Will 1 Percent Matter for Freedom?

On my birthday next week, April 24, a mega-church in Kentucky will broadcast a show by satellite that will try to makeover injustice with a facelift of freedom. The US Senate Majority Leader is going to take part in Justice Sunday, a show that might reach a million people through the Internet and Christian radio and TV networks. Makeovers are so popular these days. But we ought to leave that entertainment to trashed-out backyards and bungalows. Freedom looks pretty good without the circus makeup of religious fervor on its face.

Everybody has a right to an opinion and the right to express it. The Justice Sunday opinion tries to make civil liberty sound like thievery, and intolerance sound like a birthright. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council trumpets his side's narrow victories in recent elections. Now he hungers to cut the courts off at the knees, too. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the ACLU, have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

I live in Texas, and I'm well aware of how these "freedoms" look. Like some thugs' idea of freedom to drag a man to his death behind a pickup in a small Texas town, just because the man is black. Or our bike ride in two weeks to raise funds for AIDS charities — money for people who are sick and dying — a ride that needs to keep its route secret until ride day, because people came out to heckle the riders and protest the charity fundraiser.

Freedom means the permission to live a life that doesn't hurt anyone else. It's not a blank check to squash people who have different sexual preferences or beliefs about the right to life, to push them down with the weight of What My God Says Is So.

We're lucky that Justice Sunday has a reach so small. A million people is less than one percent of last year's voters. And face it, this Sabbath Day hate-fest is really not preaching to anybody but their own choir.

The rally hopes to pump up public support for ending the right to filibuster over the appointment of judges. The right has been working for more than 200 years. Now that the right-wing has packed the Senate with a majority, it's ready to remake our courts. This is the "nuclear" option talked about for months now. (That's kind of like the word "nook-kew-lure" we hear from our President. Great picture of W's grandfather at that nuclear link, sleeping on a cot during a 60s filibuster against civil rights. I guess the Bush fruit has fallen far from the tree by now.)

The fallout from this political nuclear blast has a half-life that might extend into half of what's left of my life, and yours too. Bad law is a real tar pit to escape.

Bill Frist, that Senate leader, needs to re-read the separation of church and state articles in the US Consitution, not the bible in the Justice Sunday ads. The constitution's that big document he swore to protect when his constituents gave him his job. If he wants to preach next Sunday, he ought to return to a job serving his God. He shouldn't be able to use that gavel in the ad to beat down the rights of people who don't share his faith or his preferences.