Just a quick update on an ongoing topic. There is an interesting essay in The Wall Street Journal about Catholicism, John Roberts, Sen. Richard Durbin and St. Thomas More -- sort of in that order. Clearly this topic is going to keep coming up, as demonstrated by Jeremy with this post yesterday and Doug with another earlier in the week (great art) about the start of this new angle on the Supreme Court wars. The WSJ article is by Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and once the dean of the Catholic University law school. The piece is low-key and sane, and this is how it ends:

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."

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.

I know this is an obvious point, but this whole Roberts/Catholic angle is really not a clash between Republicans and Democrats, at this stage. It's a flash point between Catholics. James Davison Hunter, please call your answering service.