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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Liberal religious leaders on Thursday criticized Sunday's planned rally to back U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and said its Christian conservative organizers should not drag religion into his confirmation fight.
"There is no one religious position on the Roberts nomination, no one religious view on the future of the court or the cases it will hear," Rev. Bill Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, told reporters in a conference call.Sinkford and other religious leaders criticized plans for the evangelical rally, which is designed to build support for Roberts' nomination and highlight what organizers say is the court's judicial activism and hostility to religion.The Sunday rally in Nashville, Tennessee, is the second televised church event co-sponsored by prominent Christian conservative groups like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. The event is titled "Justice Sunday II: God Save the United States and this Honorable Court." The first "Justice Sunday" rally in April attacked Democrats filibustering against President George W. Bush's judicial nominees, saying the Democrats were opposed to people of faith. It featured an appearance by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist.
Frist was not invited to speak at Sunday's rally after he recently broke with Bush and supported an expansion of human embryonic stem cell research. House of Representatives Republican leader Tom DeLay of Texas will speak on Sunday.Other speakers at the rally, to be broadcast live to churches around the country and carried on hundreds of radio stations and the Internet, will include former Democratic Sen. Zell Miller (news, bio, voting record) and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson.Liberal religious groups criticized the organizers' emphasis on religion in the evaluation of Roberts and called it a threat to the principle of separation of church and state.
"A senator or a congressman's faith should never be called into question based on their support or opposition to a particular nominee," said Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary to the National Council of Churches.A spokeswoman for the Family Research Council said liberal religious groups were being disingenuous in pushing to remove issues of faith from the Roberts confirmation debate while injecting their own political views.
"We think the democratic process is robust enough to accommodate all kinds of voices," said Charmaine Yoest, a senior fellow at the council.Edgar said the group's only position on the Roberts nomination was that tough questioning of his views and experience should take place."It is damaging to the legitimacy of the confirmation process to suggest the examination of a nominee's record, as well as support for or opposition to a nominee, is in any way religiously motivated," Edgar said.
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