One of the most interesting questions in today’s politics is why Judith Miller of the New York Times is being met with such sympathy when she vows to disobey a court on principle and Judge Roy Moore of Alabama was met with so little – at least here in the press capital of the country. It is, after all, under the same First Amendment that both Ms. Miller and Judge Moore are standing on principle for the rights they assert. In Ms. Miller’s case, it is the right to maintain the confidentiality of the sources she needs to practice the journalism that the First Amendment prohibits Congress from abridging. In Judge Moore’s case, it is the right to acknowledge God that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause prohibits the Congress from restricting.

By our lights, it may be possible to argue that both Ms. Miller and Judge Moore are right. It is the individual, this argument would go, not the courts, who, under the American system, decides what the First Amendment says and what the limits should be. Indeed, many Americans are being turned off by the courts, whether it be the Supreme Court in Massachusetts, which tossed out three centuries of marriage law without so much as a how-do-you-do to the Legislature, or the Supreme Court of the United States, which decided that George W. Bush, rather than Vice President Gore, should be president of the United States, without so much as a snort to the House of Representatives, the constitutional arbitrator of a deadlocked vote.

But we can also see where it might be possible to argue that both Ms. Miller and Judge Moore, much as we admire them both for the determination to take a stand, are wrong. It is clearly to one Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress creates that the judicial power of the United States is vested. And it’s to all cases in law and equity that the jurisdiction of these courts extends. No doubt the thinking of the founders was that if it is left to the individual, rather than the courts, to decide what the First Amendment says and what the limits on it should be, we’ll end up with a country of 280 million interpretations of the First Amendment and the very idea of the rule of law will be lost.

Though we can see both sides to this story, it’s harder to see a benign explanation for supporting Ms. Miller’s determination to defy a court order on the one hand and not supporting Judge Moore’s on the other. Is the prohibition on Congress against abridging the freedom of the press more emphatic than the prohibition on Congress against restricting free exercise? The publisher of the Times wants to hand the matter to the Congress to carve out, in federal law if not in the Constitution, an exception so that journalists will not have to provide evidence in criminal cases if doing so would compromise a news source. These columns will support such a law if it also includes a provision that would, as a matter of law, allow a future Judge Moore to acknowledge God in the lobby of the Supreme Court of Alabama.