Goodling ...So help her God

Libby Spencer

Now I understand why Monica Goodling refuses to testify about the attorney purge scandal at Justice. As a born-again Christian, she's not allowed to lie. Makes you wonder how she and 150 fellow graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law ever got jobs with the Bush administration in the first place, but it does explain why her most memorable public quote is "no comment."

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate fills us in on the backstory about Regent U and generally doesn't have a problem with the administration filling its ranks with grads whose "express goal" is "to tear down the wall between church and state," but I find it really objectionable myself. Without the undue influence of AG Gonzales and this team of young holy rollers, this might not have happened.

In the five years after 2001, the civil rights division brought no voting cases on behalf of African-Americans. It brought one employment case on behalf of an African-American. Instead, the division took up the "civil rights" abuses of reverse discrimination—claims of voter fraud or discrimination against Christians. On Feb. 20, Gonzales announced a new initiative called the First Freedom Project to carry out "even greater enforcement of religious rights for all Americans." In his view, the fight for a student's right to read a Bible at school is as urgent a civil rights problem as the right to vote.

How is that not problematic? I have to agree with Michael J.W. Stickings.

... [H]ow is it possible for religious (in this case conservative evangelical Christian) legal scholarship not to distort the law according to its own religious purposes? If you're out to do God's work, after all, you likely won't have much time to do the work of a secular liberal democracy with safeguards against religious rule like the United States.

...[T]here is something profoundly anti-American about this Christian leadership out to change the world. It's bad for America, which isn't the theocracy these zealots imagine it to be, and likely also bad for Christianity, which ought to concern itself not with politics but with faith.

Amen to that and on another note, take a look at Ms. Goodling's webpage. Don't you think she's showing an awful lot of leg for a good God-fearing Christian? I thought they had some strict rules about modesty.