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Christian right challenges Obama's Justice picks

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-05 15:24

WASHINGTON -- Christian conservatives are challenging US President Barack Obama's picks for top Justice Department positions, charging that past clients like the adult magazine Playboy taint their resumes.

Eric Holder (R) speaks after being sworn in by US Vice President Joe Biden (L) as US Attorney General in at the Justice Department in Washington, February 3, 2009. Holder's wife Sharon is pictured behind him. [Agencies]

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The criticism comes ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Thursday for David Ogden, Obama's pick for deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the Justice Department.

Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, was confirmed by the Senate on Monday and started work the next day. As he waits for confirmation of his top aides, many on the religious right are questioning the nominee's backgrounds, saying they have promoted far left, pro-abortion, pro-gay policies.

"Ogden has been an activist in the support of a right to pornography, a right of abortion and the rights of homosexuals," said Patrick Trueman, a former Justice Department official during the first Bush presidency who is now in private practice.

"It isn't so much that he's represented pornographers or that he's been a porn attorney, but it's his world view, and his world view reflects President Obama's world view," said Trueman, echoing criticism from conservative activist groups like the American Family Association and Focus on the Family.

While a private attorney, Ogden argued on behalf of Playboy and librarians fighting congressionally mandated Internet filtering software. His clients also include corporate giants such as an oil company and the pharmaceutical industry.

The challenge to Obama's Justice picks come as conservative evangelicals seek to limit the new Democratic administration's power and maintain their own power within the Republican Party.

Some Republicans believe a tight embrace of social conservative values turns off independents and moderates, but many Christian right leaders resist compromise and contend that, if anything, the Republican party has strayed too far from its principles.

Besides Ogden, conservatives also have taken aim at two other Justice picks -- Indiana University professor Dawn Johnsen for her association with an abortion rights group, and Thomas Perrelli, who represented the husband of Terry Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman at the center of a right-to-die case that energized evangelical groups across the country.

Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a past colleague of the three during the Clinton administration, said the conservatives' criticism of the trio is unusual and unwarranted.

"Usually, you may have a fight over who the attorney general is, but this is not par for the course, picking off next to the attorney general three of his top appointments," Greenberger said. "This is harassment and it is an attempt to reverse the election."

Accusations of political manipulation at the Justice Department are not new. Over the past two years, the Bush administration has been investigated and excoriated by Democrats for making firing and hiring decisions based on political considerations.

Tom Minnery, a vice president at Focus on the Family, charges that through the nominations, the new Democratic administration is not depoliticizing, but re-politicizing the Justice Department.

"They take our breath away the more we learn about these people," said Minnery. "This is left-wing politicization of the Justice Department. This is not a Justice Department that looks like America."