HEWITT

Hugh Hewitt defends Republican accusations of Democratic anti-catholicism with this line which should warm the hearts of political liberals everywhere:

The fact of discrimination is not in the motive of the offender but the effect upon the offended.

Motives don't matter: effects do. Since he's writing about the courts, perhaps Hewitt would then like to apply his newfound understanding of the realities of discrimination to such areas as school desegregation. Anyone want to brave the long odds on that one?

Hewitt's invocation of a principle that he would almost certainly reject in other contexts is amusing, of course, but the main point of the Pryor nominations flap lies elsewhere, as Jim Joyner notes today. (Link to Hewitt's piece is from him as well.) Religion is newly fashionable in politics. It's a big political winner. It's not only Republicans who are arguing for a return to religion, of course; think of Joe Lieberman. Senate Republican shifting of the ground toward the question of "anti-catholic bigotry" is a good political move because it gets them talking about what they want to talk about, namely, Democratic opposition to Pryor's stance on abortion. It also allows them to link Pryor with Estrada and the Hispanic vote.

Fair enough. I still find it hard to swallow that Republicans are taking this line even though the Catholic Church has issued directives in other areas -- the death penalty and "social justice," especially -- where it's not clear that Pryor takes the Church seriously, and where other prominent Republican Catholics, like Scalia, have apparently chosen what they want to take from Church teaching and what they don't.