Posted on 05/06/2010 8:10:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
When Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court last year, the media was full of stories of an historic first, a barrier broken. The first Latina to serve on the high court is certainly something to note.
Justice Clarence Thomas was only the second black American to be nominated to the Supreme Court. His confirmation hearings, however, were hardly the stuff of "let's make history."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden, after promising Judge Thomas a fair hearing, enabled the worst kind of gutter rumor and "over the transom" innuendo to be introduced against the dignified and principled Clarence Thomas. All of this was broadcast on national television.
Protesting strongly against hearsay evidence being dragged in against him, Judge Thomas aptly labeled Biden's "star chamber" proceedings "a high-tech lynching." Thomas was confirmed by the narrowest Senate vote in a century.
When Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, at the beginning of the last century, the elevation of the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice was considered noteworthy. A century later, a Jewish Justice hardly evoked media comment. By 1991, it seemed we were well into the period where Supreme Court nominations were seen as marks of respect for this or that ethnic group.
With Justice John Paul Stevens' retirement, however, we have come to another milestone. Stevens, who will be 90 this June, is the last Protestant serving on the Supreme Court. In a nation once overwhelmingly Protestant, this alone might occasion comment.
It's not as if the Protestants have gone the way of the passenger pigeon. There are still hundreds of millions of them in America. But the largest group among Protestants is no longer the Methodists; it's the Evangelicals. How many of these are there? Because our U.S. Census has never asked about religion, it's difficult to say with precision. A liberal publication, Public Eye Magazine, recently put the number at between 25% to 45% of the U.S. population.
Liberals certainly are trying to dig more deeply into that figure, earnestly searching for ways to speak to a diverse community that could number as many as 135 million Americans.
Would even one of these Evangelicals wind up on President Obama's short list for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court? Don't bet on it. During the bruising Senate Judiciary Committee battles over the appointments of President George W. Bush, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-L-NY) made sure to "drill down" on nominees' and potential nominees' views. Schumer made sure Miguel Estrada was sidetracked early, before he could qualify as Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court. Liberals were not about to let Bush nominate the first Hispanic to the high court.
Schumer also bored in on the "deeply held beliefs" of Bush nominees. That's what happened to Charles Pickering. Named to the federal district court by the senior President Bush, Judge Pickering was also President of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, an Evangelical church body that called for a correction of Roe v. Wade's rule of abortion-on-demand.
That was enough for Sen. Schumer, who developed his own version of a religious test. In Schumer's view, it was perfectly fine for nominees to profess a personal religious faith so long as it never affected their worldview. Schumer made sure Judge Pickering never survived long enough to serve on the Appeals Court.
President Barack Obama and Sen. John Kerry, of course, can express their opposition to men marrying men. That is their official position. No problem. If, however, Gov. Mike Huckabee, an Evangelical, or Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Catholic, takes the same position, both are to be opposed because of their "deeply held beliefs." In other words, they really mean it.
So, today we will see a new NENA: No Evangelicals Need Apply. To our shame, America once had an old NINA. That was the sign prominently posted in Massachusetts factory windows that meant "No Irish Need Apply." John F. Kennedy's election as president was a time of rejoicing for millions of Irish and Catholics in this country. That old NINA bias had been overcome. For black Americans, similarly, the election of Barack Obama represented a widespread belief that "our time has come."
In a time of increasingly unembarrassed ethnic identity politics, there is one notable exception: a serious Evangelical will not be seriously considered for the U.S. Supreme Court. There has not been a prominent Evangelical on the court since John Jay, the first Chief Justice. Evangelicals have been passed over so many times that it's as if they're invisible. Mercifully, there was one prominent Evangelical named by Barack Obama: Rev. Rick Warren got to deliver the invocation at President Obama's historic Inauguration. But Rick Warren was gone by one o'clock!
-- Ken Blackwell a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union. He is the co-author of the book The Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency. Bob Morrison is senior fellow at the Family Research Council.
I thought that went without saying.
As a Catholic, I would love to have another Catholic on the court. Can never get enough.
The Soviet Union afforded freedom of religion. One could practice the religion of their choice, but they would remain on the lowest social and political order. That kind of thing is quickly being adopted by American system. Pretty soon Christians will be discredited quicker than child molesters.
“Evangelicals”, as it is currently defined,
are simply [literal] Bible believing Christians.
Biblical truths diametrically oppose the entire liberal worldview and ideology,
so they must reject it.
This makes “liberal Christian” an oxymoron.
Why do we act like the President, any president, should have their say on this. It’s a lifetime appt. Every congress critter should be researching a candidate and making an informed decision, not trying to make the president feel validated over his nomination.
Take em apart, put them through the hoops like they did with Clarence Thomas. Take it seriously Congress!
From what I can tell, the only thing congress takes seriously is their own pockets.
“Let Us Help You Pack”
A new song from the Heartland of Colorado ! A real catchy tune!! Should be the theme song for the next few elections.
Speakers up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=x2G3wGVAnlQ
I’d be happy with another Catholic but not one like a couple that are already there. (I assume Kennedy is, and Sotomayor.) John Kerry is a Catholic isn’t he? Do you want him on there?
I would definitely have to disagree and say that it certainly is possible to have “enough” Catholics on there.
I know...I was being sarcastic. I don’t think anything should be “you can be on the court because of this and that”. It should be strictly “Do you believe in the constitution and do you think it should be changed and that is about it.
Like Ivory soap overwhelmingly, all other religions combined was about half of 1%.
Obama does not seem to be comfortable with serious Evangelicals.
Notice how the Pentagon has disinvited Franklin Graham (who used to attend ) from the National Day of Prayer and notice Obama’s silence on this matter.
Says a lot right there.
True believers carry the “scent of Christ” (2 Cor 2:14),
which is the stench of death to those who are perishing (unsaved).
Um, no. Even the least favourable place the percentage of Catholics at about 1.6 percent at the time of the revolution. They’ve been about 25 percent since about 1850.
Wow, you are way off. Most estimates run about, .4 or .5 % with some people rounding it off to 1% when we created the United States, as Catholic immigration started in the 1830s it grew to from a few to 5% by 1850.
“Catholics were a decided minority in the original 13 English colonies. As we see in the first general report on the state of Catholicism by John Carroll in 1785, Catholics were a mere handful. He conservatively estimated the Catholic population in those colonies to be 25,000. Of this figure, 15,800 resided in Maryland, about 7,000 in Pennsylvania, and another 1,500 in New York. Considering that the population in the first federal census of 1790 totaled 3,939,000, the Catholic presence was less than one percent, certainly not a significant force in the original 13 British colonies.”
http://www.traditioninaction.org/History/B_001_Colonies.html
“Until about 1850, the Roman Catholic population of the United States was a small minority made up primarily of English Catholics. Following the potato famine and other events in Europe in the 1840s, millions of Irish and other European Catholics began a massive emigration to the United States. In the early to mid-1800s, Catholics made up only 5 percent of the nation’s population. But by the end of the 19th century, the Catholic population had grown to represent 14 percent of the total U.S. population (14 million out of 82 million people).”
http://archstl.org/archives/page/catholic-church-usa
You are comparing apples to oranges. Using a 1785 count of Catholics against the 1790 census is problematic given the annual growth rate of the American population in those days.
I’ve seen estimates of around 35,000 Catholics by the 1790 census.
195,000 in 1820 and 1.6 million in 1850
I believe those are Catholic sources, I used to have better graphs and numbers but have lost track of them, I have seen lower numbers than I posted.
Catholics were almost nonexistent when the Protestants created America and they only started growing around the 1830s with immigration and then more immigration and then floods of immigration until the American people got control of immigration in the 1920s, until the flood gates got opened again by the Kennedys in 1965, which started the current flood of Catholic immigration that we are in today.
Catholics reached about 16% in 1900 and peaked at about 24% in 1965. By 1990 in spite of importing 10s of millions of Mexicans, Catholics had dropped to about 22% of the population of the American people.
Yes, but the recent trend is primarily because of Non-Christian immigration. Protestant numbers are falling precipitiously, particularly among the mainline Episcopalians, Calvinists, Lutherans and Presbyterians.
I’m not disputing that there were few Catholics in the revolution, but Maryland is Maryland because of the Calvarts, and Catholics too were oppressed by the Anglicans in the UK. We fled religious persecution for much the same reason that the dissenters fled.
The immigration is largely millions and millions of Mexican Catholics, almost 10% of their population has moved here as they colonize the United States.
We created a great nation, and immigration brought Catholics and liberalism to America.
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