Women of A2K, have you seen this ?

Can you back up your excluding christians claim, though???

It is intriguing.

Hurray! The Bunny and I agree.

Stop everything and check for pods!!

Well, (nervous laughter) - I need to explore this more.

It feels like the opening scenr of a horror movie so far - you know, the little bunnies frolicking on the grass.....

lol

The exclusion of Christians by Democrats on the 'judicial appointment' committee is common knowledge here.

I may bring some supporting articles tomorrow. Lazy tonight.

This Holmes guy angie cites is one example.

But its not his group affiliation per se, but specific views that are being called unacceptable. Specific views that he may consider as based in his religion, but that do not necessarily come part and parcel with being Christian, per se.

For example, if the gay candidate judge you describe, in his book formulated explicitly his views about how straight people are only good for ... and gay people should always ... -- or about how men ... and women ..., et cetera -- and these views would be obviously in contrast with the laws and conventions of the land (like this guy's views on women seem to be) -- then I think the story would be very different, no?

But, his religious beliefs are personal.

Why would one think because he applies his religious views to himself, that he would apply them in the decisions he makes on the bench?

If he was writing a tome about how his personal beliefs apply to judicial decisions, you'd have an argument.

Doesn't he have a right to his religious views? And doesn't he have a right to write them in a book? To be denied a job, based on personal religious views is illegal, and wrong.

My religion does state that women are to be submissive to their husbands. But, I don't apply this to others, or my job. To make the leap that a person would do this, and deny them a job on that basis is pure discrimination.

I will read what Holmes wrote, and see if I can bring it--so we can all discuss it from a more informed viewpoint. If it is simply a religious-type book, I am secure in my point. Only if he seeks to change society will I change my opinion.

We can't ban religious people from judicial appointments.

What is being said here by sofia and baldimo is false. And I'm going to give them the figures, and they are going to ignore them and keep on saying what is false.

In Bush's term, the Senate has blocked 6 nominees. Two (Pryor and Pickering) were appointed by Bush through a bypass of the Senate.

In the last five years of Clinton's presidency, Republicans blocked 20% of Clinton nominees. That compares to 3.4 % the other way around.

In the circuit courts, 30 nominees have already been approved. That is more than Republicans allowed Clinton to appoint in two full terms.

Get it right you two.

Title: Three More Bush Appeals Court Nominees Blocked
Source: reuters
URL Source: http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/123679|top|07-22-2004::14:08|reuters.html
Published: Jul 22, 2004

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Democrats blocked three more of President Bush's judicial nominees on Thursday, raising to 10 the number they have stopped in a battle sure to extend until at least November elections.
In what have become campaign slogans, Republicans again branded Democrats "obstructionists," and Democrats accused Bush of trying to tilt the courts with "right-wing extremists."

"It is the American people, I believe, who in a little more than 100 days, will next vote on this issue," said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican.

As Congress prepared for a six-week recess during which members will gear up for the November presidential and congressional contests, Senate Republicans forced showdown votes on three of Bush's stalled judicial nominees.

Each time, Republicans fell about a half dozen short of the needed 60 votes in the 100-member Senate to clear procedural hurdles against Michigan Appeals Court judges Henry Saad and Richard Griffin, and David McKeague, a U.S. District judge in Michigan.
Bush wants to put them on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over objections led by Michigan's two Democratic senators, Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin. The court is based in Cincinnati but its territory includes Michigan.

The Michigan senators' opposition dates back to a Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee that refused to hold hearings on two of former Democratic President Bill Clinton's nominees to the same courts. Stabenow and Levin also complain Bush rejected their input before making his own nominations to the court.

"It's not about two senators. It's about the people we represent," Stabenow said. "These judges makes decisions that affect each of us."

"It's our responsibility to be involved and make sure that we are working with the White House ... to have the very best choices that are balanced and mainstream," Stabenow said.

The U.S. Constitution says the Senate is to give its "advice and consent" on judicial nominees, but Republicans said the president is the one with the power to make such nominations.

"We shouldn't rewrite the Constitution to allow senators, especially those of the opposite party, to nominate judges," said Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.

McConnell warned Democrats about setting a precedent that "senators of the opposite party get to pick a president's circuit court nominees ... this precedent may well be used when there is a Democrat in office."

Democrats said they have tried to cooperate with Bush, noting they had joined Republicans in helping confirm nearly 200 of his other judicial nominees.

About two dozen of Bush's judicial nominations are still pending and it is uncertain how many, if any, will be confirmed before the president's first term ends in January.

Gathering information here, as far as numbers and names. The charge I am making, however, is not about numbers--it is about why they are voted down. What constitutes a right-wing extremist?

I'll continue to bring pertinent articles for a while, until I feel I have the necessary information.

Compared to how many passed?


Yes. Not because they attend a Christian church or a mosque.


Yes, and again, compare to the figures in my post.


why you bolded this word is a mystery.



Well, it ought to be about numbers, for god's sake. If you are going to argue obstrutionism, then get it right on who's doing what.

And what reasons did Republicans have for all the appointments they blocked? What constitutes a liberal extremist?

Follow this story sofia. Maybe, finally, you'll get some notion of the false information that is flowing in to you on your favored communication lines. You're a smart girl, but your sources are making you stupider.

Note: my figures are from March this year.

Pecking Pickering
Feminists slap judge with race card
by
Daniel Clark

As they have done to many Bush administration judicial nominees, the Democrats have accused Charles Pickering of having a "poor record on civil rights." Ostensibly because of this, they blocked his nomination from coming to the Senate floor. In response, President Bush has given Pickering a recess appointment, which allows him to sit on the appellate bench until a new Congress is sworn in next January, at which point the usual accusations of racism will start all over again.

A March 28th 60 Minutes piece, reported by Mike Wallace, summarized the judge's record on race, and it so sharply contrasts with the caricature of him drawn by Democrats that it's a wonder that they've carried the charade this far. Pickering told Wallace about how he "worked with the FBI to stop Klan violence" when he was serving as county attorney. One of the ways he did this was to appear as a government witness in the 1966 murder trial of Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. After his testimony, he said, the FBI informed him of threats made against him, and one agent who had infiltrated the KKK kept his house under surveillance, in case any of "the crazies" came by after Klan meetings.

If 60 Minutes had devoted as much time to the Pickering story as it had to its interview with Richard Clarke a week earlier, Wallace might have spoken to former Jones County, MS district attorney Chet Dillard. Quoted in a February 7, 2002 Biloxi Sun Herald article, Dillard described an occasion on which Pickering accompanied him to a meeting with a Klan informant. "I was deathly afraid, so Charles borrowed a pistol from the FBI and waited across the street in the upstairs part of a funeral home. ... He was going to start shooting if I flashed my headlights three times. ...He was there with me ready to shoot a bunch of Kluckers."

One might think that this information would end any questions about the judge's commitment to equal justice. But then, why let a minor detail like taking up arms against the KKK stand in the way of a good borking?

The Democrats successfully blocked Judge Pickering in the Judiciary Committee when they still controlled the Senate in March of 2002. A year later, though, a new Republican majority was sworn in, and President Bush resubmitted him for consideration. In October of that year, the committee cast a party-line 10-9 vote to send the nomination to the full Senate.

Although the Democrats came up short in this second committee vote, the additional round of hearings did give them another opportunity to publicly claim that Pickering wanted to "roll back civil rights," as Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) put it. Their drumbeat of criticism was augmented by similar charges from the NAACP and People for the American Way, as well as by news reports that repeated the accusations, without examining their veracity.
(...)
The Democrats' overriding concern with Pickering, as with all judicial appointees, is abortion. The difficulty they face is that the pro-abortion position isn't nearly as popular as they'd like it to be. It is far more popular to be opposed to racism, they've observed, so they've tried to fuse the two issues together, in the motley amalgam they call "womensandcivilrights."

This is the strategy that Hillary Clinton described this January when she spoke to NARAL, the pro-abortion group that has removed the word "abortion" from its title because it's bad for business. Sen. Clinton advised her fellow abortion advocates to accuse their opponents of wanting to "turn back the clock" on womensandcivilrights. She instructed them to link the pro-abortion movement with desegregation as frequently as possible, in order to suggest to people that a ban on abortion, by "turning back the clock," must coincide with a return to the Jim Crow era.

(...)
When Charles Pickering was a delegate to the 1976 Republican National Convention, he chaired the subcommittee that first added the anti-abortion plank to the party platform. If Bond, Clinton and others are going to equate abortion with civil rights, then this is all the information they need to declare him a racist. In order to defeat his nomination, however, they'll need to convince more than just those within their own activist circles. Therefore, their accusations against Pickering have got to be supported by evidence that a sensible person would consider to be relevant.

Considering the Left's inveterate hostility toward Southerners, they probably thought this would be easy. They might not have even bothered looking into his background before pronouncing themselves "concerned" over his "poor record on womensandcivilrights." They certainly didn't anticipate that the brother of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers would rally to the judge's defense, which he did vigorously during the 60 Minutes segment.
---------
Christian translates to a threat, obviously, to pro-abortion groups.

They maligned this man, and hoo-dooed the public into thinking a civil rights activist was a racist--because the race card is the heavy hitter in American politics. It was very nasty of the Dems and the pro-abortion lobby to try to smear this man.

back !

Very interesting discussion going on.

Sofia, you wrote: "We can't ban religious people from judicial appointments. "

I SURE HOPE NOT !

Is that what you think I am saying should happen?

No, No, no. In fact, the most disturbing thing about the Holmes nomination to me has nothing to do with his Christian background. It's the 'woment should be submissive to men' thing. I, too was brought up in a Christian church (Eastern Orthodox) where this was part of the value system. I now attend another type of Christian church, one that does not expect women to view themselves as subordinates.

It's not a Christian thing at all. I guess I find it difficult to understand how a man can truly believe this about women, and then go into a courtroom and be able to make rulings based upon male/female equality. And since this is what the law requires, I feel Mr. Holmes would be putting himself into an almost untenable position.

Again, it's not about being Christian. Christ himself NEVER discriminated against women. I remember a bible story where he actually seemed to PREFER the behavoir of a more assertive, confident woman (Mary) to that of a submissive one (Martha). (I may have mixed up the names, not sure.)

I hope that clears up my position a bit.

Also, you wrote:Christian translates to a threat, obviously, to pro-abortion groups. "

Not obvious. Not all Christians are anti-abortion.

Not even all Catholics are anti-abortion.

Nah, sofia ain't gonna get this one. She's too comfortable with her fixed idea.

As the rest of us comprehend, this is simply a repeat of the fixed idea which hasn't budged no matter what we say to her or no matter what a logical appraisal would show. If she was right, the only judges passed would be athiests or members of some other faith. And as that isn't the case, she's got it wrong. Christians are appointed regularly to judicial positions. And as the rest of us also comprehend, what she has wrong is that these people held up or contested are not merely Christian, but Christian plus something else, and it is the something else that is the problem.

For those interested, here's the 60 minutes bit sofia mentions...
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/25/60minutes/main608667.shtml

And though the article sofia pastes is pretty silly and uncareful ("the left's inveterate hostility to Southerners", etc) it looks quite probable that the dems used the race issue and blew it out of proportion (thought there may be more I don't know of) and likely for the reason of the abortion issue.

That's a fundamental divider in the US. I don't think there is a chance in hell that Bush would appoint, to any important judicial position, anyone who said "I'm for a woman's right to choose". And I don't think a dem president would appoint the opposite. And either party will attempt to stop the other in their goal. Another is separation of church and state.

So, if the claim is that dems obstruct republican judicial appointments more than the reverse, the claim is false. Republicans have been more frequently obstructive.

If the claim is that dems obstruct Christians to the bench, that claim is also false.

If the claim is that dems attempt to obstruct judicial appointment where the appointee, by past action or speech, may be counted on to find against access to abortion, then that claim is valid. This person may be Christian or athiest or a follower of the sun god Rah, that is not relevant to why the appointee is obstructed. It is the abortion issue, or in some cases, the separation issue, and perhaps some another issue in other cases (eg, status of women). That appointee may well hold his/her value through interpretation of Christian text, or through membership in some particular variant of Christian faith, but that's irrelevant to the point. It isn't the faith that is the problem. Not all christians are moderates, in precisely the same way that not all Muslims are moderates. To obstruct a fundamentalist Muslim extremist who interprets his scriptures in one way, is not to obstruct the Muslim faith.

Well said, Blatham.

Sofia has made the point that, in spite of his beliefs, a judge is still capable of being impartial. In some cases, to some degree, that may be true, which is why, IMO, this particular nomination (Holmes) may be about degree. Holmes appears to be an extremist, and as such, one would think he would not be able to reconcile his extremist beliefs with laws that are in opposition to those beliefs.


Sofia, curiously, has not really commented upon the content of the quotations referenced in the list.

'the battered women's movement has outlived iits useful beginnings.'
'children whose parents are not married should be last in line for Head Start and other benefits.'
'a woman should subordinate herself to her husband.'

We, as voters, hear comments like these and make decisions about their authors based upon our own personal beliefs. I do wonder what Sofia's personal beliefs are re the content of these comments.

And I wonder if she, like some other Bush supporters, would continue to support him regardless of whom he has appointed and what they stand for.

Gee, I'm being discussed so much here. (Guess we need more conservative females.)

angie-- I don't even know you. Puzzling why you seek my opinion so diligently... I don't mind bumping into you once on a while on different subjects--but it's rather odd to be the object of such continued focus.

As we all do, I'll comment when the topic provides sufficient interest.

Did I read correctly? Did "sofia" really make the claim that judges arer not being approved because they are Christians? His/her posts become more absurd with each passing day.

Sofia, why are you ashamed of your sources?

This is a common claim. Sites like Judicial Watch and any number of right wing voices echo the same thing. It gets repeated so often that folks come to believe that it must be so. But it is mythical.

So there are two things going on here. There are the folks like sofia who have come to believe it so, and there are the folks who know better but consciously forward the deceit/lie/misrepresentation to people like sofia anyway because it seems an effective way to forward a poltical idea or value. It is effective.