In many of the 13 colonies, before the Revolution, Catholics were forbidden to disembark. Despite their alternating periods of self-congratulation and feigned victimhood, the Church has not successfully persuaded many of us that the colonials were wrong. The malign theocracy they're currently trying to impose on this secular state, with straitjacketed genders, hostility to gays, abortion bans, government funding for their religious schools, and near-total domination of the Supreme Court, is bad enough. But it pales in comparison to their slave-holding past .