President Barack Obama has made his first nomination to the federal courts. While the New York Time claims David Hamilton is a moderate, but as LifeNews and CNS News explain, his pro-abortion views and judicial record would suggest he is a radical liberal.
Judge Hamilton was responsible for overturning Indiana’s over a hundred-year policy of allowing prayer in to open sessions of the State House and ruling that people giving the invocation could not pray in the name of Jesus.
Brian Sikma, with the Indiana-based organization Reclaim Our Heritage provides more information about the Hamilton nomination. Excerpt:
In nominating Judge David F. Hamilton to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, President Obama solidified what many had already suspected about his approach to the judiciary. Judge Hamilton has served as the Chief Judge for the Federal District Court of the Southern District of the State of Indiana and in that capacity he has earned a reputation that runs counter to the flowery rhetoric that is now used to describe his temperament and qualifications.
Judge Hamilton drew the ire of many Hoosiers and a sizeable number of Indiana state legislators when he ruled in 2005 that prayers before the Indiana House of Representatives must not contain the words “Jesus Christ” or any other phrase that refers to the Christian faith. In a poorly researched opinion that relied on an amateurish ignorance of controlling precedent, he made it clear that prayer was allowed so long as it was to a vague, God-like figure that was not affiliated with any particular faith. Prayers that were clearly affiliated with non-Christian faiths were allowed to proceed.
Two years before his ruling imposing a gag order on the Indiana House of Representatives’ opening prayers, Hamilton struck down a state law requiring women seeking an abortion to be provided with information 18 hours before the abortion by either the doctor or staff regarding alternatives to abortion. The law did not seek to eliminate abortion, it only sought to make sure that women preparing to undergo a very serious medical procedure with important psychological consequences were aware of the fact that they do not have to kill their unborn child to deal with the situation.
Tellingly, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals-the very court Hamilton has been nominated to serve on-has found occasion to do damage control and reign in his aggressive rewriting of the Constitution and legal precedent. Now that he will be sitting on the court that has often overturned his judicial misbehavior, he is in a position to support activist judges like himself who are working hard at the federal district court level in Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.