The New York Times had a fun feature today in which they asked "seven legal experts" the questions they would like to ask Sonia Sotomayor in her hearings. The experts included four law professors, one historian, and two former government officials. I liked most of the questions--they go beyond silly gotchas and empty questions of "judicial philosophy" and raise important issues. Actually, it would be interesting to hear what the current justices on the court think about these questions.
This being a blog, though, what I'm going to focus on is the silliest of the proposed questions, from Ann Althouse, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin:
If a diverse array of justices is desirable, should we not be concerned that if you are confirmed, six out of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, or is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our first Hispanic nominee?
I'm guessing that this question is a joke, but just in case it's serious . . . My impression is that, for about 150 years, an overwhelming majority of Supreme Court justices have been Protestant. I can't imagine that, when, say, Charles Evans Hughes was being nominated for his Supreme Court seat, that somebody asked him: "Is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Protestantism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?"
To do a quick check on the numbers, I did a quick Google search and found this page with the religious affiliation of all 109 Supreme Court justices up to this point.
We've had 12 Catholics, 7 Jews, 1 unaffiliated, and 89 Protestants (in decreasing order of frequency, Episcopalians, Presbyterian, Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, a few others with one or two each, and a bunch of Protestants not further defined):
(As noted on the linked webpage, there's some ambiguity as to whether Episcopalians should be characterized as Protestant, but for the purpose of ethnicity, I think the label fits here.)
Most of the Catholics and almost all the Jews on the court were appointed since 1930. All the data are on the linked webpage, so feel free to make your own fun graphs.
P.S. In response to some of the early comments:
1. By making this graph, I'm not "defending reverse discrimination." I'm just pointing out that we've had about 200 years during which white Supreme Court nominees could've been asked, "Is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Protestantism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?" It just seems a little silly to start asking this sort of question right now.
To put it another way, I agree that intellectual diversity of opinions is a good thing, but I think Althouse's "Is it somehow wrong" formulation is just silly. If you want to ask about diversity of opinions, you can do it directly without talking about "extreme overrepresentation" in a historically context-free way.
2. One commenter asked about other religions. They are shown on the chart above.
P.P.S. To get to a more interesting statistical question hinted at by Althouse, it is indeed impossible for any collection of 9 people to be truly diverse. Beyond the ethnic and religious dimensions already mentioned, there's the division between politicians and non-politicians, lawyers and non-lawyers, lawyers with and without business experience, and so on. As noted above, I think it's a bit odd to suddenly be bringing up overrepresentation of Catholics now, given the historical record, but some of these other questions of breadth could be relevant.
P.P.P.S. Commenter John S. at my other blog linked to this excellent news article by Robin Toner from a time two years ago when questions arose about there being five Catholics on the Supreme Court. Oddly enough, nobody was asking, "is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?"
91 comments
One interesting thing to do is to weight each of them based on the amount of time they served. :-)
So if we have 90% African American and Latino Catholics for the next 100 years... then 100% Asian and Middle Eastern Jews for the 100 after that... then 100% mixed-race Athiests for the next 100... it should all balance out, right?
I have to say, while I am a solid Democrat, a solid Sotomayor supporter, and even a solid supporter of race-based "hard quota" affirmative action, it disappoints me from an intellectual perspective to see this blog miss the point so badly. You can't just assume that past discrimination either excuses or requires future "reverse-discrimination" — you have to defend this idea. Your defense can be as simple as "it's only fair," but you have to at least acknowledge the other side's argument.
I don't see how (a) that refutes the specific point or (b) refutes the broader point.
(a) Maybe there's a historical protestant bias - but what they're talking about is current intellectual diversity of opinions. I think this seems valid, when a huge percentage are catholics.
(b) what about other religions? Or, say, atheists? I'd guess a huge chunk of the US is either strictly or functionally atheist, and yet how many are on the supreme court? Or mormons, muslims, etc?
While it pains me to defend Ann Althouse, I think this post really misses her point, such as it is. The fact that Sotomayor will be the first ever Hispanic on the court is hunky dory and historic and all the rest. But former Justices don't get a vote, so the more relevant point is that she will be the only Hispanic on the court right now. It has been widely argued that a more demographically representative court is, ceteris paribus, a good thing, and that this is a point in her favor. In that context, the point about Roman Catholics isn't really addressed by the historical charts.
It's still a terrible point, though. That there are suddenly so many Catholic justices is testimony to the fact that mainstream anti-Catholic prejudice has gone the way of the buffalo. The same phenomenon that has made the appointment of all these Catholics possible also makes it pretty irrelevant what the denominational spread of the court's Christians is.
To me the more interesting question to come out of this would be "why?" As in, what has led to the predominance of RCs on the SC? Do more catholics go to law school? Are catholics more likely to serve in the public rather than private legal sector? Are catholics more likely to pass the stringent sniff tests that potential justices now have to undergo? Not that any of it really matters, but it piques my curiosity.
It's probably just coincidence that there are so many Catholics.
Peter
You said the list included one historian. Were you referring to James McGregor Burns? He's actually a political scientist (former president of the American Political Science Association). Though his books include a lot of history, his main focus is on leadership, presidential and otherwise They're not chock full of data, the current fashion in political science.
We were actually discussing the abundance of Catholics (especially relative to their proportion of the general population) at my [very nerdy] office today.
I posited that Catholic temperaments tend to be most in line with the sort of "moderate" views one has to have to get onto the Supreme Court these days. (The only Protestant currently on the Court is John Paul Stevens--who I think is the longest serving member.)
I also think it's a LITTLE silly to make "Protestant" a single category, given how many Protestant sects there are, and the diversity of their beliefs. A Baptist is definitely NOT the same as a Presbyterian, for example.
(full disclosure: I am an atheist.)
The odd thing is I thought Althouse's question was inappropriate until I read your blog post. In hind sight I absolutely do wish someone in decades past had asked the question you propose.
Looking back I can't help but to wonder why your relevant question wasn't the most prevalent question in the past. I would hate to think that future pundits will look back at us and see the same thing as when we look back.
Well ... isn't Catholicism the only denomination that explicitly states that not only abortion but even birth control is wrong? You can't be officially be Catholic and officially support abortion as an OK choice. So a Catholic judge might be expected to be sympathetic to overturning Roe v. Wade.
And haven't we had lots of Republican presidents appointing the last 30 years of Supreme Court Justices? And the Republican platform is anti-abortion?
RME: One interesting thing might be to weight each of them, literally. I think the clinically obese are grossly underrepresented!
Yeah, obviously the poster is not an atheist.
I recall one argument in favor of Nixon's nominees (I forget which one) was that people who were mediocre were under-represented on the Court. This argument was advanced in all seriousness. I kid you not.
To add to my previous comment, I think that the historical context of "overwhelming Protestant" numbers being replaced by a current 2/3 majority of Catholics (when, in the wild, American Catholic denominations are dwindling rapidly) is hugely significant, not chance.
I think that we are seeing the concrete results of 30 years of applying a Republican litmus test on abortion to Supreme Court nominees.
During most of that time, there has either been a Republican president nominating the appointee or a Republican congressional majority confirming that nominee -- and mostly both.
My hunch is that Althouse is race-baiting. That is, she sympathizes with the discomfort Graham spoke of today when considering the prospect that he would be discriminated against were he to emphasize his own race, and she is mocking the concept of "diversity" itself. Stephen Colbert cunningly displays this sort of flimsy resentment when he cheekily claims to "see no color".
That she is wrong is built into her first premise: "If a diverse array of justices is desirable...".
Of course this is desirable. What she disagrees with is the enforcement of diversity. This libertarian impulse is admirable, yet terribly forgetful of what the civil rights movement has taught us about race, ethnicity, identity and culture. It is a fundamental category mistake to equate white and black, or male and female struggles for equality.
This would be like spending more time watering to restore the yellow area of your lawn, and then being accused of favoritism by the green side. The liberal/conservative divide over this issue says more to me about the racist apologetics inherent in conservatism than liberalism's inherent fascism.
What I found really annoying was the blatant attempt by Republicans in making the argument someone's experiences don't have any relevance to upholding the rule of law. They continuously referred to her "Latina" comment and her "policy" comment.
Their strategy is to discredit her for the empathy she feels towards those that come before her in the courtroom.
I would make the argument (I understand why she doesn't, but someone has to make it) the Justices that came before her did not fully uphold the constitution, but instead allowed their experiences influence their decisions.
The constitution originally guaranteed the rights explicit within it to white land owning males. The right to vote was denied to most of the population. The right to an education was denied to most of the population. The right to be even considered one whole person was denied to many.
How did this all change if it wasn't for judges who intrepid the law through their own experiences while considering the current rule of law?
Two points here:
1. The argument provided in the post does not respond at all to Althouse's concern. Past Justices do not vote on future cases. If you think religious diversity is an important factor in evaluating Supreme Court nominees, which I, for one, do not, Althouse's question is valid. The past makeup of the Court is not relevant in responding to it.
2. The reason the makeup of the Court is so heavily Catholic has a lot to do with coincidence, but it should be recalled that right-leaning legal theorists have a much more pronounced libertarian bent than the right-leaning segment of the political culture at large, due in great part to the prominence of the "law and economics" movement over the past thirty years. Within the right wing of the legal world, Catholics are more likely to pair a policy orientation in favor of economic libertarianism with a belief that the law should prohibit abortion. To some degree, that probably explains why Republican Presidents have tapped Catholics in recent years. Again, though, chance is probably a more significant factor.
I’ll bet no atheist could ever achieve confirmation nowadays. First, no president would ever nominate an avowed atheist. If employing a nanny without paying her FICA contribution is a bar to employment at high levels of the government, think of what the religious right lobbies could make of someone who does not profess a belief in God.
Why so many Catholics? The answer is obvious. While a prospective candidate won't say whether he or she will follow Roe v. Wade, the Presidents who nominated most of the Catholics currently on the court hoped that their Catholic education (capital C) would lead them to overturn abortion decisions.
Indeed, Rush Limbaugh became excited after he discovered (brilliantly, I might add, and he was so proud) that Sotomayor was a Catholic. He thought that maybe she'd be "pro-life."
Sotomayor is a coincidence. The other nominees -- not so much.
Following my earlier comment and in line with the current post, why is empathy, and following the rule of law an issue now? An injustice is an injustice. Whether it be separate but equal education, denying voting rights to all, or simply private decisions that should be kept private. All those decisions went against the rule of law at that time.
Why weren't the white male nominees asked about what they would be empathetic to? Why were they not mocked for comments made because of the injustice they have seen through their own life experiences?
Hmmm….
Wow 7 Jews? I thought it was only 2. Who's unaffiliated?
juvanya…
Here ya go…
juvanya…
David Davis, Abe Lincoln’s campaign manager in 1860 and later named to the Court by him, is apparently the only member of undeclared religious preference. Scoll way down.
A few comments:
1) We're selecting judges here not a jury. I don't think we have to have a racially balanced, gender balanced and religiously balanced court in order for it to be effective. After all just by the fact that we are talking about judges here I don't think it's possible to get a court that thinks about the common man - I mean can you imagine Scalia turning to Souter and asking if he wanted to grab a beer and watch the football game? My point exactly.
2) That said I can't wait until the day we have 4-5 women on the court, an openly gay justice, a Muslim or Hindu justice, an Asian justice, etc. Not because there has to be a racial quota for the bench or from some wrong-headed idea that the Supremes should be a representation of the demographics of the country but because damn it diversity is a good thing. Diversity brings different points of view to every situation. I think the sodomy laws would not have stayed on the books as long as they did if there had been a openly gay justice. Republicans often mistake diversity as a hard-fast mandated goal and not as an aspiration. But then telling shades of grey has never been their strong suit.
3) I was glad to see that Senator Russ Feingold finally take on this ridiculous bumper sticker slogan regarding 'Judicial Activism." Hopeful this cliched and trite slogan will die a death like all their others. It is a meaningless statement because making interpretations regarding the law and the Constitution is the job of a Supreme Court Judge. I read an excellent argument refuting the comcept of Judicial Activism - http://www.electoral-vote.com/ Basically the argument is that the Constitution is written in broad vague terms, as are most of our laws. It is one of the reason that there are few unanimous decisions handed down by the Court. As our technology and society continues to advance the Supreme Court is going to be called to determine more and more laws and how they apply to the Constitution. PIck any subject - say whether Spam emails are protected as free speech. If you reread the constitution you will not find a single mention of emails, Spam or even the internet. A strict constructionalist and a non-Judicial Activist would say that emails and Spam were both against the law since they are not in the Constitution. Any ruling about this subject would by necessity require a Justice from Scalia to Ginsberg to make an interpretation of what the Constitution intended, which is sometimes not an easy thing.
4) I think the reason there is a predominance of Catholic Supreme Court Justices is look who has pickeed the majority of the justices currently serving - Republicans. The reason why is because the Republicans have an agenda to sack the bench with Pro-Life justices. They are picking conservative Catholic judges to fill the bench, who they hope will be so devotely religious that they will follow the guidance of the Pope without question and throw down Roe v Wade. Of course this religious bigotry and cynicism to the extreme. It shows a basic flaw in Protestant thinking about Catholics that they are slaves to the view of the Pope. JFK had to fight that kind of nonsense when he ran for President. God forbid that the Republicans promote an out-of-date bigotry towards any group not sufficiently WASP-y. Perhaps this waas what the person who ask this question was so inartfully trying to get to or perhaps she was just showing her bigotry.
Andrew, I think where you go wrong in this is lumping all Protestants together when they have extreme differences in religious philosophy...differences that often translate into extreme differences in political philosophy. Lumping together a Southern Baptist with an upper Midwestern ELCA Lutheran (currently the first and third largest Protestant denominations in the US, and the ELCA is third depending on how you want to categorize the Mormons who arguably fall outside the Catholic/Protestant schism) and calling them similar religiously and politically shows vast ignorance of the often dramatic differences between the Protestant sects in this country.
Protestantism is most certainly not some sort of monolithic body and the differences in belief between each other, even in the same sect, as well as the differences between Catholicism, have caused significant grief and death in this country through our history. The schism in the Baptist church in 1845 (the year after the Philadelphia Bible Riots where Protestants and Catholics gleefully murdered each other over which version of the Bible to use in public schools) is without question the religious foundation behind the US Civil War, a schism which still exists to this day.
Identifying Supreme Court Justices, or anyone else for that matter, simply as "Protestant" is wholly insufficient information on which to base an informed opinion on this matter. The differences between the Protestant sects are simply too vast, as the history of religious violence in this country, which has most commonly been Protestant-on-Protestant violence, has often shown.
@Pragmatus:
Thanks. Interesting. I thought it was only Ginsburg and Brandeis (who didnt practice afaik). But Stephen Breyer. Interesting stuff there.
David Davis (lol) held Obama's senate seat. :O
Well, it's no more nor no less wrong than it is to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of males on the court at the moment
I think this question hits the nail on the head concerning group representation. The notion that the miniscule Supreme Court could have a similar make-up to any large population is laughable.
I think most of us would agree that a representative body's members ideally should more or less reflect the make-up of the group that body represents. However, the make-up of the group is a statistical issue, while the make-up of the representative body is not. Especially when the body has nine members to represent 300 million+ people. Especially when ethnic or religious affiliation are not high-priority criteria for nomination.
The Supreme Court is simply not large enough to expect a statistic concerning 300 million people to apply to 9. You could run the numbers with any groups of those sizes, and you would never expect the small group to have the same composition as the gigantic one.
Those numbers are interesting, but tracking SCOTUS justices religious identities through such a long time period is misleading, because of the amount that religious denominations evolve and their placement in the American scheme of things evolves.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I hardly think we count as "protestant" this day in age. Walk into a UU church with Wiccan religious symbols and Buddhist Prayer Flags hanging from the rafters and you know what I'm talking about. Unitarian Universalists are farther from Catholics and Protestants alike than Catholics and Protestants are from each other!
I understand that the Unitarian identity has evolved and is more liberal now than it was. I'd classify Unitarians and Universalists (which merged in the 1960s) as a protestant denominations till, perhaps, 1940, in which case they both become something much more vague.
I'd also classify Protestants and Evangelicals as two separate categories after 1975. They are no longer culturally indistinguishable as they were before.
I think this all lends itself to the fact that the American religious identity is an evolving thing, and groups of outsiders easily shift to become insiders and vice versa. (I don't think we'd have a Unitarian president nowadays, even though we have had several in the past.)
Unitiarian Univeralists have no Christian identity, nor do they even have a creed. They are officially agnostic and could just as easily be ethnically Jewish - and nonpracticing - with identical religious beliefs.
I'd be interested to see if any Unitarian Supreme Court justices come from the second half of the 20th century, in which case it would be harder to pin down how they fit in religiously. Same for Quakers, and all the really old-fashioned American religious identities like Deist and Theosophical.
Catholic on the court has become a shorthand in legal circles for extreme conservatism with Scalia even speaking at Catholic events on a regular basis and slapping down people who question him.
This is a great question, Andrew just does not have the facts.
Gelman, you lie.
it is indeed impossible for any collection of 9 people to be truly diverse.
As a statistician, let me say my professional characterization of this statement is "bullshit."
How can you write such drivel? There is in fact an exact amount of diversity we can compute for 9 qualified judges given any number of "divisions" we want, but I won't pursue that line, because the point of your bullshitting seems to be to intentionally remove focus from what is important: Is the SC particularly FAR from diverse given the field of qualified candidates, and would Sotomayor make it more or less diverse?
It is not odd at all that nobody was asking about Protestant or Caucasian overload when the country was overtly bigoted against non-Whites and non-Protestants and thought racial and ethnic diversity was a sin that threatened the country; what an idiotic defense. You might as well say, "Well we used to all be racist bigot homophobic Protestants and I see no reason to stop now."
You say it just seems silly to start asking this sort of question now: That is also idiotic, you can't defend current bigotry with past bigotry; as in "That's how we do it here." We have learned to pay attention to such issues since then.
Finally, the religious question is relevant to law because Roman Catholics are officially (because they follow the Pope) opposed to abortion and homosexual equality and prevention of AIDS by using condoms. Your other questions (pol on not, lawyer or not, business experience or none) have almost nothing to do with the most controversial decisions the SC might decide in the current environment, while Roman Catholicism is central to the current political hot buttons.
Either you cannot think very clearly about statistical issues, or you are purposely obfuscating the issue for your own political reasons and biases.
Clarence Thomas was raised a Catholic but currently worships aa an Episcopalian. Since the data on him is inaccurate, how can we be sure any of the other is?
A two-sided binomial p-value seems reasonable to detect over or under-representation, with a multiple testing correction equal to the number of ethnicities or categories tested.
Using the population frequencies from http://www.adherents.com/adh_sc.html as the null, I get p-values from R's binom.test as
Christian p = 1
Protestant p = 0.016
Catholic p = 0.045
Episcopalian p = 0.14
Jewish p = 0.0075
Since we're doing 5 tests, we should multiply each p-value by 5 to get a rough guide to significance. This indicates that Jews are significantly over-represented, but no other religious group deviates from the population average at p = 0.05.
Also reasonable is to test for groups not represented on the SC. The religions not represented on the court amount to 25.3% of the US population, p = 0.12 for 0 members on the court, again not significant.
1. Diversity has to be tempered by the "bench" of people good enough to be nominated to the Supreme Court, even on a left-wing website like 538. For all the griping about Muslims being under-represented, there aren't many Muslims who practise law at the highest level.
2. I think it's great that people think Sotomayor will be the same as Scalia on various issues because of their religion. It just goes to show that even within the largest denomination in the United States, it's still useful to stereotype.
The right has to nominate Catholics - all the "qualified" i.e. crazy Protestants are to obviously crazy - its harder to tell with Catholics
Pragmatus, you can be a Jewish atheist. Not sure if any of the seven have been, but I'd be surprised if not... quite a lot of Jews consider themselves Jewish by ethnicity and/or culture, but not by religion.
It's a valid question to any justice whether their religion will inform their legal decisions. The fact is that the Pope in particular has certainly encouraged Catholic jurists and politicians to make "moral" decisions, in the churchy sense. This is a problem if justices of the Supreme court follow his advice.
That said, Sotomeyer does bring a new perspective to the court (liberal Catholic), so I don't see that this is a diversity of opinion problem. Still, I'll be waited with baited breath for the first atheist nomination to further diversify the court.
It is not just the Pope and Catholic Bishops who have encouraged jurists and politicians to vote in accordance with the theological tenets of their faith and church officials. The entire evangelical conservative Christian movement in the United States is based on religious control of government. The Dominionist theology that dominates the right today expressly calls for the "conquest of the land for glory of Christ."
We as a nation are continually falling into the "old error" (as James Madison called it) that without the support of government, religion cannot thrive.
Following up on my response the Neil, I do have to disagree that it is a valid question to any justice as to whether their religion will inform their legal decisions. That sounds to me like a violation of Article VI which says "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." If a government official (such as a Senator) is making a religious litmus test to determine whether or not someone is qualified to hold a government position (such as a Supreme Court Justice), that official is directly violating the Constitution.
"impossible for any collection of 9 people to be truly diverse."
Indeed, and that is an excellent opportunity for thinking about whether 9 can actually serve as large and complex a country as this one has become.
Like the US House, the US Supreme Court has fallen way behind the standards of modern democracies.
Diversity is good, so make these bodies larger.
(And a context of debating size would be a great opportunity, for both bodies, to talk about changing how we choose who gets to sit in them. We certainly don't want a "court packing" debate. Such a politicized appointment process for our courts is every bit as archaic and detrimental to diversity and democracy as is the use of winner-take-all electoral systems for legislators or the electoral college for the national executive.)
I don't think its an entirely silly question. I think its worth considering why so many Catholics have made it to the Court, particularly why so many Republican Catholics considering the fact that Catholics have historically been associated with Democrats. I think the answer is abortion. Catholics have been considered to have safely pro-life sympathies. And to the extent that is true, I think it should concern Americans that care about the Court's protection of reproductive freedom.
I agree with Andrew's assessment that Althouse's question was silly, but not for the same reasons Andrew gives. I think it's all in the bizarre 'or is it somehow wrong' formation of the second half of the question. It's not 'wrong' to bring up the question. There's nothing really morally objectionable about someone saying that. And by framing her question in that stilted way, Althouse inoculates herself against many people being willing to choose option B, even if they think the ultimate question is silly/frivolous - but not 'wrong'. She's using the wrong threshold for dividing the two options she presents. It's not about right and wrong, it's about relevant or irrelevant.
I actually thought the biggest surprise in the NYT article wasn't Althouse, but rather how thoughtful and insightful Gonzalez's questions were. Check out http://jointstock.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/justice-or-law-what-do-you-want-from-your-leaders/ if you're interested in an analysis.
I find it odd to consider that there is any doubt that episcopalians may not be protestants. Also I am not sure exactly of the dayrs, but I am pretty sure that the Anglican church in the UK started AFTER Martin Luther. In the old WASP thing, I would imagine most peoples idea of a WASP most closely resembles an episcopalian. That being said I appreciate a desire to differentiate between episcopalian and more 'American' forms of protestantism.
I think the overloading of the court with Catholics may have something to do with the importance of abortion as an issue in the thought process of nominating justices. I am not sure but how many of the 12 Catholics have been nominated by Democrats? And how many of the 5 on the court at the moment?
Markymark, as I alluded to earlier in the responses, I thought it was deliberately deceitful to lump all the Protestant denominations into one group when there are such vast theological and political differences between them. Even within some sects such as the Baptists (the schism between the totalitarian Southern Baptists and the more libertarian Northern ones being virtually irrevocable) and the Lutherans (such as between the ELCA and Missouri Synod) the gulf of difference between their ideologies is tremendously wide and it is difficult to see that they ever came from the same religious tradition.
Grouping all Protestants together trivializes the differences in their theology and presumes a uniformity in belief and politics that not only does not exist now but never existed.
The great Republican orator Robert Ingersoll once said, "Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man. To each reader the Bible conveys a different meaning." How many different Protestant sects are there in this country? Thousands? Tens of thousands? To even imply they are all one in belief is ludicrous folly.
This last post is a bit hyperbolic - however I think it does hit on the fundamental difference - logically Catholics pose a threat to the Union that Protestants do not - Protestants invented seperation of church and state because they could never agree on what the church should be - I don't think in actuality we are at risk of a papist conspiracy but logically a court of all Catholics is far different than all protestants
While pizzuti certainly is correct in characterizing (modern) Unitarian Universalists as (largely) post-Christian, his analysis doesn't quite address the question of whether the Unitarians who sat on the court should be described (without qualification) as protestants (and therefore Christian theists.)
They shouldn't be: most pre-UU-merger Unitarians would have been deists.
I think it is deliberately deceitful to attribute the separation of church and state to Protestantism. After all, it was Protestants who came up with the concept of "Cuius regio, eius religio" the failure of which was one of the leading causes of the Thirty Years War. The English Civil War which dominated the politics and theology of early Colonial America was largely a war between rival Protestant sects to decide which one would dominate.
The concept of the separation of religion and government as it exists in the US more accurately belongs to Englightenment-era Deism, a non-Christian religious belief that today would be more closely related with atheism. Admittedly, the writings and practices of Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony, also had a vast influence. Williams did indeed escape religious tyranny...that of the Massachusetts Bay colony.
You are not be familiar w/ Althouse. Her comments seem silly, trivial & irrelevant because she is silly, trivial & irrelevant. If you spent any time on legal blogs you would know enough to ignore her.
Anthony, I think it is supremely ironic to say that Catholics logically pose a threat to the Union that Protestants do not when it was the US's largest Protestant denomination (the Southern Baptist Congress) that posed the greatest threat to the Union in this country's history, engineering the US Civil War. If you look through the founding documents of the Confederacy and the speeches of their framers, you will find them laden with Protestant religious rhetoric (specifically Southern Baptist religious dogma) that does not exist in the founding documents of the US.
Now, swivel your eyes over to Obama's feet. The foot closest to the woman, like Sarkozy's, is planted and aimed forward, but the other steps off in the direction of the woman, bending the knee upward into a bit of a crotch-squeeze and forming the base of a dramatic tilt of the entire body into a flexible S-shape that leans toward the woman. Obama's arms hang free, emphasizing the tilt, and either gravity or will causes the left arm to hang inches away from the torso. See how much lower the right hand is than the left? His neck is craned out and around so that the line of sight is directly at the ass. His mouth is open as if to say: That's what I want.
AND: Yes, I have seen the video, and I stand by my analysis of the still photograph.
That was Ann Althouse in a post that was labelled "Assgawkgate". It tells you absolutely nothing about Obama, of course, but everything you need to know about Ann Althouse.
The chart appears to show one or more justices as having had "no religion." Which one(s)?
It's silly to ask ANY question about ethnic, gender, or religious "representation" on the court. The court is not, never was, and never should be a "representative" body in any sense of the word. They are there to do a job, and the court should ideally be composed of the nine people who would do the best job.
Politics will always play a part in the selection of justices, but "representation" is an illegitimate concern in every respect. We hear statements like "Blacks, or Hispanics, or women, or ... DESERVE to be represented on the court." What Blacks, Hispanics, women, Catholics and atheists deserve is to have the nine best judges in the country on the court. An injustice against any one woman, any one African-American, or any one evangelical Christian, is an injustice against us all - including white male agnostics like me.
Re the number of Catholics on the Court, it might just speak to the strength of Catholic primary and secondary education in preparing students for college and further success. I have no doubt that Ms. Sotomayor was better served at Cardinal Spellman than a public high school in the Bronx.
Kevin, while some Catholic high schools are often superlative (like my own city's Canisius HS, best known as the high school of Tim Russert), the overwhelming majority of Catholic primary schools (the parish K-5/K-8 schools) are often quite dreadful as are the poorer Catholic high schools. This is largely because of the quality of teachers they are able to get. Such parish schools often accept non-certified teachers and pay them roughly minimum wage. Also internal bickering within the church can also shut down quality schools, as happened with the gifted/talented Calasanctius in Buffalo, where lack of support from the Diocese because of political differences between the religious orders (Calasanctius had been run by Piarists, who are not well regarded in the US Catholic hierarchy) forced an economic crisis shutting the school shut down.
Catholic primary education in the US is far from uniform, even within the same Diocese. It varies quite widely from excellent to utterly abysmal. Even knowing all of that, the best public school districts in this area are better than the best Catholic schools and the worst public school districts are still better than the worst Catholic schools.
Lord Calvert,
Excellent point - I was not aware of this history - However indirectly it supports my point - The Southern Baptist are a majority or atleast a plurality in the South and therefore a threat regionally - The Catholics due to their numbers form a similar sort of threat
I don't understand how representation on the courts from inception is relevant to the current composition of the court. I think it is initially curious why Catholics are so well represented on the court, but when you examine the sorts of legal opinions the right wing seeks in appointees their representation is well explained.
If we want to have a more representational supreme court, and I think in some ways we do, I think it is relevant. If we were to suddenly have eight women supreme court justices on the court instead of just the one we have today, I think there would be nearly as strong an argument for having more men on the supreme court bench as there is for having more women on the bench. I think in general the same is true for religion, although religion is much more of a broad spectrum than gender, which is mostly binary.
Anthony, this is something the framers acknowledged and one that we have seen in the US through our history...when there is a predominance of one sect in a country or a region, that sect invariably abuses the power of government making it an ideological hammer against dissenting faiths. The majority of the freedom of religion cases we've seen in the courts over the last century and a half were made by minority faiths attempting to protect themselves from government being used as a religious auxiliary of the majority faith, such as the Santa Fe vs. Doe case in Texas (made by Catholics and Mormons against a Southern Baptist majority).
James Madison said, "Religion flourishes in greater purity without than with the aid of government." We have all found out through our own country's history that when religious groups get control of government, no matter how holy the motive, the result is persecution, bigotry and death.
Not directly on point, but here goes:
How many SC justices do you think Obama will appoint?
I'm figuring him to appoint enough to reshape the Court.
Stevens is quite elderly, of course; though he seems quite healthy and firm of mind, he won't be on the Court forever. Kennedy and Scalia aren't getting any younger.
The bottom lion: assuming he serves two terms (which I believe is a safe bet at this point), I figure Obama to appoint six Supreme Court justices. That, my friends, would ensure that his influence would be felt into the 2030's. Wow.
Anyone else care to hazard a prediction?
Lord Calvert, I should perhaps again restate my position of being a Catholic, so I tend to view all protestants in that light. That being said, obviously there are huge differences between protestant faiths.
And Young mr Burns, its fascinating that there are still people prepared to publicly slander American Catholics in that the Catholic faith has never sought to dominate Catholic politicians. Look at the vast difference of opinion within the Catholic church's representatives within American politics. And remember that the Catholic faith is about the only religion in US history to have a political movement set up to oppose it directly (the know nothings). That and the lingering anti Irish Catholic bigotry that lasted into the 20th Century suggests that your post does not suggest a deep understanding of American politicial or American Catholic history.
@slinkers:
The SC nominee who was defended on the basis that mediocre people deserve representation was G. Harrold Carswell. The doofoid who crafted that bit of logic was U.S. Senator Roman Hruska (R-NE).
@Nick:
Thank you very much for your post about Althouse. The enlightenment that flows from this website is why I keep coming back, and the commenters are an integral part.
Lord Calvert, your last post was a great one. To me, an atheist, I would like to see 9 atheists on the Supreme Court. That is the best way to ensure the prevention of any religion being privileged over another (or to those of us who have none) at the hands of government. It would also erect a strong barrier between church and state instead of the more fragile one under attack all the time from the Religious Right.
Matt, the only way Obama can reshape the Court is if he gets to replace Kennedy and/or Scalia, the two oldest conservatives (or at least leaning that way) on the Court now. Obama would have to last two terms for any chance of this happening, as both reasonably healthy men will turn 80 in 2016, the final year of an Obama second term. In the meantime, Obama can replace any or all of the older or less healthy liberals such as Stevens and Ginsburg.
Out of curiosity, I would want to know what the equivalent religious ratios were at every level of the judicial system.
What if we were to find that at every level, religious judges were more opinionated (or more obvious in their opinions) than atheist judges?
Or what if we were to find decreasing levels of atheist judges?
These are valid concerns if one thinks that atheist=fair, because then it would mean that the likelihood of any set of justices would end up being 'not fair'.
So... are atheists under-represented in the judicial population as a whole? If so, what do you do?
Dave said
'Lord Calvert, your last post was a great one. To me, an atheist, I would like to see 9 atheists on the Supreme Court. That is the best way to ensure the prevention of any religion being privileged over another (or to those of us who have none) at the hands of government. It would also erect a strong barrier between church and state instead of the more fragile one under attack all the time from the Religious Right.'
----------------------
As a Catholic, I find this quite an odd post. Firstly what about Atheism makes it not a religion? It seems to me that many atheists are far more zealous than those who follow a theistic religious faith. (Think Richard Dawkins). My experience is that atheists tend to be far less respectful of other peoples faith than those who hold a theistic faith. So your claim that a court of 9 athiests would be more respectful of the seperation of church and state rings hollow to me. Indeed one could claim that the absence of school prayer is already a victory for atheism over theism. (Though personally I would be reluctanct to make that case, I have heard it made, given that the constitutional seperation of church and state is not about the denial of faith, but about the protection of it, and the lack of school prayer seems to be against that.)
Thats not to say that having an atheist on the court would not be desirable. Though I do wonder what the religious right would make of an 'out' atheist being nominated to the bench.
Holy Cow, markymark.
Let me take the liberty of answering: >> Firstly what about Atheism makes it not a religion?
Religions believe in supernatural phenomenon; e.g. souls, ghosts, reincarnation, god(s), demons, angels, immortality, miracles, witchcraft, magic, and supernatural justice or reward systems like Karma, hell, heaven or Valhalla, and supernatural intervention in earthly events. Atheists do not believe in any of these. Most religious people want to say we take the non-existence of such things on faith; but we do not: Faith is believing in things that cannot be demonstrated or proven. Atheists do not believe in that which cannot be demonstrated or proven from some mutually acceptable set of simple axioms by logic.
>> It seems to me that many atheists are far more zealous than those who follow a theistic religious faith.
Oh I see, you're iron faith that God exists that cannot be shaken by any logic or facts or the billions of counter-examples we atheists provide does not make you a zealot? No, YOU are the crazy zealots, and our insistence on evidence-based belief is not zealotry at all, it is just an insistence upon sanity, by which we mean we don't start from some unprovable imaginary premise (like the idea that God exists) in order to arrive at the conclusion we want to hear (like personal immortality).
>> My experience is that atheists tend to be far less respectful of other peoples faith than those who hold a theistic faith.
Of course, all the religious believe in the supernatural, this common ground lets them agree to disagree on the details. But the atheists reject the supernatural in its entirety. We have no common ground. Our entire evidence based premise is that there is no magic, not even a tiny little bit of magic. None. Zero. You and somebody from a different religion can compromise, each of you mutually believing that the other is just misinterpreting the signs of magic, or has different names for god, or souls, or whatever. You and I can never compromise. Either I rescue you and bring you back to reality, or you abduct me into your fantasy. For atheists this is a zero-sum game.
>> I have heard [the case] made [that] given that the constitutional separation of church and state is not about the denial of faith, but about the protection of it, and the lack of school prayer seems to be against that.
You are wrong on the facts. If you read the Constitution, you will see that separation of church and state is about the state NOT endorsing or promoting or funding any religion in any form. The founding fathers did not want religious groups to have the power of government, even remotely, because they believed the church (and specifically the Catholic Church) would use law to promote a theistic state, oppress minority religions, and fund itself at taxpayer expense. It had already done so in Europe for centuries.
As a public governmental institution, a demand or request that children pray in school is the government endorsing religion. Prayer is a religious act. Further the Supreme Court found that the overwhelming majority of prayer in school was led by authority figures whose very job was to be believed by children, and children could not be expected to reject or separate the religious arguments of these authority figures from their academic arguments, or even to recognize the difference. They also found that prayer in public school was overwhelmingly Christian prayer to Jesus or the Christian God, and this suggests the government is effectively endorsing a specific religion.
This is not "protecting faith", it is prejudice against all those that do not believe in Jesus Christ or the Christian God and inculcating the children of those non-Christians into a faith they may believe is a sin, or may believe is actively harmful (as I believe as an Atheist).
The way to "protect religion" is for the government to stay out of it.
Markymark, Tony C. did a great job of answering your questions (thank you, Tony C.!).
All atheism is is the absence of a belief in god. Nothing more, nothing less. It is NOT a religion. That is a common mistake, among many, that theists make. A more "fun" description could be this: "Atheism is a religion the way natural baldness is a hairstyle!"
If you want to learn more about atheism and rid yourself of your misconceptions, go to atheism.about.com , a comprehensive blog written by an atheist. He has many articles about this topic.
I think the fact that Atheist are annoying has been made clear on this comment thread - as the atheist seem to be the only ones who would prefer to have a theological discussion to the demographic and sociological discussion
@Burns:
Yeah, we atheists are annoying, we keep bringing up those pesky facts. I am trained at the graduate level in sociology and my sister is an academically peer-reviewed and published sociologist.
I would be happy to have a sociological discussion, but exactly what sort of sociology do you want to discuss in this particular case that does not involve some religious belief? The title of this blog entry is "Protestants, Catholics, and Jews on the Supreme Court."
As far as a demographic discussion, who cares? What difference do the demographics of various religions make unless the religion in question influences the decisions of the judge? Which brings us back to the belief system itself, and whether such a belief system is an effective method of approximating just decisions.
And so we must return to atheism and beliefs; we atheists believe that if a judge deliberates while believing in lies as divine and infallible truth, this will create a high probability of horribly skewed justice.
So yeah, all that logic and those infuriating facts, why can't we all just agree that apples are oranges and leave it at that?
Jesus loves you
Jesus is a myth and never existed, he was invented about 280 AD, a rehash of the Sun God myth that was already over 3000 years old. You can compare the life of Christ to that of Krishna. That the names sound similar is no accident; many centuries BC the myth of Krishna is that he was born of a virgin on December 25th, taught peace with his twelve disciples (one for each sign of the zodiac) and was then tortured and crucified on a tree with nails, arms spread, feet together.
Just like Christ... The genius of the Catholic church was to set this story 280 years in the past and then claim it really happened. It was a con job done for money; and you are still paying their tax.
Jesus doesn't exist now and didn't exist then, Jesus is an entirely fictional character you were conned into thinking was real. There is not one shred of archaeological evidence Jesus existed in 30 AD, despite the fact that we have contemporaneous Roman records of the time in the cities he visited recording speeches and altercations down to the level of fist fights. No Jesus of Nazareth.
Also, the Bible itself references towns, markets and roads that existed in 200 AD that did not even exist in 33 AD. Why? Because the story was written in 280 AD, it is not a story from 33 AD. It is a lie.
So when you say Jesus loves me you might as well be assuring me that the Great Pumpkin and the Easter Bunny love me; it provides precisely the same amount of comfort and provokes precisely the same amount of disbelief that you can possibly be serious.
I wasn't serious it was a joke man
Everyone knows Jesus doesn't love Atheists
Tony C kind of made my point about atheists being zealous very nicely for me.
But I will come but to the constitutional reason for the seperation of church and state. The reason the Founding Fathers wanted there to be no established religion was not through an absence of faith, but through an awareness that an established religion would limit the respect given to other religions. No you could argue that in the late 18th century there was more of an assumption that most members of a society would belong to a religion. But the fact is that the Founding Fathers were assuming religion [perhaps I should say faith] would be supported by the nation and by the states.
And its wrong to assume that the Founding Fathers were worried about the Catholic church in that worry. As most of them came from the British Empire, the weight of there fears came from the established religion in the UK, and its restrictions to other faiths. (Predominantly, incidentally this included Catholics). It could be claimed that the founding fathers were keen to send a message that all religious groups facing prejudice were welcome in the US, thereby making sure a steady flow of immigrants came, but thats a far more cynical view that most would have of the Founders.
I am not against Atheists, let me make that clear. My point is that I don't believe that 9 atheists on SCOTUS would ensure what the Founding Fathers wanted. My own view is that a varied and a thoughtful court would reach a better view of what the original intention of the Founders was.
(And without wanting to get into a theological debate about the existence of Jesus, its an historical fact that preachers, of the nature of Jesus were in existence at the time of Jesus, and whether in fact Jesus was one person, or an amalgamation of many different people preaching, seems somewhat irrelevant to me. Its the lessons within the Gospels and the Bible that are important, not the literal words. I choose to believe that Jesus did exist (there is evidence of this, relatively strong evidence given that he lived 2000 years ago), and I choose to believe that the way the world has evolved and the existence of the miracle of life is proof enough of a force that I choose to call God.
Although he was only a Virginia trial judge, Leon Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed in what later became the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that...
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
Having only atheists as judges/justices will result in zero chance of having religious nonsense such as this causing such a horrible ruling requiring reversal later. It is a big fear of mine that a SCOTUS justice will make a ruling using this awful reasoning, even if he or she does not state it so explicitly.
And atheists are accused of being zealots?
Wow, Tony C. You have all the answers about Jesus Christ. As a fact- and logic-driven atheist, please prove that your theory on Jesus is correct.
You know - evidence. Evidence that Jesus is some big lie created by the Catholic Church. Surely you or Dan Brown have some sort of document from the Vatican that sets the whole Jesus Christ myth in motion.
Do tell.
You are truly off the reservation. Most atheists I know realize that Jesus was an actual man, verified in historical Roman and Jewish documents. They simply contend he wasn't the son of God.
You need to start showing some proof, douchebag.
"douchebag" whats up with that - totally unnecessary
First off I haven't accused atheists of being zealots, I have said they are zealous. That may seem semantic but IMO its a big difference.
I don't seek to defend any or all religious-tipped decisions any judge has made. Plenty of good judgements have been made using a persons religious faith as a background. (Its not a legal judgement, but remember that the man most responsible for desegregating Baseball, Branch Rickey, was a religious zealot.) I think its possible to see religion as being a starting point for much bad that happens in the world, but remember that the Holocaust was largely perpetrated by paganistic against people based on belonging to a faith. I think its often possible to see the absence of faith, rather than extra faith, in evil. This isn't to say either that an atheist is capapble of showing amazing humanity. The problem isn't faith or the lack of it, the problem is what human being do with that.
Zealous versus zealot? Seems very semantic to me.
And the Nazi party's position was Christian even if some of them were pagans. Hitler often said that he was doing god's will.
I see religion as the basis of much evil in the world. When is the last time you saw someone commit a violent act "in the name of NO god"?
But it is *atheists* who are the scapegoats for the problems.
"When is the last time you saw someone commit a violent act "in the name of NO god"?"
Easy question. Stalin, Mao.
Also note the relative lack of historical atheists in power from which to choose.
Darn, accidentally erased my post.
Well, basically I wanted to mention the idea that when comparing ideologies one should always compare the best with the best and the worst with the worst.
As an atheist I think religion is hocus-pocus, but I don't need to imbue it with any more negative qualities than it actually has, just to make a point.
And I may be over-zealous about drinking coffee, but I'm no "coffee zealot".
Stalin and Mao killed in the name of "no god"? More myths to make atheism look bad.
Atheism itself isn't a principle, cause, philosophy, or belief system which people fight, die, or kill for. Being killed by an atheist is no more being killed in the name of atheism than being killed by a tall person is being killed in the name of tallness.
Communism certainly inspired people to act and gave them motivations to do certain things, but atheism — which is the absence of a belief and not even a belief itself — did not. The assumption that people in Russia and China were killed merely on account of atheism is based upon two other myths: first, that atheism is itself some sort of philosophy or belief system which can motivate people, and second that atheism is somehow interchangeable with the actual belief system of communism. It also pretends that all the various elements of communist totalitarianism were irrelevant to what happened — which is utter nonsense.
Stop perpetuating myths about atheism.
http://atheism.about.com/od/isatheismdangerous/a/AtheismKilled.htm
Dave, I could say pretty much what you said about how 'atheism' hasn't killed anyone to suggest that religion hasn't killed anyone. In fact I would make that case. I think most wars and conflicts that are said to be about religion are really about culture, power and land, and that religion really plays little part in that. Even groups like Al Qaeda to me are more about power and land and anti-imperialism than they are about religion. Religion just happens to be a dividing line in culture. You may as well say that wars are about flags than about religion.
PAN:
You need to start showing some proof, douchebag.
Okay. I suggest you start with The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by Acharya S. If you want a lighter read, try The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors; Christianity Before Christ, by Kersey Graves.
Acharya is a professional archaeologist and provides the most academic treatment I have ever seen with footnote refs on nearly every paragraph.
She will show you four compelling facts; I will address the most important last.
First, every story about Christ, every parable he tells, every sermon he gives was given centuries earlier, in writing. e.g. Acharya goes through the entire Sermon on the Mount and shows how everything in it was written before 400 BC; it is a stitched together lift of writings attributed to Buddha and Krishna, reliably dated to before 400 BC. But not just that; I am talking about everything Christ said. Acharya is mind-numbingly thorough with thousands of references.
Second, she shows the New Testament is riddled with at least a dozen anachronistic statements. I.e, references to towns, roads and political situations that did not exist in 33 AD.
Third, no piece of the New Testament is dated before 300 AD, no reliably dated material even referencing the NT before 290 AD, and no reliably dated material even reference Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth before 280 AD. Based on evidence gathered from dead sea scrolls and the earliest versions of the New Testament, Acharya argues (with references and documentation) it was written around 280 AD. The Romans kept records of trials and executions and have no record within 50 years of anybody crucified like Christ, or any Barabbas like exchange. BTW, the Romans had fantastic freedom of religion and speech, just not against their government. Those that spoke against the government were summarily put to death on the spot by the sword by any guard handy, they did not require permission or orders to do so. Modern people seem to forget that Romans watched people torn apart by lions just for the fun of it, this was not a culture that found life precious.
Fourth, Acharya shows the origin of the Christ Myth. It is a lift of The Solar Myth; dated (by stone carvings) to at least 3500 BC, probably earlier. It tells the adventures of the Sun as it travels through the constellations in a year. In this story, the Sun is "betrayed" by the final constellation, and then "crucified" (on a star configuration called The Cross) between two bright stars the Chinese called "The Two Thieves." This occurs on December 22, the Winter Solstice and the shortest day of the year. After three days, the Sun moves off the Cross and is "reborn". About 25 saviors BEFORE Jesus are born on December 25th for exactly this reason.
The New Testament is a retelling of this story, set on Earth with a human form deity.
As Acharya documents the Solar Myth is a memory-device for pre-literate societies; the Constellations are not named for what they look like, they are named for what you should be ready for at that time of year. For example, Aries is a frikkin' triangle; but the point is that March/April is the time for goats to give birth. For millennia people knew the Solar Myth was fiction, and for millennia people refined the story for drama and impact.
Christianity just plagiarized it. It was a theft and a lie to begin with, and is today.
Now you will have to take the evidence presented by Acharya and then apply logic to conclude she is right and Christ is a myth, just like you must apply logic and common sense to conclude that wood elves and garden fairies do not exist. But by any standard I'd say the evidence is compelling, and if I had to bet my life on the existence/non-existence of Jesus Christ, I'd bet on non-existence.
Of all the reasons there are for an imbalanced Supreme Court, the one explanation we can send to the rubbish can without further ado is the one about Catholic education. The lay Catholic school system is atrocious wherever it exists, see Quebec, Ireland and Belgium as notorious examples. If it were about the excellence of primary and secondary educations, the Supreme Court would consist entirely of graduates from Quaker schools and Episcopal academies.
The fact that the Supreme Court used to be heavily weighted, or exclusively Protestant has no bearing on the current imbalance. The proportion of Catholics in the population was insignificant until the turn of the 20th century, and the number of Catholics with the educational credentials, or professional attainments necessary to sit on SCOTUS was smaller still. It was natural for SCOTUS to be uniformly Protestant 100-years ago. But in a country where Catholics make up less than 25% of the population, (and are generally less educated at that) the incidence of that many Catholics on the Court is not an accident.
Social issues have driven the selection process in recent decades, and it's probably been an assumption that a Catholic jurist is more likely to be hostile to things like abortion, or gay rights then a Jew, or a member of a mainline Protestant denomination. The mainline Protestant groups--Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Quakers and non-Southern Baptists are notoriously liberal. They've historically been progressive socially, anti-authoritarian, and tolerant. They ordain women, tolerate openly gay clergy, have been in the vanguard of scientific, philosophical, scholarly and humanitarian opinion. They invented Higher Criticism, responsible for more people walking out the church exit doors in the 19th century then Darwin, Spencer and Nietzsche combined.
The mainline Protestant Churches, and Judaism are not agreeable to the prevailing conservative orthodoxy, and any member of those sects are more likely than not, to share the prevailing opinions, with individual exceptions of course. The Republicans have seen the danger of this on the lower courts, where Episcopalians and Methodists and Lutheran jurists with excellent credentials and good conservative breeding get on the bench and all the sudden start ruling in favor of privacy rights and the right to choose and against public funding of parochial schools. Perhaps the conservative Catholic jurist is considered a more dogmatic choice then say a Posner, or an Easterbrook, conservative Jewish jurists with a philosophy that often defies dogma. There are plenty of Catholics that reject as absurd most, if not all of the Vatican's teachings, but to those devout few, and people like Scalia and Thomas can be considered devout, they are generally going to be doctrinaire in their views, and doctrinaire to a Catholic is something entirely different then doctrinaire to a Unitarian, or a Methodist.
You've completely missed Althouse's point, which is not silly at all. Of course her question is a joke, or more accurately, a reductio ad absurdum. Althouse thinks that being concerned with Catholic overrepresentation is absurd. Her point is that counting Sotomayor's religion against her would be the flip-side of counting her ethnicity for her.
Tony: Acharya S is a notorious confabulator. Yes, she gives tons of references, however if you follow up on them you will find that what the texts actually say have nothing at all in common with what she claims.
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請加入我們艾葳酒店經紀公司工作單純輕鬆”高時薪”又可日領徵想要當傳播妹,上班小姐,酒店兼差,酒店兼職,歡迎學生打工,!!!
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