Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg is no friend to people of faith, warns Catholic League President Bill Donohue, but rather a “loyal soldier in the secularist war on religion.”

Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has embraced the Democrat party’s “secularist agenda,” Donohue observes, an agenda that is “hostile to religious liberty” even if some engage in empty “God-talk.”

Like Barack Obama, Buttigieg knows how to use “religion-friendly words,” but they conceal a “phobia” about religion and will never become deeds, Donohue declares.

It is liberals such as Buttigieg “who treat the public expression of religion as if it were some sort of communicable disease,” Donohue adds, whereas conservatives “want a robust public expression of religion.”

Similarly, it is liberals rather than conservatives who support anti-faith organizations like the Freedom from Religion Foundation, he notes.

The New York Times, of course, is falling over itself to promote Mr. Buttigieg, painting him as a deeply religious man despite certain life choices that clash with biblical morality — like support for gay marriage and abortion up to birth.

“A devoted Episcopalian who fluidly quotes Scripture and married his husband, Chasten, in a church service last year,” the Times oozes, “Mr. Buttigieg is making the argument that marriage is a moral issue.”

Mr. Donohue rightly calls out the newspaper for acting as if Buttigieg were the first person to treat marriage as a moral issue, something Christians have been doing since the time of Jesus.

Donohue also suggests that Buttigieg’s efforts to trash Vice President Mike Pence are really a ham-fisted attempt to “steal the mantle of religion” from him, a Herculean task given that Buttigieg opposes religious liberty legislation.

In the end, what Donohue objects to is not Buttigieg’s belief that gay rights should always trump religious freedom. What he objects to is the hypocrisy of trying to pass off that agenda as somehow consistent with Christianity.

Let him “make his case against religious liberty without setting himself up as a religious moralizer,” Donohue declares. “And let him do so without demonizing those with whom he disagrees.”

“That would be the Christian thing to do,” he says.

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