For Bachmann, God and Justice Were Intertwined

[rug]

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

The entrance to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., where Michele Bachmann was part of the first class of law students, arriving in 1979.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: October 13, 2011

TULSA, Okla. — Michele Bachmann was 22 and newly married when, in the fall of 1979, she and 53 other aspiring lawyers arrived on the manicured campus of Oral Roberts University here. They were the inaugural class in an unusual educational experiment: a law school rooted in charismatic Christian belief.

“We hope to guide our students to a deeper understanding of their spiritual gifts and of their place in God’s kingdom,” the school’s dean, Charles Kothe, wrote in the first edition of its law review, The Journal of Christian Jurisprudence. The aim, he said, was to train the next generation of legal minds to “integrate their Christian faith into their chosen profession,” and to “restore law to its historic roots in the Bible.”

Today, as a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota seeking her party’s nomination for president, Mrs. Bachmann often talks of her work as a lawyer, describing herself as a “former federal tax litigation attorney,” though not identifying her employer as the Internal Revenue Service. She points to her master’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, from a nine-month program in tax law.

But the far more formative experience was one she rarely discusses in front of secular audiences: the legal education she received at Oral Roberts University, founded by the Christian televangelist and Pentecostal faith healer of that name. It was, one fellow student recalls, a “Petri dish of conservatism and Judeo-Christian thought.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/politics/bachmanns-years-at-oral-roberts-university.html?_r=2&ref=us

[struggle4progress]

1. Now, see, I had thought our legal tradition sprang from a bunch of hardboiled Anglo-Saxon

opportunists out-arguing their conquerors in the courts established by William the Bastard after 1066 -- and a crafty gaggle of shrewd tendentious knaves they seem to have been, too, whatwith inventing great webs of novel home-spun still-undecipherable legal goobledy-gook in just a few years

[onager]

2. Local joke in Tulsa about that statue...

Originally, the hands were outspread, with the palms turned up toward Heaven.

Then a nickel rolled past them...