2008—Some nine months after his nomination to the Fourth Circuit, federal district judge Robert J. Conrad has still not been afforded a confirmation hearing, even though he received the ABA judicial-evaluations committee’s unanimous highest rating of “well qualified” and enjoys the strong support of both home-state senators. Trying to defend his obstruction of Conrad, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy accuses Conrad of having made “anti-Catholic comments about a nun.” In fact, Conrad, himself a Catholic, had in 1999 criticized a nun for “the near total contempt [she] displayed for the Roman Catholic Church.” Conrad’s nomination will expire months later without his ever receiving a hearing.
2009—The lawless judicial attack on traditional marriage and on representative government continues, as the Iowa supreme court rules unanimously (in Varnum v. Brien) that a “state statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.”
Central to the court’s ruling is its assertion that “equal protection can only be defined by the standards of each generation.” An intelligent citizen not attuned to the deceptive rhetoric of living-constitutionalist judges would sensibly imagine that that proposition would mean that the court would defer to the standard of the current generation of Iowans reflected in the statute that Iowa adopted in 1998. But what the court really means is that each generation of judges is free to expand the meaning of equal protection according to its own subjective standards—and to shrink the realm of representative government. Or, as the court puts it in activist gobbledygook:
“The point in time when the standard of equal protection finally takes a new form is a product of the conviction of one, or many, individuals that a particular grouping results in inequality and the ability of the judicial system to perform its constitutional role free from the influences that tend to make society’s understanding of equal protection resistant to change.”