A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time

Frank Rich editorialized in The New York Times Whatever your religious denomination, or lack of same, it was hard not to be swept up in last week's televised pageantry from Rome: the grandeur of St. Peter's Square, the panoply of the cardinals, the continuity of history embodied by the joyous emergence of the 265th pope.

There were a number in the Main Stream Media that took various swipes at the new Pope because they said he was too Conservative.

As a show of faith, it's a tough act to follow. But that has not stopped some ingenious American hucksters from trying.

Tonight is the much-awaited "Justice Sunday," the judge-bashing rally being disseminated nationwide by cable, satellite and Internet from a megachurch in Louisville. It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry." These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher, "was born to be a senator," we now have senators who are born to be Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched plans to be beamed into tonight's festivities by videotape, a stunt that in itself imbues "Justice Sunday" with a touch of all-American spectacle worthy of "The Wizard of Oz."

The liberals have forgotten how disappointed they were the new pope was a Conservative; they can always attack him in the future. Now they need to focus on Bill Frist.

Like the wizard himself, "Justice Sunday" is a humbug, albeit one with real potential consequences. It brings mass-media firepower to a campaign against so-called activist judges whose virulence increasingly echoes the rhetoric of George Wallace and other segregationists in the 1960's. Back then, Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up security, a cross was burned on Johnson's lawn and his mother's house was bombed.

Do the Liberals have similar plans for Senator Frist, or will they be happy by just trying to belittle him?

The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith."

And that is the truth

In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees.

Lower court appointees were approved, but a number of appointments to the appeals court were fillibustered by the minority, and NONE of Clinton's nominees were fillibustered. They never made it out of the Republican controlled Judiciary Committee

Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court.

They may be Republican appointees, but several of them vote with the left much of not all of the time

It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach.

It is true that Reagan appointed him, but he certainly votes with the left almost all the time.

Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.

RINOs (Republicans in Name Only

The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore.

The Schivo case was a mistake; Congress should not have nterveined and Bush should not have signed it.

The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.

Activist judges are judges that legislate from the bench, whether it be to create a "right" to an abortion, or same sex marriage, or anything else. If you want things like that, you should persuade the legislature to approve them, as was done recently in Connecticut

Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of "people of faith." But "people of faith," as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight's presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to "sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers," according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable.

I don't know what the NRB requires for membership, but the Catholic Church, ans well as Jewish and Muslim religious leaders are opposed to abortion and homosexuality.