Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe blasts Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer and Attorney General Henry McMaster for their roll in the “I Believe” license plate boondoggle. Read the whole editorial from the Nov. 22 State newspaper at /www.thestate.com/scoppe/story/1037636.html?RSS=untracked
The license tag case was not about trying to regain something that has been taken away from Christians. Even before the courts started striking down organized Christian prayers in school and other governmental displays of religiosity, we didn’t have cross-emblazoned license tags. The tags were a new idea, dreamed up by politicians, and perhaps political interest groups hoping to fire up their bases, who were looking to pick a fight with secularists who were all too eager to oblige.
Mr. Bauer, who like Mr. McMaster hopes to be our next governor, goaded the Legislature into approving the tags and now has been painting himself as the great defender of the persecuted Christian majority, castigating the “liberal judge” who was “using her personal wishes” in “yet another example of judicial activism, of federal judges out of control.”
Just the opposite is true. Judicial activists ignore clear precedent and essentially write new laws, which judges have absolutely no business doing. Judicial restraint, on the other hand, is drawing on clear precedent, established by the Supreme Court and applied even by our ultra-conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, to tell a legislature it cannot do something. Which is what Judge Curry did.
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