Just swatting some stray gnats of ignorance here—apologies for being off-topic:
december: Prejudice against Southerners, military people, conservatives, and Roman Catholics isn’t [condemned as] bigotry – it’s [seen as] praisworthy. (E.g. AMERICAN BEAUTY. the “Bush is a moron” crowd, and the Brooklyn Art Museum flap).
While I think there are some grains of truth in this thought, I have to take exception to the use of the “Brooklyn Art Museum flap” as an illustration of it. It is not IMHO really very plausible to accuse Catholic artist Chris Ofili of anti-Catholicism just because he used dried elephant dung (a traditional medium in his native Nigerian culture, and one that he’s used in several of his other paintings) and small cutouts from pornographic images as part of his painting “The Holy Virgin Mary”. According to small reproductions I’ve seen of the work and descriptions I’ve read of it, it’s not at all presenting the figure of the Virgin in a contemptuous or humiliating way—it’s simply the fact of using dung and pornography images in the composition (which IMHO most people would hardly even recognize just from looking at the painting) that has led many people to assume that it must be meant to be degrading.
Similarly, I’ve seen reproductions of Catholic (or former Catholic, I’m not sure) photographer Renee Cox’s work, “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” the one that represents the Jesus figure by a naked black woman (Cox herself) at table with twelve clothed male disciples; and I don’t see what’s bigoted about it either. The naked female Jesus-figure isn’t shown in a contemptuous or humiliating way, any more than Ofili’s Mary is: she stands alone in the middle of the picture in a stance reminiscent of the typical crucifixion pose, looking vulnerable and sad. Check out this (pretty poor) online reproduction and judge for yourself.
Anti-Catholic? Hardly. Both Ofili and Cox are riffing on religious imagery, as painters have always done, and some of the allusions are definitely meant to be startling. But they’re not disparaging religion or religious figures, much less making bigoted statements about Catholics. (Where’d anybody get the idea that Mary and the Last Supper are exclusively Catholic images, anyway?) Mayor Giuliani and other people who complain about these works as anti-Catholic (especially without even having seen what they actually look like) are just indulging in some more of that “victim posturing” that cuautemhoc mentioned.