WASHINGTON (ABP) — Speakers at a second rally designed to support socially conservative nominees to federal courts Aug. 14 decried several decades' worth of Supreme Court precedent on social issues, but made little direct mention of the current battle over a Supreme Court nominee.
Several conservative leaders spoke from the pulpit of Two Rivers Baptist Church, Nashville, as part of the second “Justice Sunday” event. Sponsored by major Religious Right organizations, the rally was a follow-up to a similar one in April designed to push the Senate to approve President Bush's nominees to the federal courts.
The second event was designed to call special attention to the Supreme Court, on which there is a vacancy for the first time in 11 years. However, few speakers reportedly mentioned Bush's nominee, federal appellate judge John Roberts, choosing instead to criticize several high court rulings from recent years.
“How do the judges get away with such outrageous decisions? By asserting that Supreme Court decisions are the supreme law of the land,” said Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative commentator and founder of Concerned Women for America, according to the New York Times. “But you know that is not true. That is a terrible heresy.”
Zell Miller, a former Democratic senator from Georgia who has campaigned for Republicans since retiring from the Senate, reportedly said the high court has “removed prayer from our public schools…legalized the barbaric killing of unborn babies, and it is ready to discard like an outdated hula hoop the universal institution of marriage between a man and a woman.”
And William Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, compared the plight of conservative Christians in modern-day America to that of African-Americans in the South in the 1950s and '60s.
“It's time we move to the front of the bus and that we take command of the wheel,” he told the crowd, according to news reports.
But groups supportive of church-state separation said such allegations were both intemperate and inaccurate.
“These decisions to keep government out of religion are hardly hostile to Christians,” said Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, in a statement on the telecast. “Although the [Supreme] Court does not always get it right, its enforcement of the [Constitution's] religion clauses has ensured greater religious freedom in this country than anywhere in the world.”
She referred specifically to the court's decisions over the last several decades on government-sanctioned prayer in public schools and displays of sectarian religious items on government buildings and property, such as the court's June decisions in two cases on displays of the Ten Commandments.
“Christians have the right, and in fact the responsibility, to weigh in on important policy issues,” Hollman said. “But the exploitation of religion for partisan ends damages both religion and politics.”