by Stanley Rogouski
The rally that took place in Louisville, Kentucky on April
24th, 2005, sponsored by the Family Research Council, also known as Justice
Sunday I was a landmark event in American politics.
Even though Tom Delay is currently having problems with the
law and the push to ‘save’ Terri Schiavo wound up turning into a Bible thumping,
snake handling circus right out of a Sinclair Lewis novel, Justice Sunday I set
an important precedent. The Senate
Majority Leader and the most powerful man in Congress shared a stage with the
most extremist representatives of the Christian right. George Bush called
congress back into session, and James Dobson and Focus on the Family moved out
of the extremist fringe and displaced the Senate as the organization to which
George Bush goes to get advice and consent on his judicial nominations.
This is a radical change in how the President appoints
judges, breaking with 200 years of tradition, and an important step in breaking
down the wall that separates church and state and in transforming the American
government into a theocracy.
Justice Sunday II was held on August 14th in Nashville
and Bill Frist, who had taken hits from his own medical community for his
opposition to stem cell research, didn’t show up. Instead we were treated to
the spectacle of Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Robert H. Bork, Tom DeLay, Zell
Miller, Chuck Colson, Phyllis Schlafly, William A. Donohue, and Harry R.
Jackson, Jr.
But don’t let Frist’s absence fool you. When George Bush
nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in October, he shared information
about her not with Harry Reid or the Democrats in the Senate, not with the opposition
party in Congress, but with the shadowy leader of an extremist anti-gay cult in
Colorado Springs. As reported by the New York Times, ‘Senator
Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, and several Democrats on the committee said Sunday that they were
considering calling the evangelical conservative James C. Dobson to testify on
what he has been told about Harriet E. Miers, the president’s Supreme Court
nominee.’
That Justice Sunday has permanently changed the landscape of
American politics is underscored by the fact that after Bush withdrew the nomination
of the Dobson approved right-wing sycophant Miers, he didn’t nominate a
compromise candidate, somebody in the political center with a high-rating from
the American Bar Association who might have been palatable to Harry Reid and
the Democrats. Instead, he nominated somebody even further to the right than
Harriet Miers was, Samuel Alito. I’m not going to rehash here what’s all over
the media about the extremism of Judge Alito. I will mention that, in light of
the recent scandal over the NSA’s wiretapping of American citizens, it’s highly
disturbing that in 1984, Alito argued in favor of warrantless wiretaps. As the
Washington Post reported on December 24, ‘Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito
Jr. once argued that the nation’s top law enforcement official deserves blanket
protection from lawsuits when acting in the name of national security, even
when those actions involve the illegal wiretapping of American citizens,
documents released yesterday show.’
Justice Sunday III will take place this January 8th
in Philadelphia and will kick off
the Christian right’s campaign to put Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.
The religious arm of the Republican party led by right-wing
extremists like James Dobson and Lou Sheldon are able to provide George Bush
with an army of ideologically committed Christian soldiers who are available at
any time to go on a crusade to man the phones, write letters, go to
demonstrations, lobby congress, and give money and they will be squarely behind
the nomination of Samuel Alito. Even if Reid and the Democrats oppose Alito’s
nomination, they will fail unless there’s a grassroots campaign to back them
up, unless we can flood the airwaves and the streets with the opposing message
that Alito is a dangerous extremist who should be sent back to his Opus Dei
pals in New Jersey. Harry Reid may be a more skilled
parliamentarian than Tom Daschle but don’t expect a savior from the Democratic
party to keep Alito from filling his hand picked role of repealing Roe vs.
Wade.
It will take an organized movement of millions, determined
to stop this whole disastrous course, to drive out the Bush regime. Join this
growing movement in our next step – the agenda for 2006 must not be set by Bush
but by the people taking independent mass political action.