Tuesday May 11, 2010
Poll Finds 33% Favor Kagan for Supreme Court, 33% Oppose, 34% Unsure
By Kathleen Gilbert
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 11, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A nearly perfect divide has split U.S. voters over Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s eligibility as the next Supreme Court Justice, according to a Rasmussen Reports Survey released Tuesday.
Taken the night after President Obama announced the pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality Kagan as his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the survey found 33 percent of U.S. voters favoring Kagan for the position, 33 percent opposing, and 34 percent uncertain.
Nonetheless, most were convinced Kagan’s nomination would be approved by the U.S. Senate: 82 percent said Kagan would be confirmed, with 52 percent considering confirmation “very likely,” while only 5 percent considered Senate confirmation “not very or not at all likely.”
The numbers confirm fears advanced by pro-family groups that Kagan’s hostility to traditional marriage, which they call radically out of step with the American mainstream, is underreported. The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) immediately issued a press release following the nomination Monday detailing Kagan’s record, which they called “an enormous red flag” on pro-family issues.
The release pointed out her responsibility for a Justice Department brief regarding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) last year that gutted the law’s legal grounding, setting up pro-family advocates to fail should DOMA be challenged on the federal level.
NOM Chairman Maggie Gallagher told LifeSiteNews.com that the group might have “held off weighing in on this so quickly, except there seemed to be a concerted effort to suggest that somehow her statements would lead you to believe that she’s moderate on the gay marriage issue.” The timing of Kagan’s ascension, noted the group, will be critical for key traditional marriage fights that are expected to land in the Supreme Court in coming years.
In addition, Kagan has come under fire for her persistence in barring military recruiters from entering Harvard Law’s campus, out of protest that the military obeyed federal law in the form of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule barring open homosexuals from military service.
“Only because of pressure from then-President Larry Summers, and the threat of losing millions in federal funds, did Kagan opt for an apartheid system rather than an outright ban,” Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth outreach group, reported in a press release Monday. “She forced students to meet with military representatives off campus or in a segregated part of the campus, essentially telling these young people to ‘get to the back of the bus.'”
Kagan unsuccessfully filed an amicus brief in the 2006 Supreme Court case Rumsfeld v. FAIR, in which the Court ruled that schools did not have free rein to ban military recruiters over DADT. “Kagan’s position was so extreme that it was rejected unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court,” noted the Foundation. The group also cited then-candidate Obama’s own 2008 statement at the Service Nation Presidential Forum asserting that banning such recruiters was “a mistake.”
The Obama administration appears to have already worked hard to keep Kagan’s image clear of controversy: last month, well before the nomination, the White House forced a CBS news blogger to retract his assertion that Kagan would be the first “openly gay judge,” whose female partner “is rather well known in Harvard circles.”
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Nat’l Organization for Marriage: a Vote for Kagan is a Vote against Traditional Marriage
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10051013.html