Honest Howard.(Scan)

It's easy to dismiss Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean as a loose-lipped ideologue. (Republican Senator John McCain has referred to him as "the gift that keeps on giving.") But Dean's seemingly casual remark that the GOP is "pretty much a white Christian party," reflects the views of his militantly secularist faction.

In a recent talk show interview, Democratic senator Tom Harkin charged that Christian broadcasters are "sort of our home-grown Taliban." In The New Yorker last September, M Gore described the faith of President George W. Bush as "the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia." Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor wrote in The American Prospect that America's "evangelical right" despises religious liberty and seeks nothing less than a "state-sponsored religion."

Which religion would that be--the Catholicism of Pope Benedict XVI, the evangelical Christianity of James Dobson, the Mormonism of several conservative senators, or perhaps the Judaism of Dr. Laura Schlessinger?

Democrats still can't figure out why most religious people view them with emotions ranging from distrust to revulsion. Yet their party wrote off authentic Christians long ago. That's why it's been decades since ...