Richard Land appeared Wednesday on TheDove TV’s “Focus Today” program, where he criticized President Joe Biden for pledging to nominate a Black woman to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, saying that in doing so, Biden is “draining the pool” of qualified candidates “down to a foot wash.”
Land is a longtime religious-right activist who most recently served as president of Southern Evangelical Seminary. Prior to that, he served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, but retired under a cloud of controversy in 2012 after Right Wing Watch posted audio of him declaring that “race hustlers” were using death of Trayvon Martin to “gin up the Black vote” for President Barack Obama.
Land, it seems, did not learn anything from that previous controversy.
“He’s gonna pick a Black woman to be his choice for being on Supreme Court,” Land griped. “I don’t think that he should make that his criteria. His criteria should be: Is this the most qualified person that shares my legal philosophy that I can get [on] the court?”
“Equality should be about excellence,” he continued. “Equity is about groupthink. If you want to know what equity produces, equity produces Kamala Harris, perhaps the most unqualified vice presidential person since Henry Wallace in Franklin Roosevelt’s third term. This is really appalling.”
“He should pick the most qualified person that fits his legal philosophy,” Land added. “Now, that may very well be a Black woman. Certainly, I believe it’s very possible it could be because I believe that God distributes talent equally among the ethnicities of our country. You could have somebody from any ethnic group that might be the most qualified person. Now, the reality is that where we are in the United States in the year of our Lord 2022, only 2 percent of the lawyers in the United States are Black women, so he’s draining the pool down from a pool down to a foot wash to start with, and the likelihood of finding the best qualified candidate from 2 percent of the population is slim.”
