One Nation, Under God, By Any Means Necessary
Salon has an excellent wrap-up of the Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference, which took place in Washington DC at the end of last week. [Note: Salon is a subscription-based online magazine, but you can get to the full content of the linked article by watching an extended animated ad.]

For a bit of flava, here's a taste of one of the news releases from the conference:

Rick Scarborough, acting chairman of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration, charged: “Activist judges have brought us to a constitutional crisis. Liberals in black robes are usurping the authority of the other branches of government, undermining democracy, assaulting our faith, our families and our freedom and imposing dangerous and deluded social experiments – with potentially disastrous consequences -- on the nation.” Scarborough added: “When the courts abandon their legitimate role and seek to impose their will on a nation, a free people must respond.”

Yikes. This "war" on the judiciary has been bubbling up the last couple of years--with "attacks" on Ten Commandments statues and the mention of God in the Pledge of Allegiance--but the movement has amped up to 11 after crowning Terri Schiavo as its own Joan of Arc. Back to the Salon article:

The event was remarkable in bringing together lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers with unabashed theocrats. Rep. Todd Akin, R-Texas, shared the stage with prominent adherents of Christian Reconstructionism, a Calvinist doctrine that calls for the subordination of American civil law to biblical law. Other strains of the religious right were represented as well -- Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s conservative niece, was there, as was the Catholic anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court Justice who lost his job after he refused to remove a two-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse, received an adulatory welcome. There was Tom Jipping, a counselor to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch who used to work at Concerned Women for America, and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. All were united by a frantic sense of crisis symbolized by Schiavo, who has become a mythical figure, martyred and quasi-divine, in the stories that percolate through America's evangelical subculture. [...] Some believe that the problem can be rectified by replacing liberal judges with conservative ones. Others, noting that even judges appointed by Republicans often rule against them, have become convinced that they must destroy the federal judiciary itself. Thus, ideas offered at the conference ranged from ending the filibuster and impeaching all but the most right-wing judges to abolishing all federal courts below the Supreme Court altogether. At least one panelist dropped coy hints about murder.

That's right. In the last week, Republicans have turned decidedly Mafioso in their threatening language toward the judiciary. It started with Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.) last week (via the New York Sun):

Mr. Cornyn has been under fire since questioning on the Senate floor last week, "whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds and builds to the point where some people engage in violence." He made the remarks on Monday, less than four weeks after a man charged with rape allegedly shot and killed a judge and three others in an Atlanta shooting rampage.

But it got even more explicit at the Judicial War conference:

On a Friday panel titled Remedies to Judicial Tyranny, a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his jurisprudence. What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, "Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'" The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel." As Dana Milbank pointed out on Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards. Was Vieira calling for assassination? I'm not sure. The conference's rhetoric, though, certainly suggested that judges deserve to reap the horrors they have been ostensibly sown. The affair finished with a rousing speech by recent Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes, who drew enthusiastic applause when he said, "I believe that in our country today the judiciary is the focus of evil."

Salon notes that the conference only drew about 200 people--a fairly small number to elicit as much press as they did. So how much credence should be given to this fringe element?

It is a challenge to know how seriously to take this sort of thing. The world inhabited by most of those at the conference seems so at odds with empirical reality that one expects it to collapse around them. With each new lunacy perpetrated by religious fundamentalists, progressives tell each other than any second the pendulum will swing the other way and some equilibrium will return to our national life. They've been telling each other that for more than four years. But the influence of religious authoritarianism keeps growing.

The U.S. populace will not wake up to how dangerous this fringe element is until something dire and drastic happens. With leaders whipping followers up into a fever pitch, that day could come soon.