Bill Frist, as scheduled, shared his thoughts on the federal judiciary during yesterday’s controversial “Justice Sunday” rally. But Frist seemed to take inordinate joy in reminding anyone who would listen that his remarks were less-than radical.
Without mentioning DeLay, Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said, “Our judiciary must be independent, impartial and fair. When we think judicial decisions are outside mainstream American values, we will say so.”
“But we must also be clear that the balance of power among all three branches (of government) requires respect — not retaliation. I won’t go along with that,” Frist said in a prerecorded address for a nationwide telecast, “Justice Sunday.” […]
“We can disagree without being disagreeable,” said Frist, who along with fellow Republicans may soon seek to change Senate rules to eliminate judicial filibusters.
“Never in 214 years, never in the history of the United States Senate had a judicial nominee with majority support been denied an up-or-down vote … until two years ago,” Frist said.
Frist was obviously not telling the truth — he personally backed a filibuster of a Clinton judicial nominee five years ago. Putting that aside, however, Frist’s office furiously distributed a copy of the senator’s remarks to news outlets throughout the weekend, starting Saturday morning, apparently because they were so proud of it. “See,” Frist seemed to be saying, “this is just the boilerplate language I’ve been using for months. Nothing theological. No cause for alarm.”
If this is Frist’s defense for crossing the decency line and participating in the event, he’s missing the point badly. As Chuck Schumer said, “Senator Frist’s words today were less important than his giving the imprimatur to this conference, which clearly argues that people of one viewpoint have God on their side and all others are faithless.”
The reason Frist came under intense fire for agreeing to appear at “Justice Sunday” had nothing to do with his specific remarks and everything to do with the radical conservatives who had organized an anti-judiciary hate-fest and condemned their ideological opponents as anti-religion. Frist could have used his remarks to read the phone book; the criticisms would have been the same. It’s not what he said; it’s where he said it.
Frist’s office made a special point in reminding reporters that the senator didn’t mention religion during his address. But this, too, suffers from the same problem. The Senate Majority Leader shouldn’t be a part of a far-right rally that exploits faith for partisan political purposes. Whether Frist personally talked about religion is, once again, irrelevant.
Frank Rich noted, in a terrific column, that Frist’s video address was intended to serve as a “prophylactic to shield him from the charge that he is breaching the wall separating church and state.” It didn’t work.
To be sure, Frist’s “Justice Sunday” friends are radicals who don’t deserve the support of the Senate’s top lawmaker. Again from Rich:
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.
This is the company that Bill Frist has decided to keep.
By agreeing to participate at the event, Frist lent extremist groups and their message a degree of legitimacy — and the imprimatur of a high-ranking GOP official — they clearly do not deserve.