HOLY CRAP! LEAHY IS A CATHOLIC TOO? HOW CAN ANYONE TELL?

If Judge Roberts wins the support of a majority of the U.S. Senate, he will become the fourth Roman Catholic on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Is that cause for alarm? It used to be said that one of the nine court chairs is "The Catholic Seat."

WTF???

Is the possibility of four Catholic seats a sign that Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned?

Go back to President Eisenhower in 1956 and to the Catholic layman he nominated and the Senate approved: William J. Brennan.

May God have mercy on his black, bloody, soul.

Justice Brennan was a strong supporter of the constitutional right to abortion. And four years after his nomination to the high court, a senator from Massachusetts, who was the second Roman Catholic ever nominated by a major party for the presidency, told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association: "I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."

Twenty-four years later, New York's Gov. Mario Cuomo declared that while he personally accepted his church's teachings on abortion, he could not impose those teachings on a pluralistic society.

On the Senate Judiciary Committee that will approve or veto Judge Roberts, four of the eight Democrats are Catholics, as are two of the 10 Republicans.

The New York Times reports:

Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, tried to have a private discussion with Judge Roberts about their shared Catholic religion and found himself embroiled in a controversy and denounced by religious conservatives. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said he was once denounced on a Sunday morning talk show as "anti-Christian or anti-Catholic" – while he was at mass.

"It's a world upside down," said Mr. Leahy, who spoke nostalgically of the bright lines drawn by Kennedy in 1960.