My point of course is that Catholics were anathema to most of the Founding Fathers. If Scalia really wanted to interpret the Constitution incorporating the values of the time in which it was written, he would recuse himself from the Court because no Catholics could have been appointed.
The first Catholic was appointed in
The demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States encompass the gender, ethnicity, and religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds of the 112 justices appointed to the Supreme Court. Certain of these characteristics have been raised as an issue since the Court was established in 1789. For its first 180 years, justices were almost always white male Protestants.[1] Prior to the 20th century, a few Roman Catholics were appointed, but concerns about diversity of the Court were mainly in terms of geographic diversity, to represent all geographic regions of the country, as opposed to ethnic, religious, or gender diversity.[2] The 20th century saw the first appointment of a Jewish justice (Louis Brandeis, 1916), an African-American (Thurgood Marshall, 1967), an Italian-American (Antonin Scalia, 1986), and a woman (Sandra Day O'Connor, 1981). The 21st century saw the first appointment of a Hispanic justice (Sonia Sotomayor, 2009; if Benjamin Cardozo, 1932, is excluded).
. . . .
When the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the first members came from among the ranks of the Founding Fathers and were almost uniformly Protestant. Of the 112 justices who have been appointed to the court, 91 have been from various Protestant denominations, 12 have been Catholics (one other Justice, Sherman Minton, converted to Catholicism after leaving the Court), eight have been Jewish and one, David Davis, had no known religious affiliation. Three of the 17 chief justices have been Catholics, and one Jewish Justice, Abe Fortas, was unsuccessfully nominated to be Chief Justice.
. . . . .
The first Roman Catholic Justice, Roger B. Taney, was appointed Chief Justice in 1836 by Andrew Jackson. The second, Edward Douglass White, was appointed as an Associate Justice in 1894, but also went on to become Chief Justice. Joseph McKenna was appointed in 1898, placing two Catholics on the Court until White's death in 1921. This period marked the beginning of an inconsistently observed "tradition" of having a "Catholic seat" on the court.[70]
. . . .
Most Supreme Court justices have been from various Protestant denominations, and these have included 33 Episcopalians, 18 Presbyterians, nine Unitarians, five Methodists, three Baptists, and lone representatives of various other denominations.[67] William Rehnquist was the Court's only Lutheran; Noah Swayne was a Quaker. Some 15 Protestant justices did not adhere to a particular denomination. Notably, the Baptist church and other evangelical churches have been underrepresented on the Court, relative to the population of the United States. Conversely, so-called mainline Protestant churches historically were overrepresented.[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States
Early America was, in so far as religion is concerned, not entirely but mostly a Protestant creation. And our national values until very recently strongly reflected those Protestant values.
Scalia is treading on very uncertain ground when he talks about the religious nature of the country. And then there is the problem of defining "religion." Are Tibetan monks religious? How about the Hindu religion? Buddhism does not necessarily require that a "believer" accept the concept of God. And then we get to the even bigger question: Does religion just encompass traditional churches? Do you have to have an affiliation with a church or synagogue or established, self-described "religious" organization to be religious? And why wouldn't not believing in God be recognized as a religion for the purposes of the Constitution?
The First Amendment says
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
"no law respecting an establishment of religion" seems pretty clear to me that our government is not supposed to do anything that prefers or promotes religion at all. That would mean to me that the government should neither favor nor disfavor the idea of religion in its activities. That's not the way the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted that phrase. I would say the Supreme Court has been inconsistent in its interpretation of the phrase. In Hobby Lobby it allowed itself to take a side based on the religious views of Hobby Lobby. Since Hobby Lobby had a sincere religious belief, it was allowed to have its way. I'm oversimplifying, but that was a consideration. That is a very, very bad direction.
The Catholic Church has, historically been extremely authoritarian and was a primary support for the very anti-democratic idea of the Divine Right of Kings. It is not a good sign that so many of our current Supreme Court justices are Catholic and that with the exception of Clarence Thomas a convert from the Catholic Church to a fundamentalist Protestant church, we have no Protestants on the Court. That does not come close to representing our demographics as a nation. And the Catholic Church's teachings are not entirely compatible with the beliefs of our Founding Fathers or with our Bill of Rights when it comes to religion in my opinion. We have a problem here. I am a Unitarian, but I think that the number of Catholics on our Supreme Court is a problem. If I were a member of a major Protestant religion, I would be talking about this. Too few women, and too few Protestants on that court. It's a problem in my view.
Edited because I originally copied the wrong paragraph from Wikipedia.
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