Apocalypse Now?

I've written frequently, and recently, about the consequences of the incredible power that the Religious Right holds within today's Republican Party. But, even after reading about women who couldn't get their birth control prescriptions filled by moralistic pharmacists or state legislators passing bills to allow doctors to refuse to treat homosexuals, I can't say anything gave me as much pause as reading about the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference that was held in Washington DC, beginning April 7.

Salon.com had an excellent article, and here's some highlights. First, the conference began on the premise that Terri Schiavo had been murdered. And to support that premise, they made up some facts:

According to David Gibbs, the attorney for Terri Schiavo's parents, Terri
sobbed in her mother's arms after the courts condemned her to death. "Terri
Schiavo was as alive as any person sitting here," he said. "Anything you saw on
the videos, multiply times two hundred. I mean completely animated, completely
responsive, desperately trying to talk." Schiavo, said Gibbs, would struggle to
repeat the word "love" after her mother, and managed to get out something like
"loooo."

Gibbs was speaking to a banquet of religious right activists and
conservative operatives last Thursday, the first night of the Confronting the
Judicial War on Faith conference in Washington. The 100 or so people in the
audience had converged on the Washington Marriott from 25 states. Many cried as
they listened.

"America needs a healing," Gibbs said, and the crowd murmured its assent.
"We're sitting here desperately as a nation needing to adopt the heart of God …
We're on the eve of a real major decision. Are we going to do it God's way, or
are we going to head down the path of whatever these judges think is best? Terri
was alive. The courts killed her. The courts killed her in a barbaric fashion.
Others are already facing and will face a similar fate if we don't do
something."

Tom DeLay appeared via videotape (he was on his way to Pope's funeral) and made similar comments to his earlier threats on the judges from the Schiavo case. And since the complaint about the judges there was that they weren't activist enough, right-wingers have had to fine tune their complaints against the judiciary. They've moved from screaming about "judicial activism" to "judicial tyranny."

Back when there actually WERE liberals on the Supreme Court, billboards showed up down South that read, "Impeach Earl Warren." Now, just because every decision doesn't go their way, right-wingers have set their sights on not-sufficiently-brainwashed judges like Anthony Kennedy:

On a Friday panel titled "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny," a constitutional
lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs.
Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of
relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his
jurisprudence.

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said,
"Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest
political figure of the 20th century … He had a slogan, and it worked very well
for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This
is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."

As Dana Milbank pointed out Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards. ...

The affair finished with a rousing speech by recent Republican senatorial
candidate Alan Keyes, who drew enthusiastic applause when he said, "I believe
that in our country today the judiciary is the focus of evil."

Oh. So when right-wingers claim that it is inappropriate for Democrats to oppose judicial nominees based on the fact that they possess an extreme conservative record, just remind them of this conference. Absent the Democrats involvement, we will have a judiciary that is chosen for its adherence to getting the right result (i.e. the result the religious right wants) every time. So much for an independent judiciary.

And, by the way, with all of this talk about judges ignoring the significance of God and moral law when they interpret the Constitution, this fact is worth remembering:

In Gibbs' telling, Circuit Court Judge George Greer cavalierly ignored all
this overwhelming evidence. Such villainy, he said, is the direct result of a
legal system that has tried to cast off God's dominion.

"Our Founding Fathers," he said, "they were going to take the word of
God, and God has given us in the Bible his word, and they said this book will
always be true, and if there is ever a close call in policy, in leadership, in
law, in society, if there's ever a question, we want to look to the source of
absolute truth. That's why the Ten Commandments are so important. They were the original source of American law."

That version of history is taught at Christian schools like Jerry Falwell's
Liberty University, Gibbs' alma mater. It is also a virtual fairy tale. The
Constitution contains not a single mention of God, Christianity or the Bible. As
the historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore wrote in their book "The
Godless Constitution," such secularism wasn't lost on an earlier generation of
Christian conservatives, who decried America's founding document as a sin
against God.

They quote the Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, who said in
1812, "The nation has offended Providence. We formed our Constitution without
any acknowledgement of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a
people, of His government or even of His existence. The [Constitutional]
Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or His
blessings, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under
the present system, without God."

Someone should tell Antonin Scalia. He missed that part when he was looking for the "original intent" of the Constitution.

Put simply, this is what the fight over the filibuster is all about: An independent judiciary vs. one that is beholden to the narrow views of one incredibly powerful interest group.
- posted by Joshua @ 1:59 PM