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Homemade
Inquisition
August
2, 2003
By Terry Sawyer
 Someone
needs to pen a column called "New Lows" and dedicate every
week to the Republican party. Doubtlessly the latest edition
of said column would involve the recent imagined anti-Catholicism
created by the Committee for Justice's attack ads against
the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. In a nutshell, the
ads proclaim that by questioning the "deeply held beliefs"
of federal appeals court nominee William Pryor, Democrats
were really saying that Catholics should not be allowed to
be judges. Like all laughably bad Republican arguments, this
one would be a lot funnier if everyone got it.
Jeff Sessions, Pryor's good ole' boy Don King in this here
fight has been one of the most vocal proponents of this inanity.
During the hearing he argued, "Well, let me tell you, the
doctrine that abortion is not justified for rape and incest
is Catholic doctrine. It is a position of the Pope and it's
a position of the Catholic Church in unity. So are we saying
that if you believe in that principle, you can't be a federal
judge? Is that what we're saying? And are we not saying, then,
good Catholics need not apply?" Of course, no Democrat had
been or would be that gaudy, and the entire debate on Pryor's
"deeply held beliefs" had revolved around his ability to separate
his application of the law from his outrageously partisan
commentary about it. This is the man, after all, who can't
help but refer to the "so-called separation of Church and
State".
When I really begin to think about the charge, I can't see
why it should be illegitimate to ask someone if their belief
system prevents them from applying the constitution in a fair
and equal manner. What if a conservative Muslim jurist (like
Republicans would ever let that happen) said that they couldn't
enforce laws against sex discrimination because, in their
cosmology, women are inherently beneath men? The fact of the
matter is that all judicial nominees are expected to subordinate
their particular beliefs about God to their service to the
Constitution and not the other way around. The adherence to
constitutional principles above religious piety is designed
to prevent judges from making our legal standards based on
whatever a given judge happens to believe about the mind of
God. This is especially prudent with conservatives, who seem
to believe that the God's intentions conveniently mimic their
own agenda, like some lying sack of shit Snow White mirror.
(William Pryor is most certainly not the fairest of them all.)
Truth be told, Orrin Hatch introduced Pryor's Catholicism
into the hearing in order to be able to milk this lie with
any amount of plausibility. Up until that point, Pryor's religious
affiliation hadn't even been part of the record. But since
we're there, let's not even call it strict Catholicism. Pryor
finds it convenient to junk the Pope's edicts when they happen
to come into conflict with his more fervent political alliances.
If Pryor and the Republican Party seek to bring sectarianism
center stage, then it should certainly be legitimate to ask
why the Church should dictate Pryor's beliefs about abortion
but not the death penalty. I'm being facetious, of course,
because every condom-wearing Catholic in America understands
that their relationship to their Faith isn't nearly as involuntary
as Sessions implies. All this conveniently divisive talk bout
religious freedom leads me to believe Pryor's actual Church
is Sister Ashcroft of the Broken Glass Houses.
It's unfortunate that this careening hallucination of an
argument distracts from the fact that Pryor makes a truly
ghastly nominee. He's called Roe v. Wade an "abomination"
and has consistently proposed the fig leaf of Federalism for
every single social issue where the Constitution might act
as a bulwark against the unsavory march of the Right. Of course,
lo and behold his belief in Federalism seemed to momentarily
lapse when he became the only attorney general in the country
to file an amicus brief in support the Supreme Court's election
of the President in Bush v. Gore. I suppose every good
lap dog deserves a scratch behind the ears. Pryor has also
come out in support of sodomy laws commenting that they are
not discriminatory against homosexuals per se, but merely
acts of homosexual conduct. Oh, I see, is that like loving
the ignoramus but hating the ignorance? Silly me, I loathe
both. Hey maybe I'd be willing to support the idea of conservatism,
as long as none of them voted.
The reality is that William Pryor is a religious extremist
who seems to have a long record of being unable to distinguish
his beliefs in God and his job of enforcing the protections
of the Constitution. That's in addition to his ethically checkered
past shilling for corporate cash with the Republican Attorney
General's Association. He's part of a fairly recent though
corrosively successful trend of defining the Constitution
down in order to remove impeding liberties, precedents, and
rights like privacy and desegregation that conservatives consider
"made up." In short, conservatives hope that, by nominating
judges like Pryor they can effectively gut the Constitution's
safeguards against tyrannical majorities or misguided but
powerful minorities.
This is part of a broader, snaking, and wily reversal of
truth constructed by evangelicals who seek to define any effort
to thwart their imposition of theocracy as "anti-religious"
or denying them "freedom". Sadly, it's not the first that
the language of authentic social just has been hijacked. (See
also Reverse Racism and The Defense of Marriage Act.) Republicans
don't sincerely believe that Democrats are anti-Catholic.
Nor would, under normal circumstances, evangelicals be above
bashing a Catholic piñata with glee. Truth be told, certain
Southern protestants are of the few Americans left who actually
care about such arcane irrelevancies. But surely sowing phantom
division has been a boon to Republican coffers and electoral
success. Why not dredge up papist hatred historically fomented
by right-wing protestants in order to paint liberals as tarring
a sweet innocent man of Faith? For once, Republicans might
actually be overreaching in their underestimation of the body
politic. This argument is so blatantly self-inflicted, so
incoherently frothed out, that is unlikely that all but the
most unreconstructed wingnuts will buy this line of phony
martyrdom. Then again, they always seem to surprise me with
an unseen trapdoor in the bargain basement of ethics.
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