Conservative Christians press for confirmation of John Roberts to Supreme Court

The final two speakers did not represent the Christian tradition. They still captured the largely Christian audience with their humor, which was sometimes mildly self-deprecating, more often just stating what makes common sense.

Rabbi Cliff Fiedler went through the list of Congressional bills that the Justice Sunday II leadership is pressing. One of them is the Protection of Marriage Act. His response: "If two gays married on the courthouse steps in San Francisco can't save their marriage, can a Protection of Marriage Act accomplish it?" Like others, he expressed his fears of a theocracy in which wealth and power are concentrated, while there is indifference to children, the poor, and the sick.

Gail Seavey, freshly arrived as minister of the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Nashville, acknowledged that she was a "damnyankee," but pointed out that, starting in New England and spreading to other colonies and states, there were Baptists and Univeralists and others who went to court, one by one, and persuaded those courts to separate church and state and not force people to support someone else's religion. That is a legal heritage, more than two centuries old, which is worth preserving, especially in this time when some are seeking religious uniformity and the power to enforce it.

Speech delivered August 14, 2005 at the Cathedral of Praise

I bring you greetings from people of faith from Puerto Rico to Hawaii and from Alaska to Texas, as well as from my home state of California. We are grateful to the good people of Nashville for coming together today to affirm that people of faith believe in JUSTICE EVERYDAY, not in "Just Us Sunday."

Those folks meeting tonight with Tom Delay, Chuck Colson, and James Dobson think they own the Bible and God speaks only to them. They are boasting that they have taken over two branches of our federal government and that they are going to take over the third. Earlier this year, Tom Delay and his ilk in Congress actually threatened to take away the funding for our courts if judges did not enforce their narrow agenda. There’s a word for an extremist government controlled by one narrow religion; it is called theocracy, not democracy.

We here today inherit a great legacy of people of faith who organized movements to safeguard the core values of our democracy. They worked for abolition, women’s suffrage, care for the poor, peace, and civil rights. Even Roe v. Wade was started in a church basement in Dallas TX by women of faith who were wanted to protect women’s lives.

And now, one grieving mother, camped in Crawford, TX, is trying to stop an illegal, unjust, and unwise war. Cindy Sheehan was a speaker on our national Freedom and Faith Bus Tour in June, and, following today’s events, a number of religious leaders will leave here and join her in Crawford to stand with her and other grieving mothers struggling for peace.  [Brock reports on this visit >>]

My Christian tradition taught me to value the religious freedom of everyone in this land. My faith is not just something I do in private. It informs my politics, which it should. But I know that if my values are good for our democracy, other religious and nonreligious people can discuss them, and we can reach a common good for all.

This commitment to the common good of all is one way I live out the core of my faith, which is that God is love. Jesus told us to love our neighbor and he placed no limits on who is our neighbor, no limits by race, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, IQ, language, physical ability, nationality, or income level. My faith is strengthened by how widely I love my neighbors, not by how narrowly I define them.

Today, the Christian extreme right has given American Christians a bad name around the world. Instead of loving our neighbors, they seem determined to ignore them. They are determined to control the world for their own interests rather than being part of the community of God, which knows no national boundaries.

When Tom Delay and his friends want to deny religious freedom to their Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Unitarian, and Sikh neighbors, we must ask, Where is the love?

When they want to dismantle affirmative action, we must ask, Where is the love?

When they deny health care and a liveable wage to 45 million Americans, we must ask, Where is the love?

When they let 7 out 1000 babies die for lack of support and nutrition for their mothers, giving us the worst infant mortality rate in the industrialized world, we must ask, Where is the love?

When they support a war built on false intelligence and wishful thinking, a war that is stealing our young people, killing civilians by the thousands, and increasing the dangers of terrorism, we must ask, Where is the love?

They are not only waging a war in Iraq. They are waging a war against love in our own country.

They ask God to bless America, but for God to bless us, we must respect what God has created: the world and everyone in it. We must honor our commitments to the protection of our environment, we must uphold international law, we must foster peace, and we must care for those in need, not only here, but around the world.

You here today know that people of faith must not be silent. The mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers of those serving in our military must do all we can to end this horrible war and keep speaking and working until it is ended. We must speak up and do all we can for the next few years to protect this precious experiment we call democracy because there is none but us together to protect it.

Let us bring God’s blessing to America by upholding the separation of church and hate. Let us protect all of our faiths through the separation of church and state. And let us join together to work for freedom and justice for all.