Where have all the Protestants gone? Apparently not to law school. If Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, is confirmed to replace John Paul Stevens, who is Protestant, America’s highest court will have six Catholics, three Jews and zero Protestants. This would be a historic development ”” a coup nearly as momentous as the 2009 inauguration of America’s first black president, but far less widely understood.
When the Supreme Court first convened in 1790 (with six judges as opposed to the current nine) it was an all-Protestant club, with four Episcopalians, a Unitarian and a Presbyterian. During the 19th century, Protestants worked through churches and voluntary associations to make America Protestant. They did this by identifying Catholics as the enemy, scapegoating the pope as the Antichrist and U.S. Catholics as his minions overseas. If, as historian Richard Hofstadter has argued, anti-Catholicism was “the pornography of the Puritan,” it was the Victorian’s fantasy, too.
Protestants still account for about 55% of the 111th Congress, but a recent flurry of Catholic and Jewish appointments has turned them into a minority of one on the Supreme Court. Should Kagan be confirmed, the nation’s highest court would be a Protestant-free zone for the first time since John Jay, the nation’s first chief justice (and an Episcopalian), banged his gavel in 1790.
Why none of this ought to matter:
Because of the First Amendment, because non-WASPs who make it that high are WASPified (SWPLified) in their views where it counts anyway and although of course I want to keep the old way’s virtues — fair play/sportsmanship, objective rule of law, duty/responsibility and at its best meritocracy — when you think about it even today the SWPLs say to Catholics, ‘It’s our country; you’re just visiting, so run along and entertain us by being vibrant while we run your lives’, so the worst of old WASPdom isn’t going away.
What do you have against “White” Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
Is there something wrong with being Caucasian?
Is there something wrong with having Angles and/or Saxons in your ancestry?
Is there something wrong with being Protestant?
Do you have a bias against people with light skin coloration?
Do you have a bias against people that have a northern European ethnicity?
Do you have a bias against people that practice Protestant religion?
Statistically and for true diversity, there should be more White Anglo-Saxon Protestant SCOTUS justices and about half should be women…that is if your true aim is a diverse court that represents the makeup of our country.
From the sound of your comment, you appear to be predjudiced against Caucasian Protestants that have an Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. Is that so? Are you racist and bigoted in your beliefs?
There is a real problem with racism against Caucasians in this country and there is a huge problem with anti-Christian bigotry, too.
I think we all need to work on that.
Prothero inaccurately asserts that Justice Kennedy argued that the cross did not send a Christian message in the Mojave cross case. What Kennedy reasoned according to Supreme Court precedent, not his religious biases, is that any religious symbol which has been displayed in public for a significant period of time may not violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. So, Kennedy’s result had nothing to do with his religion, but had everything to do with legal precedent. If it had been the Mojave Star of David, Kennedy’s result would have been the same. So, the only example that Pothero gives in order to support his argument that religious status affects judicial results actually proves the opposite.
Yet, when believing Protestants have been nominated for high offices or have served, they have been excoriated as “fundamentalists.” Perhaps this author only wants Protestants who are modernists about religion on the court.
I am far more interested in Kagan’s legal views and history indicating what those may be than I am in her ancestry or her private sexual thoughts. This business of separating people into little categories is something we should be moving away from, not towards.
#4–Kagan approved of and supported breaking the law when she was Dean at Harvard. That alone should disqualify her. This is the essential problem with Washington in general and liberals specifically. The law she advocated breaking wasn’t popular with libs, so therefore it is OK. And even the Repubs just wink at it. She has the right to advocate whatever she wants, but she shouldn’t even have been considered for the SCt. Can you imagine what would have happened if Reagan or the Bushes had proposed a conservative who had advocted civil disobedience?
Not just advocated civil disobedience, David Keller, but Kagan, as you point out, deliberately acted against a ruling from the Court she now seeks to join.