Shailagh Murray reports: “The issue for both sides is not so much what Roberts believes is right or wrong. Rather, it is the degree to which he believes religious morality may be permitted to influence public policy. Liberals believe in a firewall between church and state, but as Christian conservatives see it, the Supreme Court should allow elected officials to restrict abortions or permit a Ten Commandments monument to be displayed on public property, if those actions have voter support.”

This seems off to me. If Bush had nominated Nat Hentoff, an atheist who opposes abortion and Roe, the same people who are raising alarms about Roberts’s Catholicism would be objecting. The issue isn’t whether “religious morality” should be allowed to influence public policy so much as it is whether elected officials should be able to restrict abortion, whatever their reasons for restricting it.

Murray goes on to write, “Members of Congress now take legislative action in God’s name — for instance, when they tried to save the life of Terri Schiavo, who was brain-damaged.” I have no doubt that many members of Congress invoked God’s name during the Schiavo affair, but the sentence seems to imply that religious beliefs were the sole possible basis for the congressional action–which is simply untrue; see Hentoff’s columns from the time.