Senator Feinstein's Family Benefitted from America's Religious Freedom, but She and Other Democrats Seem to Be Anti-Religion, Anti-Christian Bigots

Our hearts and prayers go out to all the people of Florida, the southeast United States, and the Caribbean who have suffered losses and displacement from Hurricane Irma. If you can help, please find a way to do it. • • • THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THAT DEMOCRATS ARE STILL LAUGHING AT THE CONSTITUTION. The New American reported on Sunday that a Trump judicial appointee got an unconstitutional grilling on her Catholic faith from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats last week. The Democrats on the Committee applied a religious test to one of President Trump’s nominees for federal judge, in direct violation of Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, which reads : “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” • On September 6, Notre Dame Law Professor Amy Coney Barrett faced the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the nomination process to become a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She was nominated last year by President Trump. The New American reported that during the hearing, several Democrat members of the committee questioned whether Barrett’s faith -- she’s a Roman Catholic and clerked for Justice Scalia -- would keep her from following the law. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee, led the unconstitutional charge for the ProgDems. Referring to a paper published by Barrett regarding the obligations of Christian jurists, Senator Feinstein revealed her prejudice against people of faith, or, in words forbidden by the Constitution, she applied a “religious test” to someone seeking “office or public trust under the United States.” Feinstein said : “When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country. • • • PROFESSOR BARRETT WROTE ABOUT DEATH PENALTY CASES -- DEMOCRATS TALKED ABOUT A PROSCRIBED RELIGIOUS TEST FOR PUBLIC OFFICE. Barrett and her co-author's article was seized upon by Feinstein and the ProgDems to attack Barrett for writing in defense of the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that judges in death penalty cases should not let their religious views interfere with the law. The 1998 article Barrett wrote regarding the responsibilities of Catholic judges with respect to the death penalty was co-authored by Catholic University president John Garvey, who defended her in an op-ed published by the Washington Examiner last Thursday. Garvey said : "Our point was that judges should respect the law, even laws they disagree with." And, on Friday, Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber, a constitutional scholar, wrote to Feinstein to defend Barrett, stating that "the questions directed to Professor Barrett about her faith were not consistent with the principle set forth in the Constitution's 'no religious test' clause." • Professor Barrett told the Senators the same thing she had written back in 1998 -- that she would, in fact, decide cases according to established law and not her own “personal convictions.” • But, that wasn't good enough for Senator Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, who grilled Barrett a second time, applying once again an unconstitutional set of religious tests to a candidate for public office. Hirono insisted : “You wrote about the duty of Catholic judges in capital cases. In spite of the fact that you had written in an earlier article that Catholic judges -- and you would be a Catholic judge [that is an outrageously unconstitutional statement] -- you would not recuse yourself from death-penalty cases?” Barrett pointed out that when she clerked for Antonin Scalia, she dealt with a number of death-penalty cases and did not recuse herself from dealing with those. There’s no general class of cases she feels she would need to recuse herself from, she said, AND, her article also didn’t actually say that Catholic judges should recuse themselves from death-penalty cases. But, Hirono pursued the frobidden set of religious test questions : “Ms. Barrett, I think your article is very plain in your perspective about the role of religion for judges. It seems to me that your testimony today is at variance with your earlier writings.” Barrett said, “I continue to subscribe to the core argument of that article, which is that a judge may never subvert the law or twist it in any way to match the judge’s convictions.” However, Hirono had the religious-test bit in her teeth and she continued to embarrass herself and Senate Democrats : “It was enough of a statement of what you believe the role of religion was that it certainly caught my attention because I thought that justice was supposed to be blind. We sit here in this bizarre-o world in which we’re asked to pretend that nominees’ personal views...have no role. Ms. Barrett, I think your article is very plain in your perspective about the role of religion for judges, and particularly with regard to Catholic judges.” • For anyone who still does not believe that Democrat Senators were targeting Barrett’s faith and imposing a religious test, consider Senator Dick Durbin’s comments and questions during the hearing. Durbin shredded the Constitution, asking : “What’s an ‘orthodox Catholic?' Do you consider yourself an ‘orthodox Catholic?” [another outrageously unconstitutional question] Professor Barrett kept her composure, although she seemed stunned that Durbin was being so directly unconstitutional : "If you’re asking whether I’m a faithful Catholic, I am, although I would stress that my own personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge.” • • • ONE REPUBLICAN SENATOR SPOKE UP FOR THE CONSTITUTION. One member of the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to remain silent while his colleagues ignored their oaths of office and explicitly made unconstitutional comments. Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, is consistently attentive to the Constitution, and the day after the hearing he delivered a speech on the Senate floor that deserves to be read in its entirety. Here is an excerpt : "I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the fascinating men and women of America’s Founding Generation. I want to share with you one of their stories. Jonas Phillips was a penniless Jewish immigrant, an indentured servant, a hard-working businessman, and an American patriot who served in the Philadelphia Militia during the Revolutionary War. During the British occupation of New York, he snuck messages past the censors by writing in Yiddish. Years later, Phillips addressed a letter to George Washington and the delegates at the Constitutional Convention. He urged them not to include a religious test in the Constitution as a requirement for public service, because no man, he wrote, should be 'deprived or abridged of any Civil Right as a Citizen on account of his Religious sentiments.' Jonas Phillips wrote this letter because Pennsylvania, the state where he lived, required officials to swear that the New Testament was inspired by God. As a faithful Jew, Jonas Phillips could not do that. 'By the above law,' he wrote, 'a Jew is deprived of holding any public office or place of government.' Thankfully, Jonas Phillips’ letter...his prayer..was answered. Days earlier, the convention had voted unanimously to ban religious tests for federal office. The language the Framers inserted into the Constitution was unequivocal : 'No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.' When the Founders wrote 'ever,' they meant it. These strange inquisitions have nothing to do with the nominees’ competency, patriotism, or ability to serve Americans of different faiths equally. I’ll give the final word to one of the Framers, Edmund Randolph, who, on June 10, 1788, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, explained the restriction on religious tests with the unique insight of one who was there when it was included in the Constitution. Read Randolph’s words closely. They are timely and timeless. Regarding this clause, Randolph said : 'It puts all sects on the same footing. A man of abilities and character, of any sect whatever, may be admitted to any office or public trust under the United States. I am a friend to a variety of sects, because they keep one another in order. How many different sects are we composed of throughout the United States? How many different sects will be in Congress? We cannot enumerate the sects that may be in Congress. And there are so many now in the United States that they will prevent the establishment of any one sect in prejudice to the rest, and will forever oppose all attempts to infringe religious liberty. If such an attempt be made, will not the alarm be sounded throughout America? If Congress be as wicked as we are foretold they will, they would not run the risk of exciting the resentment of all, or most of the religious sects in America.' " • • • SURPRISINGLY, SOME OF THE CRITICISM OF FEINSTEIN & CO. CAME FROM THE LEFT. • The Los Angeles Times -- a key left-leaning newspaper in Feinstein's home state -- published an article by Michael McGough on Saturday : "Is Senator Dianne Feinstein an anti-Catholic bigot? Did she violate the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution’s ban on a 'religious test' for public office when she worried this week that a Catholic nominee for a federal appeals court might be unduly influenced by her religious beliefs because, as she told the nominee, 'the dogma lives loudly within you.' Feinstein’s comments at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Judiciary Committee were directed to Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee to the US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (and, as some noted, a mother of seven). The response on Twitter was immediate and righteously indignant. 'Bigotry pure and simple' tweeted USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers. 'Out of bounds' declared Sohrab Ahmari, a writer for Commentary who asked : 'Would she say so to a Moslem judicial nominee?' 'Dianne Feinstein stepped in it today,' tweeted Christopher Hale, a prominent Catholic Democrat.....Barrett didn’t deserve such treatment, despite a claim by a liberal interest group, the Alliance for Justice, that 'Barrett has said that judges should be free to put their personal views ahead of their judicial oath to faithfully follow the law.' Nowhere in its screed against Barrett did the group substantiate this extraordinary accusation....I haven’t see any quotations from Barrett’s speeches or writings that support the notion that her rulings would be warped by religious dogma....In the two-decade-old law review article about judges and capital punishment, Barrett and her coauthor say : 'Judges cannot -- nor should they try to -- align our legal system with the church's moral teaching whenever the two diverge.' Of course, Feinstein’s concerns about ulterior religious motives involve not capital punishment but abortion. As a spokeswoman for the Senator explained : 'Professor Barrett has argued that a judge’s faith should affect how they approach certain cases. Based on this, Senator Feinstein questioned her about whether she could separate her personal views from the law, particularly regarding women’s reproductive rights.'....Feinstein is free not to vote for Barrett, but she owes the professor an apology." • University of Notre Dame president John Jenkins issued a rebuke to Senator Feinstein in a letter he wrote to her on Saturday, stating that her line of questioning into the religious beliefs of a judicial nominee and Notre Dame professor was "chilling" : "It is chilling to hear from a United States Senator that this might now disqualify someone from service as a federal judge." Jenkins, a Holy Cross priest, wrote : "I am one in whose heart 'dogma lives loudly,' as it has for centuries in the lives of many Americans, some of whom have given their lives in service to this nation. Indeed, it lived loudly in the hearts of those who founded our nation as one where citizens could practice their faith freely and without apology." • On Friday, The Atlantic published an article by Emma Green that went far in support of Feinstein's untenable position by proposing the shocking idea that Christian belief may be more and more an issue for those nominated to be federal judges : "As conservative, often religiously motivated positions on issues like gay marriage and banning abortion increasingly become out of step with popular opinion and legal precedent, this boundary between personal conviction and legal fidelity is going to become even tricker to navigate. What’s the line between examining a nominee’s religious convictions and believing those convictions disqualify her from serving the country?" Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, wrote Green, spent most of their time questioning a 1998 paper Barrett wrote as a law student along with John Garvey, who is now president of the Catholic University of America....In those rare cases when law and conscience do conflict, Barrett and Garvey argued in the paper, the most important thing is that 'judges cannot -- nor should they try to -- align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge.' ....The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to read the paper in the opposite way, saying that a judge’s religious beliefs should trump the law....'You are controversial. Let’s start with that,' Feinstein said during the hearing. 'You’re controversial because many of us who have lived our lives as women really recognize the value of finally being able to control our reproductive systems, and Roe entered into that, obviously....You have a long history of believing that your religious beliefs should prevail.'....And yet, certain ideological areas are particularly charged. It’s no coincidence that abortion and LGBT rights were the two issue areas Barrett was questioned about most fiercely. As legal precedent moves farther away from traditional Catholic and Christian teachings on these questions, it may be harder to tell whether a Senator is questioning a nominee about her legal views or questioning her faith. Ultimately, this is an issue of red lines. Should particular beliefs, including deep religious convictions, disqualify a nominee from serving on the federal bench, even if they promise to set those convictions aside?” • We must note, if nothing else about the Atlantic article, that it assumes that America is moving away from its majority-held positions agianst abortion and some of the recently granted LGBT rights. Green gives no statistics to support her statement because there are none. The Washington Post's Thursday article by Aaron Blake cited Senator Bernie Sanders' earlier suggestion that a Trump administration nominee's interpretation of their Christian faith may be disqualifying. Controversy arose earlier this year when Senator Sanders took issue with a nominee's past comments on Islam and Christianity's view of it. Sanders rounded on Russell Vought, whom President Trump has nominated as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and who had once written that Moslems “stand condemned” for rejecting Jesus. This was a crude way of putting Christian doctrine, so it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for lawmakers to press Vought to ensure that he wouldn’t discriminate against Moslems while serving in government. End of story -- because if Vought’s comments were disqualifying, as Senator Sanders argued, the logical conclusion would be that any strong expression of theological conviction is unwelcome in the public square. Orthodox Moslems -- who hold the Koran to be God’s final and fullest revelation, superseding Mosaic law and Christianity -- wouldn’t fare any better under the Sanders rule, if it were applied uniformly. The Atlantic's Emma Green labeled this as “Bernie Sanders's Religious Test for Christians in Public Office.” Paul Horwitz, a law professor at the University of Alabama, said at the time that Senators are “free to vote against a nominee for religious reasons, just as he or she is free to do so for other reasons, including racism or sexism....It may be atrocious, but it's not unconstitutional.” And, Horwitz added Thursday in a blog post quoted by the WP : "Let us give a highly charitable reading to Feinstein's Yoda-like quote and assume that she means 'dogma' as a term of art and without any intention of triggering the suspicion and hostility that the word seems to evoke for some unlettered individuals....The question is still unhelpful enough that it ends up doing more to cast suspicion on Catholic nominees generally than to illuminate anything important about this nominee. What one might reasonably want to know is whether, when, and how often a judicial nominee might consider herself obliged to recuse in cases, for whatever reason. It is possible to ask that question in a way that explicitly mentions religion, but with great care and sensitivity and attention to the various relevant nuances, including an awareness that we are multiple and not single selves, that we negotiate the relationship between our beliefs and the world in a complicated way, and that how even believers in a 'dogma' actually carry out their faith in a particular role is equally complicated. But history suggests it's hard to do that well, and that few Senators are capable of it." • The New York Times on Monday published an Opinion Piece by Sohrab Ahmari, who is a senior writer for Commentary -- the monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues, whose editor is John Podhoretz. Ahmari said about Senator Feinstein and the other Democrats who questioned Barrett : "The notion that Catholics are so beholden to Rome as to be incapable of rendering independent judgment in public office has a long, sordid history. It was a mainstay of 19th-century nativist propaganda, and it would dog John F. Kennedy in the following century. Senator Feinstein later denied exhibiting anti-Catholic bias. But as with other forms of racial or religious animus, one needn’t always use an explicit epithet to arouse ugly emotions. Worse, these accusations were based on a mangled understanding of Ms. Barrett’s work. In a 1998 essay that has been seized on by left-wing activists, Ms. Barrett and a co-author addressed how Catholic judges might deal with capital cases, given the church’s opposition to the death penalty in virtually all situations. The same dilemma confronts liberal Protestants and many Jews, the authors noted. It could even trouble an atheist judge whose conscience tells her that capital punishment is wrong. The authors concluded that recusal rules provide a way out, and they examined when and under what conditions judges should take advantage of them....The Senate wasn’t dealing with a fanatic or theocrat in Ms. Barrett." Ahmari called the Committee episode "symptomatic of a repressive turn among Western liberals. Earlier this year, Senator Bernie Sanders railed against Russell Vought....Similar sentiments are gathering strength in Britain, where I [Ahmari] live. This week Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Catholic and a Tory member of Parliament, faced a torrent of abuse in the media -- he was called a 'bigot' and a 'reactionary' -- for explaining his anti-abortion views and opposition to same-sex marriage in a TV interview. A cartoon in The Times of London portrayed him as a man-fetus in utero, lamenting how his party-leadership hopes had been 'terminated.' In June, Britain’s Liberal Democrats ousted their leader, Tim Farron, an evangelical Christian, over his personal views on homosexuality and abortion. This, even though as a matter of public policy, Mr. Farron supported abortion rights and gay marriage." Ahmari calls himself "a classical liberal and a recent convert to Catholicism," saying "I find all of this deeply dismaying. Long before I started on my journey to Rome, I believed in the promise of the free society -- a system in which liberty and tradition could contend without either one trying to destroy the other. One could be fully a believer and fully invested in a liberal constitutional order. But for some Progressives, it isn’t enough to have won most of the cultural and policy battles of the past several decades. Even the remnants of the other side, in people’s minds and consciences, must submit to maximalist Progressive claims. It won’t happen, and the desire to do so isn’t actually liberal. It is, well, dogmatic. Not all dogmas involve Almighty God." • • • DEAR READERS, as Democrats love to remind everyone, Americans come in every color, political conviction and faith. • Sohrab Ahmari was born in Tehran, Iran. As a child, he was interrogated by security officials about his parents and faced disciplinary action for accidentally bringing a videocassette of Star Wars into school at a time when Western films were officially banned in the country. In 1998, at the age of 13, Ahmari moved with his family to the United States. He earned a law degree from Northeastern University in Boston. Between college and law school, Ahmari completed a two-year commitment to Teach for America in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas. While in law school, inspired in part by the protests following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential election, he began working as a freelance journalist, contributing pieces to publications such as The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Commentary among others. Following the murder of French priest Jacques Hamel in 2016, Ahmari announced on Twitter that he was converting to Roman Catholicism. In late September 2016, he wrote a three-page article about his conversion in The Catholic Herald, which was the cover story of the September 30, 2016 issue. In response to published reports and tweets that incorrectly claimed he was converting to Christianity from Islam, Ahmari clarified in another tweet that he actually converted from Atheism. • Dianne Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in 1933 in San Francisco, to Betty (née Rosenburg), a former model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Feinstein's paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her maternal grandparents, the Rosenburg family, were from Saint Petersburg, Russia. And, while they were of German-Jewish ancestry, they practiced the Russian Orthodox faith as was required for Jews residing in Saint Petersburg. Feinstein graduated from Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, San Francisco in 1951 and from Stanford University in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts in History. She served as mayor of San Francisco before being elected to the US Senate in 1992. She is the oldest member of the Senate and one of the wealthiest, with a net worth of more than $40 million. • What do Ahmari and Feinstein have in common? Any American can answer that. They are part of the swell of immigrants whose families came to the United States for freedom -- freedom to support their political convictions, freedom to be of any color without fear of discrimination, AND YES, freedom to worship God as they choose or to worship no God. Those families understood that all America required of them in return was the tolerance to allow other Americans to be free to follow their own personal set of political and ethical guides without fear of recrimination. • Emma Green's question in The Atlantic whether "deep religious convictions, disqualify a nominee from serving on the federal bench, even if they promise to set those convictions aside" is abhorrent to every tenet the Constitution holds up for America. It rejects tolerance and chips huge chunks away from America's historically unique conviction that the pursuit of religious freedom is a pillar of civilized society. • Sohrab Ahmari has grasped and made personal that conviction. He is living proof that it exists and works. • Dianne Feinstein should be ashamed of her anti-Christian, anti-Catholic religious bigotry. Whether she has followed her family's Jewish faith or Catholicism, or neither, she benefitted from their conviction, that in America it would not matter what they believed as long as they were tolerant of the beliefs of others. For Jewish Americans, especially, this "Truth" is, as the Constitution says, "self-evident." There is no other place on earth where Jews are, or ever have been, welcomed, assimilated, and encouraged to succeed as they are in America, except for Israel itself. Dianne Feinstein's life is proof of that Truth. She should apologize not only to Professor Barrett but to America -- and most of all to her own ancestors, who grasped that Truth and presented it to her on a silver platter called the United States Constitution.