Judicial Appointments and Religious Bigotry
One of the more bigoted and contemptible statements that a sitting President has said in several decades was uttered by President Bush.
“We need commonsense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. Those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.”
The Immorality of Violating an Oath
First, there is the fact that President Bush is acting in violation of the very Constitution he swore an oath to uphold and defend. That Constitution states, Article VI, Clause III, but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
President Bush has sworn an oath that no religious test will be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States. Yet, he stood in front of these reporters and announced that he will apply a religious test as one of his qualificiations in selecting judges.
Quite clearly, one of the requirements that morality places upon us is that we keep our promises. The person who makes a promise to others that he will do something, then refuses to do it, has done an act that no moral person can support.
The Immorality of Violating the Law
Another moral failing behind this act is that Bush is violating the law. The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land. A President who uses a religious test in his political appointments has violated the law. A moral person cannot always obey the law. There is no getting around the fact that those who hid Jews in NAZI-controlled Europe during World War II, and those who helped slaves escape through the underground railroad before America’s Civil War, were criminals. However, I challenge President Bush to stand before the country and say that the Constitution, in this respect, is an immoral document.
When faced with an immoral law, the first duty of any citizen is to speak against it and to seek to have the law changed. The Constitution provides an ammendment process for making such changes. Only when evil has taken control of the institutions for making and enforcing law and made any hope of change impossible is it permissible to violate an unjust law. It would be a strange argument indeed for a sitting President whose party controls the legislative and judicial branches to argue that evil has taken hold of the law-making bodies in this country, leaving him no choice but to violate those laws -- in this case, the Constitution -- rather than try to author a change.
The Immorality of Religious Bigotry
Yet a third moral failing behind President Bush’s words and deeds is that his words are those of a bigot.
We would easily recognize this if he were to say to reporters that he only intends to appoint judges who recognize that our rights come from that God who sacrificed his son for us. An explicit refusal to consider a Muslim or a Jewish judge would immediately classify Bush as a religious bigot.
We look around the world and we see religious war and conflict, where religious differences result in countless deaths, and even more suffer brutal maiming every day. This violence itself is founded on the idea that those who belong to one religion can impose their religion on others. It is only to be expected that those others are going to resist. As the imposition becomes more burdensome and violent, so does the resistance. We have seen, time and time again, that there is no limit to the violence that one person can do to another while holding that he not only has the blessings of his God, but that he is doing precisely what God commands him to do.
There is only one road to peace. This is a road where decent people recognize that they must judge their neighbors by their actions, and not by their religion. It requires that citizens adopt an attitude toward their neighbor that, “I do not care what your religious beliefs are. As long as you are willing to treat your neighbors, such as me, with decency and respect, I will pay you the same courtesy. I will not seek to put you at a civil or political disadvantage, but treat you in all things as civil and political equals. I will no more ask the government to force my religious views upon you than I would tolerate having you use the government to force your religious views upon me. In our homes, we each practice our own faith. On the street, we practice mutual respect.”
This latter point speaks to a principle that all moral systems — religious and nonreligious — have in common, which is the principle that others are to be treated as the agent himself wishes to be treated. To do anything else defines immorality and injustice. This means tolerating the imposition of one’s own religion on others to the degree that one would tolerate those others imposing their religions on him or her. That is to say, not at all.
This principle does not require belief in a God. It is simply madness to expect others to tolerate what the speaker himself would find intolerable if it was done against him.
It means being as tolerant of a President who is only going to consider a person qualified to be judge if he believes that our rights come from God to the degree that one would be tolerant of President who announces that he considers anybody who believes in God to be unqualified to hold the job of Judge.
I fully expect that the President himself would be appalled by such a proclamation. He would immediately denounce it as unfair and unjust. He would be right. However, this means that a President who professes such a policy himself, and those who support him in this, are also promoting injustice in their actions. They are not defenders of that which is good and right and just. They are the instigators of bigotry, injustice, and immorality on a national level.
We can only worry about a society that has degenerated so far into immorality itself that its people will listen to their leaders perpetuate bigotry, injustice, and immorality, and applaud them for it. In a democracy, the final line of defense against injustice rests with the people themselves. When those people give up the fight — when they join the perpetrators of injustice and applaud them in their efforts, then there is reason to worry how far into injustice a nation may sink.
The Hope of a Moral and Just Nation
Democracies can be unjust. When the Native Americans were forced off of their land, the voting public insisted that this be done. Where slavery in this country was a permitted and even protected institution, the people themselves voted into power those who would protect and defend slavery. Jim Crowe laws and the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II were laws passed by politicians who would have lost their political positions if they had not done what the voters wanted. In these cases, injustice and immorality that had its roots in the hearts of the people themselves.
In these cases, the people eventually came to their senses. They recognized that they themselves were supporting unjust and immoral causes. They reversed themselves, and when they did they reversed the course of government.
We can hope that they will come to see the injustice and immorality having leaders who say that, “Only people who share my religion are qualified to interpret the laws in this country. All those who do not share my religious beliefs are unqualified.”
We can hope that the people will come to recognize that they should view their own support for a President who says, “I will only appoint judges from my church or those closely aligned with it and cast out all others,” as they would view unjust those who supported a President who uttered the same words, but did not share that person's religious beliefs.
We can only hope that the people will come to recognize that if they would view the latter as immoral and unjust, that insofar as they support the former, they are supporting immorality and injustice.
We can only hope that they are the type of people who want to stand in opposition to immorality and injustice, and not be counted as one of its defenders.