First, some background: I am a Christian. I regularly attend church. I belong to a VERY mainstream religion. I belong to a very very mainstream Champaign-Urbana church.
AND: I am not qualified to be a Supreme Court justice. At least not because I am a Christian and attend church.
Nor is Harriet Miers.
From the same Washington Post article:
President Bush suggested today that religion was a factor in his choice of Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court.This, frankly, is to me very troubling.
Bush's comments came in response to a question about why his top political aide, Karl Rove, found it nececsssary to assure evangelical Christian leaders that Miers was one of them.
"People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," Bush said. "They want to know Harriet Miers's background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. Part of Harriet Miers life is her religion," he said.
That the main qualification for being nominated to the Supreme Court is that she is an evangelical Christian is appallingly irrelevant. And wrong.
The story continues:
The specific query to Bush, at a photo opportunity with Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, followed a statement by Family Research Council leader James Dobson, a major figure in the religious conservative movement. Dobson said that Rove had informed him in advance of the choice of Miers and assured him, in his words, that "Harriet Miers is an Evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life, that she had taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion, that she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life."This, of course, makes her qalified to sit on the highest court in the United States?
And where, exactly, does the concept - affirmed time and again by that Supreme Court - of separation of church and state figure into this?
According the the W-imbecile, apparently it doesn't. Her church is her qualification. Possibly her only qualification.
This is simply wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
And so it goes.
4 comments:
Thank you for this post, Ol' Guy.
I hate to jump the gun and sound like an alarmist, but with stuff like this (and everything else Bush has tried to pull), can a theocracy-in-everything-but-name be too far behind?
One wonders.
I suspect that's the W-imbecile's goal, even if he isn't smart enough to realize it. Fortunately for us, I also believe he isn't smart enough to pull it off.
He'd succeed with a Supreme Court justice if he was smart enough to nominate one who is actually qualified to sit on the bench. All Harriet will ever do is sit, make shallow fundamentalist statements and pretty much be ignored by the other justices. (Kinda like Thomas, who isn't taken seriously, either).
I don't expect great things from Harriet. But I do suspect she'll be confirmed as a 'we could do worse, I suppose' candidate.
so if a Democratic President had nominated Miers you'd be saying the same thing, right?
Yes, definitely; regardless of ideology, I pretty must insist that my Supreme Court nominees be qualified. That's a minimum requirement.
And at the same time, regardless of what kind of ideology, I pretty much insist they NOT be a religious zealot.
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