A Federal Judge responds to Dobson and the dominionists

The following letter was posted by the Aberdeen News.com on Sun, June. 12, 2005

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Misunderstanding alarming

To the editor - A recent article by Professor Art Marmorstein displayed an alarming misunderstanding of the nature of our government. He stated that judges are either of the John Lennon school or the Bolshevik school. I know judges in South Dakota and most federal judges. The professor is badly mistaken.

He praised James Dobson's Family Policy Council. Dobson in Sioux Falls last year stated that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is "the most dangerous man in America." Does that sound like a rational statement? Outlandish statements by Dobson, Pat Robertson and others encourage deranged people to act violently against judges and relatives of judges.

The professor stated: "All they ask is to have men and women on the bench who will defer to the democratic process rather than arbitrarily imposing their own ideas on the rest of us." He assumes judges act arbitrarily. If so, the solution is to go to a higher court. We have three co-equal branches of government. Our founding fathers knew what they were doing. No branch of government blindly "defers" to the other. Our judiciary is intended to protect the constitutional rights of citizens, not blindly endorse unconstitutional actions taken by Congress, the president or a state legislature.

Judges should, of course, respect our elected officials and do our best to not infringe on their prerogatives. Members of Congress should treat the judiciary in the same manner.

Charles B. Kornmann
United States District Judge Aberdeen

The founding fathers knew what they were doing when they established the judiciary with the power to review the constitutionality of government legislation and actions. Without such an independent judiciary, the government ceased to operate under the Constitution. Instead, the constitute becomes whatever the majority in the legislature says it is.

This is exactly what Dobson and the Dominionists want. They want control of the legislature and the White House with no independent judiciary to stop them.

Then they will set up an organization that submits all legislation to a group of theologians that rule on whether the actions of government conform to the dictates of the Bible. That's what Judge Roy Moore's "Ten Commandments in the Courthouse" and all law as based in the Bible means.

That's what the Shiite Fundamentalists in Iran have done since 1979. That is what it means to require that all government be based on the Bible rather than the Constitution. That's what the entire argument around Terri Schiavo was about.