What the USCCB Gets Wrong About Birthright Citizenship

In the wake of the 2007 Supreme Court decision to uphold Kansas’s ban on partial birth abortion, University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone notoriously asked and answered, “What, then, explains this decision? Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic.” He reasoned that their judgment only made sense if they failed “to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality.” The insinuation that the Catholic justices rendered decisions based on their religious views reportedly incensed Justice Antonin Scalia at the time. It’s context that makes all the more shocking a recent amicus brief by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on birthright citizenship. The brief literally tells the Supreme Court that it should adopt Catholic theology in its constitutional adjudication.