Ethics and Public Policy Center

Writing for the National Review, columnist George Weigel of the far-right Ethics and Public Policy Center lashes out at marriage equality supporters for comparing their struggle for equal rights to the civil rights movement. According to Weigel, legalizing marriage between same-sex couples is more like imposing racial segregation than ending it: “Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause.” He explains that LGBT rights require a “totalitarian impulse” to “remanufacture reality,” claiming that the gay rights movement “is the heir of Bull Connor,” referring to the Birmingham sheriff who violently crushed civil rights demonstrations. Weigel writes:

That usurpation is at the heart of the gay lobby’s emotional, cultural, and political success — the moral mantle of those Freedom Riders whose golden anniversary we mark this year has, so to speak, been successfully claimed by the Stonewall Democratic Club and its epigones. And because the classic civil-rights movement and its righteous demand for equality before the law remains one of the few agreed-upon moral touchstones in 21st-century American culture (another being the Holocaust as an icon of evil), to seize that mantle and wear it is to have won a large part of the battle — as one sees when trying to discuss these questions with otherwise sensible young people.

But the analogy simply doesn’t work. Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause. Something natural and obvious — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — was being denied by the state in its efforts to maintain segregated public facilities and to deny full citizenship rights to African Americans. Once the American people came to see that these arrangements, however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious, the law was changed.

What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.

Last week, President Obama nominated Goodwin Liu to a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and immediately Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center started attacked Liu through a series of Bench Memos posts, accusing him of engaging in "demagogic testimony against Justice Alito’s confirmation" and adhering "the living-constitutionalist gimmick that judges can redefine the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean."

That was followed by a post claiming that the American Bar Association's rating of Liu as "well qualified" was "a joke" before Whelan got around to critiquing things like Liu's law-review articles and his views on issues like marriage equality and the death penalty.

Given the Liu was just nominated last week, the "Stop Liu" effort hasn't really had a chance to get underway, but you can rest assured that once it does, it will be relying heavily on Whelan's work in laying out the case for opposing his nomination, as you can see by this post by Bruce Hausknecht on Focus on the Family's blog which consists almost entirely of links to Whelan's Bench Memos posts:

Prof. Liu would be a perfect fit for the 9th Circuit

That is, if you’d like to continue the 9th Circuit’s reputation as the most bizarro, most liberal, most reversed appeals court in the federal system.

Liu, a Berkeley law professor, was nominated by President Obama for a vacant seat on the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals headquartered in San Francisco. An under-qualified but outspoken liberal, he has managed in his short few years out of law school to burnish and publicize his liberal credentials.

He’s a former board member for an exclusive list of far Left organizations: the ACLU of California, the American Constitution Society of Northern California, and the National Women’s Law Center. He managed to get himself invited to Justice Alito’s confirmation hearings to mischaracterize and then demagogue to the Judiciary committee about Alito’s record.

Liu wrote an op-ed criticizing California’s Prop 8 marriage amendment and the seven million citizens who voted for it by labeling it as “the will of a narrow and ultimately temporary majority.”

And last but certainly not least, Liu firmly has stated his belief in the desirability of courts making law from the bench: “What we mean by [constitutional] fidelity is that the Constitution should be interpreted in ways that adapt its principles and its text to the challenges and conditions of our society in every succeeding generation.”

This guy’s confirmation hearings should be interesting.

h/t to Ed Whelan at Bench Memos 

The Supreme Court’s past term made clear its lurch to the right following the appointment of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, as outlined in a recent People For the American Way Foundation report. Awareness of this fact has spread from legal analysts to the general public: A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows less than half of Americans think the Court is balanced, and 31 percent think it’s too conservative – up from 19 percent two years ago. This was the context for Sen. Chuck Schumer’s speech at the American Constitution Society last week. “There is no doubt we were hoodwinked,” he said of the confirmation hearings.

Nevertheless, right-wing activists maintain that, despite their victory in confirming Roberts and Alito and the obvious rightward tilt of the last term, the Supreme Court remains a “bastion” of liberalism. "After decades of liberal judicial activism on so many issues, the court's position remains decidedly on the left,” said Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

“I talk to a lot of evangelicals and the only person who takes Pat Robertson seriously is Tim Russert.” So claimed Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in a speech at a church in Westchester County, New York last week. Such pointed disavowals of Robertson by other religious-right leaders have occasionally followed the televangelists more absurd and incendiary comments – such as when he declared that Ariel Sharon’s debilitating stroke was God’s punishment for “dividing God’s land” and called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez – so you might think that Cromartie was responding to recent allegations that Robertson threatened a bodybuilder involved in lawsuit over Robertson’s “Age-Defying Shake,” or perhaps to Robertson’s warning today about Muslim politicians “taking over” the U.S. But Cromartie was trying to make the point that the televangelist, sometimes referred to as a GOP “kingmaker,” is increasingly marginalized.

But it’s hard to believe that. According to its web site, Robertson’s “700 Club” is available “in 95 percent of the television markets across the United States, the program is carried on ABC Family Channel cable network, FamilyNet, Trinity Broadcasting Network, and numerous U.S. television stations and is seen daily by approximately one million viewers.” His Christian Broadcasting Network garnered $166 million in donations from March 2005 to March 2006, and he is the second most well known religious figure in America.

If one needs more evidence of Robertson’s continued influence, especially on U.S. politics, just look at the Republican presidential candidates lining up to curry his favor. Sam Brownback and now John McCain have taken to the CBN airwaves to convince Robertson’s viewers of their conservative credentials. And both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are scheduled to speak at Robertson’s Regent University.

As John Green of the Pew Forum said, figures like Robertson “are moving off the stage, but they're by no means inconsequential. … They still have good reputations, particularly with evangelicals who are politically active. There are candidates who want to be seen with these people." As long as that’s true, it’s too early to declare Pat Robertson a political has-been.