In an interview with blogger William J. Kelly at Illinois Review, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, IL, warned against an increasingly tendency of anti-Christian bigotry in our culture, saying: "We still have the First Amendment of our Constitution but that is being sorely tested."

In the video interview, Paprocki spoke specifically about the fight for marriage and the trend of anti-Christian intolerance from those who advocate redefining marriage:

We have to continue to offer a very articulate, reasoned approach to our understanding, particularly in the area of marriage. Those that talk about this as an issue of equality and discrimination and if you don’t agree with that it’s a bigoted point-of-view – that that’s simply an erroneous viewpoint. And not let them box us into that by painting us as bigots. But I think we have to do the best we can to refute that.

The Bishop specifically praised the black community in Illinois for standing up against this bigotry: "I think some of the people that have been very articulate in refuting this have been members of the black community, African Americans who resent, frankly, depicting this as a civil rights issue."