David Bernstein points out that if Samuel Alito is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will be a Catholic majority on the Court:
This is an extraordinary development. It was, let's recall, only forty-five years ago that JFK's Catholicism was a major issue in a presidential campaign. As Ken Kersch and Philip Hamburger have shown, anti-Catholic sentiment played a large role in the development of modern establishment clause jurisprudence (in part through the influence of that old KKKer, Hugo Black). The leading separationist group after WWII was known as Protestants [now, Americans] United for the Separation of Church and State.
We can rejoice that Catholics are now such an accepted part of the American scene that it will hardly raise any eyebrows that a fifth Catholic has been nominated to the Supreme Court (joining, of course, two Jews).
It is rather amazing, isn't it? Bernstein goes on to speculate that the reason we've come so far so fast is that, well, we've assimilated, and we really aren't all that different from the rest of America anymore. A mixed blessing.
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