--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradh...@...> wrote: > > On May 28, 2009, at 3:51 AM, raunchydog wrote: <snip> > > I'm sure there will be many questions Sotomayor > > will answer. We still don't know much about her. > > I'm crossing my fingers that she at least > > supports Roe v. Wade. I can't imagine she would > > not. > > Uh, two words: Roman Catholic. > > Another for ya: excommunication. > > Yeah Raunch, she'll probably convert to > Universalist Unitarian any day now...
Love it. What fun! Inna first place, if you're going to excommunicate Catholics who don't categorically denounce abortion, you'll have to excommunicate a majority of U.S. Catholics because they're pro-choice. Only 23 percent of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be illegal. (Plus which, excommunication for being pro-choice is not "automatic" in practice, as some would have you believe.) Inna second place, we don't yet know whether Sotomayor is a practicing Catholic and would therefore be concerned about the church's view of abortion. We do have two good hints that she is not: (1) she's divorced; and (2) the White House has said of her, "Judge Sotomayor was raised as a Catholic and attends church for family celebrations and other important events." That's practically an admission that she no longer takes her Catholicism very seriously. Inna third place, judges are required to rule on the basis of established law and the Constitution, regardless of their personal beliefs. Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative Catholic, put it this way in 2007: "There is no such thing as a 'Catholic judge.' The bottom line is that the Catholic faith seems to me to have little effect on my work as a judge...Just as there is no 'Catholic' way to cook a hamburger, I am hard pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic." Bottom line, that Sotomayor was raised as a Catholic tells us precisely nothing about how she'd rule on Roe v. Wade (if it ever came to that, which is *extremely* unlikely). Sorry, Vaj!
