An unconstitutional funeral?
Justice Stevens was President Ford's lone appointment to the Supreme Court. Stevens proved to be nothing like the kind of Justice conservatives admire. Yet last year, Ford said he was “prepared to allow history’s judgment” of his presidency to rest exclusively on his appointment of Justice John Paul Stevens, and that he specifically agreed with Stevens’s positions on the establishment clause.
Ed Whelan finds irony in this. He notes that Ford's burial service yesterday at the National Cathedral, which Ford planned himself, involved sufficient mingling of church and state that it would have to be considered unconsitutional under Justice Stevens' radically secularist establishment clause jurisprudence. To add to the irony, Stevens was in attendance. Whelan writes:
Ford’s state funeral is impossible to reconcile with Stevens’s extremist views of the establishment clause. Most conspicuously, members of the United States military played a prominent role in the pervasively religious ceremony, both as pallbearers and as musical performers. The United States Marine Orchestra and the Armed Forces Chorus not only performed; they sang explicitly Christian hymns. During the prelude, for example, the Marines sang “When Jesus Wept.” During the service itself, the Marine Orchestra provided the musical accompaniment for Denyce Graves’s singing of the Lord’s Prayer, and the Armed Forces Chorus sang “Eternal Father, strong to save” — a prayer to the trinitarian God. The closing hymn, “For All the Saints,” was sung by all and included lyrics like “thy Name, O Jesus, be for ever blessed”. . . .Moreover, the very existence of the National Cathedral ought to be constitutionally objectionable in Stevens’s eyes. The National Cathedral is part of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation, which was chartered by an Act of Congress, signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1893, “for the promotion of religion and education and charity.”
I find it ironic that Ford, who crusaded for the impeachment of Justice Douglas, would end up appointing a Justice who, though no Douglas, turned out to be a liberal activist through-and-through. But Ford, like the first President Bush, was an old school establishment conservative who relied on the general "soundness" of the people he appointed without much regard to the content of their ideas.
