The Nine

I just finished reading The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, and I recommend it. It is very well written and lives up to its name with a bunch of behind-the-scenes stories and analysis. Fabulous. One theme I found especially interesting was the interplay between Sandra Day O'Connor and the religious right. Throughout my adult life, I've heard how Justice O'Connor's opinions were a betrayal to the Republican Party that nominated and supported her. For her part, she felt that the far right hijacked her beloved party. As I read this book, I came to realize that I sympathized much more with Justice O'Connor than with her detractors. I completely agree with her.
Take school prayer, for example. A large swath of the Republican Party places re-instituting prayer in public schools high on its agenda. I don't understand it at all. While I believe in God and pray often, I don't see how it is somehow Christian to force people to not only pray, but to pray in a particular manner. Doesn't that smack of the Inquisition? Whatever happened to the Golden Rule? I suppose we in the GOP would have no problem if a local school board in Dearborn, MI, with its large Muslim population, decided to have students take out their prayer rugs three times a day, face East, and address Allah. Or if a Jewish school board in Long Island had students pray in Hebrew. The GOP's short-sighted cries for coercive school prayer violate the minimum moral standard of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you", and yet our national agenda is based on it. Can't we focus on something God actually cares about? When we finally meet God in the afterlife, isn't he going to ask us more about what we did to ease the lives of his other children -- how did we succor the needy and lift the poor -- than about how many people we forced to insincerely pray to Him in public school?
Well, there's my political rant. I sure do love the marketplace of ideas.