[Mb-civic] NYT - Frist blinking?

[Mike Blaxill]

Frist Draws Criticism From Some Church Leaders
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/politics/22frist.html?pagewanted=print&position=

WASHINGTON, April 21 - As the Senate battle over
judicial confirmations became increasingly
entwined with religious themes, officials of
several major Protestant denominations on
Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader,
Bill Frist, of violating the principles of his
own Presbyterian church and urged him to drop out
of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as
"against people of faith."

Dr. Frist's participation has rekindled a debate
over the role of religion in public life that may
be complicating his efforts to overcome the
Democrats' use of the filibuster, a parliamentary
tactic used by Congressional minorities, to block
President Bush's judicial nominees.

Dr. Frist has threatened to change the Senate
rules to eliminate judicial filibusters, and in
response Democrats have threatened a virtual
shutdown of the Senate. A confrontation had been
expected as early as next week, but it now
appears that the showdown may be delayed.

Religious groups, including the National Council
of Churches and the Religious Action Center of
Reform Judaism, plan to conduct a conference call
with journalists on Friday to criticize Senator
Frist's participation in the telecast. The
program is sponsored by Christian conservative
organizations that want to build support for Dr.
Frist's filibuster proposal.

Among those scheduled to speak in the conference
call is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top
official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in
which Dr. Frist is an active member.

"One of the hallmarks of our denomination is that
we are an ecumenical church," Mr. Kirkpatrick
said in an interview on Thursday. He also said,
"Elected officials should not be portraying
public policies as being for or against people of
faith."

A spokesman for Dr. Frist said his remarks, which
are not yet available, would be consistent with
previous statements about fair treatment for
judicial nominees. "I would hope that he would
read Dr. Frist's remarks," the spokesman, Bob
Stevenson, said of Mr. Kirkpatrick.

Mr. Stevenson added that the timing of the
confrontation on filibusters was not related to
the criticisms that have been raised about the
telecast, saying Dr. Frist still planned to
propose a compromise to the Democrats.

Still, the Senate moved closer to a showdown on
Thursday, when the Senate Judiciary Committee,
voting along party lines, approved two nominees,
Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, who
were blocked by a filibuster in the last Congress
and are expected to be blocked again. Republican
strategists consider the nominees - two women,
one of whom is black - favorable choices for a
filibuster fight.

There were signs, though, that Dr. Frist was
planning to postpone the confrontation for at
least another two weeks, when the Senate returns
from a spring recess.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said
Dr. Frist had told him he would like to take up a
transportation measure next week, an indication
that he did not expect a filibuster fight before
the Congressional recess. Polls, meanwhile,
suggest a lack of public support for ending the
filibuster. A recent survey conducted for NBC
News and The Wall Street Journal found that 50
percent of those polled believed that the Senate
should retain the filibusters for judicial
nominations, while 40 percent were against and 10
percent undecided.

The theme of the telecast, which is called
Justice Sunday and will be broadcast to churches
and Christian radio and television networks, is
"The Filibuster Against People of Faith." Its
sponsors argue that by blocking judicial nominees
who oppose abortion rights on religious and moral
grounds, Democrats are effectively discriminating
against those nominees.

Dr. Frist has agreed to provide a four-minute
videotaped statement for the event. Democrats are
calling his participation evidence of Republican
extremism.

"We're going to allow the majority leader to
invoke faith to rewrite Senate rules, to put
substandard, extremist judges on the bench?"
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat
and former presidential nominee, said Thursday on
the Senate floor. Mr. Kerry added, "It's not up
to us to tell any one of our colleagues what to
believe as a matter of faith."

Christian conservatives have also accused Senator
John Salazar of Colorado, a Roman Catholic, of
tolerating anti-Catholicism from his fellow
Democrats who oppose nominees who follow the
church's teachings on abortions.

On Thursday, Mr. Salazar responded by issuing a
statement taking to task one of the telecast's
speakers, Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of
the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Louisville, for deprecating the Catholic faith.
It quoted Mr. Mohler as saying "the Roman church
is a false church and it teaches a false gospel"
and "the pope himself holds a false and
unbiblical office."

Dr. Mohler called Mr. Salazar's statement
"absolutely ridiculous," saying it was hardly
news that evangelical Protestants and Roman
Catholics "differ on many key theological
issues." He said he supported a Catholic nominee
the Democrats had opposed.

In the past two weeks, religious leaders on both
sides of the judicial battle have plunged into
the debate. The United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops is distributing millions of
postcards around the country for parishioners to
send their senators asking them not to insist
that nominees uphold abortion rights. Evangelical
Protestant groups like Focus on the Family have
been portraying the confirmation debates as a
fight over public expression of religion and
respect for traditionalist values.

Now the liberal group People for the American Way
is buying advertisements and distributing church
program inserts that attack Senator Frist for
invoking religious faith in what it says is a
partisan context. The National Council of
Churches is asking members to organize news
conferences denouncing Dr. Frist.

The criticism of the telecast underscores the
delicate task facing Dr. Frist, who is laying the
groundwork for a possible presidential campaign
in 2008, as he courts the evangelical Protestant
groups and other religious traditionalists that
formed the bedrock of President Bush's winning
coalition. With his patrician bearing and
background in the relatively liberal Presbyterian
Church, Dr. Frist, a Harvard-trained transplant
surgeon, does not fit in as naturally with
Christian conservatives as President Bush.

Dr. Frist's overtures to Christian conservatives
have drawn the ire of the more liberal
hierarchies of other religious groups, including
the officials of his own denomination. Dr. Bob
Edgar, general secretary of the National Council
of Churches and a former Democratic congressman,
said he had sought to include Mr. Kirkpatrick, of
the Presbyterian Church, in the conference call
both because Dr. Frist is Presbyterian and
because of the church's emphasis on
ecumenicalism.

"To say that some group of Christians has a
monopoly on the ear of God is especially an
outrage to Presbyterians," Mr. Edgar said.

Mr. Kirkpatrick said Dr. Frist's participation in
the telecast undermined "the historical
commitment in our nation and our church to an
understanding of the First Amendment that elected
officials should not be portraying public
policies as being for or against people of
faith."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research
Council and organizer of the telecast, said those
who were offended did not have to watch the
telecast.

"There are millions of other Americans who see a
connection between the filibuster and judicial
activism," Mr. Perkins said. "And when we talk
about judicial activism, we are talking about
issues that people faith care about deeply."