Was anyone worried that the Supreme Court's Catholic majority was about to strike down capital punishment?

Our Nino has apparently thought it through and decided he would be "hard-pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic." This is interesting. Wouldn't you like to know more about what the non-Catholic Nino Scalia would be like? Like, would he maybe be thinner?

"If Justice John Paul Stevens decides to call it a career after he turns 90 next month, the Supreme Court would for the first time in its history be without a justice belonging to America's largest religious affiliations."

--Robert Barnes, in "High Court: Does religion

still matter?," in today's Washington Post

by Ken

I keep coming back to this sentence, or rather paragraph. (It's a graf unto itself.) I know what it's supposed to mean, I think. But the only way I can get there is if the "s" on "affiliations" is a typo. Or maybe what happened is that nobody could figure out how to describe Protestantism, and after rejecting "religion" and "denomination" and maybe "sect" came up with "affiliation," only to get trumped by some genius who pointed out that Protestantism isn't "an" affiliation, but many. And nobody noticed that the sentence no longer means anything.

Of course if you read the article as a whole, you develop a different theory. A renegade band of writers from The Onion have embedded themselves in the news room of the Washington Post, and are seeing how much silliness they can slip past the editors.

The basic story is this. Where once upon a time there was a "Catholic seat" on the High Court, with the arrival of "Slam Bang Sammy" Alito, there suddenly was, rather astonishingly, an absolute majority of Catholic justices, and the arrival of Sonia Sotomayor increased that to a full two-thirds. What's more, where there has sometimes been a "Jewish seat," two of the three non-Catholic justices are Jewish. And then there's the "affiliations" justice, John Paul Stevens.

Now mostly I was aware of this, of course. (Actually, the only part I wasn't aware of is that Stephen Breyer is Jewish. Am I really the only one who didn't know this?) And while I think it's grounds for concern, I wasn't all that concerned -- until reporter Robert Barnes set about setting my mind at ease this morning. By the time he was finished, I was prepared to believe that the Court's business is dictated direct from the Vatican by Pope Cardinal Ratguts.

"Supreme Court scholars, political scientists and constitutional experts have long debated how the religion of modern justices affects their decisions on the bench," writes Barnes, "with results that can only be categorized as negligible or inconclusive."

Isn't that a relief? "Negligible or inconclusive." Thank God!

Here's how it becomes "negligible or inconclusive":

* "For every conservative Catholic such as Justice Antonin Scalia, the current member who most openly and publicly embraces his religion, there is a liberal Catholic such as former justice William Brennan, his philosophical opposite." Okay, our Nino, the ideological linchpin of a bloc of five Catholic arch-conservatives currently engaged in rewriting the Constitution to reflect their rigidly authoritarian, socially ultra-orthodox views is counterbalanced by a single previous liberal Catholic justice? (What about the "for every conservative Catholic . . . there is a liberal Catholic"? Who counterbalances the other four?)

* "The Catholic majority that in 2007 endorsed a law restricting abortion also staunchly defended the death penalty. The lone member of the court who has said he now believes capital punishment violates the Constitution, in fact, is Stevens, who has always been one of the most adamant about separating church and state." In other words, we don't have to worry about the Vatican taking charge of the Supreme Court until the justices rise in righteous wrath and strike down capital punishment!

* "Scalia has said he would be 'hard-pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic.'" Of course the Right is persuaded that "diversity" is just a socialist conspiracy. Whereas here we are, us humanistic types, only too aware that we are each of us the product of what made us, and that therefore it's probably a good idea to have an assortment of "each of us"s. Foolish us.

Turns out, it's all OK.

POSTSCRIPT: Do you suppose reporter Barnes ever considered that in imitation of actual reporting he might have wanted to quote even a single person who thinks that maybe there is a problem with having such an oddly balanced Supreme Court? It wouldn't have been necessary to find someone currently living who feels this way, considering the way the ghost of poor old Justice Brennan was fair game to get dragged in as a representative of, you know, liberal Catholic justices generally.

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