(Judge Amy Coney Barrett / University of Notre Dame)
The continued existence of a federal health care system is in the hands of the unelected judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. They have voted to defer oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act until after the election in November.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett has been declared "the front runner" by the media to be nominated for the present U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. That would make her the seventh self-identified "Catholic" on the Supreme Court by my count.
Parenthetically, the media has also labelled several of these people "devout Catholic" and "faithful Catholic" based largely on their self-descriptions.
In the particular case of Amy Coney Barrett, there is a question regarding the Affordable Care Act that arises from her self-identification with Catholicism. Ordinarily (if that word still applies in 2020), a person's religion is not a proper subject for questions. But this person is a judge who wants to be a Justice and because she advertises herself or allows herself to be advertised as a "conservative Catholic," she is also the declared "front runner," so in this case it is perfectly proper to ask what it means to her to say she is a Catholic. It is not only proper, it is relevant. It is material.
Take it from the Executive Editor of THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER in this interview broadcast on Wed., September 23, 2020:
And the Catholic Church in the United States has long supported the Affordable Care Act, especially after the accommodations were made for Catholic employers that didn’t want to provide contraceptive coverage. So, it will be interesting to see if she sides with church leaders on that one or not.
"Interesting," certainly. Determinative, possibly.
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