White House Counsel Harriet Miers had a Catholic upbringing but joined Valley View Christian Church 25 years ago. Barry McCarty, the church’s preaching minister, has been chief parliamentarian for every Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting since 1986, the only non-Baptist to hold the post.
Miers’ pastor, Ron Key, who left the church recently after 33 years, said she taught Sunday school, made coffee, brought donuts and served on a missions committee. “She worked out her faith in practical, behind-the-scenes ways,” Key said, quoted by Marvin Olasky in a World Magazine blog. “She doesn’t draw attention to herself. She’s humble, self-effacing.”
Nathan Hecht, a Texas Supreme Court justice and elder at the church, described the congregation as “a conservative evangelical church … in the vernacular, fundamentalist, but the media have used that word to tar us.”
Key told Olasky that the church is strongly pro-life, but that in the 25 years he has known Miers they never talked about her views on abortion, an issue certain to be a focus of her confirmation hearings. O’Connor has been a swing vote in several cases involving a woman’s right to privacy in early pregnancy and permitting restrictions in later terms only if they don’t endanger the woman’s health.
The abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America said the burden is on President Bush and Miers to demonstrate she shares O’Connor’s commitment to “fundamental freedoms, including a woman’s right to choose.”
Read the whole thing here. Via T19.
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2 comments:
She's also never been a judge.
Joe Zollars
George Will writes of this nomination, “Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due.” The whole article is at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100400954.html
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