Bush Wants To Place Anti-Separationist Law Professor On Federal Court.

President George W. Bush has nominated a University of Utah law professor known for his strident hostility toward the separation of church and state for a seat on the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bush announced the nomination of Michael W. McConnell May 9, despite the scholar's consistant opposition to First Amendment principles such as church-state separation. Americans United announced that same day that it will oppose the nomination.

"This nomination represents a terrible assault on American freedom by the Bush administration," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. "McConnell's record is one of relentless hostility for individual rights. I urge the Senate to swiftly reject his nomination.

"McConnell is the Religious Right's dream court nominee," continued Lynn. "He's a conservative Christian, who's willing to use the force of government to impose his viewpoint."

Lynn noted that McConnell is a member of the Christian Legal Society, a board member of the right-wing Federalist Society and an advisor of the Becket Fund -- all groups seeking a radical abandonment of the Supreme Court's church-state doctrine.

The AU head charged that McConnell has a long record of extremism on a broad range of individual rights issues. He pointed to the following examples:

* McConnell called for a "radical" departure from decades of church-state separation rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in a March 11, 2000, interview with the Salt Lake Tribune and has indicated his support for school-sponsored graduation prayer, voucher subsidies for religious schools and charitable choice aid to ministries.

* In a Winter 1992 article in the University of Chicago Law Review, McConnell insisted that the Constitution allows broad public funding of religious institutions. "We must therefore reject the central animating idea of modern Establishment Clause analysis: that tax-payers have a constitutional right to insist that none of their taxes be used for religious purposes," he wrote.

* McConnell, writing in the Utah Law Review in 1999, described church-state separation as never having been a "plausible or attractive conception of proper relations between government and religion in the modern activist state."

* The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 30, 2000, reported McConnell as saying that religion cannot be separated from other areas of life, "Many people think that it's possible to have an entirely secular education and any religious training can be on the side. I don't believe that religion is something which is a separable aspect of life," he said.

* Writing in American Enterprise magazine in January of 1993, McConnell criticized Supreme Court rulings that upheld church-state separation, including Lee v. Weisman (1992), which prohibited government-sponsored prayer at public school graduation ceremonies, and County of Allegheny v. ACLU (1989), which limited government endorsement of religious displays on public property. He said these decisions "have nothing to do with freedom of religion. There is not a single person in these cases who has been hindered or discouraged by government action from following a religious practice or way of life."

* According to the Los Angeles Times (Jan. 13, 2001), McConnell praised Attorney General John Ashcroft's 1999 remarks at Bob Jones University as "beautiful." (In his remarks at the controversial school, Ashcroft said the source of America's character is "godly and eternal" and "We have no king but Jesus.") McConnell said Ashcroft "is saying freedom flourishes and the equality of human beings flourish when man is subordinate to God."

* In 1987, McConnell was an aggressive advocate of Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. McConnell said "there is no more distinguished jurist in the land" than Bork and criticized the prospects of Supreme Court nominees who are "unknown, muddleheaded middle-of-the-roaders." (July 12, 1987, Newsday)

Lynn noted that McConnell has argued several church-state cases at the Supreme Court, each time arguing for a lower wall of separation. Last year he argued Mitchell v. Helms, advocating increased public aid to private religious schools, and in 1995 he argued Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, seeking public university assistance for religious publications.

McConnell is also a strident opponent of legal abortion who has frequently denounced Roe v. Wade and other Supreme Court rulings upholding abortion rights. In a Jan. 22, 1998, Wall Street Journal opinion piece, he blasted the Supreme Court for its "extreme vision of abortion rights." McConnell argued that the high court can deny legal protection "to fetuses only if it presupposes they are not persons.... One can make a pretty convincing argument, however, that fetuses are persons. They are alive; their species is Homo sapiens."

In 1996, McConnell signed an extreme anti-abortion document called the "Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern." It called for the high court to overturn Roe and urged Congress to pass a constitutional amendment banning all abortions, including those involving rape and incest. The statement claims that "abortion kills 1.5 million innocent human beings in America every year," and mourns the fact that some fathers "watch their children killed against their will" and "learn to their distress only much later that a child they would have raised is dead."

Observed AU's Lynn, "After looking at his record, McConnell starts to make Bork look moderate. This man wants to gut the constitutional protections that Americans count on. He's the wrong man for the job."

Americans United members, said Lynn, should contact their U.S. senators and urge them to vote against the McConnell nomination.