Replies to post #28272 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[seabass]

>>>God has become nothing more than an excuse to define an enemy.<<<

Or an excuse to tear up our own constitution and judicial system.

October 23, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
In Florida Right-to-Die Case, Legislation Puts the Constitution at Issue
By ADAM LIPTAK

In enacting a tightly focused, one-time-only law that effectively reversed a series of court decisions allowing a Florida man to withdraw life support from his brain-damaged wife, the Florida Legislature has created a constitutional crisis, legal scholars said yesterday.

"Courts get to decide particular cases, not legislatures," said Steven G. Gey, a law professor at Florida State University.

The law authorized Gov. Jeb Bush to issue "a one-time stay to prevent the withholding of nutrition and hydration from a patient" who meets four criteria. Those criteria are plainly meant to identify only the woman at the center of the constitutional showdown, Terri Schiavo.

Last week, a feeding tube that had sustained Mrs. Schiavo since 1990 was removed after her husband, Michael, won a series of court battles based on his contention that she once said she never wanted to be kept alive artificially.

But after the Legislature's action on Tuesday, Mr. Bush ordered the feeding resumed, and yesterday Mrs. Schiavo was receiving nourishment through a new feeding tube. Mr. Schiavo's lawyers were contemplating their next move.

One of them, George Felos, said yesterday that Mr. Schiavo would seek a permanent injunction against enforcement of the law.

Judge W. Douglas Baird of Circuit Court in Clearwater declined to rule immediately on an emergency request filed on Tuesday to strike down the law. The judge has set an expedited briefing schedule, requiring Mr. Schiavo to file a request for a permanent injunction within five days.

"We believe that a court sooner or later — we hope sooner — will find this law to be unconstitutional," Mr. Felos said on the NBC "Today" program.

That is likely, legal scholars said yesterday. Even if it does happen, however, the governor and his allies in the Legislature will have demonstrated their commitment to an issue of great concern to conservative voters in Florida.

From a legal standpoint, the main question is whether the Florida Legislature was authorized to undo a judicial decision.

In general, courts decide particular cases, and legislatures enact general laws. When either branch of the government strays from its role in the constitutional structure, its actions can violate the separation of powers doctrine.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that Congress is prohibited from reopening final court decisions under that doctrine.

"The prohibition is violated when an individual final judgment is legislatively rescinded for even the very best of reasons," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, "such as the legislature's genuine conviction (supported by all the law professors in the land) that the judgment was wrong."

That decision interpreted the federal Constitution. The question in the Schiavo case is whether the Florida Constitution has a similar prohibition. Professor Gey said it does.

"If anything," he said, "Florida separation-of-powers law is even more rigid than federal law."

The hastily written legislation is hard to follow, and it will allow many sorts of arguments in the courts.

"It's beautifully badly drafted," said Patrick O. Gudridge, a law professor at the University of Miami. The word "stay," for instance, does not really capture what Mr. Bush was authorized to do. In legal parlance, a stay temporarily suspends a judicial decision. Here, the statute authorizes the governor to override a judicial decision.

"They wanted to use the word `stay,' " Professor Gudridge said of the Legislature, "because the analogy is to a stay of execution."

Professor Gey said the Legislature's haste was evident.

"It was done in a rush and probably without much input from the legal staff," he said. "If you put it before a law professor, they are going to find 16 things wrong with it. The Legislature will respond, `Yeah, but we got our way.' "

Among the other problems with the law, said Michael R. Masinter, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, are that it intrudes into what he called Mrs. Schiavo's constitutional right to privacy, that it gives enormous discretion to the governor in matters of life and death, and that it is so limited that it may run afoul of a provision of the Florida Constitution that limits so-called special laws.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said the central problem is that the law violates Mrs. Schiavo's rights. "Because the state is obviously not trying to determine what she wanted or would have wanted," Professor Tribe said, "but rather is deciding what should happen, it fundamentally violates her right to bodily integrity."

The Legislature's interference with the judiciary's role may be conceived of in even starker terms than is suggested by the rather bland term "separation of powers," Professor Gey said.

"The statute tells the governor that he does not have to enforce judicial decisions," he said. "That's sort of George Wallace territory."

In the 1950's and 1960's, Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama and other Southern officials defied federal court orders concerning school desegregation and protest marches. The situation in Florida is not precisely analogous, because the element of state's rights is absent.

Lars Noah, a law professor at the University of Florida, suggested a thought experiment to clarify how far the Legislature's power should extend.

"What if the courts decide, as I'm fairly sure they will, that the statute is unconstitutional?" Professor Noah asked. "Could the Legislature then instruct the governor to ignore that judicial order?"

If the answer to the second question is no, he suggested, the law enacted Tuesday must be struck down. If the answer is yes, he went on, the conventional concept of how legislatures and courts divide their responsibilities is wrong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/national/23STAY.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=

[harrypothead]

I don't know of any group of fundamentalists, Islamic, Jewish or Christian, that isn't a contradiction of the religious tenets they claim to represent. The world has become about the politics of religion or vise versa. I believe fundamentalism represents a form of mental illness. It is comforting to know US policy is being dictated by the Armageddon Lobby.

=============================================================

Published on Sunday, May 19, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times
An Unholy Alliance in Support of Israel
by Jo-Ann Mort

NEW YORK -- In the "strange bedfellows" department, one of the oddest pairings on the current political scene is American Jews and the Christian right. Yes, both groups back Israel. But their long-term visions for its future are miles apart.

Consider the following quotation from the Web site of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, a strong supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent actions: "Indeed, there will finally be such a fullness of Israel when their hardness and blindness to the gospel is overcome as to vastly enrich the whole world. For the almost unbelievable truth is that all Israel will be saved. The fullness of Gentiles will climax with the fullness of Israel." It's hard to believe that this vision of an Israel in which all the Jews convert to Christianity is compatible with the vision for Israel held by most Jews.

It's not that non-Jewish support in the U.S. for Israel is something new--think Pete Seeger or the Weavers singing "Kumbaya." But there has been a seismic shift in the makeup of that support. It used to be progressive non-Jewish Americans who strongly backed Israel. Now Israel's best friends here are people like former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed (who now heads the Georgia Republican Party) and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The Anti-Defamation League even went to the extreme of reprinting as an advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers an article titled "We People of Faith Stand Firmly With Israel" that Reed wrote for The Los Angeles Times. Is this the same ADL that has as its cornerstone fighting bigotry, supporting civil rights and maintaining separation between church and state?

If Jews feel mainstream media coverage of Israel is biased, perhaps they ought to protest by watching a network that gives plenty of positive coverage to Israel: Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Of course, the network's vision of Israel may make many Jews uncomfortable. As another article on its Web site proclaims: "Thus Jews, Israel, will eventually--and supernaturally--witness to the gospel, and with such explosive power that the world can scarcely be the same! Ah, there is God's future for ethnic Israel."

In some sense, this Christian fundamentalism is a mirror image of the Jewish fundamentalism contained within the Sharon government. While Sharon himself is a secular hawk, he has survived in politics since 1967 as the patron of the settlers, the hard core of whom are religious fanatics--and not only in their desire to control the biblical land of Israel that includes all of what they call "Judea and Samaria" or "Greater Israel." The most extreme among them also hold all of the modern democratic institutions of the state--from the Supreme Court to parliamentary democracy--in contempt. They yearn for a land of Israel fashioned in the image of the ancient kingdom of David, as opposed to the modern, pluralistic, forward-looking state Israel is today.

The newest member of Sharon's Cabinet is the head of the National Religious Party, Effi Eitam, a former Israeli army brigadier general who was refused higher promotion within the army because of his harsh treatment of Palestinians. Eitam, a "born-again" Jew, is a former secular kibbutz member transformed into a messianic Jew, much along the lines of other Religious Party settlers who saw the post-1967 era in Israel more as the fulfillment of biblical dictate than as a move to meet Israel's security needs.

Eitam, who has declared that he will be the first "kippa-wearing" prime minister (wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, denotes religious observance), is an ultrareligious Jew with fiercely undemocratic values. He believes not only in dealing ruthlessly with Palestinians across the 1967 Green Line but he says that the Israeli Arab citizens who reside within Israel's pre-1967 borders should be transferred out. He would do well with his counterparts in the United States, but his beliefs would most likely find little support among the bulk of Jews in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. Yet it is this point of view--in Israel and the U.S.--that is being strengthened by an alliance that supports Sharon, right or wrong.

As if the Christian right's vision of Israel weren't alien enough to the Israel most American Jews desire, a second result of this newfound alliance is the strengthening of the right wing's resolve within the current U.S. political landscape. The alliance of the Christian right, the neoconservative intellectuals (many of whom are Jewish) who long ago gave up on the Democrats and the more mainstream Jewish organizations has strengthened the resolve of the Bush administration to say yes to almost anything Sharon is doing. But it has also strengthened the ability of the conservatives to push through an American agenda that both runs counter to the will of the majority of American Jews and could even endanger American Jewish interests.

Karl Rove, Bush's political eyes and ears, has made it his role to be sure that Bush junior doesn't suffer the same fate as his father. In order to cement a two-term presidency, Rove is shoring up a conservative domestic agenda for the president. Now he has the aid of liberal American Jews.

Jo-Ann Mort is co-author (with Gary Brenner) of the forthcoming "Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive the New Israel?" and national secretary of Americans for Peace Now.

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

============================================================

The Christian Right:
Pragmatism vs. Theology

http://jfednepa.org/mark%20silverberg/christianright.html

To the evangelical Christian world, David Ben-Gurion's proclamation of Israeli statehood marked the imminent return of Jesus, who, after Israel expels the Palestinians from Judea and Sumeria ("as enemies of the modern State of Israel, they are enemies of God and servants of Satan") and rebuilds God's Temple in Jerusalem will descend from heaven during the apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon and subdue all Israel's enemies.

After his return (or "Second Coming"), according to their interpretation of Christian scriptures, a thousand year reign of peace will dawn, centered in Jerusalem. But, before that happens, two-thirds of Israeli Jewry (world Jewry, by then, having made aliyah to Israel) will have died in the final conflict, and the remaining third will convert to Christianity in the aftermath of Armageddon.

============================================================

It would wise to be suspect of those who include you in their end times prophecies.

[Rick Faurot]

Bill Moyers talks to Joseph C. Hough on the intersection of politics and religion, and why he thinks it is the duty of Christians, Jews and Muslims to join to fight growing economic inequality, why he’s critical of how some political pundits are using Christianity to justify their actions, and why he suspects that the time for a non-destructive, civil disobedience may be near.

Joseph C. Hough

Joseph C. Hough, former dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School, is currently President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary.
Hough graduated from Wake Forest University with a B.A. in 1955. He went on to receive the B.D. (1959), the M.A. (1964), and the Ph.D. (1965) from Yale University. Dr. Hough is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Congregational. His teaching and research interests are in social ethics, theological education, the Church and ministry.


 10.24.03
Transcript: Bill Moyers interviews Joe Hough

MOYERS: You recently did a very radical thing. You called on the children of Abraham — Muslims, Christians and Jews — to engage in an act of refusal.

HOUGH: Well, my perception, Bill, is that there is a definite intentional move on the part of political leadership in this country. In the direction that I think is not at all compatible with the prophetic tradition in Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. And that is the obligation on the part of people who believe in God to care for the least and the poorest. That central teaching, that sacred code, I think, is very well summed up in Proverbs where the writer of Proverbs says, "Those who oppress the needy insult their maker." "Those who oppress the needy insult their maker."

And I think that it would be a wonderful thing if we could stand together, these three great Abrahamic traditions, and say, "Look, we do not countenance this sort of thing. It is not only unfair, it is immoral on the basis of our religious traditions, and we believe it's an insult to God."

MOYERS: And it is what?

HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do.
MOYERS: We've all heard this from economists.

HOUGH: Yes.

MOYERS: And political pundits, and analysts, think tank experts. But we're hearing this from the president of a seminary?

HOUGH: Yeah. You are. And the reason you are is because I think that it's not just a political pundit issue. It's not just a think tank issue. It is a deep and profound theological issue. And it has to do with whether we are faithful to the deepest convictions called for by our faith.

Because the central teaching of Jesus is-announced when he says, from Isaiah 61, "God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, deliverance to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of Jubilee." And as you know, the year of Jubilee was the year when land reform was supposed to take place, debts were to be canceled, slaves freed.

Jesus drew from that Jewish tradition, that Covenental tradition, and the obligation to care for the needy. Jesus Christ was a Jew. To his soul, he was a Jew. By the time he was 11 years old, people were absolutely astounded how well he knew the Jewish tradition.

He crafted his message in direct connection to the Jewish tradition, and it was no accident that Luke put Isaiah 61 in Jesus' mouth at Nazareth. "The spirit of God is upon me because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor." If you go through the Gospel to Luke, the entire theme of Luke is this.

It appears also in the Sermon on the Mount. It appears indirectly in the feeding of the five thousand or four thousand, whichever you want. It's reported four times in the Gospel, more than any other single event in the life of Jesus. In every case, and it also, in a way, it foreshadows the Eucharist. Because the Eucharistic meal was first a meal for the people who were the followers of Jesus. And if you look it Acts 3, you will see that those followers of Jesus saw to it that people who didn't have enough to eat could come to that table and get enough to eat. That was the radical model they put out there. Nobody likes to talk about that very much. But there it is. Right in the middle of Acts.

And they continued to worship in the temple. This is a continuity with the best in the Jewish tradition, and it is also no accident that there's some strong similarities in the Koran. And that is why I think all of us in the Abrahamic traditions who share this conviction about care for the least fortunate should simply make some kind of public declaration that enough is enough. We've gone far enough.

And it is not at all in the spirit of American democracy to generate inequality, and to contradict equal opportunity in our society. Those are not the norms we've lived by.

MOYERS: Again, I come back to the paradox, which is that-these policies to which you are protesting, which you say are immoral-were enacted by a Congress and an Administration elected to a significant degree with the support of the religious right — Conservative Christians who got active in politics and saw that their candidates were elected, and they're seeing now the policies that they believe they elected those officials to carry out.

HOUGH: Well. That's true, Bill, but my Dad, as I told you, is a Baptist preacher. He was until he was 84. And there was a notorious drunk in town who when he got drunk, he really went after preachers. But he said he was born-again Christian. And one day, someone asked my father if he thought Brother Suggs was a born-again Christian. And my father said, "Only God knows that."
But, you know, the Lord Jesus said, "By their fruits, you shall know them." And speaking as a humble fruit inspector of the Lord, I'd say that if this person is a Born Again Christian, there's a mixed signal somewhere." I feel the same way.

If Tom Delay is acting out of his Born Again Christian convictions in pushing legislation that disadvantages the poor every time he opens his mouth, I'm not saying he's not a Born Again Christian, but as a the Lord's humble fruit inspector, it sure looks suspicious to me. And anybody who claims in the name of God they're gonna run over people of other nations, and just willy-nilly, by your own free will, reshape the world in your own image, and claim that you're acting on behalf of God, that sounds a lot like Caesar to me.

MOYERS: Can a secular democracy, in a pluralistic society, where there are many faiths, including people of no faith, can that democratic government be expected to represent the religious, prophetic imperatives of people like you?

HOUGH: Well, maybe so, maybe not, Bill. But I'm getting tired of people claiming they're carrying the banner of my religious tradition when they're doing everything possible to undercut it. And that's what's happening in this country right now. The policies of this country are disadvantaging poor people every day of our lives and every single thing that passes the Congress these days is disadvantaging poor people more.

MOYERS: I don't think even conservatives dispute that the inequality is growing in this country. You somehow sense that inequality is more profoundly disruptive and dangerous than others.
HOUGH: I think some inequality in terms of economics is necessary. That doesn't alarm me a great deal. It is the obscene degree to which economic inequality has taken hold in America that I think is highly questionable. There is no justification under Heaven for some corporate executives to make 1,000 times as much as their average worker. Their contribution may me great. But it's no less than Peter Drucker, my colleague at Claremont for 25 years, said…

MOYERS: Management guru par excellence.

HOUGH: Management guru and certainly nobody's fuzzy headed liberal. Peter Drucker says, "This compromises the integrity of a corporate executive. Why?" Because it does not accept, and it does not in any way acknowledge the incredible contributions of people who work at various levels, the various constituencies of a corporation to its well being. It is driven by other factors than acknowledgement of who contributes to the well being of the corporation.

Now Bill, I'm not naive. Nobody believes that everybody can be exactly the same, get the same. But there's certain bare minimums, what Amartya Sen, my favorite development economist calls. A Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen calls the capability to function in society. And Sen says that no society can claim to be fair if there are substantial number of its citizens who are not receiving enough assistance or income to have the capability to function. Now, what does that mean? It means to buy food, to have a place to live, to have their children educated, to get reasonable health care and a job.

And we want to ask the people of our traditions to join us is asking every single political leader we encounter, "What are you gonna do in order to help make this happen?" Let's make that the litmus test of whether or not we're gonna vote for a particular leader.

It's not a partisan issue. I mean, my God, who in the world could possibly stand up and say, "I'm a Christian. I don't think we should really give much attention to the life of the poor." Some do. But I don't think it's a party line thing.

I mean, I'd like for this debate to be carried on in such a way that we could, and here I'm talking about Abrahamic traditions. We could ask ourselves "What changes in the direction of this country are necessary if it really is gonna make a claim to be a democracy?" We're not asking it to be a theocracy. A democracy. That's what it's about. Politically, that's what it's about.

MOYERS: It's about?

HOUGH: It is about whether Democrats and Republicans who are sensitive to this move, where people who are sensitive to this move in our society politically, are able to get the will to say, "Enough is enough." I mean, let's stop this business, and let's look again and ask the question, "What will really make this a country that we can be proud of, and one that that pays attention to all the people, not just a few."

MOYERS: A recent Nobel Laureate has said that he thinks the time is coming for civil disobedience again. What do you think about that?

HOUGH: I think it may come to that. I think it may come to that - I really do. I don't know what form it's to take. It's got to be civil disobedience that is not destructive. One of the problems I have with some of the demonstrations against for example, the WTO and at Davos.

MOYERS: The World Trade Organization?

HOUGH: The World Trade Organization, and the Davos conferences one of the problems I have with those is that some people seem just bent on destruction and violence. And I think Martin Luther King's exactly right. If you try to advance your cause with violence, you provoke violence, and the way the world is structured, if you try to promote your cause with violence, you're gonna lose. The only way to promote your cause is civil disobedience and the willingness to take the consequences for it. And I think we're just about there.

MOYERS: Joe Hough, thank you very much.

HOUGH: Thank you.


http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_hough.html