The GOP’s hard core supporters on the Christian Right are coming out into the open with their most radical positions these days, since they are riding high on the wave of the 2004 elections.

This Washington Post story (excerpted below) is chilling. Famous Christian Right activists are getting very close to calling for Stalinist purges of judges with whom they disagree. Violence is hinted at, yet again. I blogged about a Senator’s violence-related comments a couple days ago.

There are three very positive side effects of the public suggestions of violence and purges emanating from the Christian Right:

• Democrats’ fears of the Christian Right are being well confirmed, making Democrats more loyal to the party, and causing Democrats to speak out in private and in public.
• Moderate Republicans are offended and embarassed at being associated with such radicals.
• Conservative judges are becoming quite concerned, and maybe they will begin to rethink the appropriateness of allowing so much religious influence in government. The Supreme Court in particular has been a friend of the GOP, but that friendship is being severely tested.

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty (washingtonpost.com)

By Dana Milbank
Saturday, April 9, 2005; Page A03

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good lawyer — and perhaps a few more bodyguards.

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny” decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy’s opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles “is a good ground of impeachment.” To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,” Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the “good behavior” requirement for office and that “Congress ought to talk about impeachment.”

Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy “should be the poster boy for impeachment” for citing international norms in his opinions. “If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well.”

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.