Overturning precedent: "painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic"

Did Justices' Catholicism Play Part in Abortion Ruling? | By Robert Barnes | Washington Post Staff Writer | Monday, April 30, 2007; Page A13

Is it significant that the five Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold the federal ban on a controversial abortion procedure also happen to be the court's Roman Catholics?

It is to Tony Auth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He drew Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wearing bishop's miters, and labeled his cartoon "Church and State."

Rosie O'Donnell and Barbara Walters hashed out the issue on "The View," with O'Donnell noting that a majority of the court is Catholic and wondering about "separation of church and state." Walters counseled that "we cannot assume that they did it because they're Catholic."

And the chatter continues, on talk radio and in the blogosphere. In the latter category, no one has stirred it up quite like Geoffrey R. Stone, former dean and now provost of the University of Chicago's law school.

He posted an item titled "Faith-Based Justices" on his school's blog and on Huffington Post. The post was mostly praised by liberal readers at Huffington Post, but set off a free-for-all back home in Chicago on the faculty blog.

Stone's argument was that the decision in Gonzales v. Carhart repudiated the court's previous abortion jurisprudence and offered flimsy reasoning for upholding the federal ban on the procedure opponents call "partial birth," when seven years ago it had rejected a Nebraska law that was "virtually identical."

"What then explains this decision?" he wrote. "Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out." ...