It didn't work, but alarming nevertheless

"The Connecticut state legislature recently considered a bill to wrest property away from the Catholic—and only the Catholic—Church, giving ownership of Catholic parishes to boards of local parishioners. The bill never had much chance of enactment: Nearly every available law professor declared it wildly unconstitutional, and a quick bout of agitation from the state’s Catholics sent the leaders of the legislature back­pedaling in panic.

Still, the sheer fact of the bill revealed something about the character of our present moment. It had about it a mildewed, musty scent, as though we were witnessing the return of, say, 1979—as though thirty years had rolled back without a trace. The effort to strip the public square of all religious content may have sat in angry abeyance for a while, but it now feels bold enough to overreach, and who’s to say that what appears overreaching today won’t seem the norm tomorrow? The exercise carried a revenant, graveyard odor: the stench of ideas we had long thought buried, clawing their way up to confront us once again." The Public Square
No, it's not the 70s. It's much, much worse. It's not even the 30s, unless you count the mock Soviet trials. Oh, 'scuse, please! Is that hate speech? Or is it just a look back on recent history?