{"id":4716,"date":"2005-07-29T07:55:50","date_gmt":"2005-07-29T07:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/judging-catholics.html"},"modified":"2005-07-29T07:55:50","modified_gmt":"2005-07-29T07:55:50","slug":"judging-catholics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/judging-catholics.html","title":{"rendered":"Judging Catholics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Douglas Kmiec in the WSJ today:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Judge Roberts listens carefully to the questions he is asked, and the extreme premise of Sen. Durbin’s question–as reported–was a judicial action requiring an immoral act. One would hope that all Americans, Catholic or otherwise, would recuse themselves from that. <\/p>\n

Catholics do not have to recuse themselves, though, from judging the legality of, say, abortion or the death penalty: These are matters of constitutional, not moral, authority. When More was asked why he didn’t arrest a man directly for being "bad," he replied (as retold by Sir Robert Bolt) that, though he set man’s law "far below" God’s, he was most certainly "not God," and he wanted to draw "attention to [that] fact." "The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which [others] find such plain sailing," More said, "I can’t navigate . . . . But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a forester. I doubt there’s a man alive who could follow me there, thank God." <\/p>\n

There is no match for Judge Roberts, either, in the "thickets of the law," and the Senate Democrats should evaluate him on his high merit and avoid picking a fight with American Catholics. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At Get Religion, the Catholic Card, citing a piece in which George Neumayr visits the Roberts’ parish.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas Kmiec in the WSJ today: Judge Roberts listens carefully to the questions he is asked, and the extreme premise of Sen. Durbin’s question–as reported–was a judicial action requiring an immoral act. One would hope that all Americans, Catholic or otherwise, would recuse themselves from that. Catholics do not have to recuse themselves, though, from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nJudging Catholics - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/judging-catholics.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Judging Catholics - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Douglas Kmiec in the WSJ today: Judge Roberts listens carefully to the questions he is asked, and the extreme premise of Sen. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}