How 'Bout That! A Judge with Religious Convictions Gets Senate OK
by Allie Martin and Bill Fancher
July 8, 2004
(AgapePress) - An attorney with a Christian legal firm says he's pleasantly surprised that a conservative Catholic from Arkansas won Senate confirmation to be a federal judge. At the same time, a legal watchdog group is charging that Christian bigotry was on display during the confirmation hearings.Earlier this week, Arkansas lawyer Leon Holmes -- following six hours of sometimes heated debate -- was approved by the U.S. Senate (51-46) for the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas. During the confirmation process, much attention was focused on the faith and beliefs of Holmes, who is pro-life and also believes the biblical mandate that wives should be submissive to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22-24).
Five Republicans opposed Holmes, including Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who said Holmes was not committed to the "total equality of women" in society. In contrast, attorney Brian Fahling with the Center for Law & Policy in Mississippi says the United States needs more federal judges like Leon Holmes.
"We would no longer be ruled by the judiciary; we would be ruled by the legislative branch with respect to lawmaking -- and that's the way it ought to be," Fahling says. "At present, we have judges who really are functioning as legislators."
The attorney says judicial activism needs to be curbed. "We are really no longer a people who participate in our government -- because we elect judges for life and they're the ones who seem to be controlling all of our laws presently," he says.
Kay Daly of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary says Holmes was battered by Democrats during the hearings. "As Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania so eloquently put it, this really was a test on religious liberty [and] on religious freedom," Daly says. "One group in this country that still seems to literally suffer the slings and arrows of discrimination, with the approval of places like the United States Senate, is Christians."
That is why she says she was amazed by the ultimate outcome of the full Senate vote. "If the world were right in judicial nominations, I wouldn't be surprised," she says, "but because things have been turned completely upside-down, there's now a religious litmus test that's been put on all these judges who are going through the [confirmation] process."
Daly confesses to being "deeply surprised" that someone with deep convictions made it through the confirmation process successfully.
