Was surfing the web site of a newspaper in Japan and found the following notice:

It was in reference to the recent July 4th holiday and was accompanied by a pro-America editorial by Ambassador Howard Baker (former Senator from Tennessee and Watergate Commission-member; y’know, the guy who asked John Dean “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”). The editorial also thanked the Japanese people for their friendship and partnership “in our fight for peace, prosperity and democracy.”

The piece is part of a series the paper is doing congratulating different countries on their national days (Venesuela was the next country to be congratulated, on July 5th).

I thought it was just dandy that this Japanese newspaper would take the time to congratulate the U.S. on Independence Day, and so in the same spirit, on behalf of the American people, I’d like to congratulate the people of Japan as they celebrate their national day (whenever that may be).

Was surfing the web site of a newspaper in Japan and found the following notice:

It was in reference to the recent July 4th holiday and was accompanied by a pro-America editorial by Ambassador Howard Baker (former Senator from Tennessee and Watergate Commission-member; y’know, the guy who asked John Dean “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”). The editorial also thanked the Japanese people for their friendship and partnership “in our fight for peace, prosperity and democracy.”

The piece is part of a series the paper is doing congratulating different countries on their national days (Venesuela was the next country to be congratulated, on July 5th).

I thought it was just dandy that this Japanese newspaper would take the time to congratulate the U.S. on Independence Day, and so in the same spirit, on behalf of the American people, I’d like to congratulate the people of Japan as they celebrate their national day (whenever that may be).

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.