Another Regilious Activist ?
<Fort Worthless Rag>
Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble. Doesn't take much to read the tea leaves on the Harriet Miers nomination.
First, it's Bunker Time at the White House. Miers' chief qualification for this job is loyalty to George W. Bush and the team. What the nomination means in larger terms for both law and society is the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Miers, like Bush himself, is classic Texas conservative Establishment, with the addition of Christian fundamentalism. What I mean by fundamentalist is one who believes in both biblical inerrancy and salvation by faith alone.
She attended Valley View Christian Church of Dallas for at least 20 years before moving to Washington five years ago. Among that church's alumni is Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, considered second only to former Justice Priscilla Owen as that court's most adamantly anti-abortion judge.
According to Miers' friends, she was pro-choice when a young woman but later changed her mind as a result of a Christian experience of some kind.
Miers had the support of feminists when she ran for office first in the Dallas bar and later when she became the first female president of the State Bar of Texas, even though the feminists were aware she was anti-choice.
At that time, the far more conservative Texas bar was at odds with the American Bar Association and sometimes threatened to withdraw from the national organization. Miers was considered a moderate in that she did not want to withdraw from the ABA but favored a proposal to change the organization's stance from support for abortion rights to a position of neutrality.
One of Miers' key backers was Louise Raggio, a much-revered Dallas feminist lawyer. The female lawyers groups favored Miers despite her stand on abortion because she was a candidate acceptable to the Establishment, thus making her electable as a woman.
Miers sometimes took female judicial candidates through her very prestigious law firm for the obligatory meet-'n'-greet and even donated to Democratic candidates.
The slightly feminist tinge to her credentials is a plus, but she is quite definitely anti-abortion.
She ran for the City Council in 1989 as a moderate but struggled during her interview with the lesbian-gay coalition. (At the time, it would have been considered progressive to even show up.) The Dallas Police Department did not then hire gays or lesbians, and when asked about the policy, Miers replied that the department should hire the best-qualified people -- the classic political sidestep answer.
When pressed, she said she did believe that one should be able to legally discriminate against gays, and it is the recollection of two of the organization's officers that the response involved her religious beliefs.
I have said for years about people in public life, "I don't write about sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll." If I had my druthers, I wouldn't write about the religion of those in public life, either, as I consider it a most private matter.
Separation of church and state is in the Constitution because this country was founded by people who had experienced both religious persecution and state-supported religions. I think John F. Kennedy's 1960 statement to the Baptist ministers should stand as a model of how public servants should handle the relation between religious belief and public service.
Nevertheless, we are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance -- and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to "drive God from the public square."
This division has been in part created, and certainly aggravated, by those seeking political advantage. It is a recipe for an incredibly damaging and serious split in this country, and I believe we all need to think long and carefully before doing anything to make it worse.
As an 1803 quote attributed to James Madison goes: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."
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