![\"James](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2022\/04\/JimmyCarterPortrait2-scaled.jpg\")
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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Many, many, many years ago, a friend \u2014 a former missionary companion \u2014 persuaded me to go up for a small protest when Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter visited Salt Lake City during his ultimately successful 1976 presidential campaign.\u00a0 The direct impetus for the protest (beyond, of course, general opposition to the Democratic presidential candidate himself) came from signs that had been displayed by delegates at the Democratic nominating convention earlier that year:\u00a0 \u201cJC can save America!\u201d they read, beneath a photograph of Governor Carter.\u00a0 My friend regarded the signs as blasphemous, and he had created counter-signage asking Mr. Carter \u2014 a devout evangelical Christian \u2014 to repudiate it.\u00a0 He just needed a couple of others to come up with him from BYU, where we were students, to Salt Lake City to wave his signs.\u00a0 There were, I think, three of us, though I can\u2019t recall offhand who the third person was.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Anyhow, we joined a crowd at the Salt Lake City airport to welcome Governor Carter.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t notice us, so we raced into the city in order to be there when he emerged from his de rigueur<\/em> meeting with the First Presidency in the Church Office Building.\u00a0 When he emerged to get into his waiting limousine, the three of us yelled something like \u201cWhat do you say about this?\u201d and waved our signs.\u00a0 He paused by the door of his car and yelled back, \u201cI don\u2019t like that either!\u201d\u00a0 Then he got into the car and they drove away.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s it.\u00a0 That\u2019s all that happened.\u00a0 But I remember feeling a bit awkward during the whole episode and, immediately afterward, vowing that I would never do such a thing again.\u00a0 I really didn\u2019t like the feel of it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I still don\u2019t.\u00a0 While it may be a character flaw on my part, I\u2019ve never liked yelling and name-calling in public discourse.\u00a0 I recently saw a still photograph of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert<\/a> screaming at President Biden from the floor of the United States House of Representatives during his recent State of the Union address.\u00a0 It sickened me.\u00a0 (I can still see the image very clearly in my mind.\u00a0 And it still sickens me.)\u00a0 Please note that I say this as someone who didn\u2019t vote for Mr. Biden, who has never voted for any presidential ticket including Mr. Biden, and who, barring the Apocalypse and\/or major brain surgery, never will<\/em> vote for Mr. Biden.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I hate and, truth be told, I fear the divisiveness that has afflicted American politics for many years now.\u00a0 There has, of course, always been an element of the disease in our democratic discourse, and it has sometimes been very brutal.\u00a0 (The Founders were extremely worried about the dangers of what they called \u201cfaction.\u201d)\u00a0 But, today, it seems to completely pervade our public deliberations.\u00a0 Our political opponents are not merely mistaken or misguided these days, but evil<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Consider, for example, the recent Senate confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court of the United States.\u00a0 Now, I readily admit that I would have preferred another nominee.\u00a0 A second Amy Coney Barrett or a younger clone of Clarence Thomas, for example.\u00a0 Justice Jackson is too far to the left for me.\u00a0 Which is to say that I can understand why my state\u2019s senior senator, Mike Lee, voted against her.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But I can also understand why my state\u2019s junior senator, Mitt Romney, voted to confirm her.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It is the constitutional prerogative of the president of the United States to nominate people for the Supreme Court.\u00a0 The Senate\u2019s role is to \u201cadvise and consent.\u201d\u00a0 Practically speaking, of course, that has meant that presidential nominations to the Supreme Court have been constrained by White House perceptions of what the Senate would likely accept and what the Senate would likely reject.\u00a0 (This matter might have been considerably different had Georgia\u2019s two Republican Senate seats not suddenly gone to Democratic challengers in the special January 2021 election there \u2014 as the result of a completely unforced error.)\u00a0 Historically, though, the Senate\u2019s obligation to \u201cadvise and consent\u201d has also meant that nominations to the Supreme Court have commonly (though not always) been approved by fairly large, and sometimes unanimous or almost unanimous, bipartisan Senate majorities.\u00a0 Not infrequently even by voice vote.\u00a0 (See here<\/a> for the relevant data.)\u00a0 If a nominee is not obviously corrupt or manifestly unqualified, the Senate has typically given presidents the confirmations to the Court that they\u2019ve requested.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This is plainly no longer routine.\u00a0 Perhaps because \u2014 I speak openly here as a limited-government, free-market, federalist conservative who regrets the trend \u2014 the federal government has taken on a hugely expanded and therefore far more contentious role in our nation\u2019s daily life and because litigation and regulation have assumed a much larger role within the federal government.\u00a0 In my lifetime, it began with the ugly and unjust 1987 confirmation hearings for Judge Robert Bork, a former professor at Yale Law School and one of the most distinguished legal thinkers in the country at the time; his character was assassinated in an ugly ambush presided over by the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Joseph R. Biden.\u00a0 The assault had, it seems, been carefully orchestrated from the get-go.\u00a0 Within just 45 minutes of Judge Bork\u2019s nomination by President Ronald Reagan, Senator Ted Kennedy stood up in the Senate to condemn him in a nationally televised speech:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Robert Bork\u2019s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens\u2019 doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.<\/span><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n That attempt to portray Judge Bork as effectively an agent of the Gestapo or of Stalin\u2019s NKVID was flatly outrageous. It was shameless demagoguery.\u00a0 To his credit, though, Judge Bork responded with commendable mildness: \u201cThere was,\u201d he said, \u201cnot a line in that speech that was accurate.\u201d\u00a0 (Years later, I was present among a relatively small audience when Mr. Bork was asked how it felt to be grilled before the Judiciary Committee by men like Senator Kennedy and Senator Biden.\u00a0 \u201cHow can I put this gently?\u201d he replied.\u00a0 \u201cLet me just say that I never felt intellectually intimidated.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I watched the Bork hearings very closely, and I still regard what happened to him \u2014 he was, of course, ultimately rejected by the Senate \u2014 with indignation.\u00a0 It was a travesty.\u00a0 And some recent hearings \u2014 for Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh, to choose two egregious examples \u2014 have been even worse.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But none of this justifies some of what transpired during the hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson.\u00a0 (It was certainly rich, though, to hear Democrats and many in the national media \u2014 but do I repeat myself?\u00a0 \u201cDemocrats and many in the national media\u201d sounds rather redundant \u2014 lament the roughness with which Judge Jackson was treated.)\u00a0 I see no legitimate reason to consider her \u201cpro-pedophile,\u201d and it was flatly outrageous to see Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene label Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Romney \u201cpro-pedophile\u201d for voting to confirm her.\u00a0 (Rep. Greene is a never-failing source for illustrations of incivility and crazy rhetoric.)\u00a0 In voting to confirm Judge Jackson, those three Republican senators were simply following what had long been the bipartisan tradition of the United States Senate.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m afraid that, if we don\u2019t significantly ratchet down our rhetoric, we will deserve the fate that we bring upon ourselves.\u00a0 (I cannot forget the account given at 3 Nephi 7:1-8<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m reasonably certain that, if President Mitt Romney had sent a 2021 nominee to the Supreme Court, that nominee would not have been Ketanji Brown Jackson.\u00a0 She certainly would not have been my<\/em> nominee.\u00a0 But I was, candidly, proud of him for standing in the Senate chamber\u00a0 \u2014 alone among all Republicans<\/a> \u2014 to applaud her following her confirmation.\u00a0 She is now an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court and, as such, deserves respect.\u00a0 I believe in standing up for the president of the United States, too.\u00a0 Even if I voted against him.\u00a0 And the confirmation process worked as it is intended to work, which is also worthy of applause.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In closing, I\u2019ll refer to yet another very contentious public issue, the matter of transgender athletes.\u00a0 I do believe that the entrance of biological men into women\u2019s sports is a terrible threat to the viability of women\u2019s athletics.\u00a0 I fear that women are in danger of being set back and even, in important ways, of being erased on behalf of an ideology that nobody dare question.\u00a0 Recently, though, Utah\u2019s governor, Spencer Cox, vetoed a bill sent up to him by the state legislature that would have prohibited men from competing in women\u2019s sports.\u00a0 He\u2019s been widely attacked for his action, and his veto was swiftly overridden.\u00a0 However, I can understand his concerns<\/a>.\u00a0 Even while I\u2019m deeply sympathetic to the concerns expressed by the law that he vetoed and even though I would probably myself have voted to overturn his veto, if no other acceptable choice presented itself.\u00a0 (Please see this excellent interview<\/a> of the bill\u2019s primary sponsor by the estimable Cassandra S. Hedelius<\/a>.\u00a0 But please also see this important piece by Paul S. Edwards<\/a>, whose perspective is always worth serious consideration: \u201cPerspective: Heaven help the peacemakers who threaten culture war profiteers: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox\u2019s principled approach to governance poses a threat to the outrage machine.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n There are gravely important issues at stake.\u00a0 And they\u2019re not always \u2014 they\u2019re almost never<\/em> \u2014 simple matters of black versus white, of clear good versus manifest evil.\u00a0 Decent people are on both sides.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Can we please lay off the demonization and the vilification and the name-calling a bit?\u00a0 Can we try harder to be civil and mutually respectful?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Many, many, many years ago, a friend \u2014 a former missionary companion \u2014 persuaded me to go up for a small protest when Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter visited Salt Lake City during his ultimately successful 1976 presidential campaign.\u00a0 The direct impetus for the protest (beyond, of course, general opposition to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n