SCOTUS IONUS ROBERTUS

[erikred]

If you wanted to take the heat off of Rove long enough for people to forget that you said that anyone involved in leaking the name of a CIA operative to the press would be fired, surely you could not have chosen a more controversial method than to nominate to the Supreme Court a practicing Catholic and arch-conservative with outspoken views against the right to abortion and the rights of private citizens to sue the government to prevent the wholesale destruction of mountain-tops in the pursuit of coal.

Short of nuking Iran, of course.

Comments

[tagryn]

Would a non-practicing Catholic be better, then?

I thought we put the days of automatically disqualifying Catholics behind us when JFK was elected. Its not like we're talking a guy who's an active member of Opus Dei - at least, I don't think he is.

[erikred.livejournal.com]

Pax, Tom, hear me out: I think that the choice of a practicing Catholic (or even a non-practicing Catholic), while fine by me, will engender some controversy among those traditionally in the President's camp. I further think that controversy is what the President wants right now. Whether or not controversy over his religion would translate into utter non-support is something that I, like you, hope is well and truly behind us; appoint or deny a nominee on the basis of ability to judge fairly, wisely, and without poltical bias, I say.

[tagryn]

To be sure, there's a segment of Christianity who don't consider Catholics to be Christian, and their prejudice may preclude them from supporting any "follower of Popery." However, I think he'll take more heat from folks who automatically see Catholics as unsuitable because of their own abortion stances. Unfortunately, I've heard enough with my own ears from otherwise intelligent folks who should know better to know that anti-Catholic prejudice is alive and at least somewhat well, even in the age we live in.

If you were just copying and pasting from the Wikipedia entry on the "practicing Catholic" part, then my bad. My problem is more with the Wiki entry re: relevance of Catholicism in that case. By the time the hearings are done, he'll likely have had his views dissected up the wazoo enough so that there'll be little need to use his religion to guess at where he stands on abortion for folks for whom abortion is a make-or-break issue.