toledoblade.com --

IT USED to be that politics and religion were topics not to be discussed in genial company, for fear of getting into arguments that could never be resolved.

Now, in some quarters at least, politics is religion and religion is politics, an observation underscored by last weekend's "Justice Sunday," a conflagration fanned by religious conservatives to singe opponents of a few of President Bush's most outrageous judicial nominees.

The rally, held in a Louisville, Ky., church and viewable, organizers said, by an estimated 61.5 million people around the country, was staged to support a claim by the religious right that the filibuster is being used by Democrats to deny Bush nominees Senate confirmation.

Never mind that the Republican-controlled Senate has confirmed all but a dozen or so of more than 200 nominees the President has put forth.

Tony Perkins, president of the rightist Family Research Council, claims the courts and the "judicial activists" who sit on them are "an enclave for those who seek to muzzle people of faith."

This call for, in effect, a holy war on judges is rhetoric little different from that of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who recently issued a thinly veiled threat that judges in the Terry Schiavo case would be "called to account."

Fire and brimstone, however, is no substitute for the solid rock of constitutional law that has served this nation well for more than 200 years. The checks and balances that protect our democratic system, including the principle of judicial review of legislative actions, must not be swept away in a paroxysm of self-righteousness.

Thoughtful Americans know and appreciate the difference in government based on the rule of law and that based on theology. As Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University, told Knight Ridder Newspapers, "Politics is about compromise. Religion is about absolutes. If you bring religion into it, you destroy the chance for civil disagreement."

Agreeing to disagree in a peaceful manner is the bedrock of the American system. It is what separates us from autocratic or totalitarian governments.

Some of Mr. Bush's choices as judges appear to have little faith in the legal system they've been called to join. Among them is Janice Rogers Brown, a California Supreme Court justice, whose nomination as a federal appellate judge was approved last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On the very same "Justice Sunday," Ms. Brown told a meeting of Roman Catholic legal professionals that "people of faith" are engaged in a "war" to stop the slide of America away from the religious traditions on which it was founded.

Ms. Brown, and others like her, hold a dismissive view of the American legal system, which is why they make poor choices for the judiciary.

What they forget is that the rule of law protects those same "people of faith" and gives them the right to practice whatever religion they choose, not one dictated by government as in a theocracy.

It is no small irony that the United States is engaged in wars on foreign soil that clearly illustrate the dangers of theocracy to human rights, while here at home we are faced with angry pressure to install theocrats of another stripe, but theocrats no less, on our traditionally independent courts.

Politicians that engage in this kind of moral misdirection really ought to consider clearly whether the temporary partisan advantage is worth the damage to the legal system that could result in the long run.

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