In a sane world, this would be the end of any discussion of this woman's appointment to the federal bench:

Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech....

Her comments to a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Darien, Conn., came on the same day as "Justice Sunday: Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith," a program produced by evangelical leaders and simulcast on the Internet and in homes and churches around the country....

"There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It's not a shooting war, but it is a war," she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate.

"These are perilous times for people of faith," she said, "not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud."...

--L.A. Times (story also available here)

War isn't spirited disagreement. War is war. You destroy your enemy in war. You don't work toward justice.

And this nominee believes she and her allies are at war with a large percentage of the American public.

How can she be fair on the federal bench? How is it possible, when she regards many of the people who would come before her as the Enemy?

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The original Stamford Advocate story is here, by the way. It doesn't have much more on Brown's remarks, but it does have this about the event at which she spoke:

[Father William] Lori, bishop of the Diocese of Bridgeport, said by organizing the gathering he hopes those in the legal profession will rededicate themselves to their responsibilities....

He brought up the legality of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, the death penalty and assisted suicide.

"In so many instances, we are trying to solve our problems by death rather than life," Lori said. "I think we have to solve our problems by fostering and promoting life."

I'm sure Judge Brown has all the right positions on all the issues Bishop Lori mentions -- except one. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that, as a California Supreme Court justice, she "routinely affirms death sentences," and adds

Two years ago, she wrote that 'murderers do not deserve a fate better than that inflicted on their victims."

That would seem to make her part of the "culture of death." But she's a Republican, and it's just the death penalty, so it's OK.