Pete King to Hillary: Skip Al Smith Dinner If You Won't Defend Catholics

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should skip Thursday's annual Al Smith charity dinner in New York since she has not condemned members of her staff for bashing Catholics, Republican Rep. Pete King tells Newsmax TV. 

King told "Newsmax Prime" on Monday Clinton should have been outraged at the language in the emails, "the ridiculing and the mocking of religion."

The exchange between John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, now top Clinton campaign staffers, and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, described Catholicism as having "severely backwards gender relations" and accused News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson of raising their children Catholic because it was a socially acceptable conservative religion.

Calling the Catholic Church a Middle Ages dictatorship, saying they were going to try to use left-wing groups to infiltrate the Catholic Church and bring about a 'spring' like the Arab Spring that put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt, and their "disregard and callousness and mockery of religion and the irony," bothered him, said King, a Catholic.

Clinton will be sitting on the dais at Thursday's dinner with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, King said, "who, according to her staff would be part in one of those Middle Ages dictators, one of these people who believes the medieval practices, who has no regard for women or for minorities or certainly for gays," so that would make her a hypocrite.

"If she feels that much about it she shouldn't be at that dinner," he said. "She should do the honorable thing and walk away from it."

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