Book Review: Contempt: How the Right is Wronging American Justice -- Catherine Crier

Contempt: How the Right is Wronging American Justice -- Catherine Crier (Rugged Land Books, 2005)

There are important books that help define our times, books that need to be read. Catherine Crier has written a book that exposes the conservative and ultraconservative right swing in American politics for its true mission -- the unadulterated and uninhibited ability to dictate how everyone must live as defined by a narrow set of Judeo-Christian ideals as interpreted by the aforementioned political right.

Sounds a bit authoritarian? A little toward the dictatorial? Maybe somewhat oligarchical? Frighteningly theocratic? You're correct; it does. It is. Contempt is a book that shows the utter disregard for the original intent of the Constitution's framers (although a common tactic of the right is that they wish to return to the "original intent" of the founders -- while the rewrite said "intent") when making decisions in the highest courts in the land. She systematically tracks the slow but sure takeover of the Republican Party by the fundamentalist evangelical Christian movement, and how this well-funded and tenacious minority has consistently attacked and infiltrated our highest courts. Crier also submits exhibits of the various court cases that are undermining our basic civil liberties one by one.

This book saw print just before known conservative John Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court, before Chief Justice Rehnquist died, before Roberts assumed his vacant bench seat, before the equally conservative Samuel Alito was appointed to replace the resigning Sandra Day O'Connor. She highlights the fact that the high courts of this nation have been taken over by increasingly conservative judges pushing their backward lock-stepping ideologies of revisionist history and skewed religious doctrine. She names names and points fingers, calling four powerful movers and shakers The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: businessman C. Boyden Gray, intellectualist Leonard A. Leo, politician Edwin Meese, and probably the most dangerous of them all, religious leader Jay Sekolow.