by Donald Kaul

Last week the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of
Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, perhaps
the most influential appellate court after the Supreme. She is, by all
accounts, a remarkable woman. 

She is African-American and as her supporters never tire of
pointing out, a sharecropper’s daughter who overcame early widowhood and single
motherhood to work her way through college and UCLA law school. She maneuvered
her way through the political thickets of California
to become, eventually, an associate justice on the California Supreme Court. 

She is said to write poetry, read widely and her speeches
are peppered with quotations by such as Cicero, Ayn Rand, Samuel Beckett and
Chris Rock – that crowd. She is, in short, a practically perfect candidate for
an important judicial appointment. She has but a single flaw; hardly worth
mentioning, but I’ll mention it anyway. 

She’s nuts.

She is a raving conservative lunatic who not only grasps the
most extreme right-wing views available to her, she dips them in blood and
waves them around like flags. She has said in speeches, for example, that the
New Deal, with its emphasis on regulation of business and help for the
disadvantaged, has brought upon us a new slavery. 

“In the heyday of liberal democracy all roads lead to
slavery,” she has said. “We no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. If
we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is
inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy – a license to steal, a warrant for
oppression.”

She found a 1937 Supreme Court ruling allowing federal
regulation of the workplace particularly egregious, calling it a “triumph of
our own socialist revolution.”

 “Where government
moves in, community retreats and civil society disintegrates. The result is a
debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue
contemptible.” She apparently wants a return to the pre-New Deal era – bread
lines, child labor, unfettered stock market manipulation. Those were the days.

Still, that wasn’t what bothered me most about Judge Brown.
People say extreme things in speeches all of the time; I’ve done it myself. Nor
was it the fact that in cases involving discrimination against minorities or
women that have come before her, she seems most often to favor the
discriminators rather than their victims. There are two sides to every issue;
she’s entitled to her opinion.

No, it’s statements like this:

“These are perilous
times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives
but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith
who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

Or this:

“Atheistic humanism handed human destiny over to the great
god autonomy and this is quite a different idea of freedom. Freedom then
becomes willfulness.”

As a matter of fact, these are the least perilous times for
people of faith – particularly the evangelical Protestant faith to which Judge
Brown belongs – in my lifetime. Name the last “atheistic humanist” hired by the
Bush administration to do anything. “People of faith” are in the saddle and
riding the rest of us hard. And I – an agnostic humanist, if you have to
know – have not handed over destiny, human and otherwise, to any god, let alone
the great god autonomy. As a group we secularists are at least as moral and
ethical as our religious brethren and are more fun at parties.

Believing in the progressive income tax and Social Security
is not a mortal sin. Someone should tell Judge Brown that.

The scary thing about Judge Brown’s appointment was that she
wasn’t even the worst nominee to be confirmed to the bench that week. There’s
Judge William Pryor, Jr., who thinks Roe v. Wade (the abortion decision) “the
worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and compares homosexual
relations to bestiality and necrophilia.

God, if any, help us
all.

Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington
columnist for the “Des Moines Register.” He has covered the foolishness in our
nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards
along the way. Email: donald.kaul2@verizon.net.  You can read Donald Kaul weekly at MinutemanMedia