This time, the Democrats avoided the dogma. So far.

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s faith was a big focus going into this week’s Senate Judicial Committee hearings.

In advance of the confirmation proceedings, The Associated Press’ Mary Clare Jalonick and Elana Schor noted:

WASHINGTON (AP) — “The dogma lives loudly within you.”

It’s that utterance from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, that’s on the minds of Democrats and Republicans preparing for this coming week’s hearings with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

Feinstein’s 2017 remarks as she questioned Barrett — then a nominee for an appeals court — about the influence of Barrett’s Catholic faith on her judicial views sparked bipartisan backlash, contributing to the former law professor’s quick rise as a conservative judicial star.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal’s Francis X. Rocca and Lindsay Wise pointed out:

In her 2017 confirmation hearings, senators from both parties brought up the connection between Judge Barrett’s faith and her rulings. But Democrats, especially California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, got backlash for their questions.

Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley asked, “When is it proper for a judge to put their religious views above applying the law?”

Sen. Feinstein said, “Whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma…I think in your case, Professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

In response to the line of questioning, Judge Barrett said, “My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear in the discharge of my duties as a judge.”

With the 2017 backlash in mind, Democrats steered clear of Barrett’s religion at this week’s hearings, even as Republicans focused on it.

BuzzFeed News’ Zoe Tillman explained:

In their opening statements and questions for Barrett this week, Democrats pressed her about whether she would be a vote to reverse or chip away at Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that established a nationwide right to abortion. Democrats also asked her about anti-abortion statements she’d signed in the past. But they did not focus on her faith or bring up her religious practices as a Catholic.

In trying to combat questions about Barrett’s religion that never came, Republican members ended up repeatedly bringing her religion into the hearings, however.

“You’re Catholic,” Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said to Barrett on Tuesday, kicking off a string of questions about her faith. She replied that she was. Graham asked whether her faith meant “a lot” to her personally, to confirm that she’d raised her family Catholic, and if she could set aside her religious beliefs in considering cases as a judge. Barrett answered yes to each of his questions.

“This is the first time in American history that we've nominated a woman who is unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology and she is going to the court,” Graham said on Wednesday.

Even if the dogma did not live loudly at the hearings, it figured prominently in an excellent profile of Barrett by New York Times religion writer Elizabeth Dias. Up high in Dias’ story, a former White House counsel jokes concerning Barrett, “We now affectionately call her Judge Dogma.”

Other recent must-reads on the Barrett nomination:

• Even Trump-skeptical Republicans are relishing the prospect of a 6-3 Supreme Court (by Emma Green, The Atlantic).

• Many Catholic women see themselves in Amy Coney Barrett. Others see an impossible standard (Samantha Schmidt and Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Washington Post).

• With Barrett nomination, a D.C. conservative power couple nears its dream (by Elizabeth Williamson, New York Times).

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Undocumented immigrants and churches that give them sanctuary face breaking points: We journalists don’t always do a great job of telling “the rest of the story,” to borrow the late Paul Harvey’s famous phrase.

That’s part of what makes this in-depth story by Jeff Gammage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, so impressive.

2. White evangelicals hope to keep changing Texas red for Trump: In a 2004 story for The Associated Press, I referred to fast-growing Collin County, Texas — north of Dallas — as a “bastion of evangelical Christianity and conservative political views.”

Sixteen years later, the demographics are changing — and “old and new political camps ‘are fighting it out to see which way’ it goes in Collin County,” as one Texas House candidate told AP’s Ellen Knickmeyer. 

A nitpicky quibble: I wish AP had used a different term than “parishioners” to describe the evangelicals in the lede. Catholics have parishes. Baptists don’t. (AP’s own stylebook points this out.)

CONTINUE READING “No Anti-Catholic Sequel: Democrats Avoid The Dogma At Barrett's Hearings,” by Bobby Ross Jr., at Religion Unplugged.