Maybe he needs to rally the far-right base in advance of a very tough re-election fight, or maybe he’s trying to atone for criticizing intelligent-design creationism, but whatever the motivation, even Rick Santorum should know better than to appear at Justice Sunday III.
[Santorum] was just added to the program of Justice Sunday III, a notoriously offensive effort by right-wing religious leaders to rally support for President Bush’s judicial nominations.
If you’ll recall, a flier for the original Justice Sunday called any attempt to filibuster a judicial nominee an attack “against people of faith.” Santorum is back in his comfort zone.
Yes, Santorum will be appearing alongside respectable luminaries such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Tony Perkins. If Santorum is judged by the company he keeps, this does not bode well for the senator’s character.
In fact, I expected, perhaps naively, that Santorum would know better. Earlier this year Last spring, Bill Frist was widely criticized for hanging out with the exact same crowd at Justice Sunday I. When members of the Senate leadership, of which Frist and Santorum are a part, lend credence to radical conservatives by attending an anti-judiciary hate-fest, they undermine their credibility and bolster the standing of demagogues.
Indeed, Frank Rich helped summarize the problem with Justice Sunday several months ago.
Anyone who doesn’t get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of “people of faith.” But “people of faith,” as used by the event’s organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it’s a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight’s presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to “sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers,” according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with “Justice Sunday,” R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a “false and unbiblical office” but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that “any belief system” leading “away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil.”
Tonight’s megachurch setting and pseudoreligious accouterments notwithstanding, the actual organizer of “Justice Sunday” isn’t a clergyman at all but a former state legislator and candidate for insurance commissioner in Louisiana, Tony Perkins. He now runs the Family Research Council, a Washington propaganda machine devoted to debunking “myths” like “People are born gay” and “Homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals are.” It will give you an idea of the level of Mr. Perkins’s hysteria that, as reported by The American Prospect, he told a gathering in Washington this month that the judiciary poses “a greater threat to representative government” than “terrorist groups.” And we all know the punishment for terrorists. Accordingly, Newsweek reports that both Justices Kennedy and Clarence Thomas have “asked Congress for money to add 11 police officers” to the Supreme Court, “including one new officer just to assess threats against the justices.” The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has requested $12 million for home-security systems for another 800 judges.
Mr. Perkins’s fellow producer tonight is James Dobson, the child psychologist who created Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs media behemoth most famous of late for condemning SpongeBob SquarePants for joining other cartoon characters in a gay-friendly public-service “We Are Family” video for children. Dr. Dobson sees same-sex marriage as the path to “marriage between a man and his donkey” and, in yet another perversion of civil rights history, has likened the robed justices of the Supreme Court to the robed thugs of the Ku Klux Klan. He has promised “a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea” if he doesn’t get the judges he wants.
These are the people Rick Santorum wants to help by attending their far-right rally. Santorum, of course, can hang out with whomever he pleases, but he should be prepared to explain why he believes Justice Sunday deserves his support.