IS PRESIDENT BUSH A SOCIALIST?

Judge for Yourself: Are Senate Democrats determined to keep believers off the bench? (KAY DALY, July 25, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

It cannot be mere coincidence that Mr. Holmes--as well as fellow disputed nominees like Mr. Pryor, Carolyn Kuhl (in the Ninth Circuit), Bob Conrad (eastern district of North Carolina) and three of the four stalled nominees from Michigan (Sixth Circuit)--is a practicing Catholic. For Catholics, Purgatory may very well be the judicial nominations process. Then again, Charles Pickering, a nominee for the Sixth Circuit who once served as president of the Mississippi Southern Baptist Convention, and Priscilla Owen, a filibustered Fifth Circuit nominee and Episcopalian Sunday school teacher, are also under attack.

What seems to have escaped the skittish senators is that, regardless of what these nominees believe personally, as constitutionalists and strict constructionists they recognize that their role as federal judges is to apply the Constitution and the law as they find it--no matter how contrary it may be to their personal belief system. It is judicial activism, whether on the left or the right, that is cause for concern, and the nominees under suspicion are opposed to it.

This should matter but doesn't seem to. Maybe the Senate should just print a sign that reads: "Believers Need Not Apply."

Here's what's really at stake while doctinaire conservatives fret about the steel tariffs and the agriculture bill. Stacking the judiciary with conservatives would do more to effect the kind of change the Right desires than any of the minor political measures they want to go to war over.

FOR EXAMPLE:
Sodomites owe Texas Republicans their thanks (DALE CARPENTER, July 23, 2003, Houston Chronicle)

[T]he best evidence of Texas GOP leaders' devotion to theocracy is their 22-page party platform, which is less a political document than a fundamentalist encyclical. It declares the United States "a Christian nation" founded "on the Holy Bible." It repudiates "the myth of separation of Church and State." It supports a "school prayer" amendment to the Constitution. It backs "a character education curriculum" in public schools "based upon biblical principles." On and on it goes in that fashion.

When it comes to gays, the state party platform lapses into obsessed rage. References to "homosexuals" or "homosexuality" (14) even outnumber invocations of "God" (10).

Needless to say, the platform opposes gay marriage and gays in the military. It goes further, opposing domestic partners benefits and allowing gays to adopt kids or even have custody of their own children. It urges stripping AIDS sufferers of any legal protection from discrimination.

Here is the Texas GOP on gay sex:

"The Party believes that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God," blah, blah, blah.

Of course, Mr, Carpenter doesn't, nor could he, argue that any of that is inaccurate. Our deciding as a society to allow folks to degrade themselves and each other in private hasn't magically made such behavior mentally healthy nor made it physically healthy to have genital-anal and oral-anal intercourse. The premises by which sodomy has been forbidden for millennia have not changed, only certain attitudes toward the practitioners and the legal standards of a few folks on the Court, which are no longer based in the Constitution. Return to strict Constitutionalism and a Judeo-Christian concern for defending human dignity even in private and there'll be at least one Texas Republican the sodomites won't be so happy about.



MORE:
-Democrats do not cooperate (John A. Nowacki, 7/24/2003, USA Today) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 25, 2003 11:11 AM