LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Senator Gary Hart talks about God and Caesar in America:

The revelation that a senior White House official "cleared" the since-failed nomination of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson reminded me of the huge controversy caused by John Kennedy's campaign for president in 1960. Then it was the religious conservatives who were up in arms about the separation of church and state and about preventing "the Pope from taking over the White House."
Can you imagine their reaction if, in 1961 when President Kennedy nominated Byron White to the Supreme Court, Ted Sorenson had placed a call to the Pope to seek his approval of the White nomination?
Reflections such as this in the context of today's political rhetoric of "faith" and "values", and the high-jacking of the Republican party by the religious right, together with my own evangelical background and divinity school studies of theology, caused me to write God and Caesar in America: And Essay on Religion and Politics.

Here's a quote from his book:

The full agenda of religious right "values"--laissez-faire economics, antigovernment biases, neo-conservative foreign policies, and rightist orthodoxy--requires a judiciary compliant with it. It does no good to convert a Jeffersonian public school system into private parochial schools, to make churches the instruments of the state by transferring public funds from social programs to them, to pass laws restricting reproductive rights, to expand law enforcement's intrusive reach in the name of security, or to torture or indefinitely detain terror suspects if a judge or court from the pre-revivalist past overturns those actions on constitutional grounds. The full religious revolution cannot be realized without a federal judiciary, up to and including at least five members of the Supreme Court, that shares those ideals and goals.

Here's a man who gets it. Read the whole post on the site.