pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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BIBLICAL LAW

237.

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it�s good enough for us�1920s Texas governor Miriam �Ma� Ferguson, barring the teaching of foreign languages in public schools

What the Bible purportedly says is often the grounds upon which political battles are decided in our country and, these days, some Bible factoid that a slick preacher can encapsulate in a little rhyming soundbyte often passes as Biblical knowledge and is used to sledgehammer biases into the maintstream.

The New York Times reports that an overwhelming majority of US citizens who were polled recently now want both creationism and evolution to be taught in our public schools. Many are under the erroneous assumption that none of the tenets of evolution are proveable. The fact that we are carbon life-forms, that our ancestors were carbon life-forms that can be traced to a certain era is not a theory though�whereas the science backing creationism or so-called intelligent design is nonexistent. So WHY is public opinion/mythology dictating what people are taught in science rather than scientists, the experts?

I�ve been thinking about how odd it is that, back when I was a kid, one of the primary tenets of Baptist faith was the absolute separation of church and state. Of course, that was when Baptists still perceived of themselves as a poor victimized minority that stuck out its chin and swore to bow down to no one. We also eschewed politics. That�s all changed now ... almost as radically as the Baptist Jesus has changed.

�

You and I can bring the rule and reign of the cross to America.

Our Constitution calls for three co-equal branches of government�Congress, the president, and the courts�but Christianists are bound and determined to undermine the independent judiciary and thus undermine the separation of powers. One of their strategies is court-stripping, but

despite the Christian Coalition�s best efforts, those pesky federal courts keep upholding the Bill of Rights and the separation of church and state. But not to worry, the group has a plan to fix that: take away the right of the courts to hear those cases in the first place. This bold gambit, called "court stripping," is all the rage among the Religious Right these days.�Rob Boston, AUSCS�s Church and State, Nov. 2004)

Jesse Helms worked hard to deny the courts the right to hear school prayer cases. In fact, for years now, the Christianists have insisted that Congress has the power to remove some �issues� from the purview of the federal court system.

You don�t have to go very far back in history to realize why we need this division of power. Remember when the federal courts stepped in when local and state governments ruled by bias and failed to protect African Americans? The courts overturned the oppressive Jim Crow statutes that denied a portion of our citizenry the right to vote and imposed segregation ... and many a white southerner has stoked a simmering rage against the federal court system ever since.

Court-stripping was not a strategy back then but think if this were present day, with the Christianists who are now in Congress. With our president. If a federal court overturned the Jim Crow laws today, a court-stripping amendment would no doubt be pushed through to uphold them before lunch.

So let�s step back into those ducktail days of yore. In 1964, George Wallace attacked passage of civil-rights legislation this way:

Today, this tyranny is imposed by the central government which claims the right to rule over our lives under sanction of the omnipotent black-robed despots who sit on the bench of the US Supreme Court.

No big surprise that Wallace insisted that legislation be passed to �curb the powers of this body of judicial tyrants.�

Judicial tyrants. The term has a 1990s sort of ring to it, fits our victimization culture that maybe was stronger in the south back then. You know, if someone enforces a law that you believe in, don't reconsider your biases but instead claim that you�re being vicitimized. �They don�t like me becawz I�m a Chwistian!� Aww. (Of course, Ralph Reed's baby face was still on a baby back then.... Then again, maybe that baby face really IS as old as Dick Clark; after all, he does prefers to do his work under the radar!)

And James Dobson sounds just like George Wallace these days. �Stop Judicial Tyranny,� he says on his Focus on The Family website. He promotes court-stripping bills and attacks the federal judiciary for any ruling that displeases the Christianists.

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Robertson wanted to reduce or eliminate the power of the judiciary. He denied that the Constitution provides a system of checks and balances between three separate and equal branches of government...

In fact, Robertson went further: he denied that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of the government. Instead, he saw the judiciary as a department of the legislative branch, which he believed was the dominant center of power in the nation. His reasoning went like this: Since Congress has complete authority to establish the lower federal courts and to establish "the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court," the court system is necessarily subordinate to the legislative. Robertson's idea was that congress could control the court by using its power to intimidate. For example, he said, �Congress could say �There's a whole class of cases you can't hear� and there's nobody can do anything about it!

Now let�s shift our gaze to Rep. John Hostetler (R-IN), who said, at a recent Christian Coalition gathering,

When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy. The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions.

And yes, he�s THAT Hostettler, the author of two recent court-stripping bills. (One was an amendment barring the use of federal funds to enforce the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals decision to remove the Ten Commandments from a Montgomery courthouse; it also restricts the court�s ability to hear cases involving other religious symbols. Hostettler drafted the so-called Marriage Protection Act too. This bill strips federal courts of jurisdiction over legal challenges to the DOMA [the federal law passed in 1996 that lets states decide whether or not to recognize same-sex marriages.)

Then there�s the so-called Constitution Restoration Act of 2004, which bans challenges to state-sponsored acknowledgments of "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government" and retroactively overturns all existing rulings even as it sets up a mechanism for impeaching federal judges who uphold church�state separation. And this was written by a judge!

Maybe he never had to take a civics course. Or maybe most current Congresspeople didn�t. Or maybe the Christianists went to Christian schools and didn�t. Or maybe the Christianists realized that they can�t buy courts the way they can buy elections. Whatever the case, our nation�s separation of powers means that Congress does not have the power to decimate the authority of the courts through legislation that deals with issues surrounding our Bill of Rights even if some citizens would like to turn the courts into rubberstamps for Congress/the Christianists.

There�s so much more to rant er blog about, since I�ve been surfing websites and researching the Bible and drafting an overdue letter to my aunt Becky of late, but I promised my pal Cybrarian that I would grill out steaks for dinner, and so will have to continue this diatribe later on.

Ciao.

5:28 p.m. - 2005-08-31

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