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Rally has little to say about Roberts, but proposes a constitutional overhaul
The speakers at Sunday's Justice Sunday II event in Nashville were eager to tell us what the gathering wasn't.

"Justice Sunday … isn't a protest against anything," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. "It's a rally in support of a constitutional judiciary that respects and adheres to the co-equal role it was given by our founders."

Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, which sponsored the event, told reporters it was "not a [John] Roberts rally." "This will be no pep rally for his confirmation," he said earlier. Instead, the point was "to educate evangelical Christians about the U.S. Supreme Court and get them talking to friends and elected officials about what they want from their justices."

So if it's not a protest, perhaps we can disregard the various protest-sounding comments the speakers made against federal courts, especially the Supreme Court (the whole of the Supreme Court, by the way; speakers seemed not to acknowledge much difference among the justices). Such statements included:

• America's most powerful judges are "unelected, unaccountable, and arrogant." (James Dobson)
• The Supreme Court has created "an oligarchy. It's the government by the few." (Dobson)
• At the Supreme Court, "rights are invented out of whole cloth. Longstanding traditions are found to be unconstitutional. Moral values that have defined the progress of human civilization for millennia are cast aside in favor of those espoused by a handful of unelected, lifetime-appointed judges." (Tom DeLay)
• "Activist courts" are imposing "state-sanctioned same-sex marriage" and partial-birth abortion, and are "ridding the public square of any mention of our nation's religious heritage" in what amounts to "judicial supremacy, judicial autocracy."(DeLay)
• "They've said that our children don't have a right to pray." (Perkins)
• "I'm tired of being told that somehow if you have a religious-formed conscience, that somehow you're a second-class citizen." (Bill Donohue)

The American Prospect's Rob Garver took note of the theme:

In the imaginary world painted by the leaders of "Justice Sunday II," conservative Christian Republicans may control the White House, the Congress, and several seats on the Supreme Court, but they remain oppressed and victimized. Speakers invoked Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony, all in service of the meme that Christians in America are being silenced, persecuted, and prevented from practicing their religion.

In fact, as Weblog has noted previously, evangelical attitudes toward the Supreme Court ran tremendously high all through the era of Roe v. Wade, Engel v. Vitale, Lemon v. Kurtzman, Lee v. Weisman, and other cases that Justice Sunday speakers have complained about. In 2001, three out of four white evangelical Protestants liked the Supreme Court. Today, it's one in two—even though Supreme Court decisions since 2001 have overwhelmingly gone in favor of religious conservatives, especially regarding the First Amendment's free exercise clause (you know, the one protecting against religious persecution).

In the past half-decade, the Supreme Court has defended religion in the public square more than it has in generations. Through the neutrality test, the Supreme Court told government agencies that if they allowed one kind of speech, they had to allow religious speech. They said if you allowed one kind of meeting, you had to allow religious meetings. They said if you funded other kinds of organizations, you could fund religious organizations. And the Justice Sunday speakers cry oppression.

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49