The Constitution prohibits the use of “a religious test” for those seeking government office. While recent questions asked of a judicial nominee by Democratic senators may not violate the letter of this clause, writes David Harsanyi, they certainly contradict its spirit:

“Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” Senator Dick Durbin asked yesterday of the Notre Dame Law School professor Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee to a federal appeals court. . . .

At least Durbin’s query about “orthodox” Catholicism was based on some concocted apprehension about Barrett’s ability to overcome faith to fulfill her obligations as a judge. The professor, who apparently takes both the law and her faith seriously enough to have pondered this question in writing, told Durbin that it’s “never appropriate for a judge to apply [his] personal convictions, whether [these] derive from [religious] faith or from personal conviction.” . . .

Barrett’s Catholicism, though, would come up a number of times during the hearing, and in far more troubling ways. “When [one] reads your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you,” Senator Dianne Feinstein claimed.

It is irksome, no doubt, that Barrett’s faith informs her views. Our backgrounds and beliefs always color our opinions. This is not yet illegal. But these lines of questioning, increasingly prevalent in political discourse, are an attempt to create the impression that faithful Christians whose beliefs are at odds with newly sanctified cultural mores are incapable of doing their jobs. They are guilty of another kind of apostasy.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.