The Last Acceptable Bias

As the Senate expends more and more energies towards not filling judicial vacancies ("I have never had an opinion. I swear, I'm as dumb as a rock! Go ahead, Mr. Chairman, bonk me with your gavel. Won't damage a thing, I assure you"), an interesting wrinkle has emerged. Byron York of National Review, discussing the debate over federal appeals court nominee William Pryor explains:

In previous confirmation fights, Democrats have controlled the agenda and the course of debate by making a variety of allegations against the president's judicial nominees. They accused Charles Pickering of racism. They accused Priscilla Owen of being a judicial activist. They accused Miguel Estrada of hiding his opinions on important legal matters. In each instance, Democrats played offense, and Republicans played defense.



The Pryor nomination began in the same way. At first, Democrats accused Pryor of being an extremist on abortion and other issues. Then they alleged that Pryor improperly sought political contributions for a group he helped create, the Republican Attorneys General Association. GOP senators, as they had many times in the past, found themselves defending a nominee by saying he was not an extremist and had not done anything wrong.



But then Republicans changed course. They leveled an accusation of their own against Democrats, accusing them of opposing Pryor because of his religious beliefs. Pryor is a Catholic who opposes Roe v. Wade both on constitutional grounds and because he believes that abortion is morally wrong. In recent weeks, Republicans accused Democrats of using coded language when questioning whether Pryor's "deeply held beliefs" would interfere with his judgment on the bench. Such language, Republicans said, was in fact an indirect way of condemning Pryor for being a faithful Catholic. That, Republicans concluded, amounted to a virtual religious test for judges, something forbidden by the Constitution.

Accusations of this kind are blood-in-the-water to interest groups, so a Catholic political-action-committe ran a newspaper ad saying "Judicial Chambers: CATHOLICS NEED NOT APPLY." And then the fit really hits the shan. Catholic Senators such as Ted Kennedy shouted very loud that OF COURSE there wasn't any Anti-Catholic bias in the democratic party, Catholics are more than welcome, etc., etc. The prospect of Ted Kennedy being a spokesman for anything spiritual naturally provoked a debate over who gets to call themselves Catholic and who doesn't. Byron York seems to think this is an improvement on the situation. Sadly, I cannot refute him.


But it all begs the question, which has been filtering through certain circles of late, of whether anti-Catholic feelings amount to "the last acceptable bias" in this country. I can see it from both sides. I remember an episode of "Sex In the City," when one of the ladies, the redhead, took up with a man who was raised Catholic, and consequently had a compulsive need to get up and shower after they had sex. Wait, it gets better. When redhead tells Sarah Jessica "I'm the succubus who destroyed Matthew Broderick" Parker's character of this, the latter is shocked. "They still have Catholics in this city?" she gasps. "I'd thought they'd all been done away with." Nice.


Then there's the hullabaloo over Mel Gibson's upcoming film about the Crucifixion, no one's seen it, but it apparently sticks to the Gospels, and that's bad, because the Gospels say that Jews were responsible for Christ's death, and that could lead to...something. I don't recall reading "And yew Jew boys better watch out, 'cuz wer gonna git'cha!" anywhere in the Gospels or the New Testament, but never mind. Believing what the Apostle John wrote about Jesus means that you're an anti-Semite. Lovely.


Now, I'm not really worried over any of this. It's a far cry from Leno making pedophile-priest jokes to a re-emergence of the Know-Nothing Party. Catholics in America are pretty well Americanized, pretty well woven into the societal fabric. I couldn't imagine that changing. Do I occasionally get annoyed when someone makes fun of or misunderstands my church? Sure. Is it fair to say that outsiders can attack Catholics and Catholicism in a way that would never be permitted for Judiaism or Islam, or any ethnic group for that matter? Yeah, but that only underlines liberal hypocrisy, and that rotting equine's already been whupped. I don't want to be a part of one more special group in this country claiming they've been picked on, we've enough of those. And as I've noted in the past, it has ever been thus for the Church. I'll take putting up with "Hee hee! Catholics hate sex!" over getting porked in the butt with a hot poker for refusing to worship the Emporer any day of the week, and twice on Sunday (Get it? Sunday! Ha HA!).


But let's get back to William Pryor. In their defense, Democrats have explained that many Catholics in America don't agree with the official Church's position on abortion (Oh, you thought they were worried about something else?). That's self-evidently true, but so what? Does that mean that only those Catholics who don't agree with church teachings get to be judges? Pryor has basically been cited for rejection from the federal bench because of "deeply held personal beliefs." Deeply held personal beliefs are now bad. No, wait, I've misspoke. Here are Republicans, speaking up in Pryor's defense:

When a devoutly religious nominee's "deeply held personal beliefs" are repeatedly cited as grounds for rejecting him, even when his public record shows the ability to distinguish personal from legal judgment, we think it warrants public criticism.

I get it now. Deeply held personal beliefs are bad, unless they can keep those deeply held personal beliefs as far, far away from whatever decisions they make as possible. So Catholics are welcome, just so long as they aren't all CATHOLIC about it. Because that's just wierd.


This is an old problem, and one which was a root of the anti-Catholic bias of the American past, the charge that Catholics will be Catholics first and Americans second, the invading armies of Popery and the Whore of Babylon. And there's a tiny little nugget of truth underneath it. At some point, Catholics are taught to think beyond tribal interests, that we owe to Caeser/Washington what is Caeser's/Washington's, but we owe to God what is God's. I can see Dianne Feinstein's point: how is someone who has signed on to Rome's teaching regarding abortion going to remain firmly rooted in the law with regard to Roe vs. Wade? If that national law is really so important to the life of the Republic, maybe the Republic's lawmaker's are right to keep away a man who may threaten it.


Course, there's another solution...