There’s been plenty of commentary about the Hysterithon pitched by the Family Research Council and various other Christian Right groups yesterday, dubbed “Justice Sunday” and indecently dignified by the boss of the United States Senate, Bill Frist (R-TN). I’ll limit myself to one simple point, playing off a CNN quote/paraphrase from FRC chief Tony Perkins:

FRC President Tony Perkins said Democrats were using filibusters to exclude religious believers from the bench. Holding up a Bible, he told the audience, “What we are saying tonight is that as American citizens, we should not have to choose between believing what is in this book and serving the public.”

Now think about that observation for a moment. Perkins surely does not actually contend that “religious believers” have been or are being excluded from the judicial branch of government, does he? I’m reasonably certain a majority of judges, like a majority of Americans, a majority of Democrats, and a majority of Democratic elected officials, are in their own view “religious believers.” Is Perkins setting himself up to judge (if you will pardon the expression) what is and is not authentic religious belief? Or is he rather arguing that certain kinds of religious believers are being excluded, and if so, who are they?The “choose between this book and serving the public” bit, which is also featured in the self-pity-soaked ad campaign set up for “Justice Sunday,” makes it clear the “excluded” are those who believe a literal interpretation of Holy Scripture is directly relevant to judicial rulings.At least back when I went to law school, the “public service” rendered by judges, depending on the case and his or her role in the system, was to find facts and interpret and apply laws as set out in the U.S. or state Constitutions, federal or state statutues, or decades if not centuries of common law. “Believing what is in” the Bible, and certainly believing Tony Perkins’ interpretation of what is in the Bible, might have some impact on the character of the judge, but anyone elevating it above actual secular law is generally violating an oath, often sworn on that selfsame Bible. So sounds to me like ol’ Tony is demanding activist judges who will ride roughshod over the law, over precedent, over constitutions and democratically elected legislatures, to do what ol’ Tony believes God has instructed them to do. Just as his buddy Tom DeLay thinks ethics rules don’t apply to “our team,” Perkins seems to think the rule of law doesn’t apply to “our judges.” Amazing, ain’t it?

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers recently posted an analysis of the extent to which Ds and Rs in the House have voted as a bloc in the early stages of this Congress. It’s sort of interesting, in the way that studies of how baseball players perform in very limited circumstaces (say, with runners in scoring position with two outs, on the road) are sort of interesting, but it also shows the danger of blowing up small distinctions into big implications.Chris’ basic take is that Republican House members are marginally more “loyal” to their party line than Democrats, who have more, if only a handful, of true “heretics.” But even those small potatoes are fluffed up misleadingly by his selection of eight “final passage” votes as “party differentiators.” As Chris knows, “final passage” votes in the House are an unreliable indicator of ideology, since (a) they ignore committee actions and amendments (on those rare occasions GOPers allow them), and (b) they reflect only those bills the Republican leadership has decided to move, generally because they are certain to pass. And they are also not exactly reliable signs of party loyalty, either, since both parties’ leaderships on occasion treat votes as “free” and don’t mind defections among Members in vulnerable districts.Still, the study was a good contribution to the general store of political knowledge. But now Chris has done a second post focusing on House Democrats who are “members of the DLC,” and finds, well, not much of anything.First, I’d like to rise to a point of personal privilege and address this “DLC membership” business, because it’s also been a source of confusion elsewhere in the blogosphere. There is one and only one way to become a “member of the DLC,” and that’s to plunk down 40 bucks and get all our stuff–policy papers, Blueprint Magazine, etc.–in the mail. There is something on our web page called the New Dem Directory (which is apparently what Chris was looking at) which is simply contact information on elected officials–most of them at the state and local levels–who have either joined some related New Dem-identified organization or participated in DLC events. It’s basically an online phone book, and the DLC has never used its contents to market itself or take credit for anybody’s career. There ain’t no membership cards, oaths, whip operations, or litmus tests. Are we straight on that?Now, most of the House Members in this online phone book are there because they are members of the House New Democratic Coalition, a completely independent group that shares a general orientation with the DLC, but neither asks for nor takes orders from anybody at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They tend to be from competitive or even dangerously vulnerable districts more than the rest of the Caucus, and thus are given “free votes” more often than their peers.Still with me here? Okay. Having analyzed these 39 Members on those 8 House final passage votes, Chris concludes they are “not dramatically more disloyal” than other Dems, and by at least one measure, are actually less disloyal. In others words, says Chris, “the only pattern here is that there is no pattern.” So, is he ready to bury the myth that the DLC, on secret instructions from Corporate America or Karl Rove or somebody, is leading its (non-)members into perfidy and Republicanism? No–he concludes we don’t have any clout with our(non-) members, and thus have to reason to exist other than to criticize other Democrats!Gee, seems to me that there are a whole hell of a lot of Democratic organizations out there who have had pretty much the same impact as the DLC on the votes of House members on these eight votes, i.e., none. Are they useless, too? Should we all just go out of business, unless we can demonstrate they we either dramatically increase or dramatically decrease the bloc voting of House Democrats on these eight votes? Lord knows, no other political activity, from policy development to political strategy to fundraising to grass-roots organizing, could be worth doing, right?Okay, you see my point by now. I’m not at all hostile to Chris Bowers; he’s a smart guy who is probably trying to be objective here. But he’s like a baseball manager who likes one player and dislikes another, and can always find some marginal, triple-loaded statistic to put the former in the starting lineup and send the latter to the minors. This is not how you build a winning team in baseball, or in politics.

On this, the 35th Earth Day, the environmental movement is undergoing a period of introspection and even self-criticism, as the hard-won progress of the last three decades seem to have stopped. Indeed, thanks to the Bush administration and a precipitous decline of support for environmental goals in the GOP generally, some of those gains are being reversed.Today’s New Dem Dispatch from the DLC offers some good cheer in examples of environmental achievements being made outside Washington, and under the national media radar screen. But the defection of GOPers (at least politicians, if not necessarily rank-and-file voters) from even a pale green version of the cause remains a big political problem, and perhaps, for Democrats, an opportunity as well.This is a fairly recent development. I’m definitely and precisely dating myself here, but on the first Earth Day, in 1970, I was in high school in Cobb County, Georgia, a very conservative suburb of Atlanta, and we devoted much of the day to environmental programming, including a speech by (for some reason) actor Hal Holbrook. Somehow or other, nobody in that community seemed to think we were buying into eco-socialism, opposing the idea of economic growth, or slipping towards paganism, even though the early aims of the environmental movement, which quickly culminated in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, were in many respects the most ambitious steps of all.Even then, there were wingnuts who tried to make a big deal of the fact that the original Earth Day coincided with Lenin’s Birthday (trust all those ex-communist right-wingers to know that one!). Indeed, I graphically remember a comment in National Review at that time: “Here’s how to celebrate Earth Day (formerly Lenin’s Birthday). Pick up a beer can. Throw it at a pollutocrat.”Some things really haven’t changed.

I’m one of those Americans who just love Canada. I don’t have any big desire to go live in Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal, and don’t think our country is inferior, but do like to go up there when I can, and in particular, enjoy political discourse with Canadians, who, until recently at least, seemed to combine the best traditions of Europe and America, along with their legendary civility and openness to debate. Two Northern Exposures especially impressed me. One was a Q&A session with Deputy Cabinet Ministers (the people who actually run Canada’s national government) in 2000, when I had to explain and defend Al Gore’s policy agenda and how it would affect my country and theirs, in incredible detail. And the second, a year or two earlier, was a Future of the Left conference at Carlton University where an initially hostile audience constructively engaged, and partially accepted, my arguments for the progressive credentials of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.During all my visits to Canada in the late 1990s, I was told that Finance Minister Paul Martin was the real brains of the governing Liberal Party, and would prove that as Prime Minister when Jean Chretien decided to retire. And that is why the current agony of Martin and the Liberals is so sadly ironic.Chretien finally stepped down in 2003, and bequeathed to Martin not only leadership of the Liberals, but an endlessly unfolding series of ethics scandals, the most recent being AdScam, a sleazy tale of insider government contracts to provide illusory p.r. services in connection with efforts to tamp down Quebec separatism.Nobody has implicated Martin in this mess, but he’s the Prime Minister and Liberal leader, and like Gerald Ford after Watergate, he’s fighting an uphill battle to free his party and his leadership from a huge wave of public revulsion. Like Ford, he’s currently being mocked in the media as being a bit of a deer in the headlights. Martin is currently trying to forestall an immediate election. Despite general media assumptions that Liberals are doomed to disaster, maybe he, again like Gerald Ford, will be able to raise serious doubts about the opposition, which is in this case a Conservative Party that has moved well to the right in order to absorb the western-based Reform Party that kicked up a lot of ideological dust in the 90s. If Martin can’t pull a revival off, then Canada, like the United States, may experience the governing philosophy of a true, latter-day conservative movement, and ultimately decide that punishing themselves for Jean Chretien’s failings is an act of national masochism that should not stand,

I followed the crowds to RFK Stadium last night to see Washington’s new obsession, the Nationals, play my Atlanta Braves. It was a good game (and I didn’t really mind the Nats winning), if you like old-fashioned, pre-1990s baseball where a couple of key double plays, rather than six or seven home runs, decide the thing. And RFK, for all its decrepitude, felt right, with a bit less of the constant artificial noise and commercialism that spoiled my last trip to Camden Yards.The seats were great, except for the fact that they landed me in a nest of Young Republican Hill Staffers, who spent most of the evening networking and showing off their new spring wardrobes instead of watching the game. But in the top of the ninth, when the Nats choked off a Braves rally, even the Brats around me joined in the chant of “D.C.! D.C! D.C.!” that shook the old stadium, and for a few minutes, even the old anti-Washington populist in me was seduced.

David Brooks offers up another fine bit of sophistry in today’s New York Times. And yes, it’s another example of what I call the Dover Beach column, wherein the lofty-minded pundit sadly surveys the madness of partisan conflict from a spot high above the fray, and then proceeds to offer a lofty-minded solution that happens to coincide with one party’s agenda.In this case, the subject is abortion, and here is the gist of the Brooksian argument: (1) Roe v. Wade whisked abortion policy from the legislative to the judicial arena, making compromise impossible and empowering extremists on both sides of the issue; (2) legitimately frustrated Republicans who can’t pursue legislative remedies on abortion are now poised to Do the Bad Thing and assault both the judiciary and the essentially conservative traditions of Senate debate; and thus (3) the solution is to give Republicans what they want by overturning Roe. Neat, eh?As is generally the case with Brooks these days, his transition from bipartisan-sounding analysis to endorsement of a partisan position is greased by a big fat planted axiom of extremely dubious quality: the idea that making abortion a legislative issue will facilitate “democratic debate,” compromise, sweet reasonableness, and in general, a de-emphasis of the issue in our political system.Give me a break. Without Roe, abortion politics would be a 24-7 preoccupation of both Congress and many state legislatures, with those determined to eventually outlaw abortion altogether offering an infinite variety of incremental, poll-tested restrictions. How do I know this? Because that’s precisely what’s happened in the limited sphere of legislation allowable under Roe. Look at the last “reasonable compromise” offered by Democrats in Congress, the Daschle Amendment of the late 1990s, which would have banned third-trimester abortions with an exception for the health of the mother. It was not only opposed by some abortion rights advocates, but by right-to-lifers and Republicans generally, who weren’t interested in any “solution” other than their own contrived “partial-birth” ban, which recognized no exceptions.Moroever, look at what’s happening in the U.K., one of those wise jurisdictions where abortion policy is set through “democratic debate.” The Tories have made abortion a big issue in the current parliamentary campaign by proposing an incremental restriction of the period where abortion is allowable, in an overt attempt to peel off Labour-leaning Catholic voters.The truth is that abortion politics are toxic not because the courts have intervened, but because the issue involves very fundamental differences of opinion on matters that are more important to some people than politics itself. It’s possible to make the argument that letting “democratic debate” decide abortion policy is the right thing to do, but Brooks’ idea that it will reduce the passions involved in this issue, or keep right-to-lifers from demonizing judges or seeking to override Senate traditions, is absolutely wrong.We just learned in the Schiavo saga that conservatives are willing to demonize judges if they don’t interpret federal and state statutues to suit them. Accepting, as Brooks does, the thread-bare argument that they are only interested in reasserting the right to “democratic debate” is tantamount to total surrender to the GOP position, which is, of course, where Brooks would have us go.

Popes aren’t elected every day, so those of my dear readers who have expressed annoyance at my frequent posts on religion lately will just have to put up with one or two more.Those of you who are interested in the greater meaning, religious and political, of Pope Benedict XVI may have run across Andrew Sullivan’s agonized posts today. Here’s a pertinent excerpt aimed at his readers who are tired of all the Pope-Talk:

I was trying to explain last night to a non-Catholic just how dumb-struck many reformist Catholics are by the elevation of Ratzinger. And then I found a way to explain. This is the religious equivalent of having had four terms of George W. Bush only to find that his successor as president is Karl Rove. Get it now?

Yeah, that’s a pretty scary vision. But you also have to understand that Sullivan has some real history with the new pope, having written a very perceptive analysis of his theology in The New Republic back in 1988.To use a shorthand that some of you will find illuminating and others inscrutable, Sullivan’s take on Ratzinger back then was that he represented the marriage of the German Augustinian tradition (the same tradition that produced great Protestant theologians from Martin Luther to Karl Barth) with papal power, along with an unhealthy attitude about sex and gender. It’s a very toxic combination, producing a very political agenda in the guise of the non-political sovereignty of the Church. That’s why Andrew ultimately compared Cardinal Ratzinger then, and compares Benedict XVI now, to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: a man driven by the logic of theology to, and perhaps beyond, the limits of Christianity itself.I hope Sullivan is wrong about the new pope, but there are unsettling analogies in his Catholic analysis of Ratzinger to the strangely un-Christian tendencies recently apparent in so many conspicuously Christian U.S. religious and political leaders.

Today pretty much everybody in Washington thought John Bolton’s confirmation as ambassador to the U.N. would slip out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a party-line vote, with clear skies ahead on the Senate floor. But at the last minute, it appears, Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich threw a big sack of sand into the gears, saying he had missed a lot of the hearings and needed to hear more before he was comfortable voting for the fiery Bolton. The objects of the whole Democratic strategy for derailing this confirmation, Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel and Linc Chafee, also looked kinda wobbly.I’ve been publicly and privately unhappy with the Mean Mister Mustard approach of Foreign Relations Democrats to Bolton, who has a rich record of questionable attitudes on nuclear proliferation, humanitarian interventions, and the value of alliances and multilateral organizations in general. They obviously knew something I didn’t know.But with a three-week delay (at a minimum) in the committee vote, and more hearings a certainty, I do hope the case against making this guy our spokesman in the most visible international forum gets broadened into his philosophy and record, giving Democrats not only a chance at a “win,” but also the opportunity to score some serious points about the right way to protect our national security in a world far more complicated than George W. Bush will ever acknowledge.

I’m not Roman Catholic, so my views on the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI don’t much matter, but I do want to make one simple point about the likely American reaction based on Ratzinger’s reputation as a “conservative.”Like much of the non-American hierarchy these days, the new pope’s orthdox views on cultural and theological controversies appear to be completely integrated with an anti-capitalist and not-so-secret anti-American attitude on global economic issues. Here’s how The New York Times’ Laurie Goodstein and Ian Fisher put it in Sunday’s profile of the German cardinal:

Based on Cardinal Ratzinger’s record and pronouncements, his agenda seems clear. Inside the church, he would like to impose more doctrinal discipline, reining in priests who experiment with liturgy or seminaries that permit a broad interpretation of doctrine. Outside, he would like the church to assert itself more forcefully against the trend he sees as most threatening: globalization leading eventually to global secularization.

Ratzinger, by all accounts a brilliant theologian, is a systematic thinker, so I don’t think we are going to hear just one side of the equation he draws between economic globaliation and “the dictatorship of relativism.” Assuming he doesn’t intend to just be a caretaker pope (a very safe assumption), all those American conservatives, Catholic or not, who are high-fiving each other right now over the election of a “conservative pope” may be eating their words before long. Over at National Review’s The Corner, Kathryn Lopez says: “CHAMPAGNE IS FLOWING.” You’d best keep the bubbly on ice for a while, KLo.

There’s been a lot of buzz about NBC’s mini-series “Revelations,” a sort of mainstreamed version of the Left Behind novels. The Washington Post’s TV critic Tom Shales pretty much buried the series as television drama. And in a more ideological corner of the media, The New Republic’s TV critic Lee Siegel tauntingly suggested that this saga represented the secular cooptation, and potential taming, of the fundamentalism so rampant in U.S. politics in recent years.I’m prejudiced on this subject, being sympathetic to Martin Luther’s view that the Revelation of St. John should be expelled from the canon of Holy Scripture as “fundamentally un-Christian.” And I’ve also been influenced by the New Testament scholars who tell us that Revelations was not a prophecy, but a classic apocalyptic text motivated by the incredible trauma of the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple, at a time when Christians had not definitively separated themselves from Judaism.Still, the obvious fascination of American Christians with what can only be described as a predictive interpretation of Revelations is impossible to ignore.I’m not sure at what point the premillenial theology of The End Times, with its antinomian interpretation of Western Christendom as actively Satanic, escaped its pentecostal and adventist ghetto and began to conquer ostensibly postmillenial Calvinist turf in the major fundamentalist denominations, such as the Southern Baptists. Maybe it coincided with the decline of the confident, triumphalist Moral Majority and the rise of the pessimist, counter-revolutionary Christian Coalition, and more recenctly, its openly seditious cousin in the radio ministry of James Dobson.Lee Siegel views “Revelations” as the potential beginning of a secularly-induced cooptation and corruption of militant Christian Fundamentalism. I personally view much of contemporary militant Christian Fundamentalism as secularly motivated in itself, a misuse of Holy Scripture, including Revelations, to support a secular cultural conservatism that has little to do with the Bible or with Christianity. And the premillenial trend among historically postmillenial denominations may simply represent this same process of secularization, without any help from popular culture.Watch Revelations if you wish, but if you want to see a truly interesting presentation of premillenial theology set against the worst features of secular culture, rent a copy of The Rapture, Michael Tolkin’s bizarre and fascinating 1991 film, featuring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, which alternates between graphic couple-swapping sex and a very literal depiction of the The Tribulations, with a morally and theologically challenging twist at the very end.