In this morning's Wall Street Journal, William McGurn interviews APP founder Robert George after posing the question: "Why was Samuel Alito's Catholicism so much more discussed than Sonia Sotomayor's?"

"... the relatively soft reaction to Ms. Sotomayor's Catholicism [by Democrats] is because of a calculation that when it comes to hot-button issues such as abortion or gay marriage, she doesn't really believe what her church teaches.

Robert George [founder of the American Principles Project] says the Sotomayor hearings highlight a glaring double standard about how the Catholicism of judicial nominees is treated -- and the great irony this treatment exposes.

"According to one theory of jurisprudence," says Mr. George, "the judge may not bring his own moral beliefs or personal feelings to bear on his rulings on what the law is. This is the view held by people like Scalia and Alito and Roberts."

This means that a judge who is personally pro-life can uphold a pro-choice law -- and a judge who is personally pro-choice can uphold a pro-life law. What matters is the law, not the personal feelings. When judges follow this path, they take some of the heat out of culture wars. That's because those who want to change the law -- pro-life or pro-choice -- have to do it the way our Founders intended: through their elected representatives.

"The other theory of jurisprudence," the professor told me, "holds that the judge has a responsibility to bring his or her moral beliefs to cases. This is famously defended by scholars such as Ronald Dworkin, and practiced by judges such as William Brennan and John Paul Stevens."

"Among the many problems with this view is that it leads inexorably to the politicization of the judicial process. If someone expects us to accept this theory as a legitimate judicial philosophy, then he or she has to be prepared to answer questions about what his or her moral beliefs or personal feelings are -- and where they come from."

"Yet here's the irony. The same people who feel no compunction in trying to use the Catholicism of an Alito or Pryor to raise suspicions about their suitability then cry foul when anyone demands to know the basis of the moral convictions and personal feelings of someone that a liberal Democratic president is trying to place on the Supreme Court."

If the indifference to Ms. Sotomayor's Catholicism were truly a sign of a new respect for the "no religious test" provisions of the Constitution, that would be something to celebrate. But in the unlikely case that this "wise Latina" ever comes to see the legal wisdom of overturning Roe and returning abortion to the democratic process, we'll be reading a very different story.

[Read the full story here.]