We spent a lot of time on our knees at St. John Vianney School in Brookfield, Wis. We prayed all the time for peace, for good health, for food for the hungry, for A’s in arithmetic and wins for the Packers.
One thing we never prayed for was an end to the filibuster.
Leave it to Dr. James Dobson to make hot air on the Senate floor a sin.
Now the Focus on the Family founder and other far-right political leaders have mobilized a multimillion-dollar nationwide campaign of political attack ads and a political TV broadcast today called “Justice Sunday – Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith.”
Among the 20 senators targeted is former Catholic seminarian Ken Salazar.
The attack ads urge people of faith to pressure the senator to vote to ban the filibuster against judicial nominees, which Focus spokeswoman Amanda Banks – who is not a Supreme Court justice yet – says is unconstitutional, not to mention godless and evil.
But Salazar’s faithful in Colorado are not impressed. Outraged is more like it.
“Being a religious person does not mean you have to just point your head down one small path,” said Kay Lynn Hefley, a farmer in Walsh and a strongly religious Salazar supporter.
Hefley said she has known Salazar for nearly 15 years.
“He’s a deeply religious man.”
Marguerite Salazar (no relation) went to high school with the senator and said that Focus’ assertion that his position on the filibuster is somehow anti-Christian is “ludicrous.”
The president of Valley-Wide Health Systems in Alamosa said anybody who knows Ken Salazar realizes that attacking him as anti-faith is absurd.
“Sometimes people criticize him as too religious. But that’s who Ken is. It’s a big piece of his family life.”
Irish Catholic Michael McLachlan, a Durango lawyer who worked with then-Attorney General Salazar in the ’90s, said, “I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this is exactly what we elected Ken Salazar to the Senate for. We don’t always agree with him, but we know he will take stands on principle.”
McLachlan said regardless of the attack ads, “Ken’s supporters are going to stick with him.”
In fact, the whole “nuclear option” campaign may be one of the right’s most serious political miscalculations. And after the drubbing Republicans in Congress took over the Terri Schiavo political fiasco, that’s saying a lot.
CNN reported last week that a Republican poll showed overwhelming opposition to the plan to ban filibusters.
Prominent Republicans John McCain and Lincoln Chafee oppose it. And the party doesn’t yet have enough votes to outlaw the 200-year-old parliamentary ploy. So even a high-dollar attack-ad campaign by the religious right may not be sufficiently intimidating to get this turkey passed.
Still, for Banks it’s a crusade.
She insists that “the federal courts have attacked family values for decades.” Focus wants “strict constructionist” judges who – for starters – will legalize school prayer, outlaw abortion and sodomy, and strike down the Massachusetts court ruling on same-sex marriage, she said.
“Liberals have realized that the judiciary is the only branch of government they have left,” she said.
She acknowledged that the vast majority of these “liberal” judges – including 200 of President Bush’s judicial nominees who already have been approved by the Senate – were appointed by Republicans. Still, these Reagan-Bush-Bush appointees are not toeing the line.
“They continue to pursue their radical agenda,” she said.
The religious right has control of the legislature and the presidency, Banks said. All they need now is the judiciary. The filibuster is all that stands in their way.
So with this vote looming, it may be time for all of us to get down on our knees.
Because if these kooks succeed in painting Ken Salazar as a heathen, just imagine what’s in store for the rest of us.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
