By the Senate, that is.
J. Leon Holmes was one of President Bush’s nominees to the federal judiciary whose nomination had been languishing for eighteen months due to Democratic Party stonewalling. But it ain’t languishing any more, because the nomination finally came up for a vote, and he was confirmed!
Woo-hoo!
I’m unusually excited about this because Leon happens to be a friend of mine. In fact, he played a role in my conversion to the Catholic Church, as you can read about in my conversion story (search on his name).
Leon wasn’t (unfortunately) nominated to the Supreme Court but to a minor federal judgeship. He will be one of five judges adjudicating matters in half of the state of Arkansas. Normally such appointees are passed with only a couple of minutes’ debate and often with a voice vote. Their confirmations are about as non-controversial as it gets in the Senate.
But not in Leon’s case.
His nomination received a full day of debate and a squeaker, roll-call vote (that barely passed, in part due to the absence of several senators who would have voted the other way, including Kerry and his new . . . uh . . . running-mate, Edwards).
The reason is that Leon is a conservative Catholic and–consequently–he is committedly pro-life. In fact, he was president of Arkansas Right to Life for two years in the 1980s. As a result, pro-abortion forces seized on his nomination and raised a huge hullabaloo. You can read attacks on him by the National Organization for Women, NARAL, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and oodles of others if you do a Google search on him.
Some openly announced that they were deliberately using his nomination to send a message to President Bush that pro-life nominees to the Supreme Court would not be tolerated.
And they lost.
On the significance of that for the forthcoming election, you might want to read this analysis.
If you look at some of the attacks on Leon on various web pages, you may note how brief the quotations from his writings (often from pro-life writings from the early 1980s) are. This is deliberate quotation out of context, because to read them in a larger context would result in a much different impression being conveyed. I have confidence in my readers’ intelligence to see how the same quote could come across very differently. I will, however, mention the most widely-used statement, because there are facts regarding this statement that are often not disclosed.
The charge that was most widely used against Leon was a statement taken from an article he wrote in his local diocesan newspaper on “inclusive” language. The article summarized what St. Paul said regarding how husbands and wives should relate to each other as Christ and the Church and what this means for the roles of spouses in marriage. Consequently the quote was used to portray him as a troglodytic oppressor of women.
What was widely not reported was the fact that Leon didn’t write this article alone. It was co-authored with his wife, Susan. In fact, it was based on Susan’s Bible study. He was her co-author.
The way the article was used to portray Leon is especially ironic since Susan is most definitely not a shy, retiring woman “dominated by” her husband. She is a sharp, intelligent, plainspoken woman who has no difficulty at all making her views known. I know she was quite irked at the way her views and her writing were used to defame her husband.
Ultimately, though, the effort was not enough. People from every political and social viewpoint who actually know Leon recognize him as a man of supreme integrity and came forward to support his nomination. This included both Arkansas senators (both Democrats) and many who would sharply disagree with his views on abortion. Multiple senators, including especially Sen. Rick Santorum (a Catholic senator from Pennsylvania) argued that to oppose Leon for his adherence to biblical and Catholic teaching would amount to saying that being a Catholic or taking the Bible at face value was of itself reason to be disqualified from the judiciary. (How’s that for freedom of religion!?)
A special irony of the situation is that, in the course of processing the nomination, Leon was required to submit copies of his writings going back years. One of these was a paper he wrote about Mary which played a role in my conversion. As I mention in my conversion story, it was reading that paper that helped turn me around on some Catholic issues and thus contributed to my conversion. The irony is that the opponents of Leon’s nomination–in search of material to use against it–had to read through that very same paper.
So who knows . . . perhaps it will lead to their conversions as well.
Being written up by Planned Parenthood has got to be one of the greatest honours.
It looks like Senators Kerry and Edwards were two of only three senators who didn’t show up for the vote. I wonder who else was missing. Is there any site that shows how each senator voted?
It’s nice to see that at least some of Bush’s nominees can actually get through the Senate. I was really disappointed by that whole Estrada affair. Bush has really done a good job nominating judges as far as I can tell. I wish more people will realize how important it is to elect politicians who will appoint good judges who respect the congress, the right to life and the traditional definition of marriage.
I greatly admire the US system of government and am amazed at how many checks and balances it has. Your founding fathers really did a superb job. They were centuries ahead of their time. Here in Canada, the Prime Minister (devout Catholic who supports abortion and gay marriage but is personally opposed and won’t legislate his religious beliefs on the masses because we have a separation of church and state you know the type 🙂 basically has the sole power to appoint judges and senators all according to his own whim…few checks and balances.
One strategy the Liberal Party has used to great effect here to advance their pro-homosexual agenda is to appoint liberal judges who believe a “ban” on gay “marriage” is unconstitutional. In fact, 20 years ago said same party debated the merits of including language in the constitution that would forbid discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” but decided firmly against it because it would have meant a backlash from voters and losing power, Liberals will do (and have done) anything to keep power. They even explicitly defined marriage as between one man and one woman. This of course didn’t stop them from appointing their activist judges which have now read between the lines of the constitution what they wanted to read and legislated gay marriage from the bench. The Liberals can now say that the “courts made us do it” to avoid any voter backlash. They have now reframed the debate by accusing the Conservatives of being “bigots” trying to “take away equality rights guaranteed by the constitution”.
Oh, what a sad country I live in. Don’t let that happen to you America!
Sorry if that last post was too long. I didn’t realize I had started to rant.
Don’t worry.
Wasn’t too long. 🙂
I found the roll call of the Senate vote if anybody cares:
http://tinyurl.com/yv5ga