What Personal Behavior Can We Demand of Supreme Court Justices

The editorial linked to this post (Click on the title of the post) is by a law professor who writes frequently on church/state issues. This time, she is complaining that 5 Supreme Court justices should not have attended an annual mass in Washington, D.C. She opines that their attendance at this particular worship service brings into question their ability to judge fairly and impartially, and that they should not have gone, and certainly should not have attended together.

This is some heavy thinking, but I think that she is not only asking too much from a judge when she requests that he refuse to attend church, but that she is asking far too much of the people of this country to insist that judges have an inviolate duty to separate their religion from their jobs. Each of the Justices had a record that was reviewed by the President and by the Senate before their confirmation. Each of them had years to expose any alleged agenda to violate the Free Exercise or Establishment Clause(s) of the Constitution. Each of them worked for many years around people that surely would have seen the grand conspiracy to infect judicial rulings with religious belief. Too much, then, is being made of the coincidence of a desire to worship and a duty to perform judicial duties with integrity and faithfulness to their oath and to the law of the land.

I have a unashamed bias for people in public service who believe in something. The worst kind of public servant is the kind who has whitewashed his mind of any beliefs, and engages in a mechanical application of a set of rules. No rule is devoid of exception. No rule should be applied without a view toward grace or mercy. People who believe in things motivate others to do better and to be better. Robotic work should be saved for machines.