Month: April 2007

by publius

In this column, Dahlia Lithwick explores one of the most fascinating sidebars to the U.S. Attorney scandal — religion and the DOJ. Using Monica Goodling as an example, she documents how deeply Regent University Law School graduates have penetrated the upper echelons of the Bush administration. Like Lithwick, I don’t have a problem with the administration hiring Regent grads (assuming they’re qualified). In fact, I’ve worked with outstanding attorneys who graduated from Regent.

What interests me then is not so much why DOJ hired Regent grads, but why Regent grads like Monica Goodling acted like they did. In particular, it’s the psychological and sociological dimensions that intrigue me. How did someone like Goodling justify her actions in her own mind? How did she square them with her religious faith? [For what it’s worth, these questions extend well beyond Goodling. How (and why), for instance, do so many social conservatives tolerate and even applaud our detention “policy” and war and unprogressive tax structures and so on?]

With respect to the more narrow Goodling question, Lithwick proposes an answer — people like Goodling started mistaking Bush for God. She writes, “[T]he real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God’s work with the president’s.” While that’s true in a sense, I don’t think it goes far enough. Assuming Lithwick is right, the more fundamental question is how Goodling (and other evangelicals) got to that point in the first place.

To take a step back, although liberals are not hostile to religion, I do think that they — in their own minds anyway — often conceptualize evangelical Christians in very simple ways. People get these visions of brainwashed automatons marching to the beat of Dobson and his P-Funk All-Stars. The truth is, though, that social conservatives — like all other groups — have a unique and complex psychology. And in their own mind, they (like everyone else) think of themselves as good people doing good things. That’s why it’s interesting to explore the specific rationalizations they use to justify actions that are hypocritical in light of their religious faith.

The first rationalization relates to our old friend, liberal hatred. I believe that evangelicals like Goodling are not so much pro-Republican as they are deeply, and even pathologically, anti-liberal. In this sense, Goodling represents the political coming-of-age of a generation of young social conservatives that has been taught from childhood to hate “the Left.” And it’s not just that the Left is bad, it’s that the Left is constantly attacking them from all directions — e.g., the courts, the media, Hollywood, academia, etc. It’s all one big attack. I mean, Regent University is premised on the notion that Christians are under attack. (The Federalist Society was too – check out their mission statement).

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by publius

I need some help. I’m having trouble discerning a thesis in George Will’s tirade today against the ERA. The argument seems to go like this: (1) Liberals like bell bottoms and love beads [cue Stayin’ Alive bass line]. (2) The ERA is bad because it duplicates the equal protection clause (Will’s favorite constitutional provision no doubt). (3) Hairy, bell-bottomed, love-beaded ERA-supporting hippies cheated back in the 70s. [Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk . . .] (4) The ERA is bad because it’s an end run around the legislative process. As #4 is the most ridiculous part of a fairly ridiculous op-ed, let’s start with that one.

The Will column is a textbook example of how conceptual narratives can harden to the point where facts become irrelevant. Remember that one of the central (and sometimes accurate) arguments of modern conservative jurisprudence is that post-World War II liberals use vague constitutional doctrine to do an end run around the legislative process. Inevitably, conservatives argue that if liberals want to change the Constitution, they need to do so through the proper channels – i.e., the Article V amendment process.

Funny thing, though. That’s exactly what the renewed effort to pass the ERA is trying to do. But to Will, these efforts are merely an even-more-cleverer way to avoid legislatures:

All amendments generate litigation, but the ERA’s purpose is to generate litigation. It is a device to get courts to impose social policies that supporters of the policies cannot persuade legislatures to enact. ERA — now WEA — supporters, being politically lazy, prefer the shortcut of litigation to the patient politics necessary to pass legislation.

If Kennedy and like-minded legislators think that the condition of American women needs improvements, they should try to legislate them. Instead, they prefer to hope that liberal judges will regard the ERA’s language as a license to legislate.
To sum up, commanding legislative supermajorities at the federal and state level in the manner explicitly provided for by Article V is a “politically lazy” “shortcut.” What legislators who want to help women should really do, Will explains, is to “try to legislate” rather than, you know, legislating.

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