Christine M. Flowers: King & Spalding law firm's flabby 'principles'

LAWYERS can be incredibly pompous creatures.

It's not that we're empirically worse as a group than, say, cable talk-show hosts. We have our good apples and our bad ones, our superstars and the mediocre models. What makes lawyers particularly obnoxious is our sometimes prissy insistence that we're noble defenders of the best legal system in the world. We wax poetic about the Constitution and civil rights, and insist that our pursuit of justice doesn't come with any political baggage.

You might as well just pin a red cape on our collective backs.

But there's a double standard that few of my colleagues are willing to talk about or even acknowledge. For example, the men and women who represent Guantanamo detainees are generally looked upon as noble defenders of the underdog. To me, people who get picked up on the battlefield while crying "Death to the infidel!" don't deserve the same kind of consideration as, say, some poor schmo who was wrongly convicted. We're supposed to accept without question that the lawyers who represent them are acting according to conscience, and are majestic defenders of the rule of law, no matter how they feel personally about their "clients."

That would be fine, if we treated every unpopular client the same way. Unfortunately, in the rarefied upper circles of the legal profession, enemy combatants get a fairer hearing than our duly elected members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

AS I NOTED a few columns ago, the Justice Department has decided to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act against legal challenges.

The reason given for the abrupt about-face was a decision by President Obama and his attorney general, Eric "Be Nice to Black Panthers" Holder, that DOMA was unconstitutional. Apparently, the chief enforcer of our laws and the guy who appointed him thought they could simply bypass the Supreme Court and make their own personal ad hoc determination about the legality of an act of Congress.

Not so fast. Congress didn't take so kindly to its authority being undercut (separation of powers, and all that) and decided to pick up the ball. Speaker John Boehner hired Paul Clement, a former solicitor general and (until Monday) partner at the white-shoe firm of King & Spalding to assist Congress in defending DOMA in federal court.

Despite some grumbling about the money being spent (imagine that!), it was clear that Boehner was doing exactly what Obama and Holder had forced him to do. If government lawyers weren't going to defend a law, the House had to look elsewhere for legal counsel.

And that doesn't come cheap in D.C. But the real anger had nothing to do with the money, despite what San Fran Nan Pelosi and her cronies tried to make it seem. A groundswell of protest rose up from the LGBT community (surprise! - a strong Pelosi constituency), which was apoplectic that Boehner didn't just roll over and let DOMA die a quick and whimpering death by executive fiat.

And so, the backroom campaign began. Lobbyists from a number of gay and lesbian organizations started pounding Clement's law firm with threats of boycotts and promises to target the firm's other clients. (Somewhere, Joe McCarthy is smiling.)

In this free country, the LGBT community had the right to do whatever it legally could to lobby against a law that it hated, up to and including threatening the potential defenders of that law with financial ruin. It's a tried-and-true tradition, albeit one that has a very rank smell.

But the problem rests solely with the lawyers. As I was saying, my profession is plagued with a double standard, one that is usually evident in the upper echelons of white-shoe firms, bar associations and law schools.

And it is this: Political correctness, diversity and a progressive (read "ultra-lefty") view of rights will trump integrity every single time the values clash.

Clement is just the latest piece of roadkill on the hypocrisy highway. King & Spalding let a powerful lobbying group subvert its basic piety - the pursuit of justice. Even if some lawyers at the firm were strongly opposed to DOMA, and even if they were unhappy with the type of negative publicity it might create in some corners of the legal community, you'd think they'd understand the larger point of the obligation that they'd agreed to.

Clement himself did. That's why he resigned from the firm when told of its betrayal. In his resignation letter, he wrote that "efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law."

Clement is a hero. As for his former firm, one that coincidentally represents Gitmo guys pro bono, they look like the butt of the latest lawyer joke.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer. E-mail

cflowers1961@yahoo.com. She blogs at philly.com/philly/blogs/flowersshow.