Elect Jill Karofsky to the Supreme Court

Elect Jill Karovsky to Rid Wisconsin's Supreme Court of Religious Extremism

We must elect Jill Karofsky in April because her opponent Daniel Kelly is a dangerous religious extremist, and we should remove him from Wisconsin’s Supreme Court before he causes serious damage to our state. Kelly wants to impose the doctrines of religious authorities on Wisconsin’s legal system.

A Hard-Won and Valuable Tradition of Secular Law

We in America believe that our government must be independent of any particular religion. We believe that the legitimacy of our laws comes from the will of the American people as expressed through their representatives. In our tradition, God enters the political arena only as the creator who endowed us with “unalienable rights.”

We came to that belief through painful experience. Our ancestors slaughtered each other in religious conflicts for generations, and many of the early settlers came to North American to escape those conflicts. Our founding fathers knew in their bones that trying to base a government on religious doctrine was a recipe for disaster. They specified clearly that the United States would have no established religion, and since then, our courts have established a long and honorable tradition of secular interpretation of the law.


That tradition has enabled us to build a country in which millions of people of widely different faiths are able to live together in relative harmony[1]. The American Constitution was written by English Protestants, but Irish Catholics and Russian Jews have found a home here. Where I live in Appleton, Wisconsin, we now have mosques and a Sikh Temple.  We have not eliminated religious hatred, but over the years, we have moved closer to doing so, and we must not abandon our struggle to build a society in which people of all faiths are welcome.

A Dangerous, Religious Extremist

Daniel Kelly would overthrow our tradition of secular law. He believes in the supremacy of religious doctrine over legal precedent. He believes deeply that, as a judge, he should interpret the law in accordance with his religious principles. On his blog, he says, 

I start with a series of jurisdictional propositions (why?  Because I’m a lawyer, that’s why).  In the beginning there was God, so the Bible tells us.  And because everything has to come from somewhere, all authority must come from him by virtue of having existed before all else.  But he did not stay alone – he made us.  And in doing so he spread complexity throughout the world.

But we can tease out some of the complexity by observing how he delegated some of his authority.  Those things he created, he created with a purpose, and authority followed the purpose.  So, we have, originally, individual authority.  That is, man’s right to do whatever he wishes so long as it does not contradict the boundaries established by his Author. [My italics]

That is, the Constitution of the United States is valid only when it “does not contradict the boundaries” established by God. How does Kelly know what those boundaries are? Kelly is a committed, born-again Christian. In his view, Christianity is the revealed word of God. He says that his religious beliefs will play no role in his work as a judge, but how can we believe that when his religious beliefs are at the core of his judicial philosophy?

Kelly Will Eliminate a Woman’s Right to Choose

A woman’s right to choose to have an abortion is one area where Kelly’s religious principles must affect his judicial interpretation. He says that judges should interpret the law and not try to make new law, but he believes that man-made laws – like our Constitution – are valid only to the degree that they are consistent with the will of God.

For example, in his view, every abortion without exception is a murder. He says on his blog,

An abortion, of course, involves taking the life of a human being.  And everyone involved in the subject knows it.  Not only is the proximal fuse short between the policy and the destructive consequence, it is simultaneous.  So, we may safely charge them [the Democratic Party and NARAL] with knowingly favoring a policy that has as its primary purpose harming children. 

There can be no doubt that, if an abortion is a murder, it is contrary to the ten commandments, where God clearly ordered, “Thou shalt not commit murder.”[2] In this context, it would make no difference to Kelly that Roe v. Wade is settled law. He has to see Roe v. Wade as invalid because it is inconsistent with God’s will. He would see overturning Roe v. Wade not as judicial activism but as the restoration of the proper meaning of our laws, which cannot contradict God’s will.

Save Our Tradition: Vote for Jill Karofsky

In effect, Kelly would set up his version of Christianity as the established church in Wisconsin, and we cannot allow that. Vote for Jill Karofsky for the Supreme Court and prevent Mr. Kelly from imposing his religious views on all of us. Vote to maintain our long tradition of secular law that has served us so well for more than two hundred years.

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[1] Most of the time.

[2] “This is a better translation of the Hebrew than “Thou shalt not kill.”