Bryan Fischer's judiciary: Where false witness takes the stand

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11/08/2010

by Jeremy Hooper

Sometimes the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer condemns gays with lines like "homosexuals in the military gave us...six million dead Jews." Other times he pretends our President is an eight-year-old boy who covertly sends messages via his middle finger. But today, Fischer is opting for the "If I say it, it'll make it true" page of his playbook, positing the following about what those of us who speak out in favor of an independent judiciary are supposedly seeking:

"All the arguments against throwing these hyperactive [Iowa] judges off the bench boiled down to one argument in the end: we need an “independent” judiciary.

This begs the question: independent of what? We can all agree that we need a judiciary that is independent of political pressure, bribery, and corruption.

However, that’s not the kind of independence our friends on the left want. They want a judiciary which is untethered to the constitution and the law. That’s something no stable society can afford. If judges operate independently of the constitution and the law, as these Iowa judges did, we no longer have the rule of law but the rule of men, something the Founders rightly despised.

The role of judges is not to make law but to apply it. When judges begin to legislate from the bench, usurping powers that properly belong to the legislative branch of government, they immediately forfeit their moral authority to exercise judicial power, and the people have every right to send them packing."
Fischer: An independent judiciary independent of what? [AFA]

Totally right, Bryan. Except, you know: For the "totally" and "right" parts (and perhaps even the "Bryan" part, as we've always been suspect of that iconoclastic "y").

The obvious reality: We who supported the Iowa judges and who continue to support judicial fairness in general are supporting the independent judiciary concept by its very definition. We are supporting a court that puts equal protection and due process above personal faith condemnations. A court that bases a ruling on the arguments that were actually presented to them. A court that does right by a minority population of tax-paying citizens, even when political pressure points to a markedly easier choice. A court that doesn't need well-financed out-of-state groups to convince voters of what they supposedly said, instead letting their reasoned rulings talk for them (reasoned rulings that the opposition voices never once encouraged their own supporters to actually sit down, read, and intellectually process, and in fact, actually went out of their way to unfairly clip or misrepesent).

Bryan Fischer is now seeking to define his opposition, continuing the hope that his supporters will take his hooked- and sinkered-line rather than actually listen to what judicial scholars have to say on the matter. Right, fine -- whatever. We just wonder what lies he'll use once a few more independent judicial bodies rule in the way that's written in both the cards and the constitution, and a long-duped band of social conservatives begins to see that they've been focusing their ire, cash, and time on the wrong band of activists!

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**FOR THOSE NOT FAMILIAR WITH FISCHER: He's the guy who's said that "homosexuals in the military gave us...six million dead Jews," who's said "homosexuals should be disqualified from public office," who has called on Christian conservatives to breed gays and progressives out of existence, has called gay sex a "form of domestic terrorism," who's said only gays were savage enough for Hitler, has compared gays to heroin abusers, has directly compared laws against gay soldiers to those that apply to bank robbers, who once invoked a Biblical story about stabbing "sexually immoral" people with spears, saying we need this kind of action in modern day, and who has spoken out against gays serving as public school teachers, and who has blamed gay activists for dead gay kids, saying that: "If we want to see fewer students commit suicide, we want fewer homosexual students."