“Justice Sunday II” Rally Targets “Arrogant Judiciary”

The schizophrenia of the Christian Right continues to rage unchecked and untreated. This is evidence by the fact that the key speaker for a rally which they called “Justice Sunday II” was House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; a man who has been charged with numerous ethics violations and has only avoided probable prison time because the Republicans have blocked every investigation, replaced members of investigation committees with people more sympathetic to DeLay and outright changed the rules of the House of Representatives so that DeLay could remain in office while under investigation. So much for justice.

Dr. James Dobson and other Religious Right leaders apparently believe that the Judiciary should only be independent in regard to supporting their agenda. What Dobson and other extremist Christian leaders are calling for is a well-heeled Judiciary that will support whatever far-Right legislation politicians like Tom DeLay force through Congress. That such legislation should face scrutiny for compatability with the United States Constitution is an abhorrent idea to people like James Dobson.

Dobson and his ilk love to quote Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson when they can twist his words to their advantage, and yet anyone who has read Jefferson's words in their correct context knows that people like Dobson were feared by Jefferson, and that Jefferson warned us of their influence. Dobson and other Religious Right leaders love to invoke the image of the Founding Fathers, claiming that our Government has strayed from their original intentions, when any impartial scholar would have to note that if we have indeed strayed from the intentions of the Founding Fathers, it has been in a decided and frightening shift to the Right.

I refuse to believe that an educated man like Dr. James Dobson truly does not understand how our Democracy was intended to work. Whether or not Dobson likes the rulings of the Judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, it was intended as a check against possible abuse of Congressional power. That is its function, to determine that Congress, in its bid to please its highest paying contributors and settle political debts with people like Dobson and his Focus on the Family, does not install legislation that cannot pass Constitutional muster.

Make no mistake. “Justice Sunday II” has nothing whatsoever to do with justice. This rally is all about convincing the American public that the next appointee to the Supreme Court should be a Right-Wing wacko like James Dobson, that the court does not lean far enough to the right already. We're talking about a court which has already appointed a President (Bush in 2000) in defiance of the will of the American people and the due process of law (Al Gore was legally entitled to demand a recount of the entire state of Florida; a recount that was stopped by the Supreme Court).

These people talk a lot about justice, but only appear to recognize it as concessions to their will. If ever there were enemies to our Democracy, the people in the pulpit at Two Rivers Baptist Church are the enemies of the United States of America. Why do I say this? Only our enemies would work so tirelessly to overturn the very Democracy that our Founding Fathers worked so hard and spilled their blood for.

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” -Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814.

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