This is What Theocracy Looks Like
Ready for the money quote from this past weekend's "Justice Sunday"? Here it is, courtesy of Michele Goldberg's piece in salon.com:

"We are not calling for people to be moral, we want them to be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ."
--Al Mohler, president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Yeah, this is the guy I want picking federal jurists. This runs more directly counter to my own leanings than anything else I've read in this whole debate: my deal is that we absolutely should call for people to be moral, and that the dogmatic strictures and social control aspects of organized religion often do more harm than good in that effort. Swap out "Jesus Christ" for "the Prophet Muhammad" and think of some notable villains you could imagine speaking that line.

Here's Goldberg expanding on the point:

Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, angrily recalled something that Judge Charles Pickering, one of the appellate court nominees that Democrats blocked, was asked during his hearings. "He was asked about something he said as president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention. He said, of all things, that Christians ought to base their decision making on the Bible ... that is normative Christianity! There's what it means to be a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and to be a Christian incorporated into the body of Christ!"

Of course, the concern about Pickering's comment at the hearings had to do with the implication that when the law contradicts his reading of the Bible, he sets the law aside. In the rhetoric surrounding Justice Sunday, though, expecting judges to put the law before their personal theology constitutes discrimination that threatens all Christians. "If it's Judge Pickering now, it can be you tomorrow," Mohler warned.

The language on Sunday was consistently apocalyptic. Dobson, the avuncular culture warrior, declared, "I think this is one of the most significant issues we've ever faced as a nation, because the future of democracy and ordered liberty actually depends on the outcome of this struggle." After all, the Supreme Court is responsible for "the biggest holocaust in world history" -- the legalization of abortion. "For 44 years, the Supreme Court has been on a campaign to limit religious freedom," Dobson said. He continued, "We do have a right to participate in this great representative form of government." From the way the crowd cheered, you'd have thought someone had told them they didn't.

The cognitive disconnect here would be funny if it weren't so frightening. In calling for a remedy to "unaccountable activist judges," the religious extremists champion avowedly activist judges accountable only to (their very specific conception of) God. But don't take my word for it: Janice Rogers Brown, one of the (figuratively) martyred nominees, has declared herself a holy warrior against "secular humanists who [threaten] to divorce America from its religious roots."

Brown is perhaps the most interesting of Bush's blocked nominees: she's African-American, and thusly probably gets Karl Rove quite excited in his long-term goal of peeling off that usually Democratic constituency by appealing to their social conservatism on homosexuality and other issues. And while the business community, which as Bull Moose points out isn't primarily interested in Dobsonite crusades to save the world for theocracy, that key Republican base group probably loves Brown's contention that the New Deal marked "the triumph of our socialist revolution." So in a way, she's as perfect a "Bridge Republican" as Tom DeLay himself, winning favor from fundamentalists of both the kulturkampf and free market stripes.

Nobody said these guys were stupid.