Ever since Supreme Court Justice David Souter announced that he is retiring, the blogosphere has been abuzz about whom President Obama will appoint to replace him. Much buzz in particular has been surrounding the names Kathleen Sullivan and Pam Karlan.
Sulivan is "a nationally prominent scholar and teacher of constitutional law" according to her faculty bio on the Stanford University Web site. Pam Karlan is also a Stanford law professor who is "the founding director of the school's extraordinarily successful Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court."
There is, of course, a lot more to their bios. In fact, the more you learn about them, the more qualified they seem. Until, that is, you learn this shocking fact: both women are (gasp!) lesbians. And not the Condoleezza Rice kind, either. These ladies are open, blatant, professional lesbians.
Needless to say, this is making some members of the right-wing compound very upset. And they aren't afraid to say so. One of those folks is Matt Barber of the Liberty Council, a group that calls itself a "litigation, education and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the traditional family."
"Well, in light of this nation's undeniable Christian heritage, it's hard to believe we're even having a conversation about whether a sitting United States president will count deviant sexual behavior as a favorable qualification in determining a nomination to the highest court of the land," said Barber, according to http://www.OneNewsNow.com.
Christian heritage or no, I agree with Barber that hyping someone for a spot on the highest court in our land based on "deviant sexual behavior" would be totally fucked up. But the only people having that conversation are folks like Barber who consider homosexuality to be the same thing as pedophilia or necrophilia or bestiality or any other truly deviant sexual behaviors.
Hey, I haven't done a full background check on either Kathleen Sullivan or Pam Karlan, so who knows, maybe it'll come out that one of them really loves potbellied pigs or lurks around her local Chuck E. Cheese. But I doubt it.
But Barber doesn't.
"We insist upon a Supreme Court justice who will strictly interpret the Constitution – which was the clear intent of our Founding Fathers – and not use the Constitution (or) abuse the Constitution as a means to an ideological end, which I fear this administration intends to do," he said.
Gosh, that sounds familiar. It sounds like Barber is afraid that Obama will do for liberals what he and all of his ilk were begging President George W. Bush to do: appoint people who will do their ideological bidding. And they got what they wanted with Bush appointees John G. Roberts, Jr. and Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr. Using and abusing the Constitution "as a means to an ideological end" is fine as long as that ideological end is legal discrimination against gays and lesbians and making sure women have no reproductive freedom.
Thankfully, we don't have a dummy in the White House any more. Obama isn't a puppet for the gay agenda like Bush was for the right. Whoever ends up replacing Souter, I feel pretty confident that I won't lose any sleep over it for the first time in eight years.
