Goodling: Another Wrinkle

Sandy Levinson has some comments that open up another aspect of the concerns I mentioned (all too briefly) in this post.

Still, the story walks on eggs with regard to one of the most important aspects of Ms. Goodling, her religious zeal. Lipton mentions that she graduated from Regent Law School, '99, and notes that that is Pat Robertson's law school. But there has still been no genuine examination of the extent to which Ms. Goodling used her remarkable clout within the Justice Department to focus on hiring not only conservative Republicans, but also persons who were equally opposed to what she no doubt believes is the sinful secularism of modern society. I doubt that she was preferring Evangelical Protestants as such; rather, I think the key to being hired might well be a strong religious identification, and one proxy for that was attending identifiably religious law schools, including, for example, Brigham Young, Regent, Catholic University (though not Georgetown, I strongly suspect), or Marquette. Sooner or later, someone should go through the bios of people hired over the past three years or so, i.e., since the triumphalist election of George W. Bush in 2004 (I refuse to call it a "re-election"), and see how many of them graduated from such schools, as against more secular schools (and, of course, how many of those hired from the latter had been vetted by virtue of their affiliation with the Federalist Society and the like, apparently something highly important to Ms. Goodling).

No one wants to talk about things like this -- it's "not nice." Of course, the people who are the most dangerous in this regard make full use of that reluctance -- you know, the ones who scream "religious freedom" when they're trying to take away yours.

Consider that former AG John Ashcroft held prayer meetings at Justice. Attendance was "voluntary." If you wanted to keep your job, you went. Consider the disproportionate numbers of graduates of law schools such as Regent who have come to infest the DoJ. Consider also that (and I'm having another memory lapse here) a video for a conservative Christian organization was made at the Pentagon, starring something like seven senior officers. In uniform. Consider that Gen. Boykin, whose God is bigger than Allah, received not even a reprimand when he should have been busted.

Of course, consider that the Deciderer is taking instructions directly from God. Apparently his hearing isn't so good.