[Mb-civic] Religious right bashes the courts - Derrick Z. Jackson - The Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

<>Religious right bashes the courts
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  August 16, 2005

We glibly call out religious fanaticism from abroad. President Bush 
warns us how ''small groups of fanatics or failing states could gain the 
power to threaten great nations, threaten the world peace. America and 
the entire civilized world will face this threat for decades to come.'' 
Bush is of course silent on the religious fanatics he is indebted to, 
who are on the verge of helping him change America for decades to come.

Last weekend, leaders of the Christian right held ''Justice Sunday II,'' 
a mega-church telecast. Speaker after speaker attacked the Supreme 
Court. It is not enough for them that Bush's conservative choices for 
lower courts are being approved. It is not enough that the high court, 
under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, has generally become more 
conservative over the last quarter century and played a key final role 
in Bush gaining office in the disputed 2000 election.

No, even with a court that can hardly be described as liberal, Justice 
Sunday was a crazed attack on the court. House majority leader Tom DeLay 
of Texas said the Supreme Court had usurped the power of Congress to 
make laws. He said the high court was guilty of ''judicial supremacy, 
judicial autocracy.''

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and 
Civil Rights, said the high court is so out of control, it needs a 
constitutional amendment to say that ''unless a judicial vote is 
unanimous, you cannot overturn a law created by Congress.'' In a story 
in Newsday, Donohue said, ''I'm going to try to do my job to intimidate 
the Senate Judiciary Committee so they do their job more carefully.'' 
Asked by Newsday if he really meant to use the word intimidate, he 
answered, ''Absolutely.''

 From the way Robert Bork talked at Justice Sunday, you would have 
thought he was talking about Margaret Marshall and the Massachusetts 
Supreme Judicial Court that legalized gay marriage. Even though the 
Supreme Court has issued mixed rulings concerning the rights of gay and 
lesbian people -- striking down a criminal statute on sodomy on one hand 
but upholding the right of private groups to ban gay leaders and 
participants on the other -- Bork, the famously rejected high court 
nominee, said that body has made homosexuality ''a constitutional 
right.'' He moaned that ''once homosexuality is defined as a 
constitutional right, there is nothing the states can do about it, 
nothing the people can do about it.''

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, who blasts moderate, 
prochoice, progay-rights Republicans, calls the court an ''oligarchy.'' 
The organizer of Justice Sunday, Tony Perkins, president of the Family 
Research Council, railed that the high court legalized the killing of 
unborn children and ''homosexual sodomy."


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/16/religious_right_bashes_the_courts/

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