@Smokin Joe
As long as they are qualified,what's wrong with that?
As long as they are qualified, there is nothing wrong with that. Which is my point.
Fifty years ago, the quality of education for children in Parochial (Catholic) and other private schools was far superior to the public schools. I went to both, and public school was easy, unless you pissed off a particular teacher. (In that case, everything had to be so dead solid perfect that there was no way it could be graded down in order to just pass instead of getting an 'A'. I won't say I never vexed a Parochial school teacher, but I can honestly say I don't believe that was ever reflected in my grade.)
But let me trot out something that may be misinterpreted, and preemptively, I want to say it is an observation, not some religious prejudice.
The Catholics and Jews I know were raised with a more strict religious regimen, and that discipline carried over into the academic part of their lives as well. The local Protestant sects did not require church on Sundays, every Sunday, and while there were some excellent Protestant students as well, that was more the determination of their parents that those children not grow up to be sharecroppers or be doomed to a life of manual labor in the fields or on oyster boats.
The idea that their child could grow up to be a doctor, dentist, or a lawyer (or other respectable professions at the time) often drove parents to drive their children,
white or black, to excel. For blacks and 'poor' whites, the key was to either get a scholarship to college, whether academically or through sports (and it seemed as if the sports scholarships were more common for public school students), or to enlist, serve, and upon discharge use the GI Bill to go to college. If you were middle class, you didn't get some of the loan or other guarantees you could get if you were poorer, and only careful financial planning and management would make college affordable, short of going the GI Bill route or a scholarship.
Either way, the ticket to success required discipline, hard work, and often luck, and many were derailed along the way through injuries in the case of sports, through their experience in the service, the usual distractions of drugs or alcohol, inadvertently starting a family, or other misfortune. But the students who were most disciplined, through either parental insistence on excellence throughout their school years, or with religious backgrounds which kept them from the ordinary pitfalls which derailed so many aspirations, were those most likely to succeed.
That those raised with strict doctrinal religious guidance would make jurists of the caliber of SCOTUS is no surprise,whether I agree with their interpretation of the Law or not.
While that is not to say there are not those who were neither Catholic nor Jewish who could muster that combination of formative adherence to academic and/or religious discipline, it is not really surprising that those who were raised 40 or 50 years ago come from either of the two backgrounds.
In a Nation which according to
Wikipedia where religions claimed (not necessarily strictly practiced) are 43% Protestant, 20% Catholic, 2% Jewish, 2% LDS,
26% unaffiliated, and 1% or less each of other (Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, and others) for 6% total, and 2% who just didn't answer, either the 1/3 of the court that is Jewish or the 2/3 Catholic are representations of religious backgrounds far in excess of the respective representation in the overall population. Neither is the result of some Zionist or Papist conspiracy, but instead, the result of the discipline and hard work in those formative environments carried over into the professional lives of those justices.
