CHARLES CHAPUT, the Archbishop of Denver, issued a stinging rebuke to Catholic senator Richard Durbin and concluded that “a new kind of religious discrimination is very welcome at the Capitol, even among elected officials who claim to be Catholic,” and the national news media barely took note. A single Washington Times story cited Chaput’s column on the William Pryor nomination, and the sole mention in the Washington Post was contained in a letter to the editor from C. Boyden Gray, who is leading an effort to break the Democratic filibuster of the Catholic Pryor. The blogosphere did better. Discussions of Chaput’s charge broke out at Powerline, The Brothers Judd, The Inn at the End of the World, and InfiniteMonkeys, among others. But the big blogs stayed away from the Chaput statement and from the Pryor controversy generally, touching on them–if at all–in a glancing fashion. Joshua Micah Marshall was the most disingenuous of all, refusing to reference Chaput’s statement in either his blog or his column in the Hill, even after we had specifically discussed it on air and off. Instead of attempting to respond to Chaput in an intellectually honest fashion, Marshall quotes me without naming me, describing me as a “fulminating right-wing commentator.” Marshall’s bad form is the best indicator yet that the hard-left senses that anti-Catholic bigotry is a disastrous tactic.

Some interesting commentary followed publication of The Catholic Test in THE DAILY STANDARD on Tuesday. OutsidetheBeltway.com was dismissive of the argument that a new anti-Catholic test had emerged from the Democratic strategy on Pryor, and LegalTheoryBlog spent considerable energy analyzing the proposition. Previously SouthernAppeal had joined the fray, and with luck, more serious blogs will follow.