|
|
First Things
The Public Square
(August/September 1994)
Richard John Neuhaus
Copyright
(c) 1994 First Things 45 (August/September 1994)
Never Again?
For most people in the West it is possibly the case that the only absolutely
unambiguous icon of evil is the Third Reich and the Holocaust. One may
argue that there are other instances of evil that should have that status
in the popular consciousness, but they don't. It is therefore understandable
that we continue to make moral discernments by employing Nazism as an absolute
test line separating the discussable from the unspeakable. A new book from
Oxford represents such an exercise in discernment, Stefan Kuhl's The
Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism.
It is a short (160 pp.), assiduously documented, and devastating account
of the way in which American scientists admired and abetted Nazi schemes
of racial eugenics in the 1930s, and how they changed their stories and
tried to cover their tracks after 1945 when the full dimensions of the
Nazi horror became more widely known.
Kuhl's is a necessary reminder of how very liberal and progressive
the advocacy of eugenics was thought to be in the first half of this century.
Negative eugenics, the elimination of the "unfit," and positive
eugenics, the breeding of "superior stock," were both greatly
favored by the enlightened of the day. Even before the Nazis came to power,
German scientists and politicians declared their indebtedness to the inspiring
example of America's pioneering programs of sterilizing the mentally deficient
and criminally prone. The American example is favorably cited in Hitler's
Mein Kampf, and in the 1930s he wrote admiring letters to prominent
American scientists who fully reciprocated his sentiments. Oliver Wendell
Holmes had written in a notorious court decision that "three generations
of imbeciles is enough," and it was this "realistic" approach
of the Americans that German writers lifted up in unfavorable contrast
to what they criticized as the dilatory ways of German scientists and policy
makers. Come the Third Reich and the world would learn the new meaning
of realism.
The leaders of some of the most distinguished universities and research
institutions in America were ardently courted by the Nazis. The 550th anniversary
of the University of Heidelberg in 1936 was marked by the bestowing of
honorary doctorates on prominent American eugenicists, including Foster
Kennedy, a psychiatrist and major figure in the Euthanasia Society of the
United States until he broke with the society because it was squeamish
about advocating the involuntary and systematic extermination of the mentally
and physically unfit. In the eyes of a good many American scientists, the
Germans would become the model of a rational determination that refused
to be inhibited by sentimental concern for the weak who were allegedly
jeopardizing the future of the race.
As useful as Kuhl's study is, there are disappointing omissions and
moments of curious reticence. One suspects that Kuhl, a German academic,
was too well coached by some of the American advisers whom he thanks in
his introduction. In any event, he steers clear of the turbulent waters
surrounding some of the contemporary questions most pertinent to his subject.
By organizing his interpretation around scientists and "American racism,"
he severely narrows the focus to include chiefly those scientists who espoused
theories that today we would call racist. When it comes to commenting on
the contemporary significance of his story, this leaves him with a handful
of villains on the kooky margins of scientific and political discourse.
His own account makes it clear, however, that most of the American scientists
and public policy experts involved were too savvy to make an explicitly
racialist argument for eugenics. While racial overtones were almost everywhere
present, the formal advocacy was usually framed in terms of the fitness
or unfitness not of racial groups but of individuals.
Then too, there is no attention paid the campaign for birth and population
control during the period studied. Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of
Planned Parenthood, is not mentioned even once, although her views (often
explicitly racial) closely paralleled those of the eugenicists, and the
organizations pressing this common agenda had overlapping leadership and
coordinated programs. One might leave the Kuhl book with the impression
that the story he relates has little to do with today, except for some
fringe racists and some generalized cautions about the moral obtuseness
of scientific expertise. In fact, today's disputes over abortion, euthanasia,
fetal experimentation, and population control are on a continuum with the
scientific culture of death examined by Stefan Kuhl. He does, almost in
passing, note the extraordinary role of the Rockefeller Foundation in pushing
the eugenics agenda from the start. Rockefeller funded numerous conferences
and research projects that were a great boost to Nazi-American collaboration,
and the role of the foundation was generously appreciated by the Germans
for giving their efforts international respectability.
Today Rockefeller is joined by Ford, MacArthur, and other megaphilanthropies
that, together with a number of Western governments, pour hundreds of millions
of dollars per year into promoting sterilization, abortion, and other measures
aimed at limiting the fecundity of the poor and disadvantaged. All of this
is done under the rubric of "population control," but it is in
fact a massive exercise in negative eugenics. The racial, cultural, and
economic presuppositions undergirding it are usually thinly disguised,
and sometimes openly admitted. As Nicholas Eberstadt's thorough examination
demonstrates (First Things, January 1994), population control is
ideology disguised as science. There is no scientific measure of "overpopulation,"
but there is a powerful and ideologically driven dread of lesser breeds
that threaten our advantaged way of life and, presumably, the planetary
balance.
We Americans are given to smugly assuring ourselves that "It can't
happen here." And of course the full horror of something like the
Third Reich has not happened here and, God willing, will not. What has
happened here, as Stefan Kuhl so trenchantly demonstrates, is that many
of the "brightest and best" of the American scientific and public
policy community warmly endorsed the ideas, and some of the practices,
that gave the world the Holocaust. After 1945 they drew back in repugnance
from the consequences of their ideas but, with slight semantic changes,
they continued and they continue to advance the same ideas. One of the
prosecutors at Nuremberg explained how people could act so savagely: "There
is only one step to take. You may not think it possible to take it; but
I assure you that men I thought decent men did take it. You have only to
decide that one group of human beings have lost their human rights."
As a polity, the United States has long since taken that step with respect
to unborn children. The proponents of euthanasia urge upon us further steps
in deciding that those who cannot effectively assert their rights have
no rights. At Nuremberg the prosecution argued that the killing programs
unfolded quite predictably from one thing to another, that the killing
of the six-millionth Jew was set in motion by the morphine overdose given
the first harelipped child.
Most of us rebel against the drawing of any analogies between ourselves
and the Nazis. That is understandable. The rebellion is rooted in part
in our conceit that we are not capable of such great evil. It is rooted
also in an entirely reasonable appreciation of the differences between
our circumstance-culturally, politically, economically-and that of Germany
in the 1930s. But our perception of reality is distorted by making Nazism
the test of evil. It is as though we can comfort ourselves that "it"
is not happening here because there is no American Auschwitz and nobody
is proposing the extermination of millions of Jews, gypsies, and others
officially classified as subhuman.
So we allow, and even provide government subsidy for, the killing of
1.6 million unborn children each year. That, we are told, is no analogy
with the Nazis because they prohibited abortion, at least for the socially
desirable. So, moreover, it is open season for fetal experimentation, fetal
farming, and the use of aborted corpses for transplants. That, we are told,
is not comparable to doing the same thing with born children and grown-ups-and
of course it both is and is not the same thing. It is not the same thing
chiefly because we have decided that a group of human beings have no rights.
So, yet further, the incidence of involuntary euthanasia (killing people
who do not want to be killed) may one day reach the level that it is today
in the Netherlands. That would be many thousands of killings per year.
Even then, we will be told, that is nowhere near the scale of the Holocaust
and, anyway, many of those people might want to be killed if they only
knew what was best for them.
By making the Holocaust the measure of evil, we set an unreasonably
high standard, so to speak. Whatever we have done and now do and may do
in the future, it is certainly not that bad. It is as though we
were to take a somewhat relaxed view of murderers who operate on a scale
that falls short of Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. But then we remember
the rabbinic wisdom that to save one life is to save the world; and its
obverse, to kill one life is to kill the world. Not literally, of course,
but morally, which is much more important. Genocide began with the first
morphine overdose given a harelipped baby. Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection
documents much more than its author knows, or at least much more than he
says. It makes disturbingly clear that many of the most respectable, most
influential, and most progressive scientific minds of this century laid
the intellectual and moral groundwork on which the Nazis built, and cheered
them on as they were building.
Later, most of these Nazi sympathizers would adamantly insist that
that is not what they had meant, that is not what they meant at all. But
the ideas are what matter, and in many cases they did not and have not
disowned the ideas. The word "eugenics" does not appear in the
annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation, but it does not take a cryptologist
to recognize the euphemisms. "It" assumes many forms. While we
work ourselves up into a fine heat shouting "Never again!" it
is happening again.
Like Father Like Son, Almost
On a more personal note, but one not unrelated to the concerns addressed
in these pages, my sister Mildred has been sorting through the heaps of
letters, photos, and family oddments accumulated by Mom before she moved
to the nursing home a few months ago at age ninety-two. Mildred has been
mailing packets of selected materials to the eight children, and I am surprised
to be learning things about my parents different from what I thought I
knew. As with most small children, I suppose, I was endlessly fascinated
by my parents' stories about "the olden days," meaning mainly
the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, the decade before my birth. Years ago I
wrote out a reflection by a Llewelyn Powys and recently came across it
again: "The years lived by our father before he begot us have upon
them a wonder that cannot easily be matched. . . . In some dim way we share
in those adventures of this mortal who not so long ago moved over the face
of the earth like a god to call us up out of the deep."
The packet reveals that I wrote more often to my folks than I had remembered,
in more detail, and more affectionately. Dad died at age seventy-two in
1972, and I have often thought that the life I have lived is in very large
part his, but that is a long and complicated story that need not delay
us here. More to the point is a document in the packet sent by Mim that
is dated May 14, 1941. It is a paper given by the Rev. C. H. Neuhaus to
the Ontario District Pastoral Conference, and in it he challenges a proposal
by the Canadian government for the moral and religious education of children
in the public schools. Apparently the paper met with the approval of his
colleagues in the ministerium of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and
was given some wider distribution in Canadian church circles. It is, so
far as I know, the only extensive statement by Dad on religion and public
policy, and this son cannot read it without entertaining a question about
how it is that arguments and dispositions are transmitted from one generation
to another. I very much doubt that it is in the genes. Certainly Dad and
I had not discussed these matters in any detail, in fact hardly at all,
and yet I discover more than fifty years later that-with a smidgen of difference
here and there-his arguments are mine, and that the issues he addressed
in 1941 are not all that different from those being disputed in 1994.
It was wartime of course, Canada having gone into it with Britain in
1939, and the government, as is the wont of governments, wanted religion
to rally more fervently around the flag. (That was when Canada still had
a flag, before Prime Minister Lester Pearson fobbed off on the long- suffering
Canadians a red maple leaf contrivance that has all the gravitas of a supermarket
logo.) The government proposed putting religion courses into the public
schools, such courses to be taught by the several clergymen of each school
district. Keep in mind that in Ontario public schools were and are distinct
from "separate" schools, the latter being Catholic schools supported
by public funds. For all practical purposes, public schools were Protestant
schools-Protestant being defined as non-Catholic. Dad thought the government
proposal a very bad idea, and in these nine now yellowed single-spaced
pages he sets out twelve reasons for his opposition. (He was a most methodical
man.) I will but touch on some highlights.
First, he contended that the climate of wartime was not conducive to
"sober and calm deliberation" of such an important question.
If the proposal must be considered, it should be put off until after the
war. Meanwhile, those clergy who favored the proposal should not exploit
their positions of influence. As becomes evident, he had chiefly in mind
the clergy of the Anglican Church and the United Church of Canada, the
mainline Protestant denominations toward which he harbored some suspicion.
"Clergymen," he wrote, "are not 'a superior form of humanity.'
'Good intentions' on their part are no more worthy of special consideration
in a Democracy than are the 'good intentions' of an atheist. The
moment you depart from this ideal of Democracy you cease being democratic
and are preparing the soil for future bureaucracy and dictatorship."
It is noteworthy that throughout the paper "democracy" is upper
case and underlined, which turns out to be no mere stylistic eccentricity.
Religious instruction in the public schools, Dad argued, "is one
step toward State Religion." His animus toward state religion was
grounded in the experience of the Saxons who fled the state church of Prussia
and founded the Missouri Synod in 1847. It was also based in his pastoral
experience with immigrants from state churches who produced their church
tax receipts as bona fides of their good standing as Lutheran Christians.
The religious instruction proposal was indeed a small step, but Dad urged
that it be seen in the light of the ambitions of some to establish a national
church. He made clear that he was not speaking of the Roman Catholic Church,
for which he had considerable respect. "I mean two large Protestant
denominations in Canada. Members and clergy of the one have made the impression
on me that they believe their church should be The Official Church by right
of inheritance or by virtue of the former special recognition by the British
Crown. The other large body is on record with these words, 'that this settlement
of unity may in due time, as far as Canada is concerned, take shape in
a Church which may fittingly be described as national.'" The first
denomination was, of course, the Anglican, and the second the United Church
of Canada, which was formed by a merger of Presbyterians, Methodists, and
some others in the 1920s. In a Democracy, Dad said, they can preach
their ideas from their denominational housetops, but they should not be
given access to "the housetop of tax-supported public schools."
Moreover, clergy cannot teach, as was proposed by the government, a
nondenominational religion. Dad wondered about the integrity of clergy
who would go along with such a plan: "Will he not feel that he is
a traitor to his own beliefs and to the church to which he has bound himself
whenever he answers questions in such a manner as to give equal value to
opposite views and interpretations?" Then, sounding for all the world
like a premature postmodernist attacking putatively universal perspectives,
Dad wrote, "My conviction is that, strictly speaking, there is no
such thing as nondenominational religion. If you disagree in some point
with all the existing denominations then you form a new denomination of
at least one member, whether you give your denomination a name or not.
To be without opinion or belief is simply not human." He had on occasion
tried, he said, to present evenhandedly conflicting interpretations of
matters of importance, and it was his consistent experience that, despite
his efforts, his own convictions asserted themselves "most unexpectedly."
He did not have much confidence that most clergy would even try to make
the effort.
He also opposed the government scheme because it would be "a further
hindrance to an eventual Democratic settlement of the problem now existing
between public and separate schools." His "dream" was that
one day all school taxes would go into a common fund from which either
all churches or no church could get support for their own schools. "At
present the state's money is being used to teach only one religion in one
church's schools." He was not opposed to the Catholic separate schools;
he simply wanted other churches to have the same opportunity. The scheme
for teaching in the public schools a religion "designed to suit Christian,
Jew, and atheist" would delay a more just arrangement by creating
a delusion among the majority Protestants that the question of religious
instruction had been satisfactorily resolved, when in fact the religion
being taught would satisfy almost nobody's idea of authentic religion.
Such instruction would, however, be identifiably Christian in some
watered-down sense of the term, and that poses problems for non- Christians,
no matter how small a minority they might be. The government scheme allowed
that non-Christian children could be excused from religious instruction,
but Dad thought that not nearly enough. He imagined a Jewish child thinking
this way: "My father is a law-abiding citizen of this country which
calls itself a Democracy. He is supposed to have the same rights and privileges
as any other citizen of the land. When he pays his taxes the government
never gives him a rebate because I do not get our kind of religion in the
public schools. They say to my father that the religious instruction must
be taken from the Christian Bible. If my father complains that this is
not fair, he is told, 'If you don't like our arrangement, your boy can
stay out during that time.' Queer thing this Democracy. You belong to it
part of the time and part of the time you don't really belong." Dad
opines, "Even a small neighborhood gang of boys demonstrates the true
spirit of Democracy better than that. Will such a gang invoke the
majority rule and insist on cooking a rabbit stew on Friday when they know
that only one member, Mickey O'Brien, is not to eat meat on Friday?"
Moreover, an hour or two a week of such religious instruction would
not be able to compete with the "pseudo-science" of secularism
that is otherwise taught in the schools. "Which theory is going to
be upheld, that monkeys became evolutionists or that evolutionists became
monkeys?" Then too, sound moral instruction is unlikely since the
clergy do not agree on the nature of sin or even on what is a sin. Among
the examples he cites: "Will one condemn the modern mixed dance as
sin and another classify it as highly desirable rhythmic recreation? Will
one try to make the children believe that the Sabbath-laws of the Old Testament
are still in force while another will say that they were abolished when
Christ came? Will one present moderate drinking as a crime and another
insist that only drunkenness is sin?" (The Missouri Synod was against
dancing, indifferent to Sabbath laws, and positively disposed toward moderate
drinking, with moderation very generously defined.)
Dad also opposed the government scheme because he thought many clergy
did not "stand for true principles of patriotism." He had the
"rabid pacifists" of the liberal churches in mind, but he also
worried about those who "taught a shallow, supercilious, hysterical
brand of patriotism [that swings] too far towards the opposite extreme."
He observed, "Just being a member of the clergy was no guarantee for
a man's patriotism in the last war [World War I] and certainly is not so
today." One detects a little needling of the establishmentarian mainline
going on here. In World War I, German Lutherans were suspected of having
a "dual loyalty," if they were not actually traitors. There were
some instances of violence against Lutheran pastors, and almost everywhere
there was pressure to drop German language services and other evidences
of "foreignness." In 1941, by contrast, this German Lutheran
pastor presents himself as the guardian of "true patriotism"
against the mainline pacifists, on the one hand, and jingoists, on the
other. Dad knew a thing or two about positioning oneself to forensic advantage.
In his most detailed objection to the government proposal, he excoriates
the churches for evading their responsibility for the religious education
of their children. Religious instruction in the public schools is a deceptively
easy way out. "How disgracefully cheap is this arrangement! Cheapness
in religious instruction has for so long been in vogue among the churches
that the temptation to get still more even cheaper instruction by putting
religion into the public schools is all but irresistible to some."
Then, in his twelfth objection, he returns to the question of fairness.
"There is a minority in our Democracy which prefers not to
be bothered with our religion. For us to try to force religion on them
in a public tax-supported school because we claim it is good for them may
have the best intentions behind it, but nevertheless it is dangerous reasoning
in a Democracy. . . . In a Democracy we love to speak of
our sportsmanship. If you heard a person talking about shooting a fine
buck and knew all the while that he had first set a snare for that buck
to make sure that it couldn't get away, you'd be thoroughly disgusted with
that man." The school truancy laws, he suggested, were like that snare,
giving clergy a captive audience for their instruction. "I do not
believe," he said in summary, "that this is becoming to a Democracy."
(The analogy of children as targets should perhaps not be pressed too far,
but Dad was an almost obsessive hunter and the analogy no doubt seemed
to him quite natural.)
I suggested earlier that, mutatis mutandis, Dad's attitudes and arguments
then were pretty close to mine now. The suspicion of civil religion or
any religion under government auspices, the need for undiluted Christian
witness, the imperative to respect differences, the devotion to democratic
fairness, the impossibility of neutrality in matters of religious and moral
consequence-all these seem as pertinent today as they were in the disputes
of 1941. His "dream" of a common public fund from which people
could get support for the schools of their choice is today's advocacy of
vouchers and other measures to give parents real decision-making power
in education. I suppose some readers might even detect a connection between
Dad's objection to the pretensions of mainline churches and this writer's
occasional criticisms of oldline liberalism in this country. If there is
such a connection, it is not in the genes; it is in the continuing confusions
of liberal Protestantism. Dad, who was by his seminary classmates called
"Pope" Neuhaus, was a man of rather definite views. That, of
course, is another difference between father and son.
As it happened, the scheme that Dad was protesting did go through,
although he refused to participate in it. In my grade school we had Canon
Phillips, the Anglican rector, come in once a week for our spiritual edification.
Out of hearing, we students referred to him as "Canonball Phillips"
and thought him awfully dull. I remember thinking him not too sharp as
well, since he always got the numbering of the Ten Commandments wrong (Lutherans
and Catholics count them the right way). He was a soft-spoken and no doubt
quite admirable person, but Canon Phillips made no discernible impact on
my spiritual consciousness, and certainly posed no serious religious alternative
to a boy steeped in the true faith as promulgated by the Missouri Synod.
The Catholics were something else; they were seriously different. In religious
education, and perhaps in other respects, Dad wanted what the Catholics
had. I expect he and Father Harrington of St. John the Baptist talked about
such matters on their long deer hunting expeditions up in Algonquin country.
They almost always came back with a fine buck or doe, usually with two.
And I am sure they set no snares.
The President's Words and Actions
We had thought to offer a few excerpts from a letter sent to President
Clinton by eleven very prominent leaders in American evangelicalism, but
the letter is so nicely put together that we gave up on that idea. Here's
the whole thing:
"Dear Mr. President,
"We are sending you this open letter to express our deep concern
over the State Department's cable last month to all diplomatic and consular
posts asking them to pressure foreign governments to support greater abortion
availability in the United Nations population-stabilization plan. The cable
described access to legal abortion as a 'fundamental right of all women.'
"Mr. President, this is an unprecedented misuse of our diplomatic
corps for political ends. We can think of no other time in history when
American embassies were used to promote a domestic social agenda-particularly
one that has bitterly divided our own people for more than two decades.
The majority of Americans do not accept abortion as a 'fundamental right.'
"Moreover, the countries that the State Department is pressuring
to embrace liberalized abortion policies, often in violation of their own
laws, deeply resent what they rightly regard as cultural imperialism. The
citizens of Africa, Asia, Central America, and South America are offended
that the United States would urge them to refashion their own social policies
to 'look like America.'
"Apart from the moral issue, which we consider paramount, how can
we urge greater access to abortion in countries that often do not have
antibiotics, ultrasound machines, or even sterile operating rooms? At a
press conference on Capitol Hill, Dr. Margaret Ogola from Kenya pointed
out that in remote regions of her country, clinics often lack life-saving
medications, such as penicillin. If a surgical procedure like abortion
were introduced into these regions, the result would be massive infections
and death. Surely the United Nations' plan to slow population growth does
not include mothers dying on unsafe operating tables.
"Mr. President, we remind you of the words of Mother Teresa that
you yourself heard a few weeks ago at the National Prayer Breakfast. This
tiny woman has spent her life working among the world's poor and understands
their needs far better than any of us do. She said: 'the greatest destroyer
of peace today is abortion. . . . Any country that accepts abortion is
not teaching the people to love but to use any violence to get what they
want.
"In a recent interview with Peggy Wehmeyer of ABC News, you stated,
'I think there are too many abortions in America. I think there should
be more adoptions in America.' During your campaign you proclaimed that
abortions should be 'safe, legal, and rare.' How can these statements
be reconciled with your cable to our embassies, directing them to promote
abortions worldwide? How do they square with your recent allocation of
federal dollars to agencies that perform or support abortions internationally?
A chasm exists between your public pronouncements and the quieter actions
of your Administration. We plead with you, Mr. President, not to make the
United States an exporter of violence and death. Instead, we urge you to
maintain our heritage as a beacon of morality and hope to the poor and
suffering of the world.
"We respectfully ask that you direct the State Department to rescind
last month's directive pressuring foreign governments to accept abortion
on demand. America is at its best when we respect other nations' desire
to nurture life, not destroy life.
"Respectfully," (Signed by Charles W. Colson, Dr. Charles
Swindoll, Dr. Billy A. Melvin, Dr. William R. Bright, Dr. James C. Dobson,
Dr. Edwin Young, Dr. D. James Kennedy, Rev. John M. Perkins, Dr. Joseph
M. Stowell, Dr. Paul A. Cedar, Dr. Brandt Gustavson.)
The Constitution vs. the Rule
of Judges
A potentially constructive controversy surrounds Harry V. Jaffa's recent
book on the Constitution (Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution:
A Disputed Question, Regnery). Jaffa, a constitutional scholar and
long a prominent figure in conservative intellectual circles, has taken
it upon himself to smite hip and thigh conservatives who do not accept
his contention that the Constitution is anchored in the principles of natural
law (as in "we hold these truths to be self evident") and should
be interpreted in that light. He is particularly harsh, indeed downright
disagreeable, in his attacks on Judge Robert Bork, Chief Justice William
Rehnquist, and former Attorney General Edwin Meese, but his polemical sweep
takes in a host of others who do not subscribe to his version of the "original
understanding."
In an extended critique in National Review, Bork pulls out most
of the stops in making the case that Jaffa's argument is incoherent, disingenuous,
and finally inconsequential. Inconsequential because the main issue that
seems to be at stake in Jaffa's disputation is the interpretation of the
1857 Dred Scott decision and Federal jurisdiction with respect to
slavery. But, if Jaffa's view is accepted, it would have much wider implications
for interpreting the Constitution. Without going into detail, Bork's point
is that the Constitution reflects the practical experience of the Founders,
and is not the product of a "general theory"-whether the general
theory be based on natural law or something else. Bork notes that he has
addressed these questions in response to more temperate critics in the
pages of First Things (March 1992 and May 1992), and he does not
take kindly to Jaffa's accusation that this view of the Constitution makes
him a moral relativist. In his personal capacity, says Bork, a judge may
be a great moral philosopher, but in the assigned task of interpreting
the Constitution he must be a legal positivist who attends to the text
and does not impose his own views on what the Constitution actually says.
There are a number of important questions engaged in this dispute.
With Jaffa, one might have considerable sympathy for Abraham Lincoln's
insistence, at the supreme moment of national crisis, that the Constitution
be understood in light of the truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.
But there would seem to be no getting around the fact that those truths
are not explicitly stated in the Constitution, and it is the Constitution
that judges are sworn to uphold. The Constitution is an agreement, and
in this respect it is not unlike a contract. Unlike the Declaration, it
is not a statement of philosophical principles so much as a reflection
of deals struck (on, for example, slavery and state religious establishments).
The contract was made within a historical context marked, to be sure, by
shared philosophical and religious presuppositions.
Almost all of those involved in the writing and ratification of the
Constitution held such presuppositions and, in addition, had a strong sense
that destiny, even Providence, was engaged in what they were doing. One
might say that the Constitution is a contract within the context of a covenant;
an agreement on what will be done in practice in the light of principles
and hopes broadly shared. The covenantal sensibility and the general principles
can at points help us determine the "original understanding"
that informed the Constitution. Theology, philosophy, and moral sensibility
form the cognitive "background" of the document, so to speak,
but the founders were not entirely agreed on principles and were even less
agreed on what principles should mean in practice (slavery being the most
obvious instance of disagreement). In the face of significant disagreements,
the Constitution is the product of negotiations about the federal polity
by which the states would bind themselves. One is impressed in reading
the numerous documents in the magnificent two volumes recently issued as
The Debate on the Constitution (Library of America) at how very
practical and unphilosophical were most of the matters disputed by federalists
and antifederalists alike.
The most exigent concerns were for liberty and prosperity. Of course
the meaning of liberty, prosperity, and other aspects of the common good
invite careful philosophical reflection, but one is struck by how much
the founders thought that the philosophical and moral underpinnings could
be taken for granted. The debate over the Constitution was very little
about the meaning of the constituting ideas and very much about the mechanics
of protecting the realities to which those ideas refer. Terms of office,
the pros and cons of a standing army, executive prerogatives, the division
of functions between houses of Congress, the power of states in federal
elections-these and a host of other practical questions preoccupy the founding
debates. The Constitution is what came out of this multifaceted and often
confused process of dispute and decision. Widely shared philosophical assumptions
did not determine every decision. Despite philosophical agreements, many
questions could have been decided differently. Personalities, regional
anxieties, ambition for office, and numerous other factors all played their
part. A later generation may well think that some decisions should have
gone the other way. Anticipating that contingency, the Constitution makes
provision for its own amendment, and there have been twenty-six of them
to date.
To say that the Constitution is a set of stipulated arrangements based
on practical experience is not to say that general theory or principles
are unimportant. Washington, John Adams, and others among the founders
were publicly insistent that this experiment in republican governance could
not have been created and cannot be sustained except by a vibrant popular
belief in moral principles supported by religion and public virtue. Those
principles, however, are not the subject of the Constitution itself. The
Constitution provides for such principles to be given full play in the
legislative procedures of this representative democracy. It is for legislators,
not judges, to invoke moral vision, philosophical argument, and general
theory in making the case for the enactment of their proposals. As Judge
Bork has persuasively explained in The Tempting of America (1990),
activist judges have in recent decades put themselves in the place of the
legislature. This illegitimate preemption of power has the ironic result
that judges feel free to do what they are forbidden to do while forbidding
legislatures to do what they are required to do-namely, make law by reference
to moral principle and general theory. Thus, for example, courts impose
their notion of the "nonestablishment" of religion in a manner
that forces legislatures into a "strict separationism" that ends
up with laws requiring religion to retreat wherever government advances.
As the Declaration and other documents of the founding period make
unmistakably clear, those responsible for the Constitution believed that
there is a "higher law," sometimes expressed in terms of natural
law, sometimes in terms of reason and common sense, sometimes more explicitly
in terms of biblical revelation. These beliefs are even more pronounced
if one takes into account the several state constitutions when trying to
understand the historical context of the constitutional process. But the
ideational background of the constitutional process is not the Constitution
itself. The Constitution itself is notably devoid of philosophical or moral
affirmations. This, as the Marxists were fond of saying, is no accident.
Those involved in the writing and ratification of the Constitution were
eager not to get bogged down in disputation over first principles. They
devised a polity of practical arrangements, which arrangements include
a judiciary charged with the modest task of making sure that the provisions
of the Constitution are not violated. (Indeed, even that statement of the
task may be too immodest, since it is not the text of the Constitution
but only later experience that established that, for instance, the Supreme
Court had the authority to declare laws passed by Congress unconstitutional.)
In recent decades, judges have increasingly acted as though they were
appointed to be philosopher kings. Those who criticize this liberal "judicial
activism," however, often seem to favor conservative judicial activism.
That is, they are against the current crop of philosopher kings not because
they act like philosopher kings but because they have the wrong philosophy.
In activist literature on the right one frequently encounters the proposal
that judges should be appointed who favor "traditional morality,"
or even that the courts need more "Christian judges." If Bork
and those of like mind got it right, this way of thinking is utterly wrongheaded.
Among other things, it increases social acceptance of the courts' usurpation
of the legislative power. On the bench we need people who, whatever their
philosophy on other matters, impose upon themselves self-denying ordinances
in the exercise of their authority. In this view, citizens who want laws
more in accord with moral truth should direct their energies to the legislature,
electing representatives of like mind and holding them accountable to their
declared positions. And then citizens can only hope that the laws enacted
will not run up against judges who think it is their right, even their
duty, to override the judgment of the people's representatives with their
allegedly more enlightened understanding of the common good.
Although the terms of debate change from time to time, the questions
engaged by Bork and Jaffa (and many others) have been with us for a long
time. In our judgment, the Bork understanding of how this constitutional
order is supposed to function is convincing. At the same time, there are
those who agree with that judgment but who also believe that we have drifted
so far from the intention of the founders that there is no going back to
the jurisprudence of "original understanding." We have to accept
the fact, they say, that the judiciary has become a thoroughly politicized
institution and we therefore have no choice but to work politically to
replace "their" philosopher kings with "ours." If we
must be ruled by judges, they tell us, better that they rule by the dictates
of natural law than by the moral relativism and emotivism that currently
prevail in the courts. Whether they acknowledge it or not, those who have
reached that doleful conclusion would seem to have given up on the American
constitutional experiment as a lost cause. People who care about the moral
legitimacy of the American regime should not lightly acquiesce in that
conclusion.
A Jesuit Awakening
The Superior General of the Society of Jesus, often called the black
pope, has written to communicate his dissatisfaction with an item appearing
in these pages in the April issue. Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach asks us
to "rectify the damage you have done to the Society's name among your
readers by publishing a more accurate account of the Society's commitment
to human life in all aspects, including the life of the unborn." Father
Kolvenbach is a discerning, devoted, and very personable man whose wishes
we are eager to accommodate, but this one may be difficult.
Readers may recall that we had commented favorably on a long letter
by Fr. John Conley, a Jesuit at Fordham, that was published in the National
Jesuit News. Fr. Conley pointed out that the Society of Jesus had,
to say the very least, a very undistinguished record when it comes to addressing
the "unspeakable crime" (Vatican Council II) of abortion. More
specifically, he criticized the preparatory materials for the General Congregation
(GC) of the Society, which is to be held in 1995. In those materials, abortion
is barely mentioned, and the few references to the subject are buried in
long catalogues of other concerns that appear to have greater priority,
ranging from environmentalism, racism, capitalism, women's rights, and
drug addiction to illiteracy. Fr. Kolvenbach included with his letter a
letter in response to Fr. Conley by Fr. Paul Soukup of Santa Clara, California,
which was also published in the National Jesuit News. Fr. Soukup
was involved in the preparation of the materials for the GC and, it seems
to us, his letter only strengthens Fr. Conley's criticism.
Of the working groups that prepared the materials, Fr. Soukup writes
that "the international nature of the Society demanded a certain global
perspective that precluded lengthy treatment of even vital local issues."
It is exceedingly curious that abortion should in any sense be considered
a local issue. "However, within those constraints, more than one group
did address the question," writes Fr. Soukup. "My daily notes
indicate several discussions about abortion and how we might respond to
it. But the sheer volume of other themes and the limited space in the final
documents meant that the written comments had to be brief." Fr. Conley's
complaint, however, was not that the comments on abortion were brief but
that the few passing references to abortion were overwhelmed and relativized
by what Fr. Soukup calls "the sheer volume of other themes."
The very muted witness of the Society of Jesus with respect to abortion,
we wrote, "is in sharpest contrast with the Second Vatican Council,
the public witness of the bishops, and the urgencies that animate the ministry
of John Paul II." We regret that there is no reason to withdraw that
judgment. Fr. Kolvenbach protests our conclusion "that the Society
of Jesus, as distinct from many of its members, has become a net liability
as the Catholic Church travels into the Third Millennium." America,
the Jesuit magazine published here in New York, also took editorial umbrage
at that statement. In fact, however, we did not say that that is our conclusion.
We said that "some of those who know the Society well and love it
deeply" are reflecting upon "the possibility" that the Society
has become such a net liability. We know from numerous conversations, including
conversations with distinguished Jesuits, that that question is being asked.
Our own conclusion is that all who care about the life and mission of the
Catholic Church should pray that the General Congregation of 1995 will
witness a great reawakening of the constituting genius of the Society of
Jesus. Whether or not that happens will, in very significant part, be indicated
by the public urgency of the Society's concern for the children killed
and the women exploited by abortion.
While We're At It
- The World Council of Churches (WCC) has chosen Harare, Zimbabwe, as
the site for its fiftieth anniversary assembly in 1998. The main argument
for the site was that the impoverished churches of the South have much
to teach the churches in the developed North. But not about homosexuality.
The government there, with the support of the churches, lists sodomy as
a crime. Said Johath Siyachitema, President of the Zimbabwe Council of
Churches, "The church in Zimbabwe is very clear on this. Homosexuality
is a sin, and the government is acting in accord with the law." Some
American and European representatives thought that was reason enough not
to hold the assembly in Harare. Leonid Kishkovsky of the Orthodox Church
in America, however, argued that deciding the question on this issue could
be the "opening wedge for a general discussion of homosexual behavior"
that might imperil the future of the WCC. Recognizing that the WCC might
not survive more imperiling, the opposition subsided. The North Atlantic
champions of the feminist and gay agendas, being in thrall to the etiquette
of multiculturalism, cannot bring themselves candidly to assert that on
these and other questions the "people of color" to the South
of us are culturally backward and underdeveloped, which is obviously what
they believe. So the culturally forward and overdeveloped will, come 1998,
gather in solemn assembly in Zimbabwe.
- The Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation puts out these lovely television ads
on the theme "Life. What a Beautiful Choice." You've probably
seen them. Planned Parenthood doesn't like them at all. One ad shows a
wriggling newborn next to an ultrasound video of a ten-week-old unborn
baby moving in similar fashion. The ad says, "The only difference
is that the baby on the left is already born, and the baby on the right
would very much like to be." Alex Sanger of Planned Parenthood, the
grandson of Margaret Sanger, complains, "This ad only gives half the
story. The baby on the left is big. The fetus on the right is only a few
inches long. There's no comparison. It's deceptive." Now let's see
if we got this. Big. Little. Apparently that's all you need to know to
master Planned Parenthood Ethics 101.
- A couple of issues ago we noted Paul Kurtz's new book, which is subtitled
"The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz." We wondered if it was a precedent
to put one's own name in the subtitle of one's book. We should have known
better. Here is an announcement from Scholars Press, which is bringing
out The Sociology of Andrew M. Greeley. By Andrew M. Greeley. In
the case of this book by Father Greeley, we can be sure that he is an authority
on the subject.
- Strange are the fantasies that feed alarmism. Item from the Wanderer:
"Top Vatican officials have bluntly stated that the American Church
is in material schism. What the Pope, surely, is trying to prevent is making
this material, de facto, schism formal. He knows that bishops such as [here
the names of three bishops least favored by conservatives] might start
their own church at the slightest provocation, and that perhaps 70 percent
of the clergy and 90 percent of the laity would follow them." That
strikes us as utter fantasy. A remarkable thing about Catholics in America
is that, no matter how strident their opposition to Church teaching and
practice, they are adamant about being unquestionably members of the Church.
And that means, minimally, being in communion with Rome. Further, in the
United States, unlike Europe, Catholics are perfectly familiar with other
churches and denominations that claim to be Catholic, and there is no significant
defection to such groups. A bishop, whether on the right or the left, who
set up his own church would have the following of perhaps a few thousand
other religious eccentrics in this country, which is to say almost none.
If indeed "top Vatican officials" say what the Wanderer
says they say, they are as misinformed about the Church in America as are
many other Vatican officials. Of course the Wanderer and kindred
publications make no secret of their wish that liberals would formally
leave the Church, but that is a quite another matter.
- ERGO! That's the acronym of Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization,
a new outfit run by Hemlock Society founder Derek Humphry. They did a national
survey on doctor-assisted suicide in which half the sample was asked questions
employing euphemisms, while the other half were polled using blunter language.
So it turns out that people are more likely to favor "physician's
aid in dying" than "physician-aided suicide." An awful lot
of people, it seems, still have inhibitions about suicide. The Hemlock
newsletter draws the unsurprising conclusion: "Americans would be
more likely to vote for a law allowing physician aid-in-dying if that law
were written using euphemisms instead of more direct language." And
the vote is more likely to carry if we could do something about those old
people. According to one poll, the strongest support for euthanasia is
among people aged eighteen to twenty-nine, while another survey found that
two-thirds of medical patients over sixty-five opposed such measures while
80 percent of patients in their thirties were in support. It figures. It's
a question of whether you're talking about "them" or "us."
- This is embarrassing. It seems every time we mention something related
to Irving Louis Horowitz an error creeps in. A few months ago we forgot
to say that a book was published by Transaction, which Horowitz heads,
and now we reviewed his book, The Decomposition of Sociology, saying
it was published by Transaction when in fact it is published by Oxford.
Be assured that this will not discourage us from making mention of Horowitz
and his many impressive endeavors.
- Further evidence that, after years of most determined effort, proponents
have not been able to remove the opprobrium from the word "abortion":
the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights has changed its name to the
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Abortion by any other name
. . .
- "Revisionists" who deny or belittle the Holocaust are hit
hard in a joint statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and
the Synagogue Council of America. The revisionists are coming in for increasingly
critical attention from people who in the past hoped that they would just
go away if ignored (see the review of Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the
Holocaust and Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory in February
1994 issue). In recent years, revisionists have adopted a more scholarly
tone, muting explicit anti-Semitism, and calling for "open debate"
on college campuses and elsewhere. The statement by the Catholic and Jewish
leaders says: "The deniers then argue that the First Amendment should
be read to impel university and college publications to publish whatever
material they may choose to provide. This is a perversion of the First
Amendment. All educational institutions and their publications, whether
official or student sponsored, should unconditionally reject any efforts
to deny the horrifying realities of the Holocaust." On this one, everyone
seems to agree that censorship is a very good thing. Everyone except the
revisionists, that is.
- For many years Albert Shanker was a voice of sanity on numerous public
questions, and still is. But as President of the American Federation of
Teachers he seems to be locked into the vested interests of the union when
it comes to anything touching education. To be sure, that might be expected
of a union leader, but Shanker has at times demonstrated that he is not
simply another union leader protecting organized labor's shrinking turf.
His advertising column appears in newspapers and opinion magazines under
the Reformational title "Here We Stand," but Shanker has regrettably
little to say about genuine reform of public education. Week in week out,
the message is monothematic: Pour more money into the existing public school
system. That is the bottom line of almost every column by one who was once
thought to be something of a statesman of public policy but is turning
himself into a flack for the educational bureaucracy. There is no evidence
of critical rethinking in the face of the undeniable fact that there is
no discernible connection between public school expenditure and public
school result. In fact, expenditures have in recent decades multiplied,
while results have plummeted. Only the American Federation of Teachers
and the National Educational Association seem oblivious to this reality.
The missing component in the ideology of the unionized educational establishment
is the family. Families and parents, when mentioned at all, are viewed
as unwelcome competitors. So, in a recent column criticizing the role of
volunteers in public schools, Shanker concludes, "We should stop working
around the edges of the main institution concerned with children-the schools-and
concentrate on making our schools moral communities." The main institution
concerned with children? Surely the family is that. But in this Shanker
column, as in so many others, the family is only mentioned as a failed
institution that generates pathologies that are to be remedied, presumably,
by the public school. The unions running the state school system will more
believably present themselves as concerned for children-rather than for
their job security and monopoly on public funds-when they show a decent
respect for parents and families. Of course the Shankers fear that, if
parents had a bigger say in things, they would take their children out
of the state schools and put them in schools of their own choosing. The
more those in charge of the public schools display contempt for families,
the more parents will want to do precisely that.
- There is something almost refreshing about an unvarnished admission
of spinelessness. We have been sent copies of the correspondence between
the legal services office of a major state university and a nearby physician
who let some pro-life crisis pregnancy counselors use his office. The attorney
for the university's legal office complained to the doctor that the counselors
tried to dissuade a young woman from having an abortion. The woman, says
the attorney, "requests that you no longer allow the University Pregnancy
Crisis Center to do business in your office and that you not allow such
activities to take place there in the future." The doctor's response
concludes with this: "Since I have no strong convictions and do not
want to be picketed or entail any legal expenses, I have acquiesced to
your implied threats." It takes a kind of courage, no doubt perverse,
to so straightforwardly confess to cowardice. On the other hand, in the
absence of strong convictions, maybe neither courage nor cowardice come
into play.
- There is possibly no reason why you should ever have heard of Joseph
W. Moylan of Omaha, Nebraska. But in a time of moral derangement his name
should be noted. For many years he served on the Nebraska state court,
and then the legislature passed a law requiring judges to authorize abortions
when the parents of a minor would not give permission. Knowing what he
would be required to do, Judge Moylan resigned. He refused to be complicit
in what he recognized as an unspeakable evil. Just that. An apparently
little thing. The local papers took notice, but it did not ignite any great
furor of public attention. Maybe, however, here and there, a few people
were prompted by Moylan's witness to think again about the responsibilities
and opportunities of moral agency. When, please God, this dark night is
past, people will remember Joseph Moylan and take heart from the fact that
not everybody went along.
- Those sneaky Christians are up to it again. A front page story in the
Washington Post raises the alarm about conservative Christians who
have the effrontery not only to run for office but to actually get themselves
elected. Here is the insidious way they go about it: "The model stealth
campaign, according to People for the American Way, took place here in
San Diego County in 1990, when more than ninety conservative candidates
ran for school board and other offices. By confining their campaigns to
churches, the group charged, these candidates were able to mobilize a potent
constituency without alerting their opponents, and nearly two-thirds won
their races. 'So successful were these "stealth" candidates that
many of the long-term school board members who found themselves voted out
of office that year reported later that they were frankly unaware that
their re-elections were in any jeopardy whatsoever until election night,'
Matthew Freeman, People for the American Way's research director, wrote
in a report last year." The story does not say whether PAW's research
director has figured out that board members might have discovered what
is going on in their communities by going to church, or by talking to somebody
who did. The implication is that PAW's kind of people don't go to church
and it's unfair of church-going folk to have different ideas about how
the schools should be run. People for the American Way is today's Un- American
Activities Committee, indicting most of the American people for not being
like People for the American Way. As the Washington Post's current
advertising slogan says, "If you don't get it, you don't get it."
- Asked whether Christians must support unilateral disarmament, Jean
Marie Cardinal Lustiger of Paris responds: "Unilateral disarmament
is the transposition of the martyr's attitude to the collective plane of
nations. The believer can and must sometimes assume this vocation after
having recognized and chosen it spiritually: this has been done by many
men and women across the centuries. But it is morally indefensible to propose
to an entire people-to the detriment of its identity and present life-an
ideal that politically is utopian. Obtaining such a political suicide through
public pressure is unacceptable; the object of a spiritual choice cannot
be imposed on a nation. Thinking that the spiritual laws of the Kingdom
of God can be transformed into a mode of political management of human
history is dangerously idealistic. That would imply believing and letting
it be understood that the eschatological reconciliation had been realized
everywhere, that the Kingdom of God and its justice had become terrestrial
realities on a human and historical scale. The same is true for the notion
of ownership, for the appropriation of possessions. Christ's disciples
are urged to renounce their riches, but a society cannot be juridically
constructed on a vow of poverty. That Christians in a society should endeavor
to live in holiness and follow the evangelical counsel by renouncing worldly
belongings is well and good, but morally they cannot make this a political
requirement for their fellow citizens at the price of everyone's dignity
and freedom. Disregard for material goods cannot be made obligatory: that
would be a tyranny." An editor friend, incorrigibly Lutheran, is surprised
that the Cardinal is such an exponent of Luther's "two kingdom theology."
That's the way it is with some people; so enamored are they of their denominationally
copyrighted formulas that they claim for them the wisdom of the entire
world.
- The book is published by the Linacre Centre in London and is now being
made available here. Euthanasia, Clinical Practice, and the Law
has had a gratifying influence in England, including influence on the House
of Lords' select committee on euthanasia, and contains valuable information
on euthanasia practice in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The paperback
edition is available for $12.95 (hardcover $34.95) from Hackett Publishing
Co., P.O. Box 44937, Indianapolis, IN 46244. Make checks payable to Hackett
Publishing Co.
- It's happening all over, of course, but we have occasion to take note
when, for instance, somebody sends a clipping. Here's one from the student
newspaper of Valparaiso University in Indiana, a school associated with
the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The University Senate approved a new
discrimination policy. A discrimination policy means that you don't discriminate,
not even on the basis of religion. Professor Gerald Speckhard protested
that a Lutheran university has to discriminate on the basis of religion
in order to remain Lutheran. He and others who wanted to exclude "religion"
from the list of forbidden discriminations lost out to those who argued,
so to speak, that "excluding the word gives a bad impression."
Never mind that the school does give scholarships and grants based on a
student's being Lutheran. Never mind that, like most schools, the university
discriminates on the basis of race and ethnicity in order to increase "minority
representation." Never mind other facts to the contrary. Being in
the academy means not having to mean what you say. The important thing
is not to give a bad
- Elsewhere in this issue, Edward Shapiro reflects on the troubled (to
put it gently) relationship between blacks and Jews. Glenn Loury of Boston
University addresses that question in "The Alliance is Over"
in the June issue of Moment. The machinations of Minister Louis
Farrakhan & Co., says Loury, do not necessarily reflect a dramatic
rise in black anti-Semitism. There is an important class factor involved.
"What we see, when we look at this situation unflinchingly, is that,
far from reflecting a mass anti-Semitic sentiment among poor blacks in
the urban core, Farrakhan and company are marketing their hateful product
to a select audience of relatively elite blacks, the ones who come most
frequently into contact with Jews and who find that they come up short
in the competition for status and resources in academe. Outside of New
York City there is very little urban friction between blacks and Jews.
It was not Jews, but Koreans, who were objects of attack in the Los Angeles
riots. I doubt that your typical poor or working-class black urban resident
spends much time reflecting on the 'crimes of Jews against blacks.' I am
less confident about your typical black sociology major at a state university.
The latter is the real audience for those copies of The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion that are being sold at a nominal fee by Farrakhan's
organization." If there is hope for mending between Jews and blacks,
says Loury, it is in the realm of the spiritual. "The one prospect
for reconciliation that I see is rooted in the common spiritual heritage
of these two peoples. Many blacks, like many Jews, are deeply religious.
Blacks practice a brand of Christianity that takes the Old Testament witness
of God's chosen people quite seriously. What blacks and Jews share that
is most relevant to healing this current breach is not membership in the
Democratic party, but rather a knowledge of the prophet Isaiah, a respect
for the builder Nehemiah, an appreciation of the poet David. But contemporary
public discourse has little tolerance for explicitly religious dialogue.
Our focus is on elections, policy debates, power plays. We bring lawsuits,
call news conferences, mount publicity campaigns. Where blacks and Jews
pray together, to the same God, if in different tongues, is where our rifts
are closest to being healed. It is interesting that a comparatively tiny
number of Black Muslims, an explicitly religious cult, dominates public
discussion of black-Jewish relations without being challenged on theological
grounds by a mainstream black leadership drawn heavily from the Christian
church." As to whether such a religiously informed black leadership
will emerge, Loury is not holding his breath. His conclusion: "Despite
my deep regret at the matter, I cannot be optimistic about the prospects
that a 'special relationship' between blacks and Jews will ever be restored.
Perhaps it is best to recognize this, rather than to incur the anguish
and disappointment that inevitably accompanies attempts to sustain a marriage
from which the love has long since departed."
- If the book isn't enough for you, you can get the complete Haldeman
diaries on CD-ROM. In the complete version Richard Nixon is quoted as saying
that Billy Graham "has the strong feeling that the Bible says that
there are satanic Jews and that's where our problem arises." Contacted
by the Wall Street Journal, Graham said, "These are not my
words and this does not reflect the high view I hold for the nation of
Israel and for Jewish people, many of whom are my close friends."
We believe Dr. Graham entirely. Now if one of those close friends would
advise him on the inadvisability of that last clause. Frank Rich, columnist
with the New York Times, apparently spent delightful hours playing
with the CD-ROM, finding what new scraps of dirt he could on a man whom
he dislikes very much. By using the computer's search function, he discovers,
you can leap to every occurrence of the word "Jewish." Having
leaped, Mr. Rich leaps some more to the suggestion that Nixon was, wouldn't
you know it, an anti-Semite. Now we hold no brief for the late president.
The moratorium on nastiness that lasted for a week after the funeral was
mainly used to praise Nixon, with considerable justice, for his liberal
achievements- massive expansion of the welfare state, the establishment
of reverse discrimination as government policy, and a doctrine of detente
aimed at resigning us to live with communism forever. The moratorium past,
Mr. Rich regresses to the media's accustomed mode, reporting that, in addition
to everything else about this horrible man, he was an anti- Semite. The
evidence? Nixon told Haldeman that there were too many rabbis conducting
the Sunday services that he sponsored at the White House. That White House
service was, in our view, another of Nixon's less than brilliant ideas,
but it's unclear how many rabbis he should have had in to prove he was
not an anti-Semite. Some apologists for Nixon say he was just letting off
political, not anti-Semitic, steam with some of his cracks about Jews.
Mr. Rich writes this: "But in the unexpurgated diaries Mr. Nixon is
cited as identifying 'our enemies' as 'youth, black, Jew' in 1970."
It is too bad that Mr. Rich expurgates the statement that he takes to be
the clincher for Nixon's anti-Semitism. But even if Nixon said what Rich
alleges, so what? In 1970, the youth movement, blacks, and Jews were overwhelmingly
opposed to Nixon. Recognizing your political enemies is not a matter of
wrongful prejudice but of common sense. Mr. Rich seems to be suggesting
that anti-Semitism is a matter not of not liking Jews but of not being
liked by Jews. As we read him, Frank Rich has enough reasons for despising
Richard Nixon without making up another.
- Getting your position to be perceived as "centrist" is of
course a big leg up in public policy disputes. It is permissible to be
somewhat left of center "liberal" or somewhat right of center
"conservative," but people who are out to win public arguments
flee like the plague the perception that they are left-wing radical or
right-wing radical. The American Civil Liberties Union has been remarkably
successful over the years in presenting itself as respectably liberal,
and even at times exhibits its "conservative" credentials, in
the libertarian sense of conservative. This is, to put it politely, a con
job, as William A. Donohue makes clear beyond doubt in a new book titled
Twilight of Liberty: The Legacy of the ACLU (Transaction). With
a fine mix of scholarship, analysis, and polemic, Donohue lays bare the
truly radical aims and achievements of the ACLU. Focusing exclusively on
liberty as liberation from social and moral constraints, the ACLU's vision
of society has room only for the atomized individual and the state. Whether
always deliberate or not, the ACLU's practice is to eliminate the mediating
institutions (e.g., family, church, voluntary associations) that stand
between the individual and the state. The result, predictably, is to greatly
increase state control of the society-and all this in the name of civil
rights and freedom. "This book is a much- needed antidote to pernicious
trends in our national life," says Robert Bork, and he got it right.
A voice from the gallery: "Well, it may be that the ACLU goes to extremes
from time to time, but they also do a lot of good in protecting the little
guy." The reason the ACLU goes to extremes with unsettling regularity
is that the ACLU is an extremist organization. The gallery: "You mean
extremist as in, for instance, 'The Ku Klux Klan is an extremist organization.'"
Oh, that may be stretching, but not as much as you might think. Read the
record, read what the ACLU says about its own purposes, read Twilight
of Liberty, and then decide for yourself. As for our opinion, we would
no more support the ACLU for the little good it may occasionally do than
we would support Louis Farrakhan because he encourages black men to wear
a shirt and tie.
- True or false: The abortion rate in Japan is higher than in the U.S.
Years ago, long before Roe v. Wade, when "liberalized abortion"
was being debated here, Japan was regularly cited for its astronomically
high abortion rate. This, in turn, was frequently attributed to their very
different (and indifferent?) attitude toward the value of human life. In
the 1950s the abortion rate in Japan, measured per 1,000 women, was a little
over fifty; for the last ten years it has dropped to a little more than
twenty. The abortion rate in the U.S. in the last decade has fluctuated
between twenty-five and thirty. And far from being indifferent to life,
the Japanese are much more explicit about the anguish and guilt involved
in abortion. At shrines around the country, tens of thousands of little
stone statues of the Buddhist saint Jizo are to be found, often wearing
hand-knitted caps and surrounded by bottles, baby toys, and small gifts.
Such is the public acknowledgment and grieving for children who never were,
and yet hauntingly are. As Mary Ann Glendon has done so much to examine
U.S. law in contrast to Europe, so Lynn D. Wardle does with respect to
Japan. "Crying Stones: A Comparison of Abortion in Japan and the United
States" is published in New York Law School Journal of International
and Comparative Law (Numbers 2 & 3, 1993). The author notes, "This
study has confirmed Professor Glendon's observation that the abortion laws
of the United States are the most extremely individualistic laws known."
It is a most instructive and unsettling article. Wardle is professor of
law at Brigham Young University, and an offprint of the article may be
obtained by writing him at the university, P.O. Box 28000, Provo, Utah
84602.
- It's an embarrassment to be sure, but there's no denying the diminished
interest in human rights questions, and of religious freedom questions
in particular, since the demise of communism in most of the world (remembering
that Cuba and China are still holding out, in their ways). Our concern
should be for the people who are persecuted, tortured, and killed, and
Christians need make no apology for being especially concerned for fellow-Christians.
Yet the fact is that the concern was more intense (albeit not intense enough)
when issues of religious persecution were a ploy in domestic disputes between
anticommunists and anti-anticommunists. Some folk, thank God, are neither
driven nor distracted by such political disputes. Nina Shea and the Puebla
Institute, for example. Puebla assiduously tracks religious freedom around
the world, speaking up for believers with dispassionate passion. They have
just issued China: Religious Freedom Denied, which is available
for $7 from 1319 18th Street N.W., Washington D.C. 20036. The people of
Puebla do not tell us what U.S. policy toward China should or should not
be. They do tell us about those who are suffering for the faith; and that
we should care about them, tell others about them, and pray for them. A
note to Puebla will get you on the mailing list. It's a beginning.
- One of the most notoriously anti-woman decisions of the Supreme Court
was Buck v. Bell (1927) in which the Court upheld the involuntary
sterilization of mentally "defective" women. History has many
ironies in the fire, one of which is that the National Organization of
Women (NOW) is citing Buck v. Bell in support of a constitutional
right to assisted suicide. This gets us into the complicated connections
between abortion and euthanasia. People have a "right" to have
done what's best for them, whether they think so or not, or can say so
or not. Surely, for example, no "unwanted child" would want to
be born. Thus also the move from voluntary to involuntary euthanasia. The
move is almost inevitable if the right to suicide is modeled on the right
to abortion. Courts are already invoking Roe v. Wade to order abortions
for women who are mentally incompetent and could not make the decision
for themselves. Judge Edward Heavey of Washington state, for instance,
ordered a second-trimester abortion for a thirty-year-old mentally retarded
woman on the grounds that "the normal woman under these circumstances
would have an abortion." Similarly, the courts can readily determine
the circumstances in which a "normal" patient would want to be
killed, and then apply that standard to unconscious or incompetent patients
who never asked to die. And all this, do not forget, in the name of "freedom
of choice."
- One need not be a partisan of any of the several conservatisms current
in American thought to appreciate Russell Kirk's contribution to our political
culture. His most celebrated book, The Conservative Mind, was not
welcomed by a post-World War II intellectual establishment that had come
to almost unanimous agreement on the ideology they titled "the end
of ideology." Liberalism, it was confidently asserted, is the only
game around. It seems a long time ago that Lionel Trilling of Columbia
could suggest that conservatism is a set of irritable mental gestures pretending
to be ideas. Years later Trilling himself would become something of a patron
saint for those who are called neoconservatives. Kirk was robustly skeptical
of the "neocons," but he helped create the climate in which that
and other challenges to regnant liberalisms emerged. Certainly the revival
of interest in Edmund Burke over the last three decades owes a great deal
to him. Russell Kirk gave himself unstintingly in teaching, lecturing,
writing, and cultivating the talents of young people who had awakened to
the truth that the spiritually stifling doctrines of secular modernity
are not the only way, and not the best way, of understanding our limits
and possibilities as human beings. He came back again and again to what
he called The Permanent Things, among which are not our earthly lives.
Russell Kirk died April 29, the day of St. Catherine of Siena. They had
in common their faith, and their defiance of all who would trim that faith
to the fashions of the times. To his gracious wife Annette our heartfelt
sympathy, and for Russell, Requiescat in Pace.
- Now that the National Council of Churches appears to be turning itself
into a modest think tank, we have, readers will recall, suggested the possibility
of a merger, specifying of course that we cannot assume the NCC's liabilities.
One of the advantages for the NCC would be the possibility of moving back
to 156 Fifth Avenue, a building that was sold in the 1940s in order to
build the "Godbox" at 475 Riverside Drive, which is not upstate
but getting there. We were put in mind of this when reading John Espey's
engaging stories about growing up in the 1920s as the son of Presbyterian
missionaries stationed at South Gate near Shanghai (Minor Heresies,
Major Departures: A China Mission Boyhood, University of California
Press). Espey recalls that as a boy he had some very odd notions about
America, including the idea that the Washington everybody talked about
was the state on top of Oregon. That, he reports, did not prevent his getting
A's in American history. Espey had more important things on his mind. "Washington
had early been displaced as the center of all American life by 156 Fifth
Avenue, New York City, New York, U.S.A. This address was, as everyone should
know, the home of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church
in the United States of America. It was a perfectly respectable building,
rather gloomy and drafty, where the menservants and the handmaidens of
the Lord successfully disguised themselves to look like everyone else in
New York. But in my youth 156 Fifth Avenue was the earthly representation
of heaven, the temple of the Lord in the New Jerusalem. Its corridors sparkled
with golden pavement; its lamps were glowing carbuncles; the rooms and
halls were lined in chalcedony, marble, alabaster, and beryl; the fragrant
furniture was made from the cedars of Lebanon; and within the central courts,
each on a jewel-studded throne of Ophir, sat the High Priests who always
saw to it that the humblest workman at South Gate was worthily paid for
his hire." Espey overdoes it a bit, but that gives you a sense of
the inducement for the NCC to think about moving in with us. Lest expectations
be disappointed, we should add that the thrones of Ophir are all occupied.
Sources: On WCC in Zimbabwe, Christian Century, February 23,
1994. Alex Sanger on DeMoss pro-life ads, Christianity Today, March 7,
1994. On "schism" among U.S. Catholics, Wanderer, March 3, 1994.
On ERGO! and euthanasia statistics, Life at Risk, March 1994. Statements
on Holocaust denial quoted in Catholic New York, March 24, 1994. Shanker
advertisement in New Republic, April 11, 1994. On spineless doctor, personal
correspondence. Resignation of Judge Moylan, from personal correspondence.
On PAW and "stealth" candidates, Washington Post, May 12, 1994.
Cardinal Lustiger on unilateral disarmament, Choosing God-Chosen by God
(Ignatius Press). On discrimination policy at Valparaiso University, The
Torch, April 22, 1994. Billy Graham quoted on Jews, Wall Street Journal,
May 23, 1994. Frank Rich on Nixon and anti-Semitism, New York Times, May
29, 1994. On connections between euthanasia and abortion, Life at Risk,
March 1994.
Email this to a friend
copyright
© 1995-2012
Leadership U. All rights reserved.
Updated: 13 July 2002
|
