Balancing religious values and public obligation

Quin Hillyer has a wonderful piece today about 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Pryor Jr. Pryor in a recent essay plainly lays out how Americans -- judges in particular -- should reconcile their religious belief system with their obligations as public servants. It is a lesson, Hillyer points out, that is completely lost on Barack Obama and the liberals who support him.

If Barack Obama had written the key essay in the most recently published issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, liberal Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee would be praising it.

But the essay, about the ways in which the concurrent demands of faith and the law affect public officials, was instead written by one of the recent judicial appointees whom those same committee members most vociferously opposed.

The essay thus serves as a rebuke to those liberal senators and to their practice of blatantly politicizing the judicial nomination process. That politicization has reached such extremes that Republicans threatened to “shut down the Senate” in protest against it on Thursday.

Their protest is justified. The experience of the essay’s author is a perfect case study of how liberal senators have mischaracterized the views and records of so many of the nominees they opposed.

Read it all.