Posted: 7/25/03
Robertson wants to pray justices into retirement
By Hannah Lodwick
Associated Baptist Press
WASHINGTON (ABP)–Religious Right leader Pat Robertson has launched a 21-day “prayer offensive” to persuade the Supreme Court's oldest or most infirm justices to retire so a more conservative court can emerge.
The TV preacher recently e-mailed an “urgent call for prayer” to viewers of his CBN network, asking them to pray that several justices will retire.
“One justice is 83 years old, another has cancer and another has a heart condition,” said the letter, posted on the CBN website. “Would it not be possible for God to put it in the minds of these three judges that the time has come to retire?”
While the identity of the judge with a heart condition is uncertain, Robertson apparently referenced Justice John Paul Stevens, 83, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had colon cancer surgery in 1999, as the other two.
“With their retirement and the appointment of conservative judges, a massive change in federal jurisprudence can take place,” Robertson said in the letter announcing “Operation Supreme Court Freedom.”
Critics of Robertson's letter responded with dismay.
“There is something ghoulish about praying for the removal of some of the Supreme Court's justices while noting their age and health problems,” said Barry Lynn, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Robertson and his friends want a Supreme Court that enforces the Religious Right's version of biblical law.”
Robertson and other conservatives want to change the makeup of the high court in part because of past decisions to legalize abortion and bar government-sanctioned prayer in public schools.
More recently, conservatives blasted the court's June decision to decriminalize state laws that ban certain gay sexual acts. The court's ruling in Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas stated that gays and lesbians “are entitled to respect for their private lives.”
Robertson's letter said the court's ruling “opened the door to homosexual marriage, bigamy, legalized prostitution and even incest.”
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