Sen. Kamala Harris is running for president in a very crowded field. Maybe the need to distinguish herself drove her to take the lead on anti-Catholicism. Or maybe, along with some of her Democratic colleagues, Harris, D-Calif., is playing the long game and is simply trying to institute a religious test for office that places Catholic teaching beyond the bounds of tolerable opinions.

Harris this month went after Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee for a federal court vacancy in Nebraska, for belonging to the Knights of the Columbus. This is damning, Harris’ questions implied, because the Knights is “all-male,” because the organization’s president described Roe v. Wade as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths” (fact check: true), and because the president described abortion as “the killing of the innocent” (ditto). Further, the Knights “opposed marriage equality,” Harris pointed out.

Harris’ colleague on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, went further. She demanded that Buescher, if he is to be a federal judge, drop his membership in the Knights and recuse himself from every issue on which the Knights have taken an opinion.

This is, of course, absurd. The American Bar Association lobbies for stricter gun control laws, among many other policies. Should Justice Sonia Sotomayor have to quit the ABA and recuse herself from all gun control cases and any cases involving topics where the ABA takes a position?

The Knights of Columbus are not a fringe group. They are the single largest Catholic service organization in the country. Mostly they serve as ushers during Mass, run pancake breakfasts afterward, hold fish fries on Fridays in Lent, provide life insurance to members, and do charitable works, such as visiting the imprisoned. This may sound benign, but to the likes of Hirono and Harris, it isn’t. You see, the Knights do these things because the Catholic Church teaches that such “corporal works of mercy” are what God commands of us.

This fealty to Catholic teaching is precisely the offense in the eyes of Hirono and Harris. Their goal, we have to assume, is to deem Catholic teaching out of bounds.

Their attempt at a logical argument is absurd: Abortion is legal and so someone who thinks it ought to be illegal — or who belongs to a group that holds that view — is unqualified to be a judge. Nobody honestly thinks this way, otherwise every supporter of net neutrality, opponent of the Patriot Act, critic of Citizens United, or advocate of further gun control law would be disqualified.

That’s why the deeper, anti-Catholic and anti-Christian motivation is the more likely explanation. Also, it fits into a pattern. Recall how Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., attacked judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett on the grounds that “the dogma” spoke too loudly within her?

Conservative writer Alexandra DeSanctis at National Review posited that the effort against Buescher was “a test run in preventing their worst nightmare: the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.”

This is probably correct. But it’s also something bigger: Harris, Hirono, Feinstein, and the Democratic Party in general want a religious test for office. We can't let them have it.