No one should make the mistake of assuming that President George W. Bush considers himself a lame duck. In fact, Bush is as busy as ever trying to put his cramped view of church-state separation into practice in as many places as possible.
That includes the federal judiciary. Bush has nominated Richard Honaker, a former member of the Wyoming House of Representatives, to a federal judgeship. It’s an alarming move, considering Honaker’s extreme views.
At the Supreme Court level, Bush has been careful to appoint judges who at least have no obvious record of extremism. Thus, we were given John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito. Both have turned out to consistent, if non-flamboyant, conservatives — a lot like Antonin Scalia but with less sarcasm and fewer soundbites.
Nominees to the lower federal courts tend to receive less scrutiny from the media and the public – and it’s here Bush has tried to stack the bench with some real doozies.
Consider Honaker. He believes abortion is murder and that biblical law should trump the secular law. He once said, “I came to know that if the Bible is true, if Christianity is true, then it is true in family life. It is true in economics. It is true in law, and it is true in all facets of human endeavor. I know that with only such a world view can Christians have any impact upon the culture around them.”
Speaking before a convention of home-schooling advocates in Wyoming in 2005, Honaker said, “[I]f taught accurately, history can teach us that the greatest American patriots and leaders were Christians, and that there is indeed a Christian basis for American institutions of law, government, and business.” In the same address, he attacked the Supreme Court because it “no longer talks about America as a Christian nation or about the Christian underpinnings of the law.”
Questioned about these rather unusual views, Honaker replied that no one should worry. In a letter last year to NARAL Pro-Choice Wyoming, Honaker asserted that a higher court could always step in and overrule him. “The losing party [could] appeal to the Tenth Circuit, and perhaps on to the United States Supreme Court, and nobody would remember what the trial judge did anyhow,” he wrote.
Honaker also has ties to extreme elements in the Religious Right. He has previously served on the Board of Trustees of Patrick Henry College, founded by home-schooling advocate Michael Farris. The school discriminates on the basis of religion and requires all of its trustees, faculty members, staff and students to subscribe to a statement of faith that reflects fundamentalist Christianity.
Honaker’s nomination has been pending for about a year. It has not improved with age. A nomination like this is little more than an insult to the Constitution. It’s the sort of the thing the Senate should not even bother to take seriously. The Senate Judiciary Committee should reject Honaker’s nomination and insist that Bush name someone to the post who understands and respects the need for religious diversity in America.
There is simply no reason to allow Bush, a man with a 30 percent approval rating whose policies have proven to be not just misguided but disastrous, to continue to stack our courts with religious extremists.
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