While high-profile battles rage in the Senate over some of President Bush's more controversial nominees to the federal appellate bench, less attention is being paid to his district court picks. One, James Leon Holmes, an attorney in private practice in Arkansas, is particularly worrisome. The choice of Holmes is further evidence that Bush is trying to pack the courts with conservative ideologues.
Holmes, a former president of Arkansas Right to Life, is a man whose view of the world is so dated and backward that he shouldn't be put in charge of a classroom, much less a federal district courtroom. He questions the basic premise of gender equality. In a 1997 article he co-wrote with his wife, Holmes states that the Bible dictates a subordinate role for wives, saying "the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man." He writes that choosing any other way is "distorting the relationship between male and female" and "is as sacrilegious as profaning any of the other sacraments."
The article excoriates modern feminism, charging that it has brought society "artificial contraception and abortion on demand with recognition of homosexual liaisons soon to follow."
"No matter how often we condemn abortion," Holmes writes, "to the extent we adopt the feminist principle that the distinction between the sexes is of no consequence and should be disregarded in the organization of society . . . we are contributing to the culture of death."
In other writings Holmes has equated abortion rights supporters with Nazis, and he dismissed concerns over the impact of a total ban on abortion on rape victims with the inaccurate and compassionless assertion that "conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami." He has said since he regrets that comment.
This is the man Bush has plucked from obscurity to elevate to the federal bench. Senate Democrats may not have handled every judicial nomination fairly, but in some cases Bush has gone out of his way to find some of the most narrow-minded, extreme thinkers on the political right to place in judicial lifetime appointments.
Holmes' twisted notions of women's equality are out of step with constitutional law and modern thinking. He shouldn't be given a chance to impose his rigid moralism for the rest of his life from the bench.
