Religious Tests
Dean
Quick trivia question: where do the following words appear?
"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
1) The Uniform Code of Military Justice
2) The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798
3) The House Unamerican Activities Committee's proposed guidelines opposing communism in American schools.
4) The U.S. Constitution
Today's Wall Street Journal has the answer, and also notes that a hoary form of bigotry--Catholic-bashing--is alive and well these days.
I can't put my finger on it. Spirituality-based politics? Whatever you call it, they're arguing over what everyone's brain-share is allied to.
It must be terrible to live as a poor Catholic, what with having to hide who you are at work, and not being able to share your beliefs with your friends. It must be terrible to be a member of a religion that is powerless to protect itself from that bashing it is incurring at horrific rates. Did you know it is legal in 38 states to fire someone because they're Catholic? Or deny them housing?
Don't make me laugh.
Catholics aren't being bashed any more than atheists are. Are they being asked to explain whether or not their personal, religious views will affect the decisions they make? Yes.
And guess what? RIGHTLY SO.
That's NOT Catholic bashing. Catholics are welcome to the bench, just as anyone in America is, as long as they are willing to interpret the Constitution, and not make a decision based on their religious beliefs.
That is NOT applying a religious test. A religious test is saying you cannot be a SCOTUS Justice because you're a Catholic.
Catholic - bashing.
How Sean Hannity of you.
If you want to ask what a man's judicial philosophy is, or how he thinks about various issues, you ask him that. You don't make slimy insinuations about his character based on the fact that you don't trust his religion--which is exactly and precisely what you are defending.
You can dress it up in all the fancy clothes you want--it's what you're doing.
By the way, the cheap shots? They're beneath you. Worse, they add nothing to the conversation.
Article VI, Section 3.
Mr. Demmons, asking any candidate for public office about his religious beliefs is a foul thing. It truly falls under "none of your business." All that really should be asked is whether a candidate is qualified for the position - and Judge Roberts is qualified, and hwether he will faithfully discharge the duties of his office.
After that it is irrelevancy. And if he fails to discharge his duties congress can impeach him. See Article III, Section 1.
Yes, this is Catholic-bashing, brought about because of the word "abortion." If he were Methodist or Episcopalian, do you think the question would even have arisen? Of course not.
I'm not denying that Catholic-bashing existed.
Calling what Roberts is going through Catholic-bashing is an insult to real people who actually went through it.
And I'd rather be obnoxious than insulting.
This is a molehill.
If I interviewed you for a job, would it be okay for me to ask you whether your homosexuality would influence the decisions you made in your job?
But, if you were interviewing me for a Supreme Court seat, yes, I believe it would.
It's not about me as a regular job seeker though. So don't make it about that.
But, if you were interviewing me for a Supreme Court seat, yes, I believe it would, because you would know that decisions were going to be made about gay issues, and you would want to know if my personal feelings would trump my ability to follow the law and precedent.
This is why these questions are not to be asked.
To get back to the question of Catholic bashing, again, the thing that is behind it all is abortion. Some wish to attack Judge Roberts on this issue. However, a nominee will always say that he can't prejudge a case. So how to attack? Go through his religious faith, as the Roman Catholic Church does not support abortion.
However, neither does the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. If Judge Roberts belonged to that denomination, would his religion have been brought up? I don't think so. Frankly, there is no residue of anti-Lutheran prejudice in the united States, but their is some lingering prejudice against the Catholic Church and thus it provides an easy vehicle to approach Judge Roberts on abortion.
So yes, in this instance, it is Catholic bashing.
Such is my opinion, and yeah, I've got lots of them.
Jack T. Chick:
A Roman Papist on the Supreme Court! He will force everybody to eat a Death Cookie!
/Jack T. Chick
Outside of good old Jack T. (and the long history of anti-Catholicism among Protestants from the Reformation to the middle of the 20th century), Peter Viereck once noted that "anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals." Witness the hostility to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, demands that government subsidize "Piss Christ" and the Virgin covered with feces, etc..
I notice that Leftist "criticism" of the Catholic church takes two contradictory forms:
1) The Catholic church is evil because it interferes in affairs which should properly be left to the secular state, e.g., abortion,
and
2) The Catholic church is evil because it failed to speak out against evils committed by the secular state, e.g., the Holocaust.
Which is it?
Spectrumologically: anti-homosexualism is rapidly displacing anti-Jewishism, anti-Negroism, and anti-Catholicism in a certain quadrant of the Right, while anti-Jewishism ("anti-Zionism") is being added to anti-Catholicism on the Left, which also indulges in anti-homosexualism and even anti-Negroism whenever it finds that convenient.
In fact, in this post I haven't said anything that Mr. Esmay didn't say earlier. But it did bear repeating.
Good-day, sir.
That the statement is false does not mean nobody believes it or repeats it, after all.
My point was that the charge that the Catholic church was silent in the face of the Holocaust is usually made by the same people who demand that it must now remain silent in the face of abortion. They cannot have it both ways.
To quote Michael Ford: It's not mean if it's true.
I have no idea who you're arguing with. Who said you're crude? Certainly not me. I only said that the jibes against the Catholic church we hear so much today in the media are contradictory. If the Catholic church takes a stand against evil or what it believes to be evil (murder), it is said to be "meddling" and "violating the separation of church and state". If it doesn't, it's still damned.
OK. Sorry about the mix-up.