Juan writes:
I think it is fair to say that at least some Democratic Senators — and some outside interest groups — have taken the position that an individual who accepts the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion, and who therefore believes that abortion is murder, is unfit for the federal bench. While I would not call this anti-Catholic bigotry, it is quite anti-Catholic in effect.
If a group specifically said that it opposed nominees who accept the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion — but not people who are equally anti-abortion but not Catholic — then it would indeed be anti-Catholic bigotry. But I take it that Juan’s point is broader still: Any group that opposes nominees who believe abortion is murder, even if they do that without regard to the nominee’s religion (or lack of religion), is setting up a test that’s “anti-Catholic in effect.”
I think, though, that “anti-Catholic in effect” isn’t a helpful term here, because “anti-X” generally suggests hostility to Xs, or at least a deliberate desire to exclude Xs as Xs, and not just the adoption of a neutral rule that ends up burdening X. I wouldn’t, for instance, call a university’s decision to admit students based on high school GPA and SAT scores “anti-black in effect,” even if it has the effect of excluding many black applicants (and a higher fraction of those applicants than of Asian or white applicants). Likewise, I don’t think that we’d call professional sports teams “anti-woman in effect” simply because their selection criteria lead them to be all-male, unless we thought that the criteria were deliberately stacked against women.
More to the point here, say that President Bush decides that he’s tired of anti-death-penalty judges who either vote to strike down the death penalty generally, or undermine it in lots of ways short of striking it down altogether. He says that he will not nominate any appellate or Supreme Court judges who are on the record as being strongly morally opposed to the death penalty. Would we call this “anti-Catholic in effect”?
I don’t think so; again, “anti-Catholic” suggests opposition to someone because of his Catholicism. We should reserve the term, which has the connotation of hostility, to situations that do exhibit such hostility. “Has the effect of excluding Catholics / blacks / women” is much more accurate, both in its denotation and its connotation.
UPDATE: I had meant to note this in the original post — I realize that Catholics are not doctrinally forbidden from supporting the death penalty, but there is, as I understand it, a considerable amount of modern teaching against it. The refusal to nominate judges who support the death penalty thus won’t eliminate all Catholics (though neither would the refusal to confirm judges who deeply oppose abortion, since some Catholics are pro-choice, though there they are indeed running up against official church doctrine), but it would have a substantial disparate impact on Catholics, as I understand it. But in any event, one could substitute some other religious group that does oppose, as a matter of doctrine, the death penalty; I believe, for instance, Quakers are such a group — would one call the policy I discribed “anti-Quaker in effect”?
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