The elephant in Ms. Goodling's room

Sandy Levinson

Eric Lipton has an extensive story in today's (May 12) New York Times about Monica Goodling. titled "Colleagues Cite Partisan Focus by Justice Official." It details many of the ways that she thoroughly corrupted the process of hiring within the Department of Justice by taking a rabidly "partisan focus" for what is supposed to be a non-political process of hiring. Still, the story walks on eggs with regard to one of the most important aspects of Ms. Goodling, her religious zeal. Lipton mentions that she graduated from Regent Law School, '99, and notes that that is Pat Robertson's law school. But there has still been no genuine examination of the extent to which Ms. Goodling used her remarkable clout within the Justice Department to focus on hiring not only conservative Republicans, but also persons who were equally opposed to what she no doubt believes is the sinful secularism of modern society. I doubt that she was preferring Evangelical Protestants as such; rather, I think the key to being hired might well be a strong religious identification, and one proxy for that was attending identifiably religious law schools, including, for example, Brigham Young, Regent, Catholic University (though not Georgetown, I strongly suspect), or Marquette. Sooner or later, someone should go through the bios of people hired over the past three years or so, i.e., since the triumphalist election of George W. Bush in 2004 (I refuse to call it a "re-election"), and see how many of them graduated from such schools, as against more secular schools (and, of course, how many of those hired from the latter had been vetted by virtue of their affiliation with the Federalist Society and the like, apparently something highly important to Ms. Goodling). Just to be clear, I think that the DoJ should be hiring lawyers from all sorts of backgrounds; it would be outrageous if a strong religious identity or memership in the Federalist Society were a disqualification. But I think that it's ever more clear that with the Bush Administration we're not remotely talking about genuine respect for the mosaic of American culture. They are eager participants in a full-scale culture war and should be recognized as such.

No one really knows how to address the issue of religion in contemporary politics. It is considered tactless in the extreme to note that the five-justice majority in the recent Carhart case are all Catholics, just as, I suppose, umbrage might be taken if Justices Ginsburg and Breyer were regularly identified as Jewish. But this is the elephant in the room, and it's not going to go away.

[UPDATE: It is obviously the case, as one of the comments below notes, that not all Catholics (or any other group) are alike. Justice Brennan is the clearest counterexample to, say, Justice Scalia. That being said, I think it relevant to note that Brennan grew up in a world typified by John Kennedy's facile speech to the Houston ministers in which he reassured them about the basic irrelevance of any Catholic beliefs he might have held (and his biographers suggest that Kennedy indeed did not take religion very seriously). Brennan therefore had no trouble assuring the Senate Judiciary Committee that in any conflict between the Constitution and the Church, he would always prefer the Constitution, a viewed deemed "idolatrous"--I think for good reason--by Thomas Shaffer. The modern Catholic church is considerably more more militant with regard to disciplining political figures who stray too far from its teachings. as exemplified by Pope Benedict's comments this past week in Brazil about the self-excommunication of politicians who support abortion rights. I have a piece forthcoming on this general topic in an issue of the St. Thomas Law Review devoted to a fascinating symposium held there last year on the occasion of the Supreme Court's becoming majority Catholic. (For obvious reasons, a Catholic law school can openly discuss such a topic in a way that no other law school can.)]
Posted 1:30 AM by Sandy Levinson [link]