IT'S NOT JUST CATHOLICS

Accusation of Bias Angers Democrats (ROBIN TONER, July 27, 2003, NY Times)

In a recent newspaper advertising campaign, run by groups supporting the Bush administration's judicial nominees, a closed courtroom door bears the sign "Catholics Need Not Apply." The advertisement argues that William Pryor Jr., the Alabama attorney general and a conservative, anti-abortion nominee to the federal appeals court, was under attack in the Senate because of his "deeply held" Catholic beliefs. [...]

Republicans and their conservative allies argue that the Democrats have created a de facto religious test by their emphasis on a nominee's stand on issues like abortion. "It's not just Catholics," said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, one of the groups that paid for these advertisements, which are running in Maine and Rhode Island. "I think there's an element of the far left of the Democratic Party that sees as its project scrubbing the public square of religion, and in some cases not only religion but of religious people." [...]

Behind the anger of many Democrats is the suspicion that this advertising campaign is part of the Republican Party's courtship of Catholics, an important swing vote. In general, Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said Mr. Bush was "doing pretty well with white Catholics" lately.

It is all part of a politics that has changed radically since 1960. Among the nine Democrats on the Judiciary Committee accused of working against the interests of Catholic judicial nominees is, of course, John Kennedy's brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

How can the Democrats even argue with a straight face that, though they oppose any nominee who is strongly pro-life, they aren't predisposed against the religious? As for the supposed Catholicism of some Democratic committee members, which Ms Toner would seem to think is dispositive of the bias charge, J. Bottum had a terrific piece on their moral confusions in this month's Crisis.

MORE: (via Mike Daley)
No Religious Test Shall Ever Be ... (Robert Musil, 7/20/03) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2003 7:48 AM