Bigotry and Dogma

From Aleteia:

Just days ago, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sat before an eminently qualified law professor from the University of Notre Dame Law School, Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett, nominated for a federal judgeship on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was answering questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee when it happened. Senator Feinstein leveled her gaze at Professor Barrett and declared,

When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you…And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.

This was an overt shot at Professor Barrett’s Catholic Faith. At issue was a 1998 Marquette Law Review article titled, Catholic Judges in Capital Cases, in which Professor Barrett clearly states that where a Catholic judge finds a conflict between her fidelity to a faith-informed Conscience and her legal responsibility to uphold the law (specifically in death penalty cases), the judge is obliged to recuse herself from the case. And yet Senator Feinstein’s pronouncement seemed to imply the judge held the opposite view. If that weren’t concerning enough, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Professor Comey if she was an “orthodox Catholic” and Senator Al Franken (D-MN) paraded his concern that the professor’s speech before the Alliance Defending Freedom (a religious liberty law firm which, along with the Becket Fund, successfully defended the right to religious Conscience for Hobby Lobby/Conestoga Wood Specialties at the Supreme Court) was a disqualifying event because the ADF is a “hate group”. (Read more.)

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