The Hundred Percenters were out in force recently at a meeting in Washington, D.C., to talk about calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (not a member of the JFK branch of the Kennedys).
What has stirred the Hundred Percenters up about this less-than-radical justice is his recent written opinion that America shouldn't execute juvenile criminals, and another Kennedy ruling striking down anti-sodomy statutes left over from America's dark ages, otherwise known as 1950.
Now, an opinion is an opinion, even if it belongs to a Supreme Court justice. Or a local newspaper columnist.
The critics' language is what scares me.
Attorney Edwin Vierra told the D.C. gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his (judicial) philosophy "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
The coupling of foreigners, communist theorists and Satan all in one sentence drew rousing applause from the audience, according to the Washington Post, which has to cover these things.
As near as I can figure, Vierra is saying that Satan favors sex that isn't, shall we say, straightforward.
This would be pathetic except that many allegedly rational people support such drivelish bigotry.
Phyllis Schlafly, a shrillish older lady who even the Post now calls "the doyenne of American conservatism," proving longevity almost always outlasts talent or brains, spoke out against Justice Kennedy, too.
Her complaints focused on his ruling to spare juvenile murderers from state-sanctioned lethal injection and electrocution.
This alleged supporter of Mom, Motherhood and Apple Pie thinks Kennedy should be impeached for not killing kids who evidently must be evil because they committed an evil act before they were old enough to vote.
I'm not saying here that there aren't teenagers who deserve a long time in prison. And I support the death penalty in some adult cases. I'm simply saying it boggles my mind to categorize not wanting to execute teenagers as an impeachable offense.
Even more frightening is that this poisonous ignorance wasn't spewed out from the pulpit of some backwater Mississippi church, the speaker standing proudly beneath linked confederate and American flags. This was at a fancy setting in our nation's capital - a Marriott Hotel, for god's sake.
What I think it is important to remember in dark times like these, when real conversation is screamed down by people who think with their unexamined feelings and not their little brains, is that it was ever thus here in the Land of the Free.
What's encouraging to me amidst all this Middle Ages thinking is that change does come, albeit slowly.
This month, 148 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, citing the same gods and the same devils, ruled that Dred Scott, an African American slave, could not sue for his freedom in the Land of the Free because he was only three-fifths human.
The Dred Scott ruling was pure balderdash, of course. Evil in its results, if not its intentions - who knows what was in the minds of the nine justices seated in 1857?
But that evil, at least in this country, seems to be defeated, despite rear-guard actions by alleged patriots who will always refuse to see the handwriting on the cultural wall.
Freedom is not a simple concept.
Fascism, according to which the state is always right because it's our state, is very appealing to the kind of folks who used to equate women smoking in public with the devil, and who nowadays, from a different side of the aisle, perceive women smoking in public as murderesses - death by passive smoke.
It's reassuring to know what's right and what's wrong, and that the devil is always involved.
Justice Kennedy is a bad man who favors crime, Satan and sodomy.
What are we waiting for? Oh yeah, a commercial break. Then we'll write an angry letter to the newspaper about this Liberal Demon. This Satan-Lover.
It's our Freedom-Loving duty.[[In-content Ad]]
