The war on judges

Oh. My. God. You must read the article in The Nation by Max Blumenthal entitled, "In Contempt of Courts". It is a report on the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference recently held in Washington D.C. The chief of staff of Oklahoma's senator Tom Coburn was quoted as saying, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!" This kind of language is beyond outrageous. That it is tolerated and applauded in our society today indicates just how close we are to the establishment of a right-wing Christian Taliban in this country.

One speaker accused Michael Schiavo of strangling his wife thereby causing her neurological injuries and described her as aware and alert. He manipulated the audience into dissolving in tears over the "murder" of Terri Schiavo by the judiciary:

As members of the audience gasped, [David] Gibbs painted a vivid portrait of Schiavo in her hospital bed. "Terri Schiavo was as alive as anyone you see sitting here," he said. "She liked my voice. It was loud and deep and she would roll over and try to talk back." But after Judge Greer "literally ordered her barbaric death," everything changed.

Gibbs described his visit to Schiavo's hospital room after her feeding tube had been removed. Schiavo lay in bed "with her eyes sunken deep in her head...she was skeletal," Gibbs recounted. "Then she turned to her mother suddenly, like she wanted to speak, and she just started sobbing." By now, members of the audience were crying.

As soon as he left the stage, one of the event's planners asked all the men in the room to get down on the floor and pray. With no other choice, I moved my plastic-upholstered chair aside, took to my hands and knees and listened as plaintive voices arose all around me with prayers for Schiavo's parents and maledictions against judicial tyranny. A saccharine version of Pachelbel's Canon emanating from the player piano in the hotel lobby seeped through the banquet hall's open doors, suffusing the ceremony with a dreamlike atmosphere. When I finally dared to look up from the ground, I realized that my head was only inches from an enormous posterior belonging to William Dannemeyer, the former congressman who once issued a letter to his colleagues listing twenty-four people with some connection to Bill Clinton who died "under other than natural circumstances."

As the conference attendees filed out of the banquet hall and into the rain-flecked night, mostly silent except for the few who were still sobbing, they seemed prepared to do anything--absolutely anything--against judges...

I am very concerned about the reported tone of this conference. There truly does seem to be an incitement of violence against judges who are referred to as "evil". I really recommend that you read the entire article. It's an eye-opener.