Screenshot from MarkMiloscia.info. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Mark Miloscia, the Republican candidate for Washington State’s 30th district, has been targeted by the despicable ad above, which has since been removed from the website that hosted it. [Click on the image above to see a larger version.] But reportedly hard copies of it were put on display along with other materials for his opponent at a recent political event.

I met Mark Miloscia while working on various projects in Washington. At the time he was a true blue Democrat state rep and was so pro-life that he was a vegetarian. Active in his community and church, Mark was and is someone to be admired.

However, the Democratic party turned on him when he held his own on the marriage issue, standing in favor of traditional marriage. That cost him his run for state auditor. He then did a short stint as a lobbyist for the Catholic Conference.

Finally, with Republicans courting him, he switched parties and is now running for state senate. He explained his decision to switch parties in an op-ed here where he described his experience of not being accepted in the party as a Catholic who’s pro-life. Hard to imagine given that this is the party that helped to elect the first Catholic president.

Yet, at their last national convention, a significant portion of the Democrats tried to take God out of their party platform. Nevertheless, they invited Cardinal Dolan to give an invocation. Clearly, they were managing a major public relations battle.

The fact that no Democrat leader has stepped up to condemn the above ad speaks volumes. The silence is deafening.

The ad faults Mark from being from the South. Ironically, this is the type of ad one might have expected in the South decades ago. According to the ad, Mark has a major flaw: he’s Catholic.

The Daily Caller has more on this story, perhaps most notable that while Mark’s opponent Shari Song has condemned the ad, she also suggests that she knows who did the ad:

But Song, who condemned the image, wrote on Facebook that she told the activist to stop the anti-Catholic attacks, writing, ”I understand one of my supporters may have crossed the line of what is appropriate in that regard, and I’ve asked them to stop.”

Maybe it’s easier to get away with an ad like this in Washington state, which is largely un-churched. As I write this post, I’m visiting New York. It’s hard to imagine someone even thinking of putting out an ad like this in New York or New Jersey where Democrats are so heavily tied to Catholic culture.

But this deserves national attention even if it’s being done in a state that most people on the east coast don’t think about very often. This sort of ad needs to be condemned by national Democrat leaders. Otherwise, taken with things like the attempt to remove God from the party platform, they’re sending a clear signal that their type of diversity does not include Catholics and probably not most Evangelical Christians, Muslims, or any others who have socially conservative beliefs and values.