By Dave Andrusko

Be sure to check out Part Two: "The Essentials." And take a quick trip to www.nationalrighttolifenews.org. Please send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.  If you'd like, follow me on http://twitter.com/daveha.

When we wrote earlier this week of pro-abortion Justice John Paul Stevens' seemingly impending retirement (as in before the next term, which begins in October), I would have bet the farm that the following story would appear.
Nina Totenberg covers the Supreme Court for NPR. Totenberg is pro-abortion from the tips of her condescending lips to the tip of her shoes with which she zealously boots pro-lifers at every opportunity.

United States Supreme Court Justices

Today she filed a story under the headline, "Supreme Court May Lack Protestant Judges After Stevens." It is so disingenuous, so lacking in candor, so agenda-driven you have to laugh.

Her first line is emblematic of the pretend-courage that even reporting on this is supposed to require and the fact that this story is really about (and written for) Totenberg and her friends.

"Let's face it. This is a radioactive subject," she intones. "This" being religion, which "is the third rail of Supreme Court politics," according to Jeff Shesol, author of the new book Supreme Power.

"It's not something that is talked about in polite company," he remarks to Totenberg, "although I think privately a lot of people remark about the surprising fact that there are, in fact, this many Catholics on the Supreme Court." (It's revealing, is it not, that in the transcript on the NPR website-- which mixes direct quotes and paraphrases-- we read "so many Catholics on the Supreme Court"?)

According to Totenberg, most of the leading replacements are either Jewish or Catholic. This leads to a lot of yammering and pseudo-concern that a Supreme Court, once comprised entirely of Protestants, may well not have any after Stevens retires. So we get statistics and a short history about the gradual inclusion on the Court of a few Jews (currently represented by Breyer and Ginsburg), and a dozen Catholics (six of whom are now on the Court).

But, of course, all this has nothing to do with the religious affiliation of the nine Justices, at least not in the sense of the American public thinking about it. My guess is that this has never crossed the minds of 98% of us and, if it had, 99% of us could care less, publicly or privately.

It's rather about pro-abortionists and the "bad old days" when pro-life Republican Presidents were nominating Justices who were grilled by the "good guys"--pro-abortion Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. They employed lots of creative ways to suggest without actually saying so explicitly that when it came to abortion Catholic nominees might not rule the way pro-abortionists would prefer because they were Catholic--and therefore should not be confirmed.

But does anyone in the known universe have any doubts that pro-abortion President Obama's first Supreme Court appointment--- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is also Catholic--won't be a reliable pro-abortion vote? Or that the leading Catholic mentioned--pro-abortion Michigan's Gov. Jennifer Granholm--wouldn't be just as adamant about shoring up "abortion rights" as Stevens? Please.

Totenberg talks with Princeton Provost Christopher Eisgruber, who told her, "I don't think any of them [the current Justices] are allowing their religious views to trump their honest, sincere judgments about the Constitution. And I think it's also worth noting that we've had Catholics on the court on both sides of the abortion question."

So, where is the divide? Notre Dame Law Professor Richard Garnett contends "it is more the kind of religious versus secular divide. So for those Protestants in America for whom their faith is important, they can look to the court and say, 'Well, we do see representation on the court of people like us -- people who take their religious faith and religious traditions seriously. True, they're Roman Catholics, not Baptists like us, but they take their religious traditions seriously.'"

Finally, SHOULD a nominee be asked about his or her faith?

"I think that all hell would break loose," says Henry Abraham, of the University of Virginia. "I cannot imagine that being brought up openly. Covertly, perhaps in some ways -- but it's a highly delicate problem."

My guess is that it becomes "a highly delicate problem" not if a nominee refuses to state a position on abortion but if a prospective justice refuses to bow down and explicitly worship at the altar of Roe v. Wade.

Be sure to send your thoughts to daveandrusko@gmail.com, and please read www.nationalrighttolifenews.org.

Part Two