law,” Donohue notes, which have existed since the nation’s founding and up until recently were “considered uncontroversial.”

“All of the candidates incline against religious exemptions — some more than others — making them the least religion-friendly candidates for president in American history,” he states.

Beto O’Rourke, for example, said that if he is president, there would be “no tax break” for any institution that did not ascribe to the gay rights agenda, Donohue notes, which would — incidentally — exclude Evangelicals, the Catholic Church, a number of Protestant denominations, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews.

For his part, Julian Castro is “so opposed to religious exemptions” that his first order of business if elected would be to “roll back religious exemptions that collide with the rights of homosexuals and transgender persons,” Donohue observes.

Castro “did not give one example where he would honor the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion over the nowhere mentioned constitutional rights of homosexuals and transgender persons,” he adds.

“There are some voices in the Democratic Party that freely admit how dangerously secular the Party has grown. Their effort to bring sanity to their Party is commendable,” Donohue says.

“But it is quite clear that they have failed,” he concludes.

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