I was at a wedding last year when I met with some of my old "liberal?" Jewish friends from college and happened to get into some discussions about the Bush administration. What had changed since college was an unexpected growth of neoconservative Jews who were supporting Bush because the general positions of conservative economics and Middle Eastern intervention were projected as pro-capitalist and pro-Israel. In general Jews don't support right wing Christian candidates who would like to implement Christian values through the government. Most Jews tend to be liberal because Jews have had enough historical experience, going back to Egypt, with civil rights issues to know that in general local majority religious values coded into laws don't work well for people who aren't in the majority religion. The Yom Kippur and Passover messages communicate to the Jewish kids that historically living as Jews in a minority requires fighting for minority freedoms and ultimately the separation from church and state in the US.

To the neocon Jews at the wedding last year it was considered a reasonable trade-off to them to support some minor undesirable Christian religious government aspects of the Republican party. So they built-up an ends justifies the means argument of putting Bush and the Republicans into power as being better for Jews and Israel than the Democrats. The counter argument that I took and continue to take is that placing the religious right into power with two supreme court justice seats up for grabs is a formula for long term civil rights disaster. The stated goal of the religious right wrangling into control of the Republican party, Bush, and appeasement of many splintered groups like the neocon jews was to start to push agendas to accomplish things like pro-life, pro-Christian family, and anti-homosexual legal adjustments.

So now we come to some dark days of political harvest with two supreme court justices now nominated by Bush. The latest appointee, Miers, appears to be the pro-life crony for Bush that the right wing Christians have been waiting for. It looks like the fight is behind us now that the supreme court is inevitably shifting for a long time to the right. The Christian majority is no doubt gearing-up to roll-back the "liberal" civil rights fought for in the past half century to return them to the level of the fifties. A filibuster won't stop the supreme court now.

I sadly predict that somewhere within the next few cases pushed to the supreme court there will be a couple that are designed to have maximum impact on Roe v. Wade, gay rights, and civil rights. The Republicans may wait until 2008 to drop the bomb in order to stay in power, but I am sure something big is heading for the new supreme court to make all of this wrangling of neocons into the tent worth the right wing's while.