A tortured version of his message is being marketed for political gain.
[4-27-05]

Here are a few reports and comments on the simulcast/rally/revival (or whatever you choose to call it) held in Louisville on Sunday, April 24, with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as the star speaker, appealing to Christians to defeat efforts by anti-Christian liberals to defend the right of US senators to speak their minds – at length if necessary – as an exercise of resistance against "the tyranny of the majority."    [4-25-05]

"Holy War Sunday" is what the Courier-Journal in the host city of Louisville called the religio-political rally in an editorial which said that instead of "Justice Sunday: Stop the filibuster against people of faith," the event should have been called, "Injustice Sunday: Demean the holy and foment schism for partisan gain."

Read the editorial in the Courier-Journal, or on TruthOut.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Evangelical leaders use a simulcast to churches around the country to support conservative judges. Other groups fear a 'religious war.'"

So read the headline on the LA Times report, which noted that Sen. Frist "shied away from the fiery oratory offered by evangelical leaders," but nevertheless stuck by his threat to use the "nuclear option," forcing an end to the use of filibusters to delay and perhaps scuttle votes on some of the court nominees considered most objectionable by Democrats.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Civil rights coalition using radio ads to warn of the "nuclear option" as a threat to civil rights

On Tuesday, April 26, radio ads spotlighting Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's threatened "nuclear option" to arbitrarily cut off debate in the U.S. Senate will begin airing in nearly a dozen U.S. cities.

"We are calling on the Senate to reject this politically divisive nuclear option and put acrimonious partisanship aside. The Senate must get to work on solving some of our nation's most pressing problems - creating more jobs, educating our children, providing and improving healthcare and, reducing the deficit," said Wade Henderson, Executive Director of LCCR, the nation's oldest and largest civil and human rights organization.

More >>      [This report provides links to the audio ads themselves.]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time

That was the term used to describe the event in a New York Times opinion piece by Frank Rich

Read it in the Times, or on TruthOut.org.



http://www.tompaine.com/articles/faith_and_the_filibuster_fight.php?dateid=20050425

I am a church-going, Bible-believing Baptist, but I recently learned that I'm not a Christian. Indeed, I've not only learned that I'm not a Christian, I've also learned that I'm anti-Christian and hostile to religion. Why? Because I dare to disagree with a certain political and legal agenda.

She goes on to offer a remarkable notion:

It's time to tell the truth.

There is no "filibuster against people of faith." Religious people are on both sides of the debate about the filibuster and certain Bush-nominated judges. And it's wrong for one of the country's foremost political leaders to lend legitimacy to a contrary notion. Just as no one should have to pass a religious test in order to hold political office, no one should have to pass a political test in order to claim religion or morality.

Further, the Senate has already confirmed the overwhelming majority of President Bush's judicial nominees, and there is every reason to assume that most of these judges are religious people. Many of these judges presumably share the president's views on abortion and same-sex marriage.

She concludes:

When I hear attempts to manipulate people in the pews, I always think of one of my grandmother's favorite Bible verses: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7). May people of all faiths and political stripes reject a spirit of fear and speak the truth, with power and with love.

Stated Clerk calls on Frist to avoid condemning people of faith
[4-22-05]

Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the PC(USA), will join with other religious leaders in a conference call with journalists today to criticize the participation of Senate Republican leader (and Presbyterian) Bill Frist in a teleconference scheduled for Sunday that will depict Democrats as "against people of faith."

In an interview on Thursday, April 21, Kirkpatrick said that "one of the hallmarks of our denomination is that we are an ecumenical church. ... Elected officials should not be portraying public policies as being for or against people of faith."

Legal views of Frist's "nuclear option"

Gene TeSelle, Witherspoon's Issues Analyst, sent this on Thursday, April 21, 2005

[Posted here 4-22-05]

Today I attended a forum at Vanderbilt's Law School concerning the so-called "nuclear option" for the Senate, under which a parliamentary maneuver would bypass the Senate's cloture rule and allow a majority vote on the President's judicial nominees. The panel included two law professors and an African-American minister. They gave lots of helpful background, which also helped to clarify the foreground of the issue.

They pointed out that Orrin Hatch as chair of the Judiciary Committee during the Clinton years simply bottled up nominations in committee, not letting them get to the floor B a seemingly less "democratic" approach, since it foreclosed both debate and a registered vote.

They commented that the current system, by requiring sixty votes to close debate, encourages dialogue and negotiation in the Senate. With the current party ratio, persuasion of five Democrats can unlock debate -- and persuasion of five Republicans can make the vote go the other way. Both have happened frequently.

They also reminded us that seven of the current judicial appointments being opposed by the Democrats are re-nominations; these are people who were rejected in the last Congress for being too extreme or too ideological. Clearly the President's strategy is to keep insisting on his way and precipitate a crisis.

Now to the really interesting part. The "nuclear" scenario is one in which the President of the Senate, Vice-President Cheney, would be asked to rule on a point of order. If he were to rule that the cloture rule does not apply to judicial appointments, his ruling would be challenged. And although it takes two thirds of the Senate to change its rules, it takes only a majority vote to uphold a ruling from the chair.

Asked whether such an action could be challenged in the courts, the professors said that the Constitution allows the Senate to make its own rules. This might make an appeal difficult. And yet such an action would be a breach of the Senate's own rules. Thus there might be an opening for court challenge.

Several dimensions of this strategy were pointed out.

1. It is clearly a politicization of the confirmation process, drawing lines and whipping up passions by talking about "activist judges" who are making wrong, indeed immoral and unreligious rulings. They would be replaced by other "activist judges" who, some hope, will link church and state, inject religion into public schools and public places, repeal reproductive rights, and ban legal rights for gays and lesbians.

2. It is a disturbing kind of strategic planning (some might call it conspiracy), under which the President of the Senate, who is supposed to make parliamentary rulings impartially, would participate in a scenario written in advance. This is what has several Republicans in the Senate worried. It is also the reason many Republicans tell pollsters that they are against it.

3. If it is still a possibility that the Republicans will "go nuclear," Senator Bill Frist has already "gone ballistic." He has promised to appear, on April 24, on a "Justice Sunday" telecast sponsored by the Family Research Council. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, thinks that the courts are trying to "rob us of our Christian heritage and religious freedoms."

This, a panelist pointed out, amounts to giving religious sanction to a political power play that breaks the agreed rules of the Senate. It is a "teleological suspension of the ethical" in which religious people, in effect, are telling the Senators to do evil so that grace might abound. In holy war, after all, what is normally prohibited becomes possible, even justifiable.

Theologians have loved to debate whether God has the right C or the kind of character C to suspend God's own commands. But most people would be reluctant to give that right to human beings, even when they are religious leaders. Those who are not reluctant to do so are likely to be theocrats, claiming that God rules through human intermediaries who are to be obeyed because they have divine sanction.

The argument that is trotted out sooner or later is that religion is an "absolute commitment" C as though this makes it exempt from the rules of normal political behavior, and even confers the privilege of defining those rules.

The difficulty, of course, is that many competing groups can claim the right to carry their "absolute commitments" into public discourse, and this promotes intolerance and eventually open religious warfare.

Let's stifle the theocratic urge before it gets to that point.