LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

From Fredrick Clarkson: Religious Equality in America. Clarkson delves into the history of the second amendment.

Washington Post talks about smearing Christian Judges:

What these self-avowed Christians do not acknowledge -- and what the American public seems little aware of -- is that the war they are waging is actually against other people calling themselves Christians. To simplify: Right-wing and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic. Secular humanism is a bogeyman, a smoke screen obscuring the right-wing Christians' struggle for supremacy.

Is this blasphemy or just very poor taste? Decide for yourself.

Chip Berlet talks about the use of the word 'extremism'.

Beliefnet examines "Intelligent Design". And Slate wonders about what matters in Kansas, where a debate about ID is going on.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Interfaith Alliance response to the "Justice Sunday" of two weeks ago is very insightful:

“Response to Justice Sunday”

Audio Press Briefing

The Interfaith Alliance

Washington, DC

April 25, 2005

Don Parker: This is Don Parker. I am press secretary for The Interfaith Alliance. Our web site is www.interfaithalliance.org. I’m in Washington, but like most of you, our speakers are on the line from locations around the country. I’m going to introduce the moderator for this event.

The Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy is the president of The Interfaith Alliance and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, based in Washington. He also serves as the pastor for preaching and worship at Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana. Dr. Gaddy is also one of twenty international religious leaders on the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100 Leaders, a group formed to improve dialogue and understanding between the Western and Islamic worlds.

Dr. Gaddy and all of our speakers today are available to the news media for commentary on issues relating to the intersection of religion and politics in general and on this issue in particular. Dr Gaddy …

Welton Gaddy: Thanks, Don. Good morning and welcome to all of you who have joined us for this press briefing. We’re very pleased to have a distinguished panel with us today. The panel includes the Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, the Rev. Dr. Carlton W. Veazey, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., and Rabbi David Saperstein. In just a moment I’ll introduce each of these people to you in brief statements.

For the past several days, as you know, an event called Justice Sunday has pervaded the news. The purpose of the event was to garner support for Senate leaders seeking to do away with the historic practice of the filibuster when dealing with judicial nominations. Organizers of the Justice Sunday event had identified opponents of this initiative as “anti-faith.” ( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Here's another look at the NYC conference from a conservative point of view. It's interesting how the different sides spin these things... I've taken the rare liberty of including my own remarks in [brackets] in the body of the article- being there and actually listening to what went on is definitely an advantage.

Conference shows deep divide of liberals, religious right

By RICHARD N. OSTLING, The Associated Press
Published: Saturday, May. 7, 2005

NEW YORK – A video screen showed President Bush boarding a plane for Washington. His purpose: to get to the White House and sign Congress’ bill asking federal courts to review the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.

Joan Bokaer of TheocracyWatch.org offered her take on the action. “There’s something strange about the folks running our country,” she quipped. The audience of 500 people responded with some appreciative chuckles.

Bokaer, from a social action center affiliated with Cornell University, was speaking at a conference last weekend that denounced conservative Republicans on matters like mercy-killing, abortion, gay marriage, research using human embryos, broadcast indecency, Israel, Iraq, faith-based charity funding, judicial nominations and church-state relations. The book table sold assorted Bush-bashing titles. [I saw one or two, but the majority of books were about the Religious Right, the 'culture wars' and other subjects.- ed]

But the gathering wasn’t a Democratic Party caucus.

It was an academic conference at the City University of New York on “the real agenda of the religious far right” – and it offered a fresh example of just how venomous America’s conservative-liberal religious split has become and how entangled faith is with politics.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

I think this in on-topic, considering the importance of the judiciary in defending religious liberty.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, [Princeton] Class of '74, is preparing to change Senate rules to prevent a Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees. This "Nuclear Option" would end the institutional role of the Senate as a deliberative body that respects minority views, and judicial nominations could be approved without even the minimal degree of mainstream acceptability that had previously been necessary...

To protest this destructive move, members of the Princeton University community have come together to hold a non-stop "filibuster" outside the Frist Campus Center (a building sponsored by Senator Frist's family).

The Web Site

This is cool on so many levels. Plus, there's a webcam!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, like his immediate predecessor, John Ashcroft, has pledged to make obscenity prosecutions a priority. The department is expected to announce soon the creation of a special unit within its criminal division to focus on adult obscenity cases.

"Enforcement is absolutely necessary if we are going to protect citizens from unwanted exposure to obscene materials," Gonzales recently told federal prosecutors. He directed U.S. attorneys to report back by late July on effective ways to crack down on obscenity and what tools the prosecutors might need.

Those kind of words please religious conservatives, who claim the Clinton administration virtually ignored the proliferation of pornography, particularly on the Internet, during the 1990s...

A proponent of strict enforcement of obscenity laws [says] that so far, the administration has aimed mostly at minor figures in the industry.

"At some point, they're going to have to ratchet it up if they want to do something meaningful," said Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media.

Full Story

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article talks about the desire of the Religious Right to use the judiciary to dissolve the wall between church and state:

Religious right seeks judiciary that dissolves church-state separation

BY DICK POLMAN
Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - Religious conservatives, emboldened by President Bush's re-election and confident of their political clout, are not interested in merely overhauling the judiciary. Ideally, they are seeking a judiciary that would remove the wall of separation between church and state.

This ambition is stated clearly in numerous legal briefs currently on file at the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with a pending case; they seek removal of "a Berlin wall" that is "out of step with this nation's religious heritage." In fact, their leaders argue in interviews that the church-state barrier is a "myth" invented by the high court in 1947, thanks to a twisted interpretation of our founding documents.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY britzkrieg)

Neal Boortz is a right-wing talk-radio host based here in Atlanta. He is an unmitigated asshole; after all, that's the persona he's going for. He spews vitriol and sometimes tells outright lies because, as he freely admits, that attracts listeners he can "play commercials for." He bashes Democrats at every turn. Same old, same old, mostly.

Nevertheless, I found this in his show notes for April 25:

...the Republicans had a bit of a setback in this particular battle yesterday. I'm referring to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's little satellite broadcast to churches across the nation. The telecast was billed as an event to denounce Democrats as "against people of faith." This "against people of faith" line is a nicer way of saying "anti-Christian."

( There's lots more )

Yes, it's taken out of context, but there you have it. Maybe Boortz can become a force for Good as well as Mammon.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This AlterNet article talks about the 'constitutional option':

It's a joke that the right wing claims it is against "judicial activists." What they want are judicial activists who agree with them.

I was all set to write a column about the nuclear option -- the proposal to change the rules of the Senate in order to get President Bush's most questionable judicial appointments through -- when, lo, word came that there is no nuclear option anymore. It is now called "the constitutional option."

Who changed it? Why, the Republican Party, of course. Having found that "nuclear option" does not poll well, the Republicans simply decreed the rules change can no longer be described by that name. Further, the Republican Party sent media operatives around to major news organizations to inform them that anyone who fails to obey the new diktat on usage will be demonstrating the dread "liberal bias."

Since this particularly fateful rules change was first christened "the nuclear option" by Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi in 2003, and has been called "the nuclear option" ever since -- by Republicans, along with everybody else -- I have to say this is a distinctly Orwellian development.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

The New Republic has an article about how fundementalism is splitting the Republican Party.

For conservatives of faith, such pluralism can allow error to flourish--and immorality to become government policy--and therefore must be limited. A conservative of doubt, however, does not regard the existence of such pluralism as a problem. He sees it as an unavoidable fact of modernity, an invitation to lives that are more challenging and autonomous than in more traditional societies. Even when conservatives of doubt disagree with others' moral convictions, they recognize that, in a free, pluralist society, those other views deserve a hearing. So a conservative who believes abortion is always immoral can reconcile herself to a polity in which abortion is still legal, if regulated. Putting government power unequivocally on the side of one view of morality--especially in extremely controversial areas--must always be balanced against the rights and views of citizens who dissent. And, precisely because complete government neutrality may be impossible on these issues, government should tread as lightly as possible. The key in areas of doubt is to do as little harm as possible. Which often means, with respect to government power, doing as little as possible.

Doubt, in other words, means restraint. And restraint of government is the indispensable foundation of human freedom. The modern liberal European state was founded on such doubt. In the seventeenth century, men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke looked at the consequences of various faiths battling for control of the moralizing state--and they balked. They saw civil war, religious extremism, torture, burnings at the stake, police states, and the Inquisition. They saw polities like Great Britain's ravaged by sectarian squabbles over what the truth is, how it is discovered, and how to impose it on a society as a whole. And they made a fundamental break with ancient and medieval political thought by insisting that government retreat from such areas--that it leave the definition of the good life to private citizens, to churches uncontaminated by government, or to universities that would seek and discuss competing views of the truth.

In the modern world, where disagreement among citizens is even deeper and more diverse than three centuries ago, conservatives of doubt see their tradition as more necessary than ever. As the fusion of religious fundamentalism with politics has destroyed Muslim society and politics, so, these conservatives fear, it threatens Western freedom as well--in subtler, milder, Christian forms. Conservatives of doubt are not necessarily atheists or amoralists. Many are devout Christians who embrace a strong separation of church and state--for the sake of religion as much as politics. Others may be Oakeshottian skeptics, or Randian individualists, or Burkean pragmatists, or libertarian idealists. But they all agree that the only solution to deep social disagreement is not a forced supremacy of a majority or minority, but an attempt to keep government as neutral as possible, power as close to people as possible, and as much economic power in the hands of the private sector as possible.

For such conservatives, divided government is therefore critical. Judicial checks on democratic majorities are as vital as legislative checks on executive abuse. (They are just as queasy removing such parliamentary checks as the filibuster.) The same goes for keeping policy-making as close as possible to states and localities. Why? Because human knowledge is fallible, and those closest to the issues are more likely to get solutions right than people a long way away. The notion that the federal government should actively endorse one religion's perspective on social policy would appall such conservatives. So would the idea that individual states cannot legitimately experiment with policies on which there is no national consensus--such as stem-cell research or marriage rights.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY heartlikeawheel)

Thank you Sunfell, for the welcome. As you asked, here is a repost of my email to Frist, sent a few days ago. I'm sure it went right in the trashcan, with all the other "dissidents":

Senator Frist:

The filibuster was A-OK when Republicans wanted to use it time and again to block Clinton's appointments. But now that it is the last tool available to Democrats for blocking the appointment of Christian Reconstructionist judges to the Supreme Court, i.e., those who would impose their religious views on all Americans by force of the Bench, you and your constituents say the filibuster is "unconstitutional" and seek to ban it.

I'd like to inform you of something. There is no government on this planet who could force me to conform to the "moral ethic" of ANY religion. I will decide what is moral for me, you will not. The religious fanatics who re-elected the President and gave the Republicans the majority in Congress are dangerous people on a level with Osama Bin Laden...same premise, different religion. And you and your kind embrace them to your bosom.

The day that government begins enforcing laws dictating how people should and should not live their personal lives is the day I abandon this country for a DEMOCRACY. This one, sadly, has more fascist elements than democratic these days. But I suppose today's Republicans like it that way. Lincoln, the founder of your party, is spinning in his grave.

The Founding Fathers will weep. You think they'd like a theocracy, I'm sure, with a judiciary interpreting law based solely on Mosaic Law. After all, isn't that what the Constitutional Restoration Act is all about? Indeed it is. No law shall be higher in the land than God's law, that is the gist of it, hidden behind such deceitful, patriotic language. What the Founding Fathers really envisioned was that the American people are entitled to be free FROM religion, as well as free to practice ANY religion of their choice.

You and your kind should be ashamed. But I'll wager you're not.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY brigidsblest)

Apparently now it's not enough for some people to condemn 'activist' judges who they disagree with. Now they're trying to 'punish' them.

2 Evangelicals Want to Strip Courts' Funds

By Peter Wallsten Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.

An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation's most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.

( Read on, if you dare... )

The article can be found at:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20050422/ts_latimes/2evangelicalswanttostripcourtsfunds

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Slate Magazine article talks about the ramifications of pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control.

And Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has a few choice words to say about the extreme Right and their hate speech.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Arkansas Democrat-Gazette op-ed asks some tough questions of the Religious Right. This article is notable that it's in a very right wing paper in a very red state.

Does it strike you as odd that persons calling themselves Christians are furious that the U.S. Supreme Court found executing juveniles unconstitutional? Do you find even odder that such individuals describe themselves, straight-faced, as adherents of the "culture of life"? Are you surprised to learn that people called conservatives would quote Joseph Stalin? Yes, that Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet dictator and mass murderer. And no, I am not making this up. It happened recently at a Washington conclave held by something called the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. If not household names, many in attendance were familiar controversialists, representing right-wing groups like the Family Research Council, the American Conservative Union, etc. Catholic anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly spoke, along with unsuccessful GOP Senate nominee Alan Keyes and Alabama’s Judge Roy" Ten Commandments" Moore. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, having fled the jurisdiction—er, left town to attend the pope’s funeral, addressed the group on TV. But the real headline-maker was Edwin Vieira, allegedly an expert in constitutional law.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This New York Times article talks about the upcoming battle between the Dominionist owned Republicans and the "persecuting" Democrats over religion and judges:

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.

"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.

"Filibuster against people of faith". This is a prime example of classic Dominionist tactics at work: pretend to be persecuted and play the 'victim' card to the hilt, and make anyone who questions their bullying tactics look like some oppressor or worse. People like this love to play the martyr card, and anyone who questions them is seen as an attacker, who must be defamed and destroyed. Unfortunately, the 'lay' people who do not know how the Dominionists work take their cries of "victim" at face value, worsening the situtation. Keep a close eye on this- it will get worse.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

Having won control of two branches of the federal government, the activists of the religious right have come to see the courts as the intolerable obstacle thwarting their dream of a reborn Christian nation."

"Some [...] noting that even judges appointed by Republicans often rule against them, have become convinced that they must destroy the federal judiciary itself."

Edit: Just realized - this article already got recommended, yeah? Well, here's another, for those as ain't read it yet....

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

In this article from Salon (day pass required), last week's "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference was more than a bunch of theocon dominionist Christians gathering together grumbling about judges. At the end was a prayer which, upon my reading it, made my hair stand on end:

As Gibbs finished speaking, Scarborough invited the audience to get on their knees. All over the room, people dropped to the floor, heads bowed. From somewhere in the audience, a preacher started up:

"Father, we echo the words of the apostle Paul, because we know Judge Greer claims to be a Christian. So as the Apostle Paul said in First Corinthians 5, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus."

It sounded like a prayer for death.

It actually is a prayer for death, or total destruction. It sounded very familiar, and I realized that it was the same prayer that was used on me by my hateful Christian colleagues in my final assignment in the USAF. They would gather together every morning and say a similar prayer- praying for my destruction so that I may be 'saved'.

A friend of mine thought that it was very interesting that these people would pretty much enlist Satan's aid in destroying their enemies. Makes me wonder who they're really working for. Thing is- the Law of Return works for all- no matter what faith you practice. That which you sow, you will also reap. So, if these people are praying for the 'destruction of the flesh' of their enemies, they may well find themselves suffering from the 'blowback' of their petitions. Were they to petition for love, understanding, and healing, they would get the same back. So, in their own twisted way, these TheoCons are planting the seeds for their own destruction. So may it be.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

ZNet's coverage of this bill in Congress is headlined with "Say Hello To Taliban America And Goodbye To Godless Judges, Courts And Law". Sadly, this is true. And no one in the cowed, gutless and biased mainstream media is saying anything about it. No one.

This stunning bill and the movement behind it deserve immediate crash study on at least 3 different fronts.

1. Its hostile divorce of American jurisprudence from our hard-won secular history and international norms. To again quote the Conservative Caucus: "This important bill will restrict the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court and all lower federal courts to that permitted by the U.S. Constitution, including on the subject of the acknowledgement of God (as in the Roy Moore 10 Commandments issue); and it also restricts federal courts from recognizing the laws of foreign countries and international law [e.g., against torture, global warming, unjust wars, etc. - ed.] as the supreme law of our land."

Re the last point, envision some doddering judges who still revere our Declaration of Independence's "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," and suppose they invoke in their rulings some international precepts from the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or, God forbid, the Geneva Conventions. Well, under the CRA that would all be clearly illegal and, thank God, that's the last we'd ever hear from them.

2. The political implications of replacing "we the people" with a Christian deity as the "sovereign source" of all our laws.

Imagine hyper-zealous officers or "entities" of the Federal, State, or local government (like a governor, legislature or school board) that mandate Christian prayers, rituals and/or statuary in public buildings under their control. Were this to happen, some local Jews, Muslims and/or Buddhists might be moved to hire a lawyer and legally object. But if the CRA passes, their objection would be beyond any court's jurisdiction and that's the last we'd ever hear of that. It in fact demands "impeachment, conviction, and removal of judges" who dare to even hear a case that challenges its "Last Days" morphing of Christian church and state. (Just how our new Sovereign Source of Government's advocacy of public executions for adultery, gay-ness, contraception and blasphemy will fit into our current corrections system still remains to be seen.)

3 The incessant mainstream media blackout on the bill's existence and import.

The potential impact of the Constitution Restoration Act on American life, law and politics is so radical and vast that you would expect a boiling national debate. Yet just as with the crimes and questions of 9/11, everyone in the media seems terrifically busy looking the other way. If you want yet another dramatic metric of US journalistic dysfunction, try Googling "Constitution Restoration Act" in their News category and see what you get. Today, three weeks after the bill was filed, I find a grand total of three throwaway mentions in Alabama's Shelby County Reporter, the Decatur Daily, and the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. ("Terry Schiavo" in contrast will net you over a thousand news hits, and "Michael Jackson" just passed 36,000 with a bullet.)

The Dominionist TheoCons are already advocating killing judges who don't agree with their idea of 'morality'. No one is screaming about this, either. Why? Have we been prayed down by them into some sort of mindless quivering putty for them to do this? Why aren't these people in cuffs and doing the perp walk? Isn't anyone worried that we're about to lose our country to these people? And that they want to destroy 230 years of pretty good democracy and replace it with a theocratic government... with nukes? Again, here's ZNet's take on that:

In the meantime, however, before the CRA takes force and reduces legal education to a Bible study course, what say we undertake a little Constitutional defense of our own? To get up to speed on the current Christian right agenda, Moyers' "Welcome to Doomsday", Katherine Yurica's "The Despoiling of America" and John "The 9/11 Truth Candidate" Buchanan's "Fixing America" are excellent places to start.

None of these analyses offer a silver bullet or paint a pretty picture, but as students of 9/11 now know, spreading the courage to face the truth is really the only hope we've got.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

twistedchick talks about the "open season on judges" declared by the Dominionist ruled Republicans. They've reintroduced a bill that

Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Prohibits a court of the United States from relying upon any law, policy, or other action of a foreign state or international organization in interpreting and applying the Constitution, other than English constitutional and common law up to the time of adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

Provides that any Federal court decision relating to an issue removed from Federal jurisdiction by this Act is not binding precedent on State courts.

Provides that any Supreme Court justice or Federal court judge who exceeds the jurisdictional limitations of this Act shall be deemed to have committed an offense for which the justice or judge may be removed, and to have violated the standard of good behavior required of Article III judges by the Constitution.

They tried this (and failed) in 2003. They're going to keep at it until it passes, or they get impeached.

twistedchick says, "No way can this be called conservative -- it is a radical reworking of the law and the power of the judiciary. It is punitive to judges who interpret the law in the traditional manner. It abridges case law and constitutional law occurring since the Constitution was adopted in 1787. It expressly unites church and state, and makes religion the source of law and justice -- which opens up the possibility of changing any law that is not aligned with the religious beliefs of whoever is in power."

This must be fought. It will kill the Constitution as we know it, and turn the courts into religious courts, dispensing Biblical justice. For non-Christians, 'heretics', women, and especially homosexuals, this means almost certain death, if the extreme Dominionists have their way.

Here's another look at this "Constitution Restoration Act". I find it ironic the 'newspeak' involved in naming this bill- it's going to destroy the Constitution, not 'restore' it. Sort of like 'Healthy Forests' and "Clear Skies"...

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

"It could come as soon as tomorrow or Tuesday. Vice President Cheney could end the filibuster in a devious way. A vote will be called to confirm William Myers for the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. Cheney might declare a filibuster unconstitutional. To read about the possible scenario go to:

"If Cheney and his friends on the theocratic right in the U.S. Senate succeed, then Democrats and moderate Republicans will have lost the only leverage left in the U.S. Senate. The Supreme Court is at stake.

"Cheney will have pulled off a coup, and very few people will have known it happened! We must not let Cheney take away the filibuster. If he gets away with it, we need to get a million people to the streets of DC quickly and spontaneously! We should shut down the city until the Senate re-instates the filibuster.

"People may not understand what happened with Cheney and the filibuster, but millions of people understand something is deeply wrong in Washington. If the word gets out through grass roots organizations, blogs, the press, etc. I predict a million people will show up.

"This action must have two components: it must be non-violent, and it must have a specific goal - to reinstate the filibuster - with an understanding that we will go home when our goal is reached.

"But then, maybe the theocratic right will not succeed with their so-called nuclear option and we can all stay home and work on our spring gardens."

-Joan Bokaer
Founder, TheocracyWatch

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ordos45)

It seems the state of Virginia is going to the Supreme Court over establishing Religious Wings in its prisons.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20050211.html All in all its a really interesting article, especially the last few paragraphs.