Sheila Suess Kennedy has a column in the Indy Star entitled Playing by rules of law and order. She likens Speaker of the House, Brian Bosma and U.S. Representative for Indiana’s 8th District, John Hostettler to a couple of 3 year olds throwing tantrums when they don’t get their way. Their way, in this case, is the ability to use state and federal government for religious proselytization. Rep. Bosma supports the use of sectarian prayer as part of official House business while Rep. Hostettler refuses to condemn what appears to be a culture at the Air Force Academy hostile to people who aren’t born again Christians. Both deliberately miss the point about the role of the government in matters of religion and accuse their detractors as being “hostile to people of faith.”
More important, says Kennedy, is Hostettler’s attempt to defund enforcement of a court order involving the 10 Commandments.
To their credit, Gibson County officials have disavowed any intention to defy the court order. The attorney who defended the placement of the monument in court was quoted as saying, “We’re law-abiding people. Whether we like the ruling or not is irrelevant.”
That, of course, is the point. The rule of law becomes meaningless if we only have to obey laws and court decisions we like. Similarly, separation of powers — one of the fundamental elements of the American government structure — becomes meaningless if one branch can effectively control either of the others. (If the Democrats were to win control of Congress in 2006, would Hostettler agree that they could then “de-fund” the Bush administration, to keep it in line? Not likely!)
Think back to your days in Little League or sandlot baseball or whatever team game you played. What if the umpire called an out, but the player refused to abide by the call and insisted on running the bases? How long would the game have continued? We all know that every call an umpire makes isn’t correct; people can and do argue–often heatedly — with umpires and their decisions. But without an umpire, without someone whose job it is to call them as he sees them, without someone who has final authority to make the call, there can be no game at all.
The lawyer from Gibson County understands that; John Hostettler clearly doesn’t.
Which brings me to the point of this longish rehashing of matters I’ve already covered at length in this space. The umpire analogy reminds me of my Civil Procedure professor telling the class about judges. He said judges were like umpires and proceeded to recount a story of 3 umpires, a young one, a middle-aged one, and an old one. The young umpire said about calling pitches, “I calls ’em as I sees ’em.” The middle-aged one snorted scornfully, and said, “Hah. I callse ’em as they is. The old one just shook his head, and said, “Boys. They ain’t nuthin’ ’til I call ’em.”
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