Alon Levy's blog

If the religious right is feigning indignation over Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in order to get liberals to acquiesce to this move, it is doing a remarkably good job of keeping up the act. If with Roberts a few ultra-conservatives such as James Dobson expressed concern that he wasn't a homophobe, with Miers it seems that the Religious Right is entirely up in arms.

The San Francisco Chronicle documents statements by several key conservatives who beg Bush to withdraw her nomination. It's not just James Dobson this time: it's failed Reagan judicial nominee Robert Bork, an unnamed Republican Senator, The Republican National Coalition for Life, the director of the Christian Defense Coalition, Operation Rescue, and William Kristol.

When Roberts refused to disclose his judicial philosophy beyond vague statements about being merely an umpire, the American liberal blogosphere said it was still certain he was a Rehnquist-style conservative because unlike Souter, he had had judicial experience and clear conservative cred. Curiously, now the same bloggers who emphasized well-formed judicial views have changed their litmus test for an obvious conservative, now that evidence that Miers is a true conservative is scant.

If you worry about Miers' being a conservative hack, remember that Stevens, Souter, O'Connor, and Kennedy were all supposed to be reliably right-wing. Again, we see Bush snub the religious right, which will predictably support his party yet again in 2008 like a battered wife who always goes back to her abusive husband.

A federal judge in Sacramento ruled that the inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. The plaintiff is Michael Newdow, the same atheist who sued several years ago to remove the words from the Pledge on behalf of his daughter. Last time, the Supreme Court overruled him on the grounds that he had no custody of his daughter and so lacked standing to sue on her behalf, but now he's representing three additional atheist parents, who presumably do have custody over their children.

In theory, if this goes up to the Supreme Court, this should pass. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Newdow, but Stevens, Ginsburg, Beyer, Souter, and Kennedy said he lacked standing, whereas O'Connor, Rehnquist, and Thomas said he did have standing but the current phrasing of the Pledge was constitutional (Scalia had recused himself, but we all know how he'd have ruled).

In practice, I don't think the Supreme Court will support Newdow this time. It's clear to me that the five justices who said he lacked standing ruled that way simply as a way of avoiding controversy. Now if this suit gets to the Supreme Court, they will no longer have this as cover; however, since most Americans still think the words "under God" in the Pledge are fine, the politically expedient thing for them to do will be to claim that previously they only looked at standing, but now that they have considered the actual issue, they've concluded the words are constitutional.

However, the one thing I think will be different from the situation in 2002 is the extent of the backalsh, if any. Even if there is a national outrage, now that liberal Democrats have started finding their voice, some will support Newdow. In 2002, all Senators voted to condemn the decision, except Jesse Helms, who was in hospital, and who would no doubt join the other Senators. If this ever comes up to a vote now, I predict that at most 90 Senators will vote to condemn the decision, and at least 5 will vote not to condemn it.

Four years ago, everyone in the world made a startling discovery. The United States was not invulernable as it portrayed itself as - an organized group of fanatics, led by a very competent civil engineer whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions, could mount an attack on its territory, killing more people than any other known non-governmental act of terrorism.

My own personal reaction to this was very different from what you would expect reading my comments here and on Pharyngula and Majikthise. I started commenting on an Israeli online newspaper, saying things like, "This is why Oppenheimer invented the nuclear bomb." I was deeply concerned over what happened to any innocent civilian, as long as he was not Muslim; I thought that the US should use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan and at the same time that the Patriot Act was a fascist law. It took me until about August 2002 to realize Muslims were people, too, and that throwing bombs on civilians wasn't a particularly civilized way to settle things.

But what is more telling is not the reaction of one unimportant then-13-year-old, but the reaction of a certain then-55-year-old Texan named George W. Bush who happened to be President of the United States. After 9/11, the United States had almost everyone's sympathy. In France the headlines read, "Today, we're all Americans." Everybody wanted to console the country, to support it, to join it in its incipient war on terrorism.

The United States, however, wasn't particularly eager to placate a broad coalition. Bush could have made speeches unifying the fledgling coalition of anti-Islamic-terrorist states including not only the entire West but also Russia, India, Turkey, and Japan. Instead he said "You're either with us or against us," expressing the feelings of most patriotic Americans but at the same time playing to the global stereotype of Americans as people who can't find Russia on a map, who are completely ignorant of everything that doesn't involve football, who think they're the best nation in the world and if another country doesn't follow their path then there must be something wrong with the other country. 300 million Americans cheered when Bush said things like this (remember: his approval rates hovered around 90%); 6 billion non-Americans cringed.

According to the New York Times, John Roberts advised gay rights activists in 1996. He helped the side of gay rights on Romer vs. Evans, the 1996 gay rights case that began the shift toward more judicial protection of gay rights, which was made complete in 2003's Lawrence vs. Texas. More precisely, he gave the plaintiffs' chief lawyer pro bono advice on how to argue in such a way that it would convince conservatives.

Subject to the caveat that pro bono advice is weaker evidence than judging the case, Roberts' support for gay rights is indicative of how weak the religious right really is. The NYTimes article quotes James Dobson as strongly disapproving of his overall record. And other blogs, such as Majikthise, have dealt with how he is more of a corporatist than a social conservative. It's one thing to oppose the Lemon test and support slightly stronger restrictions on abortion; it's a whole other thing to want to force women to be stay at home moms, criminalize abortion and contraception, turn homosexuals into second-class citizens, and destroy separation of church and state.

Bush nominated him knowing that he is not much of a social conservative. James Dobson hates him; he isn't the candidate of the religious right. Despite claims of victory for social conservatives, Bush ignored them at the moment of truth. The only explanation for that that I can think of is that the religious right has painted itself into irrelevance by being so reliably partisan. When a group so consistently votes for one party, the party it votes for can get away with only giving it scraps; the same process happens inside the Democratic Party, which takes blacks' votes for granted.

This is a test post. I will probably start an actual blog here, but I'm not sure.