Attack on Catholic Judges <br>Breaches the Bedrock <br>Of U.S. Constitution

What is the most emphatic prohibition in the entire Constitution? Is it “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”? Or “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”?Or is it “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”? Or “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States”? Or “Excessive bail shall not be required”?Those are all famous limits on our government, for sure. But they are weak beer compared to the clause that says: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”“No . . . ever . . . any.” It’s not only the most emphatic statement in the entire Constitution but probably in all of American law.One just cannot make religion, or the lack of it, a condition of holding public office in our country. Many who fled to America knew all about religious tests. So this is not in the Bill of Rights or any other amendment to the main document. It’s in the main body of the Constitution. It is American bedrock.All of which is to say that The New York Times ought to be ashamed of itself for running an advertisement attacking the religion of the five Catholic justices of the Supreme Court. It did this last week in the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision.The ad actually contained the phrase “Roman Catholic majority.” It named Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.It went on to accuse the Catholic justices in the majority in the Hobby Lobby case of siding with “zealous fundamentalists who equate contraception with abortion,” a statement that combines bigotry with factual inaccuracy.Hobby Lobby actually already happily covers most contraceptives. It objects only to drugs that, rather than preventing an egg from being fertilized, stop a fertilized egg from developing into a baby.The ad calls for the repeal of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which curbs the federal government from overly burdening religion with laws and regulations. The Times ad suggests the government should to be able to burden religion.No kidding. The ad was placed by an outfit called the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The group’s very name flouts a warning issued by President George Washington in his farewell address.In that speech, the Founding Father called religion one of the “indispensible supports” to “political prosperity.” He warned that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”Washington didn’t mean to suggest that everyone had to be religious. Only that it would ruin the country to exclude religious principle from our national life. The ban on religious tests was a contrast with England, where one had to be a Protestant Christian to be in Parliament.The reason we don’t need to worry about the religion of our governmental officers is because of the constitutional oath. The oath — to support the Constitution — is required of every officer, legislator and judge of our national, state and local governments.That’s not enough for the Democratic Party intelligentsia. It has been railing about Hobby Lobby for months. Joy Reid on MSNBC complained about the “six Catholic justices,” adding: “The question is do you trust this court to make those decisions?”The American people are not dumb. They are increasingly seeing this kind of thing for what it is, a bigotry all its own. One legal blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, this week ran a satire imagining turning around these kinds of remarks.“It’s no coincidence that three of the four dissenters in Hobby Lobby were Jews with limited attachment to their religious heritage,” wrote law professor David Bernstein to mock the anti-Christian comments he was reading.Bernstein, who teaches at George Mason, didn’t say all criticism of someone’s religious views disclosed prejudice. But, he wrote, “attacking a fully secular Supreme Court opinion on the grounds that its authors happen to be Catholic should be well-out-of-bounds.”“So stop it,” he added.Not likely. Democrats in Congress are already scrambling to find a way to overturn the Hobby Lobby decision via legislation. If they fail, what will they do next — campaign against allowing Catholics on the Supreme Court in the first place? It wouldn’t be surprising were they cheered on by The New York Times.

Attack on Catholic Judges <br>Breaches the Bedrock <br>Of U.S. Constitution

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