Evangelicals' Champion to Argue Case at High Court

December 2, 2003


Evangelicals' Champion to Argue Case at High Court


By David G. Savage, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON — The nation's leading lawyer for evangelical Christians was born and raised a Jew in Brooklyn, but decided in college that Christ was the Messiah.

"I've never found a conflict between my Jewish identity and my Christian beliefs," said Jay Alan Sekulow, 47, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit law firm founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.

The firm was created to be a mirror image of the American Civil Liberties Union. And thanks in part to Sekulow's victories in the Supreme Court over the last decade, the strict separation of church and state — the constitutional rule long championed by liberal groups such as the ACLU and the American Jewish Congress — is being edged aside by a new equal-treatment-for-religion rule favored by Sekulow and other conservatives.

Today, Sekulow is scheduled to argue before the Supreme Court a case that asks whether the government sometimes must pay for religious teaching. It is a constitutional clash that pits one part of the 1st Amendment against another, a case in which liberals are touting the state's right to "just say no" to funding religion, while conservatives, including Bush administration lawyers, insist federal courts should tell the states how to spend their money. (snip/...)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-sekulow2dec02,1,4672946.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

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You will never believe this, but I have a personal reason to dislike this guy: I've had to work with him.

To clarify: I've worked in broadcasting for the last decade (I am 28, started when I was 18), and my very first career job was at a low-power evangelical Christian television station. I was basically a jack-of-all-trades intern, then paid employee.

We aired live shows, and also did live-to-tape, all 1-set deals, nothing fancy. There was a call-in show with a host, a real creepy nutjob - nobody really important, just another money-changer-in-the-temple type. He had some kind of pull, though, because he managed to get guys like Sekulow on the show every week.

Well, this Sekulow guy comes off as a nice guy on television, but I'm here to tell you, he's not so hot in the flesh. Quite haughty to me, as I recall. And my atheistic nature at the time seemed to give off vibes that he could feel.

Not a fun guy, not a fun agenda. Still gives me the willies to think of how close I was to the guy, since I used to clip his lav mic on his tie. Yeesh!

people who are fanatical always give me the creeps -- and you certainly can't say these guys aren't fanatical.