Religious Tests Are Unacceptable––we Should Never Let People Of Faith Be Automatically Disqualified From Public Service Due To Their Closely Held Beliefs.
Dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, Justice Samuel Alito gravely predicted that “those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
He was right. In Wisconsin, this campaign of religious intolerance has claimed a new casualty in Gordon Giampietro, President Trump’s former nominee to a vacant seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. He was revealed to be removed from the list of renominations Trump issued on January 22. Democrats have all but ensured that, for the crime of publicly voicing the teachings of his faith, Giampietro will never sit on the federal bench.
A number of Senate Democrats have famously come to the conclusion that Catholics faithful to the teachings of their church are unfit for public service. In September 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) bizarrely complained that “the dogma lives loudly within” Judge Amy Coney Barrett, suggesting that her faith precludes her service on the bench.
In December 2018, presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D-CA) shamefully attempted to make membership in the Knights of Columbus, a renowned Catholic charitable organization, a disqualifying offense. One can apparently be a Catholic, but ought not to be too serious about it.
That this nonsense has now claimed Giampietro is a shame. His qualifications are beyond question. An assistant general counsel at a Fortune 500 company, he has more than a decade’s experience as a federal prosecutor after becoming a partner at one of Wisconsin’s most successful law firms. He received the approval of the bipartisan Wisconsin Federal Nominating Commission (on which one of us sat), of Wisconsin Sens. Ron Johnson (R) and Tammy Baldwin (D), and of the American Bar Association, which awarded him an official rating of “qualified.” – READ MORE