Questioning the "Hispanic Karl Rove of evangelicals"

In the wake of Mitt Romney's defeat and the historically low support he received from Hispanics it is high time that attention be given not only to Karl Rove, but to "the Hispanic Karl Rove", the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez. The benediction for the opening night of the Republican National Convention was given by Rodriguez, an Assemblies of God leader and the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Council (NHCLC). Given that Rodriguez has been known for years as the “Hispanic Karl Rove of evangelicals” it was hardly shocking that Romney chose him for this symbolic task. This July Rodriguez declared that Romney had made a “180-degree turn” in his relationship with Hispanics after a primary in which he had staked out a position to the right of his key competitors. Of Puerto Rican descent, the 42-year old Rodriguez represents, as the Chicago Tribune put it in 2008, “a new generation of evangelical kingmakers on the political scene.” Due to his status as a prominent Hispanic Evangelical and his advocacy for a “compassionate” approach to immigration, Rodriguez has developed a reputation as a progressive-friendly evangelical leader. This reputation, and the privileged access he has enjoyed to the White House during Barack Obama’s first term, is surprising given his outspoken commitments to right-wing causes and organizations. More surprising, and troubling, are the grounds on which he argues for immigration reform, appealing to conservative Christians’ suspicion of Muslims and fear of Christian decline.

Rodriguez has been a prominent conservative activist throughout Obama’s presidency. In 2009 Rodriguez co-founded the Oak Initiative, a right-wing Christian advocacy group, and served until 2011 as its executive vice president. Rodriguez has described the Oak Initiative as a “Christian Tea Party,” and in 2010 he rallied the group with his claim that the Obama administration “has taken over the auto industry, the banking industry, the health industry, soon the energy industry. We have never been in this place before. Our founding fathers are turning in their graves. This is big government on steroids.” Like many conservative groups, the Oak Initiative made strident opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a central part of its mission. It produced a popular video in opposition to the ACA, which featured the controversial former Pentagon advisor Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin explaining that the ACA moved America simultaneously toward Nazism and Communism and was “laying the groundwork” for a Nazi-esque “constabulary force that will control the population in America.” Under Rodriguez’s leadership the Oak Initiative also distinguished itself as a virulently anti-Muslim organization committed to the notion that Obama is helping to advance an Islamic agenda in America.

In addition to his foundational role in the formation of the Oak Initiative, Rodriguez in 2010 became part of a five-person team leading the Affordable Power Alliance (APA). The APA has played a key role in resisting Obama administration environmental policies that they say would hurt the interests of business. The APA has made a name for itself by claiming that new EPA restrictions amounted to a “war on the poor” and declaring that “the civil rights challenge of our time is to stop extreme environmental policies that drive up the cost of energy.” Nowhere has the effect of the APA been more evident than in its attacks on the EPA’s efforts to decrease mercury poisoning, a regulatory effort that has received widespread report from USCCB and a host of other religious organizations. The APA views this regulation, and the religious groups that support it, as part of a misguided environmental movement that ends up “condemning legions of Third World children to death from real diseases” because of its impact on the global economy.

As his right wing stances solidified Rodriguez began to headline events important to conservatives in general and the religious right in particular. In 2011, Rodriguez promoted and spoke at Texas Governor Rick Perry’s controversial prayer gathering “The Response” and delivered the benediction at the Ronald Reagan award dinner at the CPAC annual convention. He is on the steering committee of the Freedom Federation, an umbrella organization of key conservative Christian groups founded in 2009 to, among other things, “secure the individual right to own, possess, and use firearms as central to the preservation of peace and liberty.” And he has joined the coalition of Christians opposing the HHS Mandate, writing in the Washington Post that “the end of our religious freedom in this country has begun.”

Yet, while Rodriguez has been at the forefront of an array of religious right initiatives, he has also managed to maintain a counter-image as a kind of “new evangelical,” one open to progressive political action and worthy of considerable access to the Obama White House. Rodriguez was one of a small number of religious leaders who led a private prayer service on the morning of Obama’s inauguration. In July 2010, Rodriguez was one of a group of leaders of Hispanic organizations who met with Obama to discuss a push for immigration reform. That same year Rodriguez served on the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which published a report on “Fatherhood and Healthy Families.” In July 2011, even as he continued as a leader of the “Christian Tea Party” he had helped to found, Rodriguez visited the White House with Jim Wallis and ten other progressive religious leaders representing the “Circle of Protection” coalition, formed to resist Tea Party efforts to balance the budget by cutting aid to “the poor and suffering,” as Rodriguez put it at the time. He returned to the White House with a delegation from the National Association of Evangelicals to meet with the president later in 2011. In the spring of 2012 Rodriguez shared the podium with Michelle Obama at a Florida rally for her “Let’s Move” campaign. To this day, the Faith Outreach Director of the Democratic National Committee, the Rev. Derrick Harkins, serves on the Board of Advisors to Rodriguez’s NHCLC.

Rodriguez’s ability to simultaneously stoke the fires of anti-Obama extremism and maintain access to the White House mystifies observers of the Religious Right. He owes his paradoxical image to his unique position on immigration reform, the issue that brought him to national prominence during the George W. Bush administration. Beginning in 2006, Rodriguez’s public advocacy for the needs of undocumented Hispanics centered on convincing white evangelicals, whom Rodriguez accused of promoting “racial profiling, discrimination,” and ethnic hostility, to support immigration reform. Sydney Blumenthal credited Rodriguez with helping to defeat a Republican congressional plan calling for the potential deportation of 12 million Hispanics, a plan Rodriguez called an example of “political expediency, xenophobia and extremism” that “defeated reason, compromise and reconciliation.” Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy welcomed Rodriguez to high-profile meetings on immigration reform, and many religious progressives rushed to embrace a theologically conservative Hispanic who seemed to share their values.

Thus was born the image of Samuel Rodriguez, post-partisan evangelical and bridge to the burgeoning Hispanic Protestant community. Major media outlets like Newsweek, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal named him as a major Hispanic leader. He became a regular contributor at the Washington Post’s On Faith website and was featured on Bill Moyers Journal. In all cases Rodriguez was presented as a politically moderate, theologically conservative Pentecostal/evangelical whose opinions about the emerging Latino vote could be trusted. In some cases, as in a 2009 report on CNN, media outlets went so far as to describe him as the leader of millions of Hispanic evangelical. Individuals and institutions seeking to unite progressives and moderates seized on Rodriguez as an embodiment of the goal. In 2007 he was one of seven evangelical founders of the Come Let Us Reason Together movement, which sought common ground on culture-war issues. He also formed a bond with the progressive evangelical leader Jim Wallis: he has lectured at Wallis’s Georgetown University class, he serves as a contributing editor for Wallis’s Sojourners magazine, and Wallis wrote a foreword for Rodriguez’s 2009 book Path of Miracles. Mainstream evangelicals have followed Wallis’s lead and embraced Rodriguez and his NHCLC as a key entry point to Hispanic Protestants. Rodriguez serves on the boards of an array of major moderate evangelical and Pentecostal organizations, including Christianity Today, Gordon Conwell Seminary, and the Assemblies of God, and his NHCLC is the official sister organization to the National Association of Evangelicals.

Rodriguez’s conflicting positions and dueling alliances have never been fully acknowledged in national media. When he signed a major statement by evangelical Christians in support of the EPA’s policy to increase regulation of mercury while at the same time heading up the American Power Alliance, which was decrying these regulations as part of a “war on the poor,” news reports focused only on his support of the progressive petition. This lack of scrutiny may be due to the fact that, while Rodriguez has staked out a number of policy positions far to the right of most Hispanics, on the need for comprehensive immigration reform he has generally pushed for policies clearly consistent with the desires of the Hispanic community and largely in keeping with his post-partisan image.

It is this essential issue, however, that raises the most troubling questions about Rodriguez’s positions and arguments. While religious and mainstream media have ignored his reasoning, an abundance of public documents and videos shows that Rodriguez’s pro-Hispanic-immigration activism draws explicitly on anti-Muslim ideology and the promise of a renewed Christian America. While he makes use of arguments focused on human rights and biblical compassion to justify his call for immigration reform, those concepts do not for him preclude arguments that denigrate Islam, promote the salvation of Christian America, or emphasize competition with Catholics.

When Rodriguez speaks to conservatives his appeal for immigration reform centers around three suppositions. First, he argues that support for Hispanic immigration will prevent the United States from becoming what Europe is becoming—a Muslim continent. By emphasizing the threat of a Muslim Europe, Rodriguez taps into a vein of conservative thought that has come to prominence post-9/11. He has spoken about the threat that he believes Europe faces from its growing Muslim communities, and the Oak Initiative continuously plays up the supposed threat to America from stealth efforts to impose sharia law. “There is a crisis in Europe,” he said in 2009, because “Europe is now the emerging Islamic continent in the world. It is not post religious. It is growing in religion but it is not Christianity. It is Islam. It is the Muslim faith. And in America we are blessed that the immigrants that are coming here still believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and have a strong Christian faith commitment.... I look at this community emerging in America as a firewall against…an assault on our biblical worldview.”

In public appearances, Rodriguez’s prayerful rhetoric occasionally gives way to crude caricaturing of Islam. In a 2010 sermon, Rodriguez repeated an aggressively Christian prayer he said he had offered at an interfaith rally for immigration reform. Boasting about his refusal to “compromise truth” in that “politically correct environment,” he explained that a Muslim imam had been asked to offer a prayer before Rodriguez. He described the Imam’s prayer this way: “I come in the name of Allah, Allah and the Prophet Mohammad, blah, blah, blah, pass the ammunition, all that good stuff.”

Second, Rodriguez claims, support for Hispanic immigration will be the salvation of Christianity in America. He speaks in near-messianic terms of the impact Hispanic spirituality will have on America if it is allowed to flourish. In a recent appearance with Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, Rodriguez said, “We are two syllables—‘His’ ‘panic.’ We are His, capital ‘H.’ We may very well be God’s ‘panic’ to the kingdom of darkness in the name of Jesus in America…. At the end of the day the Hispanic electorate may be the salvation of the conservative movement and the Christian Church in America.” An article by Lisa Miller in the Washington Post, “Why Are Evangelicals Supporting Immigration Reform?” quoted Rodriguez explaining that, in convincing the leadership of Focus on the Family to sign a pro-immigration-reform statement, “I spoke about the need. I talked about the possibility of deporting the very salvation of the evangelical community in the twenty-first century.”

Third, Rodriguez argues that support for Hispanic immigration will help Hispanic evangelical and Pentecostal churches gain converts from Catholicism. For example, The Washington Post’s Miller wrote that Evangelicals had not worked directly with Catholics in forming a statement on the need for immigration reform “because competition for Hispanic souls in America is so fierce,” adding that Rodriguez told her, “We call it strategic recruitment.”

Samuel Rodriguez is a prominent figure in Hispanic Christianity, in the debate over immigration reform, and in the Religious Right. Given his central role in Mitt Romney’s abysmal efforts to secure important Hispanic support it is time that he faces careful scrutiny in religious and political circles. While Rodriguez’s success in encouraging right-wing voters and politicians to consider immigration reform is on some level promising it should not be interpreted as representative of a broader progressive or moderate policy agenda and it should not be misconstrued as evidence of a commitment to religious pluralism. In fact, this may be the most distressing part of Rodriguez’s rising profile. By linking the cause of Hispanic rights to the denigration of Muslims he has exchanged one form of prejudice for another, and done so in explicitly Christian terms. While blending social justice for Hispanics with a type of religious supremacism has helped Rodriguez advance his standing among conservatives it is a recipe for further decay of Christian social witness and continued Republican ineptitude among the vast majority of Hispanics in America.

David Shenk, Mennonite Friend of Jesus and Muslims

Perhaps you are like I was before last week, totally unaware of David Shenk. If so, be blessed and learn about him and from him. David was one of the keynote speakers at the Evangelicals for Peace (EPC) Summit I attended Friday, September 14, on the campus of Georgetown University. In addition to his speech there I also had the chance to go to dinner with David and a few other attendees the night before. This Mennonite missionary deeply affected me with his stories of authentic Christian witness to, dialogue with and peacemaking towards Muslims the world over. Hearing his stories, particularly in the context of this horrible week of violence and misunderstanding, was a balm to my soul. Hear are three sites that will introduce you to him:

MennoLink Books and Music has the best collection of David’s writings. 

Rick Love, who convened the EPC Summit, has written a touching account of David’s influence on him. Rick’s Peace Catalyst International also awarded David with the Legacy Award for his many years of service as a peacemaker.

Eastern Mennonite Seminary has an excellent profile of Shenk and an explanation of his core ministry values.

I had a wonderful time at the EFP Summit and grew in a multitude of ways from it, but if there were only one thing I could share with you from the event it would be this: get to know the ministry of David Shenk and prepare to be changed and challenged.

Islamaphobia in Retreat

One of my major concerns over the past year has related to the issue of Muslim religious liberty in the United States. In that context I have been encouraged by the consistent voice of the Becket Fund, a leader in the fight against the HHS Mandate (they teamed up with Wheaton College yesterday) but also in the fight for religious liberty for Muslims. Given that background I was heartened to see this excellent post by Michael Sean Winters detailing three important victories--including one lead by the Becket Fund-- and placing these victories in broader historical context, as he does in this excerpt:

While many Catholics are focused on the HHS mandates and particularly the restrictive four-part definition of what constitutes a religiously exempt organization, we must remember that the situation of Muslims today is more akin to the kind of anti-Catholic bigotry faced by our Catholic forbears. Catholics today are a quarter of the population of the country: There are limits to what any government founded on the consent of the governed will be able to achieve in attacking the Catholic Church. Muslims are still a small minority and, like all minorities, have much to fear not just from a few stray bigots but from the prejudices of the majority. We Catholics face a long-term and very complicated struggle to shape political, cultural and especially legal attitudes about the role of religion in society. Muslims must live in fear of physical attacks, of Molotov cocktails and arson, and other forms of intimidation of the kind Catholics have not faced since the 1920s.

Bishop Lori and the Coming “Fortnight Follies”

Michael Sean Winters is right to detect in my post yesterday a level of frustration with Bishop Lori and President Garvey that reaches beyond the specifics of their handling of Bishop Bruskewitz’s impertinent “question.” While Michael is right to point out that there is a certain protocol to the USCCB gatherings, I want to make clear that my concern is with the broader context of the bishops’ ongoing campaign for religious freedom more generally and its upcoming “Fortnight of Freedom” specifically.

I was upset by the ignorance and incompetence displayed in Lori and Garvey’s feeble-minded response to Bishop Bruskewitz because it is part of a pattern of high profile steps indicative of some sort of combination of public relations incompetence, shallow ignorance and latent bigotry that lead me to conclude that the Fortnight of Freedom will be similarly marred by those qualities unless the bishops and the lay leaders who have their ear come to their senses. Examples of this pattern are numerous. Consider the Catholic Governor Sam Brownback, one of the leading politicians in the conservative Evangelical/Catholic alliance, signing into law just weeks ago so-called “anti-Shariah” legislation with nary a peep of resistance from the Diocese of Kansas or key leaders of the USCCB. This came on the heels of the Auxiliary Bishop of Detroit appearing at a religious freedom rally where he shared the microphone with the President of the Thomas More Law Center, an organization known for its reckless attacks on the religious liberty of Muslims. This disregard for the religious freedom of Muslims is sadly consistent with the Bishops’ own failure to even mention the numerous threats to Muslim’s religious liberty in their major “Statement on Religious Liberty”. Lest anyone believe that these judgments are the result of my own progressive bias, know that even a cursory look at the recent actions of the conservative Becket Fund to distance themselves from anti-Muslim laws and bigotry reveals that my outrage is rooted in a very basic understanding of “religious freedom for all” that the bishops claim to represent. Lori and Garvey’s stated ignorance of the gutter level charge of Muslim “exemption” from the Affordable Care Act is therefore to me not primarily a result of protocols surrounding USCCB gatherings but of a consistent display of genuine ignorance of and disregard for the very real threats to religious liberty facing Muslims.

Unfortunately the bishops’ failure to consistently apply their concern for religious freedom to Muslims is not the only major weakness that Lori and Garvey’s actions confirm. By showing such notable absence of even the most basic public relations savvy they follow in a long line of gaffes related to questions of religious freedom. Cardinal Dolan’s choice to compare the passage of a gay marriage bill by the state of New York to North Korea comes to mind, as does Cardinal George’s unfortunate comparison of gay pride marchers in Chicago to the KKK. The instinct to compare their perceived opponents to fascists was also on display when the Bishop of Peoria, Illinois said Obama’s HHS Mandate put him on a “similar path” to that taken by Bismarck, Clemenceau, Hitler and Stalin. In these and other cases the bishops have shown themselves to be, as Saturday Night Live used to say, “not yet ready for prime time players” when it comes to the task of communicating their commitment to religious freedom in civil, competent ways.

I take no delight in pointing these errors out. I have ignored them for weeks now in the hope that the bishops would use this Atlanta gathering as a time to reign in their rhetoric, put forward their competence and put these past incidents in the past--maybe even just let the excellent lawyers bringing suit agains the HHS Mandate do their work. I was perhaps naïve to expect a clear display of perspective and poise by the leaders of the upcoming Fortnight of Freedom. Instead, I saw, in addition to the Bruskewitz incident, Garvey and Lori holding up the example of Thomas More with such simplicity and naivete that Cardinal George took it upon himself, immediately after Bishop Bruskewitz’s question, to engage in a sort of mini-history lesson for Garvey and Lori on the basic fact that THOMAS MORE BEHEADED COUNTLESS PEOPLE FOR THEIR RELIGIOUS VIEWS. The sense that Lori and Garvey are leading “the gang that can’t shoot straight” was not relieved in the session that followed a recess. The very first speaker, the excellent Bishop Pates, noted that there was significant comment and some media questions during the break about Bishop Burkewitz’s question and that it had been decided that he should immediately make a statement to the gathering. The core of Pates’ comments was this: “Our very capable staff here at the Conference very quickly researched the question that Bishop Bruskewitz raised with regard to the Muslims and they asked me to say that they are not exempt.” While I commend Bishop Pates for his intervention, I can’t help but note how easy it was for the “capable staff” to ascertain the truth of the matter. If a few minutes over lunch break were enough time to answer Bruskewitz’s query with competence, what does it say for the general competence of Lori and Garvey that they could not come up with the answer in real time?

I should mention that I worked in the 1990s for a religious publisher, InterVarsity Press, in a public relations capacity and I have been an avid follower of religious and general media for decades. Since moving to Washington DC in October of 2010 I have been particularly active in writing about the intersection of religious leaders and public policy in the media spotlight. I have paid specific attention to the relationship between the Bishops and the leadership of the Obama administration, especially the leadership of the Health and Human Services (HHS). As I have said in the past, part of my interest in this relationship is personal—my wife is one of the thousands of employees of HHS and we are raising our children in the Catholic faith. I also am one of the vanishing breed of pro-life Democrats who watched in horror in 2010 as the hierarchy of the USCCB aided and abetted the demonization of “Obamacare” and helped provide the rhetorical firepower for a campaign by pro-life groups to rid the House of Representatives of pro-life Democrats who voted for the Affordable Care Act. The viciousness of this campaign—from the attack on Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to speak, to the takedown of Congressman Stupak for carving out wording on abortion that allowed him to vote for the ACA—was to me stunning and a direct reflection on the leadership of the USCCB in the age of Obama. Despite these reservations about and disagreements with the USCCB, I was very vocal at this blog and elsewhere in supporting the bishops in their initial resistance to the HHS Mandate. Like many other politically progressive Catholics, I could see in the Mandate an Executive Branch overreach with profound constitutional repercussions and potentially devastating effects on religion in public life generally, and Catholic involvement specifically.

I continue to believe, even after the Obama administration’s accommodations, that lawsuits such as those filed by Notre Dame in opposition to the Mandate are appropriate and warranted. But I am done pretending that the leadership of this campaign for religious freedom knows what they are doing, understands the issues at sufficient depth, and is capable of communicating the breadth and depth of Catholic social teaching in a way that will advance the overall common good during the upcoming Fortnight of Freedom. What I expect to see is more folly and I will be pleased if I am proven wrong. Bishop Pates and the countless other outstanding bishops deserve better than the spectacle that is likely to play out in the coming weeks. The Catholic Church is filled with outstanding voices for religious liberty and it is telling that many of them are publicly distancing themselves from the USCCB’s efforts. This is a long-winded response to Michael Sean Winters’ post, but I felt like he and you the reader deserved a richer explanation for the tone and content of yesterday’s post. Thanks for sticking with it to the end!! Peace. God is good!

Catholic Bishops and Muslim Liberty

[PART TWO OF THIS POST HERE]

I recently wrote an article for Commonweal about the Bishops’ statement on religious freedom and its failure to address the important issue of so-called anti-Shariah legislation. At the conclusion of the article I expressed hope that the bishops would address this glaring oversight and show themselves to be the true champions of religious freedom of all Americans that they claim in their statement. If they were going to show increased awareness of and sensitivity for the religious rights of Muslims the General Assembly of the USCCB, now taking place in Atlanta, would have been an ideal time for it. Occurring just days before the start of the much publicized “Fortnight for Freedom”, this Assembly represents the ideal public forum for the bishops to get their message out and demonstrate the compassion and competency we have reason to expect from them at this critical moment. Instead, what we have already seen is further evidence of the ignorance and bigotry which I warned about in my article. 

As Michael Sean Winters has pointed out, in yesterday’s afternoon session Bishop Lori, the leader of the Bishops Committee on Religious Freedom, and John Garvey, President of Catholic University of America and a leading lay spokesman for the Fortnight of Freedom, addressed the bishops on the topic of the HHS Mandate. At the conclusion of their address they took questions. The first question was from Bishop Bruskewitz of the Lincoln, Nebraska Diocese. His question and Bishop Lori and President Garvey’s response come at the 1:31 mark of this video, but I have transcribed them below:

Bishop Bruskewitz:

I haven’t had a chance to read the Obamacare Protection Act, but somebody told me that there is a total exemption from Muslims in the back of that Act that all Muslims are exempt because insurance for Muslims is a type of gambling which is contrary to the Koran and therefore Muslims are not obliged in anyway to observe the insurance mandate which derives from the act. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I just want to know if any of you know anything about it.

Bishop Lori:

Bishop, you must have got a lot further in that act than I did (laughter). I don’t really know.

John Garvey, President, Catholic University of America

I wish I could say more. We should ask the lawyers. I used to be a lawyer, but I just act it now. (laughter)

Let's be perfectly clear—there is absolutely no substance to the question Bruskewitz asked about some sort of conspiracy to let Muslims off the hook from the Affordable Care Act. It is, frankly, the kind of urban myth legend that one sees trumpeted at the most ignorant of websites and it has been thoroughly debunked at numerous fact checking sites for over two years. That we have a Catholic bishop giving voice to these kinds of questions is sad enough, but perhaps to be expected coming from someone as notorious as Bishop Bruskewitz. What we should not expect, and what we should in fact be concerned about, is the ignorance of Lori and Garvey. Here are the two men at the forefront of the bishops’ efforts to convey competence and compassion to the Catholic community and the broader public. They regularly trumpet the notion that the bishops’ efforts are for the common good of all Americans. And yet in the face of a question advancing the supposition that an entire religious group is receiving the exemptions the Catholic community is supposedly being denied, they have nothing more to say than “we don’t know”? This is beyond absurd, it is scandalous. Bishop Lori--you really don't know if the document you have spent the better part of the last 18 months criticizing does or does not allow for an entire religious group to exempt itself from its reach? Then why should we trust your judgments about the President's actions on religious freedom? Why should we trust your stated commitment to represent religious freedom for all, when you are ignorant of even the most basic facts related to a major religious group and its standing before the very law that you have made your reputation upon criticizing? 

We have a right to expect better, or we have a duty to question the real agenda of the bishops. If the best the bishops have to offer is creepy, conspiratorial questions that reflect the very worst of anti-Muslim conspiracy thinking, and/or vacuous responses like Lori and Garvey's, then we are either faced with incompetence or subtle acceptance of bigotry. Either choice is sad. As Winters puts it: "Perhaps at today's session, Bishop Bruskewitz can ask the bishop of Honolulu if he has really seen Obama's birth certificate."

[Further thoughts on these issues at this new post]

The Bishops and Sharia Law--My article for Commonweal

A few weeks back I did a short post on the Catholic Bishops' statement on religious freedom, taking special note of the absence in it of any mention of anti-Sharia law. From that I received an opportunity to write a more substantive reflection for Commonweal, which I am proud to say is now up at their website.
It begins like this:

The U.S. Catholic bishops' recent statement “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” which calls for resistance to growing threats to religious freedom, mentions Islam once. Defending religious liberty, the bishops wrote, “is not an Orthodox, Mormon, or Muslim issue. It is an American issue.” The bishops’ case for the universality of their cause would have been more persuasive if, in their list of specific concerns, they had included examples of how compromised religious liberty is, in part, a “Muslim issue.” One phenomenon they might easily have mentioned is the rise of “anti-sharia” laws in the United States.

Read more here.