I will freely admit that while I am not the most religious person in the world, I don’t think God would mind if I offered him another Commandment, “Thou shall not grandstand and use my name in the process!” I think that advice would well at least three elected officials in Indiana: Congressmen Dan Burton, Mike Sodrel and State Senator Mike Delph.

Three held a news conference this morning. Sodrel announced he has filed a bill (HR 4776) that would prohibit the federal courts from hearing cases involving the content of legislative speech. He says the bill is in direct response to the Indiana Civil Liberties prayer suit against House Speaker Brian Bosma. I thought this matter already became a federal case once it went before Judge David Hamilton, but leave it to elected officials to find opportunities to grab some headlines.

The problem with the event is that the three lawmakers obviously thought there was no in the press corps who has a law degree and studied Constitutional Law while he was law school. And he’s incredibly good looking by the way.

I asked Sodrel a couple of questions. First, by removing the federal courts jurisdiction over the content of legislative speech, don’t you open the door to discrimination with no recourse. Sodrel’s response, in part, was that “no system was perfect.” I later asked him that the last couple times Congress tried a stunt like this it was go after speech it didn’t like, alleged Communists in the 1950s and right after the Civil War during Reconstruction to go after an Alabama publisher. Once again his response was that he could think of no instance where something like that would happen today. I could.

At this point something happened to me that hadn’t occurred in years. I had a politician try to lecture me. Congressman Burton told me that he didn’t know who I was and he had never seen me before (I’ve interviewed him four times in the past, two face to face). And that he had been in the legislature longer than I had been alive. Good to know the “Nivea for Men” Products are working. Burton then went on to tell me that in his 40 years of being in the Indiana House and in Congress he would never see a religious minority be denied the chance to say a prayer at the Speaker’s podium. Call me when the Wiccans show up or the Atlantean Poseidon worshippers. But I figure the Congressman got on my case because he needed to vent on someone after getting a traffic ticket Monday in Indianapolis. I don’t take it personally.

My only real criticism of Mike Delph in all this is he apparently misunderstood Judge Hamilton’s ruling when he told the press that it was okay to say “Allah”, but not “Christ,” so he interpreted that as discrimination. The Judge actually had a logical explanation for that. “Allah” is Arabic for “God.” Actually what the order says (on page 15) is “If those offering prayers in the Indiana House of Representatives choose to use the Arabic Allah, the Spanish Dies, the German Got, the French Dieu, the Swedish Gud, the Greek Theos, the Hebrew Elohim, the Italian Dio or any other language in addressing the God who is the focus of the non-sectarian prayers contemplated in Marsh v. Chambers, the court sees little risk that the choice of language would advance a particular religion or disparage others. If and when the prayer practices in the Indiana House of Representatives ever seem to be advancing Islam, an appropriate party can bring the problem to the attention of this or another court.” Mike may not have read that far, but he’s new on the job and I’m more willing to give him a bit of a pass, for now.

The main point of all this is this morning was nothing but grandstanding before an election to score points with voters. As someone who worked in and covered politics for 12 years, I can usually respect that as long as people are honest about it. But like I stated earlier, there ought to be a Commandment to deal nonsense like this.

Posted: 02|21|06 at 3:13 pm by Abdul Hakim-Shabazz
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