August (Web-only) 2005

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Rally has little to say about Roberts, but proposes a constitutional overhaul
The speakers at Sunday's Justice Sunday II event in Nashville were eager to tell us what the gathering wasn't.

"Justice Sunday … isn't a protest against anything," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. "It's a rally in support of a constitutional judiciary that respects and adheres to the co-equal role it was given by our founders."

Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, which sponsored the event, told reporters it was "not a [John] Roberts rally." "This will be no pep rally for his confirmation," he said earlier. Instead, the point was "to educate evangelical Christians about the U.S. Supreme Court and get them talking to friends and elected officials about what they want from their justices."

So if it's not a protest, perhaps we can disregard the various protest-sounding comments the speakers made against federal courts, especially the Supreme Court (the whole of the Supreme Court, by the way; speakers seemed not to acknowledge much difference among the justices). Such statements included:

• America's most powerful judges are "unelected, unaccountable, and arrogant." (James Dobson)
• The Supreme Court has created "an oligarchy. It's the government by the few." (Dobson)
• At the Supreme Court, "rights are invented out of whole cloth. Longstanding traditions are found to be unconstitutional. Moral values that have defined the progress of human civilization for millennia are cast aside in favor of those espoused by a handful of unelected, lifetime-appointed judges." (Tom DeLay)
• "Activist courts" are imposing "state-sanctioned same-sex marriage" and partial-birth abortion, and are "ridding the public square of any mention of our nation's religious heritage" in what amounts to "judicial supremacy, judicial autocracy."(DeLay)