A Strong Christian for the High Court

You will note I am not bothering, pedantically, with citing current examples, there being enough of those as it is, spread starkly across the public record.

What else could go wrong in America? I suggest the possibility of more or less successful attempts to smear the reputation and character of a nominee for U.S. Supreme Court on the basis of her religious faith.

To that we've come in this crazy year? We'll see soon enough. You need to bear in mind that Judge Amy Coney Barrett is 1) a sincere, practicing Roman Catholic --as opposed to the Christmas-and-Easter variety, who 2) gives every appearance of believing the Bible and accepting Christian teachings dating back 2,000 years, 3) belongs to a Christian organization, People of Praise, designed to deepen faith and witness, and 4) has said publicly -- brace yourself -- that a "legal career is but a means to an end, and ... that end is building the kingdom of God."

I predict Senate critics are not going to nail her on unverified, shady accusations that, as a teenager, she harassed male fellow students -- that tactic having been tried already and failed against Brett Kavanaugh. The irony of the case, were it to go so far, would be senatorial tut-tutting and cluck-clucking over the Christian moral standards widely seen as standing between sexual desire and the sexual aggression unfairly imputed to Kavanaugh.

Any imputation that Barrett's Christian convictions render her unsuitable for a Supreme Court seat would be worse than ludicrous; it would comment, direly, on the dire state of moral belief and practice in our dire and morally dried-up times.

Back to the Department of Ironies. A president reviled by his foes as immoral has nominated to the court an exemplar of morality, according to all we have been told about her. Here is a still deeper irony. The nomination would seem not quite to herald -- we are not that far along yet -- but to illumine the growing itch for a rebirth of faith. We should be so lucky.

America's round of cultural problems -- poisonous politics, racial strains and stresses, family dissolution, male-female relationships in a huge mess -- can be ascribed, at least in part, to the dissolution of ancient moral truths. Understandings of natural law -- law written on the heart -- fed the stream of Christian understandings advertised and adhered to by the Church. Not necessarily the Church of Rome but rather the whole varied body of Christian believers. Points of procedure and practice might divide the churches occasionally -- less often, points of belief. God's calling required belief and action both.

There was little enough talk of "my truths" or "our truths" or "evolving truths" -- things that we were developing and refining for ourselves without outside help. As America's founders recognized, truth was of God. It all came down to getting with the big program: "building the kingdom of God," to borrow Barrett's formulation. There was territory to annex and subdue; there were works of the mind and the heart to perform. Fine. None of it sneaked past the large aim of living according to the prescriptions of the Author of Life.

That very authorship seems the precise point from which modern culture deviates. No, no -- it's all about us. It's what we want! Get off our backs, Lord! We're the ones writing this book!

Oh? That explains where we are today, doesn't it? The tumult, the shouting, the rape charges, the effluvia of the internet, etc.?

The possibility of elevating to the court -- not that a variety of decent people don't sit there now, but you can't have too many -- a jurist of Amy Coney Barrett's qualities and outlook should pep us up in a gloomy time. Not everything is going -- yet -- to what her fellow Christians formerly described as "the hot place." But it's nice -- and I don't care a rap what today's tasteless culture thinks about Western movies -- to hear a distant bugle blowing the charge.

>> By and large Catholic politicians are a disaster. <<

Is that you, Diane Feinstein?

Your post is more proof what I've been saying for a long time on here.

FReepers try to score political points by howling about underhanded "anti-Catholicism" on the left, while IGNORING far more overt and DIRECT anti-Catholicism on OUR side (liberals, oddly enough, try the same tactic with Judaism -- constantly accusing GOP officials of being covertly "anti-Semitic", while turning a blind eye to the fact all the outspoken Jew bashing is on their side and comes from the likes of "Free Palestine" crowd)

If you look at Catholic politicians overall, they have a wide range of views that span the entire political spectrum (unlike say, Mormon politicians who tend to be conservative, and Unitarian-Universalist politicians who tend to be liberal, though there are a handful of exceptions in both camps), so there is no other way to interpret your post than anti-Catholic bigotry. When it comes to traditional, weekly church attending, PRACTICING Catholic politicians (real SINCERE ones, not ones who just CLAIM that on the campaign trail to get votes, like Pelosi and Biden), studies have shown they tend to be very conservative, so real life is pretty much the exact opposite of what your post insinuates about Catholics.

>> Clarence Thomas is a rare exception. <<

Nope.

First off, Clarence Thomas isn't even a politician running for office, he's a judge who was appointed to the job. And if you look at a list of Catholic Supreme Court justices, it again shows the exact OPPOSITE of what your post claims. Clarence Thomas is a pretty standard example of a Catholic SCOTUS judge and the vast majority of them joined the conservative bloc on the court and routinely voted the right way (Thomas, Scalia, Alito, McKenna, Butler all solid conservatives, even an Truman appointee like Sherman Minton was STILL pretty decent.)

Obama's gal Sotomayor is "Catholic" on paper if you want to cite her as an example, but by her OWN admission she hasn't practiced in years and is pretty much "Catholic" only in terms of cultural upbringing, so it makes as much sense to cite her as a "Catholic" justice as it does to cite Bernie Sanders as a "Jewish" candidate.

Then you have wobbly judges like Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts who stabbed us in the back. Yes, those were screwups, but if people are going to defend protestant squishy judge Neil Gorsuch with the "Hillary's nominees would have worse" talking point, then it works both ways. I can just make the same excuse with any hypothetical non-Catholic judge that Walter Mondale or Al Gore had put on the court in place of Kennedy and Roberts. No doubt they would have been worse.

Other Catholic justices, like Brett Kavanaugh, could have been far better in my opinion, but are far from "disasters". Ditto with a controversial figure like Edward Douglass White -- he was dead wrong on issues like segregation, but was otherwise a pretty decent conservative.

Looking at the list of a dozen or so Catholic SCOTUS judges over the years, the only two that actually turned out to be "disasters", as you say, were the very first Catholic justice, Roger B. Taney, and Ike's appointee, William J. Brennan. Since Ike's record on justices was terrible overall and the protestants he appointed were just as awful (Earl Warren was of scandavian ancestry and a lifelong protestant), I see no moral high ground there for "proving" there's some kind of bad pattern with Catholic justices, let alone Catholic politicians overall.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.