<buckeye-ELO@nospam.net> wrote in message
news:e8op61p0982kep0qqo1iuv5iigc413et06@4ax.com...

A member of

HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/

posted this on said website

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042405Y.shtml
[Excerpt]

A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 24 April 2005

Watever your religious denomination, or lack of same, it was hard not
to be swept up in last week's televised pageantry from Rome: the grandeur
of St. Peter's Square, the panoply of the cardinals, the continuity of
history embodied by the joyous emergence of the 265th pope. As a show of
faith, it's a tough act to follow. But that has not stopped some ingenious
American hucksters from trying.

Tonight is the much-awaited "Justice Sunday," the judge-bashing rally
being disseminated nationwide by cable, satellite and Internet from a
megachurch in Louisville. It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from
above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and
mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of
millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry."
These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by
an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of
religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While
Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher,
"was born to be a senator," we now have senators who are born to be
Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched
plans
to be beamed into tonight's festivities by videotape, a stunt that in
itself imbues "Justice Sunday" with a touch of all-American spectacle
worthy of "The Wizard of Oz."

Like the wizard himself, "Justice Sunday" is a humbug, albeit one with
real potential consequences. It brings mass-media firepower to a campaign
against so-called activist judges whose virulence increasingly echoes the
rhetoric of George Wallace and other segregationists in the 1960's. Back
then, Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the
federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the
Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up
security, a cross was burned on Johnson's lawn and his mother's house was
bombed.

Sadly, many of today's judges have taken it upon themselves to rule like
little monarchs. They worship their own power and disregard Constitutional
limitations. That our elected representatives should rally in protest of
this unprecedented unbalancing of unchecked power comes as no surprise to
me. Indeed such reaction is long overdue.