The Public Square
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 Kühl’s The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. It is a short (160 pages,), 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.
Kühl’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 Kühl’s study is, there are disappointing omissions and moments of curious reticence. One suspects that Kühl, 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 Kühl 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 Kühl. 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 Kühl 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 Kühl’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 impression—like, for instance the impression that religion matters.
• 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.
