Wickersham's Conscience

Republican ex-Senator and Presidential Wannabe Rick Santorum is a lawyer (Dickinson, 1986). Presumably he was awake for most of his Constitutional Law class. So he should have a nodding familiarity with Article VI, paragraph 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

The smart guys who wrote the Constitution had watched Europe endure centuries of wars over religion. A variety of Test Acts were enacted in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their main purpose was to exclude anyone not a member of the Church of England from holding government office, notably Catholics and ”nonconforming” Protestants. You know, like the Puritans. Government officials were required to swear oaths, such as the Oath of Supremacy, that the monarch of England was the head of the Church and that they possessed no other foreign loyalties, such as to the Pope. Later acts required officials to disavow transubstantiation and the veneration of saints.

Many American colonists had left England in part to gain a measure of religious freedom. With the British government’s religious favoritism fresh in their memory, the Founders sought to prevent the return of the Test Acts by adding this clause to the Constitution.

You’d think an avowedly devout Catholic would be sensitive to Constitutional provisions which protect, among others, Catholics. You’d be wrong about that. Santorum told Teabagger supporters at a Columbus, Ohio hotel that President Obama’s agenda is

. . . not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.

In Senator Santorum’s world, you cannot be president unless you have the right religion. Christians with a different world view are ineligible. And atheists can just immediately go burn in Hell, presumably. If the Christianist Teabaggers had half a brain, they’d go find another candidate. A truly devout Catholic would also call, say, the Southern Baptist Church a “phony theology.” And there’s religious coding against The Mitt in that statement, too. The Catholic Church regards Mormons as pagans.

Santorum has openly called for making the United States a Catholic state, rejecting President Kennedy’s separation of private religious belief and public responsibility:

He told National Catholic Review that a distinction between private religious conviction and public responsibility, enshrined in Kennedy’s famous speech in 1960 saying he would not take orders from the Catholic church if elected president, has caused “much harm in America. All of us have heard people say, ‘I privately am against abortion, homosexual marriage, stem cell research, cloning. But who am I to decide that it’s not right for somebody else?’ It sounds good,” Santorum said. “But it is the corruption of freedom of conscience.”

Yeah. It also happens to be the law. Constitutional law, no less.

But law, logic and the U.S. Constitution don’t enter into this Republican primary.