Michael Reagan on "The High Court and the Anti-Catholic Left"

Hat tip: Rick Lugari

Michael Reagan writes in FrontPage Magazine on the issues faced by faithful Catholic judicial nominees when they come up before the leftist heterodox Catholics (Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, and Pat Leahy) and a rabidly anti-Catholic Jew (Chuck Schumer) on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

... In recent years the national Democrat party hasn’t merely moved farther and farther Left, it’s gone farther and farther into fantasyland, with top party members uttering insanities such as those that have become the hallmarks of Howard Dean’s frenzied rhetoric. To put it bluntly, the Democrats have gone ‘round the bend.

We can expect to see example after example of that craziness on display as the party’s lunatic wing in the Senate holds forth during the questioning of Judge Roberts. Teddy Kennedy will rant and rave, the sanctimonious Charles Schumer will attempt to portray Judge Roberts as being a threat to the life and liberty of women and minorities and endangered species such as Democrat office holders facing re-election in 2006, and the oleaginous Patrick Leahy will make believe he is involved in a sober examination of the nominee he is really determined to crucify.

Listen to Schumer trying out his interrogative technique, reminding us that the last time he questioned Judge Roberts when he was up for appointment to the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals he wanted him to name three Supreme Court decisions with which he disagreed. Roberts declined and will do so again, giving Schumer an opportunity to declare him unfit to serve on the Supreme Court for having done what judicial discretion required him to do.

John Roberts is a Roman Catholic and as such can expect to be grilled by [Dick] Durbin and his colleagues on whether he would let his religious beliefs color his opinions on abortion. When Judge William H. Pryor was first nominated to the Court of Appeals, Durbin, who describes himself as a "practicing Catholic," said that "many Catholics who oppose abortion personally do not believe the laws of the land should prohibit abortion for all others in extreme cases involving rape, incest, and the life and health of the mother."

That statement led Denver’s Archbishop Chaput to scold Durbin for distorting most Catholic’s beliefs.

As Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out in the National Review, Pryor's opponents adopted "a viewpoint test...that has the effect of screening out all Catholics faithful to their church's teachings on abortion. The only way a Catholic can pass it is by "ceasing, on the decisive issue, to be Catholic – by breaking from his church's teaching."

Father Richard John Neuhaus put it this way: for the liberal elites, the only "good" Catholic is a bad Catholic...