Tennessee pastors express 'embarrassment' towards Sen. Blackburn's SCOTUS nominee remarks
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) — Tennessee pastors expressed their "embarrassment" and "frustration" towards Tennessee's state Senior Senator Marsha Blackburn for her role on the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee after the second day of Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
Pastors part of the Southern Christian Coalition, a nonpartisan grassroots, ecumenical organization felt that Sen. Blackburn did not demonstrate professionalism by focusing on political talking points.
“While most Senators in the Judiciary Committee focused on the qualifications and experience of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, our Senator Marsha Blackburn’s line of questioning was inappropriate and irrelevant, and as a Christian, pastor, and Tennessean, I was embarrassed by her public behavior,” said Rev. Brandon Berg, Pastor of First United Church in Bristol, TN.
Senator Blackburn tossed away an opportunity to behave professionally in favor of currying votes from her political base. Her vocabulary of fear-mongering is in stark contrast to the faith she claims in a Savior who reminds us repeatedly, ‘do not fear,’ and ‘the first shall be last, and the last shall be first,’ while on the other hand, Judge Jackson shows the ability to live out the believer’s call to ‘do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God,’ as all Christians should strive to live out.
Sen. Blackburn said the nominee has taken progressive postions in her writings and speeches and Blackburn is determined to stand up for parents who don’t want progressivism in schools.
Another pastor with Southern Christian Coalition says they are also embarrassed by Sen. Blackburn's questioning of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“She took past statements by the nominee grossly out of context solely to make political points," said Rev Billy Vaughan, a retired United Methodist Pastor and Professor at Memphis Theological Seminary. "Those points had nothing to do with either the truth of the statements or the qualifications of Judge Jackson. Contrary to Senator Blackburn’s suggestion that Judge Jackson had an 'agenda,' the opposite was clearly the case. That Senator Blackburn rudely and consistently interrupted Judge Jackson when she tried to answer the legal and judicial issues involved suggests that the Senator’s primary agenda was creating sound bites for her political base. She used terms such as "progressivism," "critical race theory," "white privilege" and "social justice" to, I assume, offer an alternative conservative agenda. But what was she conserving? Certainly not the truth, something on which our judiciary and our life in community depend."
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