Maureen Dowd’s Religious Test

Let us say at the outset of this editorial that we’re abiding fans of Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. We doubt we’ve ever missed one of her columns. They make us suspect, without intending to suggest anything salacious, that she has a personal acquaintance with Shakespeare. Then again, too, we’ve never seen her in such a swivet as she’s worked herself into over the Supreme Court’s pending decision in respect of Roe v. Wade.The gist of her latest column — “Too Much Church in the State” — is the suggestion that there are too many Catholics on the high bench. She zeroes in on Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who at her confirmation hearing, “tried,” Ms. Dowd declares, “to reassure Democrats who were leery of her role as a ‘handmaid’ in a Christian group called ‘People of Praise.’” She worries about the group’s “male-dominated hierarchy” and “rigid view of sexuality.”Justice Barrett, Ms. Dowd declaims, “said then that she would not impose her personal beliefs on the country. ‘Judges can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion’ — and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world. It’s not the law of Amy. It’s the law of the American people.’ Yet that’s what seems to be coming. Like a royal queen, she will impose her will on the world.”“It will,” she adds, “be the law of Amy. And Sam. And Clarence. And Neil. And Brett.” She reckons it’s “outrageous” that “five or six people in lifelong unaccountable jobs are about to impose their personal views on the rest of the country. While they will certainly provide the legal casuistry for their opinion, let’s not be played for fools: The Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe will be owed to more than judicial argumentation.”“There are,” she writes, “prior worldviews at work in this upheaval.” And just to mark the point, she adds that there is “astonishing preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court — six out of the nine justices, and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic …” She acknowledges that a Catholic “signed on to” Roe, that another joined in Casey, that Justice Sotomayor supports Roe, and that the Chief Justice, also a Catholic, might seek a compromise. Yet Ms. Dowd, describing herself as a Catholic, goes on to express “an intense disquiet that Catholic doctrine may be shaping (or misshaping) the freedom and the future of millions of women, and men. There is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that threatens to turn our whole country upside down.” She frets that Justice Alito has fretted about a “growing hostility to Christianity and Catholicism.”What gets us about all this is that someone as brilliant as Ms. Dowd is having such a hard time grasping the points at issue. Namely, that it was Roe that did the imposing. And that what she fears the court will do is refuse to foist its views on the country. She fears the court will stop barring every state from regulating abortion and instead return the matter to the state — and federal — legislatures. That’s all the high court is weighing.And that she fails to even consider that she is imposing on the justices a religious test for being Catholics. She seems not to appreciate that the religious test clause is (we have remarked on it ad infinitum) the most emphatic statement in the entire Constitution — “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” No … ever … any. Not even Shakespeare could get past that.

Maureen Dowd’s Religious Test

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