A Roman Catholic Supreme Court Majority
There have been twelve Roman Catholics that have served on the Supreme Court. If President Barack Hussein Obama’s designated replacement for retiring Mr Justice David Souter, Appellate Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Second Circuit, is confirmed by a Senate majority, that number will increase to thirteen. The fifty-four year old New York native would become the first Latina to serve on the court and is Puerto Rican by heritage. The first Latino justice on the high court was arguably Benjamin N. Cardozo (1932-1938) a Jew whose parents were from Portugal.
While Republican party leader, radio host Rush Limbaugh, has called Judge Sotomayor and the president a “racist,” one can anticipate near certain confirmation by the Democratic controlled upper chamber. Then six out of the nine justices on the Supreme Court will be of the Roman Catholic faith. The other three consist of two Jews and only one Protestant. The Supreme Court will have one member of a non-Catholic religious denomination which to put it mildly is interesting.
One of the Roman Catholic justices was one of the great jurists in American history and probably, besides Chief Justice Earl Warren, the conscience of the twentieth-century Supreme Court. This was Justice William J. Brennan Jr. who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Dwight David Eisenhower in 1956. One of his finest moments was his majority opinion in Texas v Johnson (1989) which ruled that burning the American flag was protected speech. Hypocrites and unprincipled Americans such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, wish to criminalise desecration of a flag which they claim represents American liberties such as the right to protest.
One of them was the worst jurist of the 19th Century and brought disgrace and dishonour to the nation and the judicial branch. This monster validated slavery, denied African Americans citizenship and considered them inferior. This was Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney who wrote the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision. He was nominated in 1835 as Chief Justice to the Supreme Court by the genocidal, slave owning, sociopathic war criminal President Andrew Jackson. He served unfortunately as Chief Justice from 1836-1864. The racist president had appointed Mr Tawney as Treasury Secretary prior to his accession to Chief Justice.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr: Appointed by George W. Bush in 2006. He became the fifth Roman Catholic on the nine-member Supreme Court.
The other four Roman Catholic justices are:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.: Appointed by George W. Bush in 2005.
Justice Clarence Thomas: Appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1991. He is an enemy of Civil Rights and an advocate of inequality under law. A disgraceful justice who is contemptuous of the African American struggle for equality and liberation from the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow. Mr Thomas had been director of the E.E.O.C, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that enforces workplace non-discrimination laws including sexual harassment. Justice Thomas during his Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings was accused in 1991 by Dr Anita Hill, who was a law professor at the University of Oklahoma and currently is on the faculty at Brandeis University, of sexual harassment when they both worked at the E.E.O.C. I believed her testimony was credible and Mr Thomas, an enemy of African American advancement, used his race cynically to invoke the image of a “high-tech lynching.” Professor Hill and Justice Thomas are African American.
Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy: Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1988. A conservative with vision, nuance and honour.
Justice Antonin Scalia: Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. An arrogant, unprofessional justice without conscience or dedication to the principle of equal justice under the law. A jurist who decided not to recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy policy development, despite their personal relationship. The erratic hunter and racist, evil former vice president, took the justice in 2004 on a private duck-hunting expedition to slaughter, for sport, innocent, non-threatening animals in Louisiana.
One should recognise the nativism Roman Catholics have had to endure in a predominately Protestant nation: Irish need not apply, the racist Know-Nothing party in the 1850s and the Ku Klan Klan’s virulent strand of anti-Catholicism in the 1920s. A Supreme Court majority is indicative of social upward mobility for Roman Catholics and is a rather stunning achievement. It is also perhaps a logical outcome due to the sheer numbers of the single largest religious denomination in the United States. There are many more Protestants but they are scattered ideologically, creedally and politically into disparate sects and denominations.
Religion will play a role in juridical outcomes. It always has and always will. To suggest individuals can or should excise their f religious beliefs and ideology from one’s weltanschauung is not realistic. I recognise that justices are influenced by life experiences and a cultural ethos impacts their judicial temperament and constitutional interpretation. May the Supreme Court not veer, regardless of its composition, into an area where women’s rights, including abortion rights, the separation of church and state, civil rights, equal marriage and civil liberties are eviscerated as we struggle, as a nation, to contain the impulses toward militarism, greed and intolerance.
Will Judge Sotomayor reverse or enshrine Roe v. Wade? I hope the latter because women must not be forced to give childbirth.
updated: May 30, 2009