Washington Post Asks: "Did Justices' Catholicism Play Part in Abortion Ruling?"

From The Washington Post:

Is it significant that the five Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold the federal ban on a controversial abortion procedure also happen to be the court's Roman Catholics?

It is to Tony Auth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He drew Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wearing bishop's miters, and labeled his cartoon "Church and State."

Rosie O'Donnell and Barbara Walters hashed out the issue on "The View," with O'Donnell noting that a majority of the court is Catholic and wondering about "separation of church and state." Walters counseled that "we cannot assume that they did it because they're Catholic."

And the chatter continues, on talk radio and in the blogosphere. In the latter category, no one has stirred it up quite like Geoffrey R. Stone, former dean and now provost of the University of Chicago's law school.

[More]

My Comments:
Washington Post staff writer: "We're not saying the Justices' Catholicism played a role in this ruling, we're just covering those who say that it did."

Similar "coverage of the controversy" stories have popped up on the pages of major newspapers across the country, with The Washington Post being only the latest (see also the story in The New York Times that I covered last week).

This is how major media outlets maintain plausible deniability when they want to call into question things like the religious makeup of the Carhart majority without being cast as anti-Catholic bigots themselves.


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Partial-Birth Bigotry: The Know-Nothing Left Blames the Latest Abortion Ruling on Catholicism

Carhart, Casey, and the Supreme Court's Catholics

Chuck Colson: "The New Anti-Catholic Bigotry"

And Finally ... The New York Times Weighs In

More Supreme Anti-Catholic Bigotry

Church Defenders Take On Anti-Catholic Cartoonist

And the Philadelphia Enquirer [sic] Joins In (With an Anti-Catholic Cartoon)

In Case You Missed It ...

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