An 'Originalist' on the Law, and the Bible

Reprinted with permission from EthicsDaily.com.

President Bush's nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court is an evangelical Christian and longtime member of a Dallas church whose preaching pastor is influential in the Southern Baptist Convention.

White House Counsel Harriet Miers had a Catholic upbringing but joined Valley View Christian Church 25 years ago. Barry McCarty, the church's preaching minister, has been chief parliamentarian for every Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting since 1986, the only non-Baptist to hold the post. Beginning with Charles Stanley in 1986, Barry McCarty's counsel took center stage in parliamentary rulings in the late 1980s that helped fundamentalist SBC presidents solidify control of the nation's largest non-Catholic faith group.

Miers' pastor, Ron Key, who left the church recently after 33 years, said she taught Sunday school, made coffee, brought donuts, and served on a missions committee. "She worked out her faith in practical, behind-the-scenes ways," Key said, quoted by Marvin Olasky in a World Magazine blog. "She doesn't draw attention to herself. She's humble, self-effacing."

Nathan Hecht, a Texas Supreme Court justice and elder at the church, described the congregation as "a conservative evangelical church . in the vernacular, fundamentalist, but the media have used that word to tar us."

Key told Olasky that the church is strongly pro-life, but that in the 25 years he has known Miers they never talked about her views on abortion, an issue certain to be a focus of her confirmation hearings. O'Connor has been a swing vote in several cases involving a woman's right to privacy in early pregnancy and permitting restrictions in later terms only if they don't endanger the woman's health.

The abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America said the burden is on President Bush and Miers to demonstrate she shares O'Connor's commitment to "fundamental freedoms, including a woman's right to choose."

As president of the Texas State Bar in 1993, Miers urged the American Bar Association to put the abortion issue to a referendum, questioning whether the ABA should "be trying to speak for the entire legal community" on a divisive issue.

In 1989, the year she was elected to the Dallas City Council, she donated $150 to Texans for Life, an anti-abortion group. Hecht, a strongly pro-life justice who stood up for parental notification laws regulating abortion five years ago, said of Miers, "her personal views are consistent with that of evangelical Christians." In addition to her church work, she has served on the board of Exodus Ministry, a non-denominational Christian organization in Dallas established to assist ex-offenders and their families become productive members of society by meeting both their spiritual and physical needs. The organization is in not related to Exodus International, a controversial ministry that says homosexuals can charge their sexual orientation through a faith commitment. Exodus International has not yet taken a position on Miers' nomination to the Court.

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