September 9th 2008
Prayer Breakfasts From Hell
I
just received this email:
The Exchange Club of Irvine, Irvine Chamber of Commerce and City of Irvine are pleased to announce that the 27th Annual Thanksgiving Community Prayer Breakfast has been set for Tuesday, November 25, 2008.
This year, we are excited to feature nationally-recognized legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as our keynote speaker. As the newly named Dean of UCI Law, Dean Chemerinsky will help us celebrate our community with this important breakfast.
For those of you who don’t listen to the Hugh Hewitt show or otherwise are unfamiliar with Chemerinsky, he routinely stakes out the Left’s limits of the law – including being a separation of church and state hawk, as evidenced by this WaPo op/ed he authored:
With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act – H.R. 2679 – provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. …
Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional.
Granted, it’s possible to believe religion has no place whatsoever in the public square and still be religious. But it’s rare. I would love to attend a prayer breakfast featuring an attorney like Jay Sekulow, who stands up for religion’s right to exist broadly and robustly in American society, but Chemerinsky? I think it might be better to pray for him than with him.
