The Blog Party

an article in the mercury news details harriet miers longtime affiliation with a fundamentalist christian church. it is going to be bad.

Even though the NY TIMES and other news outlet seem to think Harriet Miers is a cautious choice for Supreme Court, I can’t help but disagree. In many pictures, including those from the announcement of her nomination, she wears a conspicuously obvious crucifix. Among the credits Bush listed were “the young women’s christian association” and “exodus ministries”. He specifically spelled out “christian” rather than say YWCA. He took a long pause after saying the word “grace” - a woman of grace…..character, etc. He talked about “knowing her heart”. I may sound paranoid, but I think that a lot of what Bush was saying was barely-coded subtext that she, like himself, is a conservative, fundamentalist christian. And though Roberts, who was just nominated, is a Catholic, he too has a heavy strain of religiosity.

Bush is essentially trying to stack the court with incredibly conservative, backwards-looking, religious fundamentalists who will choose dogma over innovation, people who are “strict constructionists” looking at the letter of the law rather than its intent.

its not enough that he will destroy america for 8 years in a row. bush is planting the seeds for the long term erosion of the dream of an enlightened america.

A few weeks back the New Yorker ran an article on Anthony Kennedy talking about how his passion for foreign law could change the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely. In the article was a very revealing paragraph that intimated a frightening and strong strain of conservative closed-mindedness and isolationism:

This spring, fifty-four conservatives in the House of Representatives sponsored a resolution criticizing the use of foreign sources by the Supreme Court, and, in August, Representative Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, completed an investigation of the Justices’ foreign trips, based on the disclosure forms that they are required to file. “Between 1998 and 2003, the Justices took a total of ninety-three foreign trips,” King told me. “And the implication is that there are at least a couple of Justices, chiefly Kennedy and Breyer, who are more enamored of the ‘enlightenment’ of the world than they are bound by our own Constitution.”

Yeah, that enlightenment was such a drag. What with inventing the whole idea of individual liberty and stuff.