Justice Sunday: The Beginning of the End For The Intolerant Right

I cannot let the occasion of last night's "Justice Sunday" simulcast pass without comment. I did not watch it. In fact, I'm not sure it was even available had I wanted to watch it (which I did not). However, clips and comments on the 11:00 news were unavoidable. It was -- is -- disgusting.

In his mince-no-words Op-Ed piece in Sunday's NYT, Frank Rich says most of what needs to be said, so I will simply quote him:

The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.

The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.

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."

This is the gist, but I would encourage you to read the whole thing. The people who are behind "Justice Sunday" are not Christians, at least not as I understand Christianity. They are lying, dissembling Goebbel-esque demagogues who have somehow managed to harness a sincere awakening of religious faith to a wagon of hatred, bigotry and intolerance.

The good news, though, is that it won't last. America periodically goes through these sorts of paroxysms, in which demagogues are able to take real concerns and turn them into a paranoia-driven crusades against the "forces of evil." The Salem witch trials and the Army-McCarthy hearing are only two examples of this. Yet, in the end, the demagogues become the victims of their own hubris. Convinced that they are on a mission from God and cannot be stopped, they are driven to ever greater excesses of stridency and confrontational in their tactics. They reveal, in the end, what they are, and the American people recoil, eventually, in horror. We are, I think very close to that point now. From Sponge Bob, to Terry Schaivo, to the foaming-at-the-mouth attacks on the judiciary, to the "Justice Sunday" spectacle, the demagogues are creating an ever wider gulf between themselves and the core values of the American people. This is quickly bringing us to -- if it has not gotten us there already -- a "tipping point" which will leave James Dobson in the same historical dustbin occupied by Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox. Even those that have supported them will be embarrassed. In 10 years, you will be able to find very few people who would admit to having agreed with the positions these men advocate.

I do not mean to suggest that we can be sanguine about this. The lesson of 1933 Germany is a stark reminder that hatred, coupled with effective propaganda, can be an enormously powerful force, and that all it takes for the purveyors of hatred to triumph is for people of good will to assume that "this too will pass." Activities and views like those advanced by Dobson & Co. need to be held up to scrutiny and condemned at every possible juncture. But, assuming that, I have an abiding faith in the basic good sense of the American People. In their private lives at least, the vast majority of Americans simply want to be left alone and they are willing, by and large, to leave others alone as well. The more it becomes clear (as it is becoming clear even now) that James Dobson et al are bent on using government to codify and enforce a narrow-minded and fundamentally intolerant view of morality, the more alienated the American People will become from them.

Update: From Korea, no less. This is a hoot!