Anti-judicial "Activism"
Every time I hear James Dobson or one of his fellow would-be theocrats talking about how persecuted Christians are, I always flash to Germany claiming Poland fired first in September 1939. But The American Prospect lets us know that more such victimization claims are on the way:

In a speech laced with claims that the federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, have “systematically attacked Christianity,” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins announced the launch of a new campaign by the right to turn the confirmation battle into a religious war against the “anti-Christian left.”
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In a live simulcast sent out to more than 1,000 churches across the country and broadcast on the Christian Television Network, Perkins and Dr. James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) will make the case that Senate Democrats have opposed a handful of the president’s judicial nominees not out of honest concern about their extreme political views but, simply, because the nominees are Christians.

“We must communicate to people of faith across this country that this is a filibuster of people of faith,” he said last week. “That the courts are consistently taking away the religious liberties of Christians in particular, and people of faith in general, in this nation.”

The next day, the onslaught on Capitol Hill is set to begin. Perkins said, “We are going to hold our fire [until April 24 -- "Justice Sunday”], and then we begin to just pound the United States Senate with phone calls and faxes, telling them to stop filibustering people of faith and vote up or down on the president’s judicial nominees. We have got to get the Christians of this country -- people of faith -- to understand that this is an issue; this is a battle they cannot miss.”

During the simulcast, listeners will undoubtedly be reminded of the religious credentials of some of the president’s stalled federal court nominees: Priscilla Owen is a Sunday school teacher; Charles Pickering is former president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention; and Mark Pryor is a devout Catholic.

Perkins, Dobson, and other leaders of the religious right will also make it clear to their supporters that helping the Bush administration in its efforts to pack the courts with Antonin Scalia-type conservatives is the only way to save the republic from what Dobson has described as an impending “long night of paganism.”

This would seem simple to factually disprove--of the hundreds of federally appointed jurists, I'm guessing that a majority of them are practicing Christians. Of course, factual arguments aren't really of interest to these people: they are, to put it much more kindly than they deserve, outcome-focused. Perhaps this is what seems to draw some of their more prominent spokespeople to favorable citations of Stalin, who was also notoriously goal-oriented.

This effort amounts to a frontal assault on both the tradition of pluralism and the notion that American law should reflect both adherence to the founding principles of the nation, and the sense of contemporary majorities as expressed by legislatures.

Nobody seems to have commented on this, but if you want to see the logical extension of what Perkins, Dobson, Tom DeLay and their counterparts on the anti-judicial fringe right are really interested in, one good place to look might be Atlanta. There, Eric Robert Rudolph yesterday was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for a series of bombing attacks he committed in the 1990s, attacks inspired by his hatred of legalized abortion and the "public practice" of homosexuality. If those concerns sound familiar, that's not a coincidence.

Mr. Rudolph's statement, an amalgam of biblical quotations, sermonizing and an oddly passive voice, offered a glimpse of how he had planned and carried out the bombings and of his five years as the nation's most famous fugitive, celebrated by some for his beliefs, admired by others for his ability to survive in the Appalachian wilderness, and reviled by many as a domestic terrorist.

Abortion was his central foe, though the Olympics, he wrote, promoted the "despicable ideals" of "global socialism" expressed in its theme song, John Lennon's "Imagine." His goal was to force the cancellation of the Games, or at least scare people away...

As for the attack on the gay nightclub, Mr. Rudolph, who has a gay brother, wrote that homosexuality practiced in private was acceptable, but that any effort to "drag this practice out of the closet" and have society recognize it as legitimate or normal "should be ruthlessly opposed."

I was working at the 1996 Olympics, was still in our office the night the bomb went off in Centennial Park (and remained there for the next eight hours or so), and I can tell you that the effect was much as this bastard intended. The Games went on, but under a pall of despair that didn't really lift until the closing ceremonies.

The difference between Eric Robert Rudolph and the Perkins/Dobson set isn't much more than one of skill sets. One knew how to work explosives; the others know how to work public opinion. I feel certain that these extremists don't come close to representing the majority views of American Christians--but if more responsible elements don't come forward and speak out about what's happening here, we'll all suffer for it.