Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I’ve been assailing the six justices who did so because they imposed their religious law on all Americans. Six of the seven Catholic justices made all American women subservient to the rules of the Catholic Church. As such, my outrage as a Jew has been strident.
Some people on social media have responded to my ire by accusing me of anti-Catholic bigotry, even going so far as to spin my admiration for Justice Sotomayor’s exceptionalism in this ruling as a claim that she’s somehow an exceptional Catholic rather than an exceptional Catholic Supreme Court justice on this particular ruling.
One person tweeted me with “Stop with the anti-Catholic talking points. Just. Stop. It!!”
But they aren’t anti-Catholic talking points. Rather, they're contemporary Supreme Court justices talking points. Six Catholics on the Court just imposed Church law on the American people. They made the Court a synod, sweeping aside the First Amendment’s establishment clause, and in so doing, looked more like servants of the Vatican than servants of the American people.
Because a pregnant woman, regardless of her religion, can no longer opt out of the dangers and rigors of pregnancy, labor, childbirth, and frequently single motherhood, she is breeding stock because six Catholic justices reduced the world’s greatest democracy to a theocracy.
When I was 12 years old my dad left the Republican Party to support Kennedy. He proceeded to teach me about the anti-Catholic bigotry of the time and the suspicion of Kennedy that this bigotry fueled. JFK's brilliant October 1960 Houston speech exposed the irrationality of such suspicion. Because his moral compass was so visible, much of that suspicion was washed away.
These Catholic justices made a mockery of Kennedy’s decency and deep understand of Jefferson’s “wall of separation” our Founders understood as (dare I say it?) sacred.
