Harriet Miers - The long hard journey from pro-choice feminist to anti-choice hypnochrist™

Over the years, I have found that there are certain people in the punditocracy who always have the inside scoop on things that happen in their back yards. If there's big news going down in Florida, I visit Leonard Pitts. If something of note is breaking near Chicago, I'll turn to Eric Zorn. And if something smells fishy in the Lone Star State, there's no other source but the inimitable Molly Ivins. She's been living in Texas and dealing with the Bush Dynasty for far longer than most of us. As expected, if you want the goods on Harriet Miers from all of her years in Texas, Molly Ivins delivers.

Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble. Doesn't take much to read the tea leaves on the Harriet Miers nomination.

First, it's Bunker Time at the White House. Miers' chief qualification for this job is loyalty to George W. Bush and the team. What the nomination means in larger terms for both law and society is the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

What's her basic background, Molly?

Miers, like Bush himself, is classic Texas conservative Establishment, with the addition of Christian fundamentalism. What I mean by fundamentalist is one who believes in both biblical inerrancy and salvation by faith alone.

Sound dire. But was she always this way? Apparently not.

According to Miers' friends, she was pro-choice when a young woman but later changed her mind as a result of a Christian experience of some kind.

Miers had the support of feminists when she ran for office first in the Dallas bar and later when she became the first female president of the State Bar of Texas, even though the feminists were aware she was anti-choice.

At that time, the far more conservative Texas bar was at odds with the American Bar Association and sometimes threatened to withdraw from the national organization. Miers was considered a moderate in that she did not want to withdraw from the ABA but favored a proposal to change the organization's stance from support for abortion rights to a position of neutrality.

One of Miers' key backers was Louise Raggio, a much-revered Dallas feminist lawyer. The female lawyers groups favored Miers despite her stand on abortion because she was a candidate acceptable to the Establishment, thus making her electable as a woman.

Miers sometimes took female judicial candidates through her very prestigious law firm for the obligatory meet-'n'-greet and even donated to Democratic candidates.

The slightly feminist tinge to her credentials is a plus, but she is quite definitely anti-abortion.

Ok. Let's put this in perspective. What does the addition of a woman like that mean for America in the long run? (And it may be a long run indeed, depending on how long she lives.)

Separation of church and state is in the Constitution because this country was founded by people who had experienced both religious persecution and state-supported religions. I think John F. Kennedy's 1960 statement to the Baptist ministers should stand as a model of how public servants should handle the relation between religious belief and public service.

Nevertheless, we are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance -- and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to "drive God from the public square."

As an 1803 quote attributed to James Madison goes: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

We recently saw a retiring KOS diarist calling for a literal revolution, with the streets running red with the blood of conservatives. Now we're seeing mainstream writers like Ivins making subtle hints pointing towards a civil (religious) war if we don't find a way to mend the country's divide. I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get nervous.

And what kind of conservative is Roberts? We may be getting as idea how he feels about "States Rights".