don’t understand why many Catholic bishops want to deny communion to Catholic politicians who vote for legal abortion but are not “applying pressure” and bringing their “coercion campaign” to Catholic judges who (allegedly) do the same thing. The short answer to this question: There’s a difference between judging and legislating.

Amy Sullivan glides right past the possibility that a distinction could be made in order to get to the real point of her piece, which is to slam the bishops for being “political” and “partisan.” (The only reason they do not “target” judges, supposedly, is that they are afraid of a backlash.) Neither charity nor clarity is her hallmark in this piece.

The closest she comes to grappling with the idea that there’s a distinction between judging and legislating is in this sentence: “[A]n honest look at the Church’s statements on the special responsibility of Catholic public officials to uphold Church teaching on abortion must conclude that they do not exempt officials in judicial positions.”

I wouldn’t go as far as her in reverse, and imply that no honest person could disagree with what I am about to say: viz., that it is possible for someone to look at those statements and honestly conclude that they do not bear on judging the way they do on legislating.

A politician who votes to make abortion legal is necessarily willing injustice: He is willing that some human beings be exclude from the basic legal protections that he favors for himself and others; he is violating the Golden Rule. A judge who votes to keep abortion legal is not necessarily willing injustice. He may be merely saying what the law is, while wishing it were otherwise. So, for example, a lower-court judge, or even a Supreme Court justice, might feel himself bound by precedent to affirm a legal right to abortion. Or, to take another example: If a successful campaign were waged for a pro-abortion amendment to the Constitution, it would be reasonable to judge the legislators who voted for that amendment differently than the judges who would have to apply it.

A judge who found that amendment to say what it said would not be “disregard[ing] church teaching on the inviolability of the human person”–as she simplistically suggests. They would also, therefore, not be failing as Catholic public officials in their “special responsibility to be model Catholics and to uphold the Church’s teaching.”

Failing to see the difference between judging and legislating is very far from being the only elementary blind spot in Amy Sullivan’s piece, but it is the central one.