“The dogma lives loudly within you.”

So said Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein on September 6, 2017, as she “questioned” Judge Amy Coney Barrett during her Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals confirmation hearing. Feinstein must’ve forgotten about the Constitution’s Article VI “no religious test” clause, and she must’ve had no idea that her catchy little anti-Catholic smear would one day be a potent rallying cry for Barrett’s supporters.

But here we are.

President Donald Trump will announce his nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court on Saturday, and Barrett has emerged as the strong favorite. “I’m saving her for Ruth’s seat,” the president had reportedly said when he decided on Justice Brett Kavanaugh to fill Anthony Kennedy’s seat in 2018.

At the time of Feinstein’s bigoted comment, a few leading voices spoke out against it. These included John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, where Barrett was then a law professor. “I am one in whose heart ‘dogma lives loudly,’ as it has for centuries in the lives of many Americans, some of whom have given their lives in service to this nation,” wrote Jenkins in an open letter to Feinstein. “Indeed, it lived loudly in the hearts of those who founded our nation as one where citizens could practice their faith freely and without apology.”

We could end this column right here, with those potent words. But we’ll soldier on a bit longer, because we need to explore the real dogma here, which is the religiously intolerant dogma — even the atheistic dogma — that today “lives loudly” both on the Left and within the Democrat Party.

The attacks on Barrett began in earnest yesterday, with the mainstream media taking the lead. As National Review’s Zachary Evans reports, “Barrett is reportedly a member of People of Praise, an interdenominational Christian community organization. A Tuesday article from Reuters questioned whether the group was similar to a totalitarian cult from the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, while a story from Newsweek initially asserted that Margaret Atwood, the author of the novel, used People of Praise as inspiration for the book’s fictional cult.”

That was a shameful and reckless falsehood, perhaps even an outright lie, and Newsweek was forced to correct it. But you’ll have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find where Newsweek “regrets the error” in a story that still smears Barrett and those Catholics.

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, though, had already heard enough. “These ugly smears against Judge Barrett,” he said, “are a combination of anti-Catholic bigotry and QAnon-level stupidity. People of Praise is basically a Bible study — and just like billions of Christians around the world, Judge Barrett reads the Bible, prays, and tries to serve her community. Senators should condemn this wacky McCarthyism.”

The secular religion of the Left is nothing new, but its numbers are growing, and so is its intolerance for people of faith. These days, leftists don’t merely reject Christianity; they ridicule it. Unless they can use it to take power — in which case they embrace it. As columnist Elle Reynolds puts it, “The media loves to fawn over the pious and heartfelt Catholicism of Joe Biden. Now they’re talking about the Catholic faith of Amy Coney Barrett, the frontrunner to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But you’ll notice a very different tone. The key differences are their adherence to their faith’s actual teachings, as well as their political leanings.”

Joe Biden is a fake Catholic, an abortion-on-demand Catholic. Judge Amy Coney Barrett, on the other hand, is a real Catholic, an honest adherent of the faith. Which is why the Left is hell-bent on destroying her.