Senators Shouldn’t Grill Nominees about Their Religious Beliefs

The Constitution prohibits the use of “a religious test” for those seeking government office. While recent questions asked of a judicial nominee by Democratic senators may not violate the letter of this clause, writes David Harsanyi, they certainly contradict its spirit:

“Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” Senator Dick Durbin asked yesterday of the Notre Dame Law School professor Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee to a federal appeals court. . . .

At least Durbin’s query about “orthodox” Catholicism was based on some concocted apprehension about Barrett’s ability to overcome faith to fulfill her obligations as a judge. The professor, who apparently takes both the law and her faith seriously enough to have pondered this question in writing, told Durbin that it’s “never appropriate for a judge to apply [his] personal convictions, whether [these] derive from [religious] faith or from personal conviction.” . . .

Barrett’s Catholicism, though, would come up a number of times during the hearing, and in far more troubling ways. “When [one] reads your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” Senator Dianne Feinstein claimed.

It is irksome, no doubt, that Barrett’s faith informs her views. Our backgrounds and beliefs always color our opinions. This is not yet illegal. But these lines of questioning, increasingly prevalent in political discourse, are an attempt to create the impression that faithful Christians whose beliefs are at odds with newly sanctified cultural mores are incapable of doing their jobs. They are guilty of another kind of apostasy.

Read more at Federalist

More about: Catholicism, Congress, Freedom of Religion, Religion and politics, U.S. Politics

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society