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That may be. If it were a slur on Harley, than it was over-the-top. But I didn't read it that way - I read it as a recitation of the history of anti-catholic bigotry. In the Protestant world, we think nothing of it, because our anti-Catholic rhetoric ends at the church door, and is entirely theological. The Catholics remember how bad things were just 50 years ago. When John Kennedy ran for President, a lot of the voters were really concerned that his loyalties would lie with a foreign power, and not the United States. We don't know how much things have changed in the past 50 years - now, John Kerry's problem was that he was not enough of a traditionalist Catholic.

Anti-catholicism was a huge problem in the United States. Ever wonder why the Catholics created a whole parochial school system? One of the driving forces behind compulsary education laws was that the public schools would indoctrinate the Catholicism out of the kids, and turn them into good American Protestants, loyal to the President and not the Pope.

Anti-catholic bigotry was very real, and it's only been a generation since the dramatic shift in Evangelical attitudes towards Catholicism started.

For more information about this, read Mark Noll's Is the Reformation Over?. It's an examination of the interactions between the Evangelical community and the Catholic Church by one of the best evangelical academics out there.