"If we're going to have peace, we're going to make it together."

Judge Amy Coney Barrett testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, September 6, 2017. (via C-SPAN)
In National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that he wants Trump to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Supreme Court Justice.

...The fight over Barrett’s confirmation would almost certainly build trust between President Trump and social conservatives. It would energize Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

...The facts of Barrett’s life — that she is a mother of seven children, and that when she speaks about her Catholic faith, she speaks about God as if she really believes in His existence — will provoke nasty and bigoted statements from Democratic senators and liberal media personalities. Again.

You may recall that this has already happened. In 2017, during confirmation hearings for a seat on the Seventh Circuit, Senator Dianne Feinstein surveyed Barrett’s public statements on her personal faith and told her that she worried that “the dogma lives loudly within you.” The bizarre idiom she created was a sign that Feinstein didn’t have an easy way to say what she wanted to say: A Catholic is fine. A believing Catholic is not.

The Feinstein incident caused Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of Princeton University, to publicly defend Barrett and her writings on how her faith relates to her duties as a judge. He then urged against what he saw as an emerging religious test. “In my view,” Eisgruber wrote, “Professor Barrett’s qualifications become stronger by virtue of her willingness to write candidly and intelligently about difficult and sensitive ethical questions: Our universities, our judiciary, and our country will be the poorer if the Senate prefers nominees who remain silent on such topics.”

Now, it would be churlish to choose Barrett only because her nomination will cause some Democrats to bleep, bloop disconcertingly before entering into auto-destruct mode. It would be good to nominate her, however, because the fight to confirm her will contain edifying political lessons. We don’t have religious tests for public office in this country, and having a republic that does not have an established religion does not require excluding sincere believers from positions of authority.

Liberals have lately internalized the idea that so long as they can justify their policy preferences as having egalitarian motives or ends, they should be able to compel religious people to conform to liberal moral norms — which just so happen to track exactly to doctrinal developments in the once dominant Mainline Protestant churches. The ACLU would compel Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. The last administration wanted to compel Notre Dame to offer contraceptives as part of its compensation to employees. The baker will be made to cater at the private solemnities that offend his conscience. Evangelicals at a crisis pregnancy center will be made to advertise for abortion.

An Amy Coney Barrett nomination fight would contain an even deeper lesson, one that is salutary for both liberal secularists, who once indulged in triumphalism, and conservative believers, who have been tempted to despair: Believing Catholics and Evangelicals will continue to make their contributions to the common good of this country. You will live with us. If we’re going to have peace, we’re going to make it together.

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