In case I didn’t make it clear in my last post, the so-called “Justice Sunday” telecast that went out tonight turns my stomach. I feel that the Christian leaders who have signed on to the Republican agenda with regard to judicial nominations have prostrated themselves at the altar of Republican politics and have placed their political ideology above their faith.

Listen, although I’m not particularly fond of the idea of the Republicans being able to ram any and all right-wing extremist judges through the confirmation process by getting rid of the filibuster, it’s their right to try it if they want (and the Democrats’ right to shut down the Senate in response). That’s politics.

But what nauseates me in this regard is the way that people who supposedly call Jesus their Lord are abusing their positions of authority to support a particular brand of secular politics. Instead of seeking the lost - instead of feeding the poor - they are using their positions to ram through the Republican agenda.

They are selling themselves out far too cheaply.

I come back from a nice vacation and what greets me when I return to the blogosphere? Why of course, the right wing extremists in power are telling me that I’m against people of faith because I don’t want to see a bunch of right-wing ideologues put into the federal courts.

It gets pretty old to be repeatedly told by a group of folks which routinely seems to discard the 80 percent of the Bible with which they don’t agree (you know, all of those teachings about compassion and justice), and then distorts the 20 percent that they can tolerate so that it fits into their right-wing agenda that *I* am against “people of faith.”

But perhaps they’re right. I am against people whose faith is firmly placed in the policies of the Republican party alone. I am against people whose faith is in intolerance.

So they can have their “people of faith.” I’m going to follow Jesus, instead.

Having been a poor blogger of late, I completely missed the story of Edwin Vieira making veiled threats on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s life by quoting Stalin’s “Death solves all problems; no man, no problem” line.

Apparently, it was all just a big misunderstanding. Eric Muller has the scoop, in the form of a comment from Vieira on his blog:

My reference to Stalin in the address that is being misrepresented on “Is That Legal” was to the point that many judges today are operating according to the principles of “democratic centralism” and “situational ethics” that characterized Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism…and for that reason should be removed from office…BUT BY THE CONSTITUTIONAL MEANS OF IMPEACHMENT, about which I wrote in detail in my recent book, How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary.

Note to Mr. Vieira: if you don’t mean to advocate the authoritarian removal of your political opponents, then don’t go quoting people who removed their political opponents by authoritarian means!

Or, to put it another way: if you don’t want to look like a crazed wingnut, don’t go quoting crazed wingnuts from the past!

I haven’t actually been following this story very closely, but it will be interesting to see how our friends in the right wing blogosphere react to this:

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian Darling, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

For those not following along at home, basically several news organizations reported that the Republicans were circulating a memo with some “talking points” about the political hay they could make over Terri Schiavo. This was followed by an immediate firestorm among conservatives who claimed, among other things, that in fact the Democrats were engaging in political dirty tricks and that Republicans had nothing to do with this memo.

Despite being wrong on both counts, the early returns aren’t showing that they’re holding themselves to the same level of accountability that they seek to apply to the mainstream media. Rather than officially backing away from their earlier accusations of a “vast left-wing/mainstream media conspiracy” generating this memo to make Republicans look bad, they seem to be playing semantic games and arguing over pluralization and the “definition of is” (metaphorically speaking).

I’m not holding my breath for any retractions.

UPDATE: I’m going to give credit to Josh Claybourn, who has issued a retraction for his criticism of ABC News. He is right that the original Washington Post story has many holes, but he seems to be giving the memo a relatively fair treatment now (he previously backed away from the charges that the memo was created by Democrats).

Version 3.0 of The Mountaintop is here! Please let me know if you encounter any bugs with the new design - it’s a bit of a work in progress right now. I already know it looks horrible in Internet Explorer on the Mac (it looks great in Firefox, Camino, and Safari, and almost as great in IE on Windows), but since that’s basically a dying browser, I’m not going to fret about it too much.

The archive content still has the old look and feel - I still need to update the templates and regenerate all of those pages - when I get a chance.

It’s nice to know that the U.S. is in the company of such enlightened states when it comes to application of the death penalty. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Pakistan top the list for number of exections carried out last year.

37 years ago today, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I don’t have anything in particular to note on this sad day, other than to ponder at what he might have accomplished if he would have had a second 39 years on this planet. Unfortunately today, we seem to lack prophetic voices which would challenge us to follow Jesus’ example of nonviolence, his call to raise up the poor, his command to love one another as we would love ourselves, regardless of what the color of our skin or the place of our birth might be.

Louise, in a comment below, asked:

You were not raised in a Christian household? Was it some other faith? If, so what? What brought you to Christianity? I didn’t see anything about this in your about the author statement, but am sorry if this has already been discussed.

I realize that I probably haven’t discussed this formally on the blog before, so I’ll give it a shot now:

My family was pretty agnostic growing up, and so was I. I always figured that there had to be a God out there somewhere, but considered him/her/it unknowable - although I still prayed to him/her/it every once in a while that he/she/it wouldn’t send me to hell. What’s more, folks like Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Republican party had me convinced that Christianity was the religion of self-righteous rich fat cats who didn’t care about anything other than fattening their own pockets, wagging their fingers in condemnation at people they didn’t like, and oppressing everyone else.

In college, though, I actually met some real followers of Jesus rather than the caricatures who manage to get all of the publicity in our country, and decided to give the Bible and Jesus a look (I never had much contact with either previously). What I found shocked me and resonated with the character of God that He had placed in my heart all along. Jesus didn’t condemn people. He loved people who others thought were “icky.” He cared deeply for the poor and called his followers to do the same. He taught us to go against the patterns of this world and lay down our swords and instead lay down our lives for others. And he described the reality of the world in a way that actually fit what I saw inside myself and around me: that while we still have the image of God firmly implanted upon us, we are all desperately sick and unable to express that image in the way God had intended.

I decided at that point that I could do nothing other than follow Jesus. And have been trying to figure out exactly what that means ever since.

“Our Holy Father John Paul has returned to the house of the Father”

Not being a Catholic, I know that I cannot quite understand the significance of the passing of a Pope. But I do wish to pay respect to the only Pope I have ever known in my lifetime (John Paul II became Pope when I was 6, and not being raised in a Christian household, much less Catholic, I had no clue before then). May he find rest with God after a race well run.