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Entry: Confederates and Catholics, Unite! Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/down_in_dixie#2536 Post contents: The late William Styron (a Virginia Tidewater man) wrote about the hypocritical "anti-racism" of the all too racist North, in "Sophie's Choice." He also wrote about the little-known sympathies of the Old South for Jews, and he suggested a parallel between the complex love-hate relationships between Southern Whites and Blacks to those of the Poles and Jews. (cf Pope John Paul the Great, a Pole who did more to heal old wounds between Catholics and Jews than any other Pope in history.) "The South" arguably extends (or used to until recently) all the way up to parts of southeastern Pennsylvania, where I'm from. I speak with a very mild kind of Tidewater accent (sounding like "Maryland-Lite"), typical of many southeastern Pennsylvanians until the recent flattening-out of all American speech into a Californianised MTV swill. In my college days one of my roommates was a Georgian who told me, "John, you ain't a real Yankee. You ain't from the Deep North." And that was a matter of manners even more than of accent. I agree with some of the above commenters who said anti-Catholicism runs deepest in New England. So does its close cousin, anti-Quakerism. When William Penn the Quaker was sailing to his newly appropriated colony, Pennsylvania, in 1682, Cotton Mather of Massachusetts wrote to the Governor of Massachusetts, urging him to capture Penn and sell him into slavery: "...a letter with the news had just arrived on a British ship, that 100 or more of the heretics called Quakers, with William Penn their leader, was headed their way. After meeting with the general court of Boston, a plan of action was unanimously agreed upon. In a letter to John Higginson, Mather told of their decision: The ship, Porpoise, would be sent out at once to waylay William Penn’s ship, the name of which was Welcome, on the high seas off Cape Cod. Then having taken them all as prisoners, the plan was to “sell the whole lot to Barbados, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar, and [we] shall not only do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for His minister and people” (quoted in Frank L. Yost, Let Freedom Ring, 6)." http://www.bibleways.com/blog621.htm Sent at: 2008 10 14