As Mr. Blumenthal points out, David Gibbs makes a very serious charge against Michael Schiavo without offering one shred of evidence to support it. Indeed, that the case took so long in the courts makes this charge look like desperation on Gibbs' part. Had there been anything to support such a claim, it would have been investigated long ago. The case is over; Mrs. Schiavo is dead; and whether Gibbs was right or wrong in his judgment of the merits of the case, it is time for him to let go of that nonsense before he is slapped with a lawsuit for slander or libel.
It is ironic that these people are upset about, as they say, judicial activists legislating from the bench. Again, as Blumenthal points out, appellate judges refused to involve themselves in this case. They simply found no fault with Judge Greer's ruling. It was ruled time and again that Greer made no errors either in fact or law; federal courts ruled likewise and even questioned their jurisdiction in the matter, in spite Congress giving them permission to hear the case. That sounds like good, old-fashioned, proper judicial restraint to me.
Indeed, for a Christian judge to impose his religious beliefs and hold the Bible
(i.e., his personal interpretation of Scripture) up as a greater legal authority than the common law as determined by written legislation and court precedents would be an egregious example of a judicial activist legislating from the bench. Yet that is exactly what these people were expecting the courts to do. That would indeed be judicial tyranny.
And where do they get off saying church and state aren't separate? Anybody who believes that has not read
the Constitution. The word
religion or
religious is found exactly twice in the constitution. In
Article 6 of the main body of the Constitution we find:
(N)o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
No one can't make any bigot vote for a Jew, a Muslim or a Buddhist if he is inclined to believe that only Christians should hold public office. However, that clause prohibits anyone from bringing suit to remove any duly elected or appointed officer on the grounds of his religious beliefs. It also prohibits Congress from passing a law that says that a federal judge must be a Christian (or a Muslim or a Wiccan or an atheist).
In the
First Amendment we find the more often quoted:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
The first part of this compound sentence is what really separates church and state. The Southern Baptist Convention is not going to be the official church of the United States. Neither is the United Methodist Churches of America. Nor the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints, the Roman Catholic Church nor the San Francisco Zen Center. Neither is there nor can there be an official state church recognized by the federal government the way the Anglican Church is the official state church in England or the Lutheran Church in most Scandinavian countries or the Catholic Church in several states of southern Europe.
The second clause says that the federal government cannot outlaw the practice of any sect of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Wicca or whatever; nor can the government compel an individual to go to any church if he does not want to for any reason.
Now, what part of the separation of church and state are they disputing? What do they not understand about this?
I feel foolish laying out such a basic civics lesson in a user post. However, we are living in times when demagogues are writing books that claim that the Constitution doesn't say what it plainly does and electing idiots to Congress willing to act like they've never read the very document on which they are supposed to basing the legislation they write.
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