Women

“Americans Have Judges on Christmas List,” according to a press release from Concerned Women for America pushing the lame-duck confirmation of a handful of controversial judicial nominees whom Bush resubmitted after the election.

As we have noted before, there appears to be something about the issue of judicial nominations that makes the Right take leave of their senses.  

For example, Vision America’s Rick Scarborough frets about the Democratic take-over of the Senate in January but insists that, despite the election results, “the American people elected George W. Bush in 2004 with the expectation that he would keep his campaign promise to nominate judges” who share the Right’s agenda regardless of which party controlled the Senate and is urging him to ignore calls to nominate any sort of “compromise” candidates.

To this end, Scarborough claims

When Clinton was president, there was no talk of compromise candidates. Our 42nd President put hard leftists like Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the bench.

The only thing that can be taken from this ridiculous claim is that Scarborough either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the facts because, as Senator Orrin Hatch recounted in his autobiography, at a time when Democrats controlled the Senate and he was merely the ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, President Clinton still conferred with him when it came to potential nominees for the Supreme Court

Our conversation moved to other potential candidates. I asked whether he had considered Judge Stephen Breyer of the First Circuit Court of Appeals or Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. President Clinton indicated he had heard Breyer’s name but had not thought about Judge Ginsberg.

I indicated I thought they would be confirmed easily. I knew them both and believed that, while liberal, they were highly honest and capable jurists and their confirmation would not embarrass the President. From my perspective, they were far better than the other likely candidates from a liberal Democrat administration.

In the end … he nominated Judge Ginsburg and Judge Breyer a year later, when Harry Blackmun retired from the Court. Both were confirmed with relative ease.

Scarborough is not the only one who seems oblivious to history, no matter how recent. In Human Events, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton writes that

Liberals in the Senate have turned the judicial confirmation process on its head, obstructing the President’s judicial nominees for political reasons. They even resorted to launching judicial filibusters, ignoring the constitutional directive to provide up-or-down votes on all judicial nominees. Why? Not because the nominees were unqualified. But rather because they didn’t like the nominees’ philosophy of judicial restraint.

As we have noted repeatedly, if folks on the Right are really concerned about judicial nominees being denied a vote because one or more senators don’t “like the nominees’ philosophy,” perhaps they can start hounding Sen. Sam Brownback to lift his hold on the nomination of Janet Neff -  a hold that Brownback says is going to continue indefinitely

“I’m still looking at the Neff situation, and I will in the future,” Brownback said.

Neff has said she attended [a same-sex commitment ceremony] as a friend of one of the two women, a longtime neighbor.

Neff has declined to answer Brownback’s queries on whether the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage or civil unions, saying it would be improper to address questions that might come before her as a federal judge.

Brownback called gay marriage a developing area of the law best not left to the judiciary anyway.

“To me these issues should be decided by the legislative bodies, not by the judicial bodies, and it seems to me this may indicate some view of hers on the legal issue. And that’s what I’m concerned about here, is her view of the legal issue involving same-sex marriage,” Brownback said.

One has to marvel at Scarborough’s willingness to claim that there is no need for consultation or compromise on Supreme Court nominees despite the standard set by Hatch and Clinton - and Fitton’s willingness to blast Democrats for opposing nominees based on philosophy at a time when Brownback is doing exactly that.   

Never let it be said that the Right will let pesky things like facts get in the way of their partisan polemics.

When it was recently announced that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) would speak at a global AIDS conference at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, radio talker Kevin McCullough was quick to denounce the partnership between the “evil” young senator and Warren, author of the best-selling “Purpose-Driven Life”:

In doing so he has joined himself with one of the smoothest politicians of our times, and also one whose wickedness in worldview contradicts nearly every tenant of the Christian faith that Warren professes.

So the question is, "why?"

Why would Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit - a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition - to the inhumane, sick, and sinister evil that Obama has worked for as a legislator?

According to McCullough, what makes Obama “a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best” is his position on abortion and his support of “the radical homosexual activist lobby.”

Obama, who in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention famously called for political ecumenism, will appear with far-right Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) to be tested for HIV on stage. But the spirit of bipartisanship in approaching issues, like AIDS, that cross the ideological divide is not enough to tamper the Right’s political efforts. Perhaps hoping to preempt a future presidential bid by Obama, right-wing leaders are coming out unusually strong against the AIDS Day appearance.

Appearing in Wednesday’s edition of the Washington Post was an op-ed by Joseph Loconte and Michael Cromartie, both affiliated with the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center, entitled “Let's Stop Stereotyping Evangelicals.”

The gist of the piece was that the culture’s conception of evangelicals “is a gross caricature” because it ignores “evangelicalism's deepening social conscience.” 

There can be no doubt that certain segments of the evangelical community have long been committed to social and justice issues beyond the Right’s standard anti-abortion and anti-gay agenda. In fact, as we noted in a post the other day, the National Association of Evangelicals is attempting to broaden its agenda to include everything from global warming to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. Of course, such efforts have not been welcomed by some right-wing pundits and Religious Right leaders, some of whom are attempting to discredit this effort by tying it directly to the NAE’s disgraced former president, Ted Haggard. 

Loconte and Cromartie insist

Even the Moral Majority in its most belligerent form amounted to nothing more terrifying than churchgoers flocking peacefully to the polls on Election Day. The only people who want a biblical theocracy in America are completely outside the evangelical mainstream, their influence negligible.

So as Jerry Falwell and other ministers were jumping into politics, leaders such as Charles Colson -- former Nixon aide turned born-again Christian -- were charting another path. In 1976 Colson launched Prison Fellowship, a ministry to inmates, to address the soaring crime problem. Today it ranks as the largest prison ministry in the world, active in most U.S. prisons and in 112 countries. "Crime and violence frustrate every political answer," he has said, "because there can be no solution apart from character and creed." No organization has done more to bring redemption and hope to inmates and their families.

Colson’s organization has indeed been very effective reaching out to inmates.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t always been doing so in a manner that is constitutional

Going into the final two weeks before the election with their party facing daunting losses, their appeal to Christian conservatives dimmed, and their anti-gay mobilization tactics falling flat, the Religious Right is looking at the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex unions as a glimmer of hope that they might maintain their influence in Congress.

"Pro-traditional-marriage organizations ought to give a distinguished service award to the New Jersey Supreme Court," said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Today the New Jersey State Supreme Court unanimously ruled that, according to the state’s constitution, same-sex couples cannot be denied the rights and benefits of marriage. While a majority stopped short of specifically granting the right to marry to same-sex couples, the court ordered the legislature to extend the same rights, whether through marriage or another institution.

“The New Jersey Supreme Court has blatantly and arrogantly ordered the state Legislature to rip up what marriage has meant for thousands of years,” said James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. “The justices have made clear their disdain and disrespect for the true decision makers in our democracy -- the people -- as well as for the institution of marriage.” He added: “Nothing less than the future of the American family hangs in the balance if we allow one-man, one- woman marriage to be redefined out of existence. And, make no mistake, that is precisely the outcome the New Jersey Supreme Court is aiming for with this decision.”

“This is a textbook example of agenda-driven judges who are willing to twist their state laws and invade the province of the legislative branch in order to force same-sex 'marriage' on the people of New Jersey,” said Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America. CWA President Wendy Wright added, “The New Jersey Supreme Court has distinguished itself once again for imposing its own form of discrimination by arrogantly declaring that a woman is not needed to make a marriage, or that a man is not.”

“This is nothing more than an act of veiled judicial activism,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “As in Massachusetts and Vermont, the New Jersey Supreme Court has acted as a super-legislature imposing their will on the people of New Jersey. He called on the legislature to “ignore this ruling.” Dobson, Perkins, and Wright also said that the ruling should give impetus for voters in the 8 states with ballot initiatives regarding same-sex marriage.

Radio-talker Mark Levin, author of the anti-Supreme Court book “Men in Black,” asserted that the ruling was “as political as any I've seen.” “New Jersey joins Massachusetts in transitioning away from democratic government,” intoned Hugh Hewitt. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) quickly called for the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, perhaps hoping to be the first member of Congress to do so.

Some struck a positive note. “This is a plus for those of us who have been pressing for a constitutional amendment that would limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman,” said Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, explaining that he meant the case is “a wakeup call to the vast majority of Americans who are opposed to gay marriage but are reluctant to access the constitutional amendment process as the right remedy.”

Alliance Defense Fund Senior Counsel Glen Lavy also called it a “wake-up call for people who believe that marriage doesn’t need constitutional protection.” According to Lavy, the court’s declining to require marriage over civil unions should be interpreted as “mak[ing] marriage meaningless” because it is characterized as “just another option along with other ‘unions.’”

Expect more tomorrow.

In a message to the Family Research Council’s “prayer team,” Tony Perkins warns what could happen “If Democrats Win the House”:

Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) will likely become House Speaker. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) boasts, "When I become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, we will have power over the entire tax system, Social Security system, pension system, Medicare and all international trade." Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., the vociferous former Marine who derides the Iraq war, will chair the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) will become Judiciary Committee Chairman and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chairman of the Government Reform Committee.

While Perkins asks FRC supporters to pray that “God-fearing men and women be elected and may those with no fear of God be unelected,” he does not explain the connection between fearing God and pension policy.

Bishop Wellington Boone is fast becoming the Family Research Council’s favorite right-wing African American pastor, having participated in an FRC “Battle for Marriage” telecast, a “Take a Stand for Family” rally, a “Watchmen on the Wall” rally, “Justice Sunday III,” the “Values Voters Summit,” and now “Liberty Sunday, where the gay-bashing rhetoric he displayed during the recent “Values Voters Summit” continued.

Relating a conversation he claimed he had with his wife that morning, Boone insisted that homosexuality was unnatural and proposed something that can either be interpreted as evidence that his wife shares his bigoted views or else a clever new plot twist for the next season of “Survivor”

If sodomites - because they’re not gay, it’s a misnomer, they’re sodomites, there were sodomy laws in this country, all over, from 1600 and it was one time a capital offense  … Tell you what, let two women go on an island, all women, sodomites, go on an island, stay by yourself.  Put all the men on another island, this is my wife talking to me this morning, let them stay and tell you what, we’ll come back and see you in about a hundred years.    

Boone then went on to reiterate his view that the push for equality is not a civil rights issue, calling attempts to equate the two a ”rape of the civil rights movement,” a remark that elicited rousing applause from the predominantly white audience.  He then went off on a rather disjointed rant presumably related to the recent swearing in of Mark Dybul, who is openly gay, to be U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator.  During the ceremony, Dybul’s partner held the Bible and, according to press reports, Secretary of State Rice reportedly “singled out … Dybul's partner and referred to [his partner’s] mother as Dybul's mother-in-law.” 

Boone was livid, fuming

And then I look at USA Today and I see, by our Secretary of State, somebody being sworn in with the President’s wife standing up there smiling.  Now I got issues, because we talk about the President reading the Bible every day, we talk about him praying every day. Now I’m not playing with this kind of stuff here …. And then the comments that were made by the Secretary of State related to the partner of the person that was sworn in - their mother-in-law.  What do you mean their mother-in-law? They’re not married, that’s not a family!

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who spoke earlier in the program, was careful to make to note that the debate over the issues of marriage should be carried out with “respect and tolerance,” a point that was apparently lost on Boone. 

Watch the Video: Broadband or Dial-Up

Last night on Comedy Central’s Daily Show, humorist and “This American Life” contributor David Rakoff described an interview he conducted with Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture and Family Institute. Knight, who in the past has attacked survivor benefits for same-sex partners of 9/11 victims and compared stores saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” to the Nazi march on Austria, has long warned right-wing audiences about a so-called “homosexual agenda.”

DAVID RAKOFF: His view of what he kept on calling “the homosexual agenda” was literally – it’s like, Oh, you actually think it’s an agenda, like a written agenda. A to-do list.

JON STEWART: It’s a literal …

RAKOFF: Yeah. Things to do: [counting off on fingers] Recruit children. Have sex with them. Spread AIDS. It was just extraordinary!

Later in their conversation, according to Rakoff, Knight argued that heterosexual couples were less likely to transmit HIV because “the vagina can take a lot of punishment.”

Watch the video on Comedy Central’s web site: Part 1 Part 2.