AAMIA Chair Responds to CAAP's Support for Alito
January 5, 2006-"It pains me but no longer surprises me to see some of my fellow pastors lining up with President Bush to support a Supreme Court nominee who would put at risk the civil rights protections for which so many people prayed, fought and died. It especially pains me that they are trying to sell people on the idea that we have to support Judge Alito to protect our ability to worship freely.
I am a Christian minister who is not shy about proclaiming the gospel or doing the work of the Lord. I don’t need money from Pharaoh to do it. And my children don’t need some government sponsored prayer at school to live out their faith.
One of the Supreme Court cases that Samuel Alito seems to have complained about -- and some of my brethren would claim has abolished God from the lives of our students -- was about a state regulation requiring that public school students be led in a prayer written by New York state bureaucrats. I have a hard time believing that many evangelical parents, black or white, think the government should be writing prayers and making our children recite them. That’s not my idea of religious freedom, or religious integrity.
False charges that liberals or judges are out to criminalize Christianity are nothing new, unfortunately, in the debates over judges. Seems that every time folks on the religious right want to distract attention from the real issues, the real debate over a judicial nominee’s record, they start calling people anti-Catholic or anti-Christian.
Not that I don’t understand why they’d rather talk about Christmas trees on the courthouse lawn than talk about cases in which Judge Alito tried to undermine protections for families with sick children or tried to keep people who faced discrimination on the job from having their day in court.
I understand why they’d rather complain about holiday cards than explain why Judge Alito thought it was OK for police to shoot in the back and kill an unarmed teenager running away from a ten-dollar burglary – even when a whole group of law enforcement organizations disagreed.
I understand why my friends would rather pretend that there’s a war on Christmas and Christianity than defend the war that the Bush administration and its judicial nominees are waging against our civil rights protections and against our privacy rights.
Yes, I understand why they’re even willing to call people like me anti-God rather than explain to God-fearing Americans what could happen to their families and their neighborhoods if Samuel Alito’s and his radical judicial philosophy ends up on the Court. This is a man who tried to get President Reagan to veto a consumer protection bill by saying it wasn’t the federal government’s job to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens.
Back in October, I thought it was extremely unfortunate that while Rosa Parks was being honored in the U.S. Capitol for moving our nation forward, President Bush was nominating an activist judge who says he was motivated to study constitutional law in part by his opposition to the Court’s one-person, one vote rulings. Today I’m disappointed at those who use the language of rights and liberty to support a judge whose confirmation will undermine our civil rights protections, including the separation of church and state, which protects my right and every Americans’ right to worship as we are called, free from interference from the government."