First Day of Roberts Hearings

Here is the text of John Roberts' measured opening statement.

Contrast it with this statement from California's other embarassing senator, Dianne Feinstein. Here's the most ridiculous part:

I recently traveled to Europe where I saw monuments enshrining the tragedies that have occurred in the name of religion. In Budapest along the River Danube there are 60 pairs of shoes covered in copper: women’s, men’s, small children’s.

During World War II, Hungarian fascist and Nazi soldiers forced thousands of Jews including men, women, and small children to remove their shoes, as a final humiliation, before shooting them and letting their bodies fall and drift down the river. These shoes represent a powerful symbol of man’s inhumanity.

And we cannot forget that in American history, Puritans, Baptists, Catholics, Jews and other religious individuals came to this continent looking for a society where they could be free from the persecution they faced in Europe and England.

In response, the Founding Fathers created a balance in the Constitution that provided for freedom of worship as well as for separation of church and state. In their efforts to protect against religious persecution, the Framers established a secular government that would remain separate from religion.

However, these basic principles could be severely weakened or unraveled depending on the Court’s allowing government funding of religious education, prayer in school, and the display of religious symbols on public property and land.

Say what? How does what happened on another continent, more than half a century ago have any bearing on John Roberts' fitness to be Chief Justice -- which is, after all, the point of the hearings?

Doesn't Senator Feinstein understand that many of the Nazi and fascist atrocities sprang from an ideology that abhors traditional religion and allows it no role in the state? The Nazis were not religious extremists, after all. In fact, the horrors she decries derive not from extremism of the values now generally espoused by American conservatives; they spring from taking the left's total "separation of church and state" to an ugly and gruesom extreme.

And the "Puritans, Baptists, Catholics, Jews and other religious individuals" to whom Feinstein referred came to this country -- not just to "escape persecution" -- but to establish a society where their freedom to worship would not be abridged by an overbearing government. Too bad that inconvenient fact doesn't fit Senator Feinstein's narrative.