April 10, 2005

the Jesublicans are scaring me again

May we all live in interesting times. So interesting that I can barely keep up. Just so it's down for posterity in the spam-littered Movabletype database, I want to quickly note a few posts from other blogs that caught my eye.

Billmon, perhaps the best writer in all of blogospheria, touched on religion a few times this week, first as a reconsideration of the pope's tenure (he had earlier called it a 'wash'), and then in his hilarious Unitarian Jihadist parody.

James Wolcott warms my heart in dissecting CNN's pope coverage from last week:

Although Hunt joked about Bob not signing on to the "Blessed are the poor" part of the Bible and Dionne facetiously said he now was hoping for a political conversion as well, the truth as any CNN viewer knows is that Novak's Catholic conversion has made him no more compassionate to the poor, weak, and infirm, no less smarmy and reputation-slurring than he was as a young punk sneering at Commie-symps and rummaging Martin Luther King. Catholicism has just provided him with a church organ for his natural pomposity.

I wonder how much airtime CNN or any other cable outfit would give to one of its correspondents who converted to Islam or Buddhism, or, sacre bleu, renounced religion and declared him or herself an atheist. I have a feeling that in the latter case they wouldn't dispatch a camera crew to the New York Historical Society to film the correspondent studying reverently the texts of the Thomas Paine: Patriot and Provocateur exhibit currently on view. No, the personalization of on-air talent only goes so far.

There's also a really interesting article in Rolling Stone (!) of all places (via Gadflyer), which cautions us to distinguish between your garden variety Evangelical and the far more dangerous strain of Christianity - the Dominionist. The 'africanized' version of the Christian honeybee.

Meet the Dominionists -- biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government. As the far-right wing of the evangelical movement, Dominionists are pressing an agenda that makes Newt Gingrich's Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation's courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions. In Florida, when the courts ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed, it was the Dominionists who organized round-the-clock protests and issued a fiery call for Gov. Jeb Bush to defy the law and take Schiavo into state custody. Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a "faith-based" government that will endure far longer than Bush's presidency -- all the way until Jesus comes back.

You'd be wrong in marginalizing them too - they have inordinate pull:

It helps that Dominionists have a direct line to the White House: The Rev. Richard Land, top lobbyist for the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, enjoys a weekly conference call with top Bush advisers including Karl Rove. "We've got the Holy Spirit's wind at our backs!" Land declares in an arm-waving, red-faced speech. He takes particular aim at the threat posed by John Lennon, denouncing "Imagine" as a "secular anthem" that envisions a future of "clone plantations, child sacrifice, legalized polygamy and hard-core porn."

And onward they march with their pitchforks to the court house steps. From Congress Daily via Atrios:

Christian conservatives and a core group of congressional supporters are launching a significant new push to restructure the federal judicial system to reflect a more explicitly biblical world view, in the hopes that these changes will pave the way for broader social and political changes, leaders of the movement said.

Some of the most prominent conservative leaders in the country -- including Vision America's Rick Scarborough, Coral Ridge Ministry's James Kennedy and the Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich -- launched the effort Thursday in Washington.
Members of the new coalition said they would immediately focus on bringing an end to Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees before pushing Senate Majority Leader Frist to enact sweeping changes in the judiciary.

They also warned that Frist and other politicians who have thus far been reluctant to force a confrontation with Senate Minority Leader Reid over the nominations would be held accountable if Democrats continue to block conservative judges.

Participants at this week's Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration meeting said the group also will focus on forcing Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against any judge who does not conform with their biblically based interpretation of the Constitution, as well as permanently curb judicial authority over matters of church and state, marriage and governmental acknowledgement of a Christian deity.

"What it is time to do is impeach justices," Texas Justice Foundation President Allan Parker extolled a crowd of a hundred or so conservative lobbyists, attorneys and activists. "The standard should be any judge who believes in the 'living constitution' should be impeached."

First of all, a quick word on the 'living constitution' - while the term wasn't coined until much later, the idea goes back much farther, and is a far more accepted mode of interpretation, with varying degrees, than the strict originalism espoused by Parker above. In 1819, Chief Justic John Marshall said in McCulloch v. Maryland:

'We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding...intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs'

Now whether this judge impeachment talk has any chance in hell is a separate question that I've been pondering for the past week and I'll try to make my thoughts more clear on these pages as things heat up. And they will heat up. But I think that high tide may have come and gone for the Jesublicans on this issue, and they simply aren't politically subtle or attuned to admit it to themselves. Unfortunately for them, much of the rhetoric the public heard on 'judicial imperialism' came from the mouth of Tom DeLay in the context of Terri Schiavo. The judges who upset DeLay so much obviously didn't have the same effect on the people polled at that time, however, and there's no good reason to think that the the public will change its mind when the expected fillibuster debate comes up. Indeed, there's every reason to think that DeLay is simply digging a deeper hole.

And while I may be naive as to the capacity of the media to make intelligent observations on the matter, won't it be hard for the Republicans to get away from DeLay's remarks insofar as it was their own conservative judges in the 11th Circuit that crashed their party? Just what kind of judge are they imagining will do their bidding?

**shiver**

posted by scott pilutik at April 10, 2005 11:15 AM

digg  |  del.icio.us  |  reddit
permalink

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://realitybasedcommunity.net/mt-tb.cgi/62