For many Democrats the only good Catholic is a bad one — a
Catholic ready to dissent from his religion for the sake of a spot
in the secularized public square. Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer, and
company are sure to question, in one veiled form or another,
Supreme Court nominee John Roberts about his Catholicism. That is,
they won’t baldly ask him about his religion but they will probe
his “personal” views, and the question implied will be: You promise
to give our judges’ liberal rewriting of the Constitution greater
priority than your own religion, right?
Anticipating this angle, the mainstream media have already begun
to red flag Roberts’ religion. On CNN, Miles O’Brien asked
a guest: “And, you know, he’s, you know, by all accounts, a Roman
Catholic who adheres to the tenets of that faith. Do you suspect
that he will advocate and when the opportunity comes up, reversing
some of the key aspects of Roe v. Wade, which provide
abortion rights in this country?”
On MSNBC, one of Tucker Carlson’s sparring partners
even raised an objection to Roberts’ wife’s personal views,
reporting with alarm her ties to a pro-life group.
To counter the Democrats’ anti-Catholic bigotry — which below
its euphemistic covering amounts to saying that believing Catholics
can’t be trusted with the Constitution — Roberts could point out
that two Catholics, Thomas Fitzsimons and Daniel Carroll, signed
it. Would they be unconfirmable, incapable of interpreting
correctly the Constitution they contributed to writing? Of course,
the men who wrote the Constitution are the last people the
Democrats look to for its meaning, so this wouldn’t impress them.
But it might put them on the defensive.
It has before. Recall how beet red and flustered Pat Leahy, a
pro-abortion Catholic, got during the controversy over William
Pryor in 2004 when the group the Committee for Justice had the
nerve to call him out on his litmus test against believing Catholic
judges. His famous run-in with Dick Cheney was due in part to his
anger at the group’s “Catholics Need Not Apply” ad that had exposed
his bigotry against members of his own religion.
Leahy and the Democrats insisted that they weren’t applying an
antireligious test against Pryor, but it was obvious in their
hectoring attempts to get Pryor to cry uncle and repudiate his
Catholic pro-life views that they were. A blundering Dianne
Feinstein had lectured Pryor: “Virtually in every area you have
extraordinarily strong views which continue and come out in a
number of different ways. Your comments about Roe make one
believe, could he really, suddenly, move away from those comments
and be a judge?”
Chuck Schumer had said: “In General Pryor’s case his beliefs are
so well known, so deeply held, that it is very hard to believe,
very hard to believe, that they are not going to deeply influence
the way he comes about saying, ‘I will follow the law…’”
What they were saying to Pryor was: since you refuse to give
greater authority to our liberal jurisprudence than your
Catholicism, we can’t confirm you.
The Democrats couldn’t even stop themselves from questioning
Pryor about his vacation schedule and the personal views that led
to its rearrangement: the Democrats were very troubled when they
learned that he didn’t want to take his children to Disney World
during its “Gay Days.” Because Pryor wouldn’t cry uncle on this
matter either — Did they expect him to say, ‘No, you are right,
Senator Feingold, I should have taken my children to Gay Days, and
the Church is just wrong on these matters”? — they considered his
“temperament” unsuitable to service on the bench.
Since everything for the Democrats comes down to Roe v.
Wade — as it contains within it the revolutionary wedge
without which uprooting the written Judeo-Christian Constitution
and creating the space for their unwritten relativistic one is
impossible — Roberts’ membership in a religion explicitly opposed
to abortion is a matter of intense interest to them. Adele Stan,
writing in the American Prospect, a barometer of
Democratic thinking, paid special attention to Roberts’
Catholicism, commenting sourly that “If you give nothing else to
the strategists in the Bush administration, you’ve got to admit,
these guys are good. By all accounts, Roberts is a first-class
lawyer. In choosing a Roman Catholic, Bush is betting he’s bought
himself some insulation — any opposition to Roberts, particularly
because of his anti-abortion record, will likely be countered with
accusations of anti-Catholicism. A timely pitch, one must say, to
conservative Catholic voters prior to the midterm elections.”
Let’s hope she is right, and the Republicans repeat what they
did during the Pryor hearings and draw attention to the
anti-Catholic test contained in the Democrats’ criteria. They are
not looking for a judge but a politically correct signatory to the
ongoing Constitutional Convention they want the Supreme Court to
remain. All the talk of a nominee’s “personal views” is nothing
more than a litmus test against those who subscribe to the theistic
philosophy that informed America’s founding documents. By
“mainstream thinking” the Democrats mean thinking like those in the
minority, a group of de facto secularists who only approve of
followers of religion entering the public square if they promise to
lose it.
