Pirate's Cove

Liberals totally have a right to question someone’s religion, says Excitable Jill Filipovic in a British news site

Democrats aren’t anti-Catholic bigots for questioning Amy Coney Barrett
The Republican party has cannily repackaged valid scrutiny as religious bigotry. But liberals are right to ask hard questions of Trump’s pick

See? It’s not bigoted. I think they should do it. How many viewers will agree with Jill’s assessment?

The latest Republican talking point: that Democrats are anti-Catholic bigots for opposing Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the US supreme court. Liberals have raised questions about Barrett’s membership in a conservative organization that dictates traditional gender roles (men as leaders, women as their helpmeets), and her many conservative rulings which seem to suggest that she brings her conservative religiosity onto the bench when deciding matters of law. The Republican party has cannily repackaged that as religious bigotry.

Barrett’s faith isn’t the issue. Her conservative, anti-equality views are.

It’s hard to make the case that liberals are hostile to Catholics when the Democratic nominee for the presidency is himself a Catholic, and when more current US supreme court justices are Catholic than are adherents to any other faith. It’s also hard to argue that Barrett’s conservative views are required by her faith, and therefore opposing them is tantamount to religious discrimination.

If they think this attempt to attack her religion will look good, well, good luck with that. The only people who’ll cheer will be the “let’s make Government the religion” folks

Catholics, like people of every faith in the world, pick and choose which tenets of the faith to adhere to; the faith itself also shifts and changes (for example: abortion, now an animating issue for many church leaders, has not been a top priority for the church for most of its history, nor considered murder). This is one reason why Catholic Americans are just as likely as Americans generally to use contraception and have abortions, even though both are formally prohibited by the faith. It’s why a great many Catholic women do not in fact submit to their husbands. It’s why some Catholics identify as LGBT, and are not chaste as the church demands. It’s why the overwhelming majority of Catholics have sex before marriage.

Who had “this is really all about abortion on demand” on their scorecard? That’s what it always comes down to with Democrats

It’s easy to argue that we should separate Amy Coney Barrett’s personal religious views from her professional work. But she doesn’t do that, and the Catholic Church demands that its own members carry their faith outside of church and often into their work. Many Catholic bishops, for example, refuse to give communion to Catholic politicians if those politicians are pro-choice. That’s not a position that happens only on the fringes; it’s exactly what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger demanded before he became pope.

If you believe in murdering the unborn because you were too lazy to have proper protected sex, then, yes, you are going against the Bible.

Liberals generally want a robust separation of church and state, where people are free to practice their own religions without interference or discrimination, but are not free to impose their religion on anyone else, or use their religious views as a pretext to violate the law or harm others. Many conservatives insist that the United States is a Christian country (or, in the more updated jargon, a “Judeo-Christian” country), that Christianity should in fact dictate political and legal decisions, and that religious freedom means the freedom to discriminate and violate generally applicable laws as long as you have a religious justification.

Well, that’s interesting, because Liberals pretty much want to impose their Beliefs on every citizen, mostly be force, especially force of law.

Amy Coney Barrett has made clear that she believes abortion is morally wrong. When she has ruled on abortion-related cases, she has ruled to restrict abortion access. She has made clear that she does not adhere to a basic ethos of gender equality, that men and women should have equal rights, opportunities, authority, and power; she instead is a voluntarily member of an organization that formally opposes gender equality, and has signaled her view that men and women are “complementary” – men in charge as leaders, women submitting to their authority.

And back to abortion. How did a political party become so defensive of killing the unborn? How did it become their #1 belief? The thing they must defend at all costs? If they were given a choice between implementing some basic restrictions (parental notification, no late term, treating abortion facilities like medical facilities, inspecting them, 48 hour waiting period, a few more) that did not end abortion on demand in exchange for winning the White House, they would give up winning the White House.