On April 18, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion by a margin of 5-4; all five Catholics on the high court affirmed the ban. We predicted—accurately as it turned out—that the bigots would seize on the outcome. “The pushback from conservative Catholics was immediate—even pre-emptive,” the New York Times said on its website. “Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, declared, ‘We need more, not fewer, Catholics on the Supreme Court.'”
The Times was referring to our news release. “We are waiting for the anti-Catholic bigots to go bonkers over the fact that all five of the justices who voted against infanticide are Roman Catholic,” Donohue said. The bigots soon proved him right.
American Atheist bloggers called the ruling “very bad news for all women in the United States, all gays and lesbians in the United States, and of course, anyone else not Catholic, especially Freethinkers, Agnostics and Atheists.” Cartoonist Tony Auth painted a vile portrait of the judges. NPR screamer Julianne Malveaux exclaimed, “You’re taking us back to the Catholic days of you kill the mother to bring the baby into the world.” And University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone sounded positively insincere, as well as foolish, when he said that it was a “painfully awkward observation” to note that all five justices in the majority are Catholic.
