Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2143308/?nav=foKennedy Made Me Do It
How one Supreme Court Justice makes all conservatives stupid.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, June 8, 2006, at 4:35 PM ET
Poor Anthony Kennedy is taking it in the chops again. A candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court more or less ran his entire campaign against Justice Kennedy's opinion in Roper v. Simmons—the 2005 decision that barred states from executing juvenile criminals. Then The Wall Street Journal laid the entire blame for the Senate's astonishingly futile and gratuitous gay-marriage debate directly on Kennedy's doorstep. And an excerpt from the new book by Ann Coulter's breasts suggests that he is somehow responsible for the ban on prayer in public schools.
Why is it that whenever conservatives behave stupidly, they blame it on Justice Kennedy? Liberals are equally capable of the stupidity. But they don't go around blaming Antonin Scalia for it.
Consider Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker.* Apparently he didn't like Kennedy's majority opinion in Roper. Fair enough. But Parker didn't just express his disapproval, he urged his colleagues on the Alabama Supreme Court to ignore the Roper ruling altogether when they faced a substantially similar case last winter. He chose to talk to them about the matter in a January op-ed in the Birmingham News that reads less like legal argument than Fox News talking points. Urging his brethren to bypass Roper because it was "the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," Parker wrote: "State supreme court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are 'precedents.' ...
judge takes an oath to support the Constitution—not to automatically follow activist judges who believe their own evolving standards of decency trump the text of the Constitution."
Parker, who got clocked this week at the polls, was rendered this frantic because, he claimed, Kennedy "based" his opinion in Roper "on foreign law." Parker wasn't really discussing Roper, though. He was, in fact, declaring Alabama's independence from the U.S. Supreme Court, a court dominated by "establishment liberals" who "look down on the pro-family policies, Southern heritage, evangelical Christianity, and other blessings of our great state."
{snipped by DU Admin}