Dr. Richard Land commented Tuesday on President Bush’s nomination of Judge John Roberts Jr., to the Supreme Court after the president’s official announcement.
Roberts’ nomination follows nearly three weeks of national speculation about who would take the place of retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
“President Bush promised in 2000 and again in 2004 that he would nominate only strict-constructionist, original-intent judges and justices in the Scalia-Thomas mold,” said Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of The Southern Baptist Convention.
“I have found the president in the 17 years I have known him personally to be a man of integrity and a man of his word. I will trust the president until I have compelling evidence to the contrary. The nomination of Judge Roberts has certainly not given me any reason at present to believe that the president has done anything other than to fulfill his campaign promises.
“Justice-nominee Roberts gives every indication of being the kind of judge that will be a neutral judicial umpire, calling them the way the Constitution sees them, not seeking to ‘fix’ the game by tilting judicial decisions toward those who do not offend his personal sense of right and wrong.”
The Southern Baptist Convention is America’s largest non-Catholic denomination with more than 16.3 million members in 43,024 churches nationwide. The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission is the SBC’s ethics, religious liberty and public policy agency with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.
