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Remember when Mark Levin's Men in Black was the New York Times bestseller no one had read?
As it has become increasingly more difficult to pretend the book is invisible, liberals have had to come up with other angles of attack. Here's a certain Stephen J. Fortunato, Jr., on a site called In These Times:
Mark R. Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America, a New York Times best-seller, is a right-wing debaters' manual that furnishes rhetoric to Tom DeLay, Bill Frist and their cohorts as they campaign to revamp the federal judiciary in their own image. . . .
Levin's thesis is as simple as it is simple-minded. Good judges--too few by Levin's count--are originalists. . . .
Originalism, of course, has no basis in history or logic, but this does not deter Levin, any more than it has deterred originalism's most famous popularizers, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. Levin occasionally references the Founding Fathers, but conveniently omits declarations by both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison that the Constitution was crafted to allow future generations to adapt the law to changed circumstances. As Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers (no. 34), "There ought to be a capacity to provide for future contingencies as they may happen; and as these are illimitable in their nature, so it is impossible safely to limit that capacity."
This is outrageous. Look at Federalist no. 34, anybody. Fortunato has twisted the sentence he quotes out of any resemblance to its meaning in the original text. (If we can have a "living Constitution," I guess it makes sense to figure we can have "living Federalist papers," too, whose meaning also changes with our ever-changing needs.)
In fact, Hamilton's point depends on the very "originalism" that Fortunato pretends was invented by modern conservatives.
What Hamilton means by "a capacity to provide for future contingencies as they may happen" is most definitely not a license for future interpreters to stretch the words of the Constitution out of their original meaning. On the contrary, he's expressing the necessity for the actual words of the Constitution to explicitly give the Federal government the powers that it may need in the future, even though the full extent of the need for those powers is not precisely foreseeable at the time he's writing.
Specifically, he's arguing for the Constitution's grant of wide powers of taxation to the Federal government, in order to finance the common defense, which may become more expensive in the future for reasons beyond the Americans' power to control. Here are the two sentences that precede the one Fortunato quotes:
Constitutions of civil government, are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies; but upon a combination of these, with the probably exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious, than to infer the extent of any power proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of immediate necessities.
And why does Hamilton think these powers of taxation should be explicitly "lodged in the national government" by the words Constitution? Because he can't imagine that anyone would think future interpreters could simply read new powers into the language of that Constitution as circumstances changed. He assumes that that government will just have to do without powers not granted to it by that Constitution:
But would it be wise, or would it not rather be the extreme of folly, to stop at this point, and leave the government intrusted with the care of the national defence, in a state of absolute incapacity to provide for the protection of the community, against future invasions of the public peace, by foreign war or domestic convulsions.
Hamilton's argument here is utterly without meaning if he's not an originalist. The Federal government would have have suffered such an "absolute incapacity" without the Constitutional grant of these taxation powers if and only if the Federal government's capacities were limited to the explicit grants of power at the time it was framed.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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Mark Fuhrman, the author of Silent Witness, will be appearing on FOX's Hannity & Colmes tonight at 8:00 Eastern Time to discuss the Terri Schiavo case.
This article in First Things argues that no law was broken, and no due process violated, in Terri's case.
I remember fearing, at the time, that the battle was really lost when the Florida legislature refused to pass a bill that would change the law in Florida. The Schiavo case is not really about judicial activism. It's about the fact that Americans and the legislators we elect are content to live with laws that make some murders legal.
The sad fact is, it's perfectly legal to dehydrate your brain-damaged wife to death in the United States today. There are laws and judicial processes in place to allow for it. What happened to Terri Schiavo happens to other Americans on a regular basis. It's only when someone -- in this case Terri's parents -- go to great lengths to fight the killing that this kind of event is even news.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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It seems all too clear that Old Europe is full of smugly superior types who hate American "cowboys" (especially George W. Bush) and who are, in Jed Babbin's words, "Worse Than You Think."
That's why this news article is so interesting. Maybe some of the Europeans have hidden depths, after all.
A hostage held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one.
Swede Ulf Hjertstrom, who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood in Baghdad, was released by his kidnappers on May 30.
. . . .
"I have now put some people to work to find these
b[--]s," he told the Ten Network today.
"I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one."
Hat tip to Chrenkoff.
-- E.K.
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Men in Black author Mark Levin will be appearing on FOX's Fox and Friends tomorrow morning at 7:15 Eastern Time to discuss the Supreme Court's two Ten Commandments decisions, which you can read on the Court's website. (There's a summary in this AP story.) Our Supreme Court announced today that the Ten Commandments are allowed on public property (at least if the monument was put up a long time ago) but not in courthouses (at least not if the monument is of recent origin). Really, it's pretty much anyone's guess whether a particular Ten Commandments monument is constitutional or unconstitutional, according to this Court.
Here's an early take on the decisions by Levin's fellow Bench Memos blogger Ed Whelan, summarizing Scalia's dissent in the anti-Commandments case:
1. The history of this country demonstrates that the majority's proposition that the government cannot favor religion over irreligion is plainly false.
2. "What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle." The majority flunks that test.
3. "If religion in the public forum had to be entirely nondenominational, there could be no religion in the public forum at all." "Historical practices . . . demonstrate that there is a distance between the acknkowledgment of a single Creator and the establishment of a religion."
As Justice Scalia has pointed out before, the rule of law depends on having a law of rules -- in other words, either people know what the law is because judges apply legal rules to the interpretation of our Constitution and our laws, or else we're governed by those men in black, who make up their minds on a case-by-case basis.
-- E.K.
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This fascinating post from Steven Vincent explores the relationship between the theology of marriage in Islam and the daily experiences of women in Islamic societies:
About two weeks ago, we interviewed a businessman sheikh--a heavy-set guy with a fleshy face who radiated a kind of sleazy prosperity. At the end of our conversation--translated by Layla--the sheikh told us he had many other ideas and thoughts he wanted to share. This sounded good, and as we left his house, I asked Layla to set up another appointment with him. She refused. Wouldn't say why. This angered me, we had words, she stormed off--and it was only a few days later that she told me what had occured. Seems the oh-so-respectable sheikh had offered during the interview to make her his second wife (he already had one), showering upon her promises of a car, a house, money. In Arabic, of course, as if I was not present in the room. Layla had translated his comments for me, editing out the marriage proposal without missing a beat--you really have to hand it to her.
The point is, polygamy and "temporary marriages" are legal here, meaning that any single woman is subject to the advances of any man, married or not. Even if they aren't bold enough to confess their ardor in conversation, the hope, or fantasy, burns in their minds and fills the eyes with a queasy leer. Woman back home who complain about the "male gaze" have no idea how bad it can get.
More proof that at least one of The Religions Next Door is not just a more exotic but equally benevolent version of Christianity.
-- E.K.
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Jim Palermo of Grantham, New Hampshire, has written in on an issue that's addressed in some depth in Stephen Greenhut's Abuse of Power. Not only have the bureaucrats gotten the go-ahead from the Supreme Court to confiscate your property and hand it over to rich developers -- you probably won't get fair compensation for it. As Greenhut illustrates with examples from actual eminent domain cases (from before Kelo v. New London) there are myriad ways the government can find to pay you less than your property is actually worth. Here's Mr. Palermo's proposed solution:
Fair Price for Condemnation
When the city decides to condemn someone's property the owners should be paid two and one half times the cities appraised value and reimburse the owners for all the taxes they paid since living in that residence.
When property will be used for commercial use by private investors, those investors should be liable for all costs paid by the city in a form of a bond before condemnation proceedings begin.
The Strata-Sphere, a blog I found over the weekend via The Anchoress (who this morning has an excellent "Letter to Any American Soldier Anywhere But Especially in Iraq"), is collecting examples of the abuse of eminent domain here.
-- E.K.
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Mr. Philip A. Zukowsky has written in with this inquiry:
I live in Clayton, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. I need your advice. The city could use more revenue as we have lots of silly programs that we could fund if we had more money. We have a plan now to raise this money. It is comprehensive. It will increase jobs in Clayton as we will use the money to hire more city workers (although we won't have much for them to do). Our plan is to take Michael Moore's property rights in all of his films and books for the City of Clayton. We can use these property rights better than he can. He would waste the money at McDonalds. We would use it to make jobs. Good city jobs in which the workers will not have to work hard to make their money. My question is will the Supreme Court allow this? Or does the city have to take these property rights and give it to some fat cat corporation in order to more literally fall within the Kelo ruling? Your advice would be appreciated.
I was just about to inform him, regretfully, that I can't answer his question because I'm not a lawyer -- when it occurred to me that the real reason I can't answer his question is that nobody knows what the Men in Black (well, four men and one woman) who make up the Supreme Court majority will decide next -- you can't go by the Constitution, because they don't.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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(Good news from Iraq, which I was planning to post yesterday, until I was blindsided by the Supreme Court's abolition of private property. Okay, maybe my language is a little strong. They're going to let us keep our property unless and until some local government official comes up with a "carefully formulated" plan to make better use of it. What follows below is not completely unrelated. It's a picture of a society moving in the opposite direction from the way the Supreme Court majority wants to take us. The Iraqis are fighting their way back from a form of government tyranny that's more horrifying than anything we've ever seen in America. Perhaps their circumstances can help us remember why our liberties are worth preserving.)
In The Case for Democracy, Natan Sharansky asks "Is Freedom for Everyone?"
Two selections from posts from on Iraq the Model suggest that it is.
Here's Omar, frustrated that insurgents have damaged the water supply in Baghdad, but delighted to be living in a country where the government suffers along with the people -- in other words, not in a totalitarian dictatorship. (I've cleaned up some erratic spacing, punctuation, and use of italics -- otherwise this is straight from the Iraqi blogger.)
This article caught my attention while I was reading Al-Mada newspaper this morning and I would like to share it with you. By the way, to avoid any misunderstanding or confusion I think I should mention that there are some sarcastic sentences in this article: Baghdadis are without water . . . and so is the government. Two contradicting feelings I had when I heard from some journalists that the offices of the Iraqi government had been temporarily evacuated because of the water shortage that is infesting Baghdad. Two different feelings I had; the 1st was positive and the other was negative. The government is without water!! The positive scene says that Iraqi officials at the top of the state's pyramid are no longer different from the people and here they are suffering from the shortage of water just like we're doing after the brave insurgents targeted the water pumps to get the Americans out of the country and rid the people of their evil and here are the Americans, thirsty to death in Iraq and they'll probably leave in a day or two!
In the near past, Iraqis lived an era where the ruling class was living in Iraq but not exactly living in it. They governed the country in the name of a people they haven't shared its pains and sufferings and never thought of providing the citizens with the most basic needs of living.
In summer times; our former officials didn't enjoy the burning sun and in winter they didn't get the advantage of sleeping on a bed of frost and the people alone-out of the government's love-enjoyed these generous gifts while they (our rulers) lived in high palaces away from noise and harm.
While today, a journalist told me what made me feel like crying and laughing at the same time, he told me about ministers and PM's who couldn't water in rest rooms and how he saw a number of them carrying water in containers on their way to the rest rooms in the corridors of the convention center. . . .
And here's Mohammed, on the fact that no terrorists have yet been executed by the Iraqi government -- a fact that seems like it could be frustrating, but of which he's proud. (Again, I've rationalized some eccentric spacing in his post.)
The number of execution sentences against convicted criminal and terrorists that have has been declared so far is now 18; none of which has been practically executed till this moment.
An official from the "supreme judicial board of Iraq" explained that these sentences were not carried out because they represent preliminary sentences and can be subject to objections and retrials and that such cases would be-incase of objections-handed to the state attorney and then to the supreme court which consists of 14 judges to verify the sentences and give a final word about them.
Anyone who didn't live under Saddam's regime would not get the significance of the above paragraph and some might even say "what do 18 criminals represent compared to the hundreds that are getting killed or injured every month during enemy attacks and sometimes with friendly fire; people's rights are-in many cases-lost in a battle where it's not easy to discriminate between an enemy and a friend.["]
But to me, reading such news makes me feel the change, and gives me a growing feeling of hope and a building justice.
We're building future here that used to look like a hard-to get-dream a couple of years ago and we're ready to sacrifice today so that we can live a better life tomorrow.
The judicial system in Iraq lost credibility and respect over the past decades and turned into a killing tool in the hand of the dictator and was even totally ignored and replaced by the notorious "revolutionary courts" that never hesitated to sentence people to death for the silliest reasons.
No one was able to know the number of executions that were made under Saddam; people would vanish and no one would dare to inquire about their fate.
Is the situation getting worse now? Are we moving in the wrong direction?
Such questions mean nothing to me; maybe some people outside are interested in discussing them but for me?
What really matters here for me is that despite the critical situation and the public pressure on the judicial system in Iraq to reactivate the death penalty against terrorists and criminals, the judges in Iraq are sticking to the principles of law and the have proven to have a good measure of independence and this -- in my opinion -- is one of the most important elements we need if we want to establish a state of law and justice.
Right now I feel much safer than before and once again I say that I don't expect people who didn't suffer what we suffered under Saddam to understand how I feel.
-- E.K.
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From the separate dissent of Justice Clarence Thomas (my very favorite Supreme Court Justice -- check out his biography here) to Kelo v. New London, yesterday's Supreme Court decision allowing the government to confiscate your property, pay you less than it's worth, and turn it over to a wealthy corporation:
Long ago, William Blackstone wrote that "the law of the land . . . postpone[s] even public necessity to the sacred and inviolable rights of private property." . . . The Framers embodied that principle in the Constitution, allowing the government to take property not for "public necessity," but instead for "public use." . . . Defying this understanding, the Court replaces the Public Use Clause with a "[P]ublic [P]urpose" Clause. . . (or perhaps the "Diverse and Always Evolving Needs of Society" Clause . . .) a restriction that is satisfied, the Court instructs, so long as the purpose is "legitimate" and the means "not irrational. This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a "public use."
I cannot agree. If such "economic development" takings are for a "public use," any taking is, and the Court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution, as JUSTICE O'CONNOR powerfully argues in dissent.
Read the whole thing on the Supreme Court's website.
-- E.K.
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The Supreme Court has just issued another opinion confirming that liberals aren't really on the side of the little guy.
In Kelo v. New London, Justice Stevens and the usual suspects on the Court's left wing have given local officials in Connecticut power to seize and demolish houses in a working class neighborhood. Not because the citizens of New London need a road -- not even because they've decided they want a park or a football stadium. These citizens' land is being handed over to private developers who plan to build, among other things, a health club and a hotel.
According to the Associated Press story linked on Drudge, Justice Stevens gives this reason for siding with the city government:
"'The city has carefully formulated an economic development [plan--in the decision, but omitted from the AP story -- E.K.]that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including -- but by no means limited to -- new jobs and increased tax revenue.'"
Well, as long as they've got a plan. Come to think of it, why do private citizens even need the right to own property? Apparently the government can make us all better off with "carefully formulated" schemes for the best use of our land.
Hey, wait a minute -- hasn't that way of organizing the ecnomomy been tried on a larger scale, somewhere or other, before? They used to call it socialism. People don't use that word much any more: Somehow those "appreciable benefits," which the planners promise at the outset, when they're arguing that they can do a better job if all our assets are put in their capable hands, rarely materialize. And handing them the keys to everybody's house and everybody's shop tends to have unintended consequences of the ugliest sort.
Even Justice O'Connor, who's hardly the most conservative member of the Court, sees in this case the familiar pattern that seems to emerge in so much government planning:
"'Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,' O'Connor wrote. 'The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process. . . .'"
Read Steven Greenhut's Abuse of Power to find out how far the abuse of the Constitution's "eminent domain" clause has already gone. This decision is one more reason President Bush needs to win the coming battle for the Supreme Court.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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Comments: See this post for a comment by Philip A. Zukowsky on 6/24/2005 at 10:17 A.M.
And this one for a comment by Jim Palermo on 6/26/2005 at 8:04 A.M.
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Read Walter Williams on Human Events Online on the sad state of medicine in Canada. Even Canada's own Supreme Court has had to admit that long waits for care have resulted in deaths. Our neighbor to the north has a "single-payer healthcare system" -- the same thing that used to be called "socialized medicine" before the propagandists realized they would never be able to sell it to the public under its real name. John Goodman's Lives at Risk explores the same subject in depth.
As our editor-in-chief has pointed out, people hesitate to believe a free market in medicine could succeed. (Partly because they don't realize we don't have a free market in healthcare now -- what with government responsible for almost half of all medical spending in the United States.) Even conservatives, who know that the free market brings us other high-quality goods and services at low prices, are reluctant to trust the market to do the same for healthcare. Is it that medicine is too basic a need to trust to the vicissitudes of the market? Then why does the market work so well -- better than any other production and distribution system ever tried -- to supply us with food (an even more basic requirement) in abundance?
-- E.K.
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Tony Blankley of the The Washington Times raves about The Truth About Hillary in this column. Blankley defends the book against charges (see, for example, this USA Today story) that it's a farrago of unsubstantiated scandal:
"About once a year I review a book in this column that ought to be required reading for people who care about politics. Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary is such a book. The pre-publication leak about the book -- that Bill Clinton had allegedly talked about raping his wife -- was off-putting for me. I don't usually waste my time reading salacious scandal books from the left or the right. But I was advised to take a look at this book, which I read last weekend.
"It was worth my time. This is not a scandal book intended merely to gratify the reader's salacious interests. Instead, Mr. Klein has written a serious political and psychological biography of the most likely next Democratic nominee for president -- and thus, quite plausibly I fear, the next president of the United States.
"Although this is a heavily researched book that includes amongst its sources almost 100 people who are or were personally close Mrs. Clinton, this is not a peek through a keyhole. Instead, it is a peek -- and more than a peek -- into the mind of Hillary. And, whether you like or hate Hillary, the inside of her mind is a fascinating place in which to rove about. Hillary haters will certainly find further evidence to support their sentiment.
"Principled liberals , I suspect, will be deeply disconcerted by what they will find out about her mind in this book.
"But for people who like their presidents ruthless, expedient and very smart (in a dangerous time those are not all bad features), the portrait Mr. Klein paints may well not be seen as negative. In fact, as the author notes, Mrs. Clinton has more than a little in common with Richard Nixon."
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Mark Levin is cited in this article in The Hill, on the Constitutional amendment that Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.) is planning to introduce in Congress once we know the outcome of two Supreme Court decisions about the Ten Commandments on public property:
"Men in Black, written by Mark Levin, a constitutional scholar often cited by DeLay, argues the doctrine of separation of church and state originated in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Conn., and not from any section of the Constitution itself."
If you're interested in how Jefferson's phrase worked its into the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, check out Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State.
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Turns out I was romanticizing the Clintons' marriage when I speculated that Chelsea's conception might have been the result of a stormy encounter between Bill and Hillary, along the lines of Rhett Butler's masterful assertion of his marital rights after Ashley Wilkes's birthday party.
Disappointingly, the story from The Truth About Hillary that Drudge was hyping as a marital "rape" was only about politics the whole time -- as author Edward Klein reveals in this Q & A with NRO's Kathryn Lopez.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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In the past I've quoted Ronald Reagan on our obligations to the captive peoples behind the Iron Curtain -- you can read his speeches in Tear Down This Wall -- in support of our current involvement in Iraq.
This morning on Chrenkoff you can read former Eastern European dissidents arguing along these lines, plus see a wonderful photo gallery: pictures of troops from countries around the world, all serving in Iraq.
From a Pole:
"Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a totalitarian state. It was a country where people were murdered and tortured. So I'm looking at this through the eyes of the political prisoner in Baghdad, and from this point of view I'm very grateful to those who opened the gates of the prison and who stopped the killing and the torture. . . . Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it. . . . We know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. -- Former Polish dissident and left-wing intellectual Adam Michnik."
From a very famous Czeck:
"I think it's not by chance that the idea of confronting evil may have found more support in [eastern European] countries that have had a recent experience with totalitarian systems compared with other European countries that haven't had the same sort of recent experience. -- Former President Vaclav Havel."
-- E.K.
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Drudge has another lurid story about the Clintons and Ed Klein's new book, The Truth About Hillary, which is due to be released by the publisher this week.
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World Net Daily is linking to this story under the headline "Michael Schiavo shopping book around" and subhead "Agent: 'The seminal case in the right-to-die-with-dignity story.'"
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We all saw Michael Schiavo kill his wife -- with the willing cooperation of American courts and American "health care providers."
Does it matter whether or not he also bears any responsibility for the brain-damaged state she lived in during the years preceding her judge- and doctor-sanctioned murder?
Florida Governor Jeb Bush is interested in the question: World Net Daily is linking to this AP story reporting Governor Bush's announcement that a prosecutor will be investigating the 40-70 minute lapse between when Michael Schiavo said he found Terri collapsed on the floor of their home and when he called 911 (one of the subjects of Mark Fuhrman's investigation for Silent Witness: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo's Death).
Governor Bush has a legal responsibility, as the chief executive of his state, to see that possible crimes in Florida are investigated. But what about us? Is it only an unhealthy curiosity, something we ought to resist -- like the urge to read about the nastier details of celebrity criminal trials -- that gives rise to our interest in this question?
While there probably is an element of voyeurism for a lot of us in our curiosity about the Schiavo marriage, it doesn't seem unreasonable to want to get to the bottom of this atrocity that we all watched, without being able to find a way to stop it.
But even if it turned out (as seems less likely since the autopsy results were released) that Michael Schiavo had originally put his wife into her brain-damaged state by brutally beating her, would it be any worse than what we already know he did do? Beating your wife into a coma is almost always a crime of passion; you're giving way to your out-of-control temper. How does that compare with spending several years of your life -- in good moods and bad, through momentary frustrations and through periods of calm reflection -- making sure she dies of dehydration?
It's hard to imagine any revelation that would make him look worse than he does already.
It's our legal and medical systems that would look really bad, if it turned out that they'd cooperated in the more ordinary kind of murder.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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Click here to read a Human Events interview of Thomas Woods, author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
My favorite Q & A:
"Why are the church's contributions ignored or disregarded?
"Woods: The opinion-makers in the United States tend to be agnostic or atheist, or at least not in the Christian tradition. Ever since the Enlightenment, there's been an attempt on the part of non-Christian intellectuals to claim for themselves all the accomplishments of the West."
Ain't it the truth? There's more: read it all here.
-- E.K.
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Two Father's Day pieces by Club authors: Legacy author Rich Lowry on why fathers are essential to children's wellbeing. And Home Invasion author Rebecca Hagelin on what fathers can do to strengthen their families. My favorite line is from the Lowry piece. Obvious, but too much ignored:
"[P]romoting involved fatherhood means promoting marriage."
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Thomas DiLorenzo, the author of How Captitalism Saved America has a new piece on Abraham Lincoln on Lew Rockwell today. His fulminations against Lincoln's protectionism and cozy relationships with big businessmen are reminders that Southern conservatives used to be free-traders -- from Revolutionary times until a generation or two ago.
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Army Captain David Rozelle, author of Back in Action, is back home and will be talking about his tour of duty in Iraq on Laura Ingraham's radio show this morning at 10:35 Eastern Time.
Captain Rozelle will also be making some television appearances next week -- with CNN's Lou Dobbs this Monday, June 20th, at 6:20 P.M. Eastern Time, and on FOX's Dayside with Linda Vester Tuesday, June 21st, at 1 P.M.
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It's a first! One of our authors has contributed an original piece to Conservative Booknotes. Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr., the author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, on the fascinating subject of Europe's future:
The shock among European elites at the decision of the French people, and now the Dutch, to reject the proposed constitution for the European Union is a delightful thing to see. All this time they'd simply assumed that they could con the peoples of Europe into believing that a large superstate governed by leftists is better and more progressive than a group of smaller, sovereign ones. No such luck, apparently.
Although rejecting the EU constitution is without doubt a step in the right direction, Europe needs to embrace something, too. No one looking at the present state of Western Europe, which is distinguishing itself in such areas of human endeavor as euthanasia, welfare statism, and nihilistic "art," can doubt that she is, well, adrift.
Pope Benedict XVI has grieved for many years about the moral and spiritual condition of Europe. In recent weeks he has spoken of "the decisive role of Christianity" in the formation of Europe, and not long ago, while still Cardinal Ratzinger, approvingly cited the remark of a German theologian that "Europe was, after all, built not through the Qur'an but through the holy scriptures of the Old and New Covenant."
But Pope John Paul II failed to persuade EU bureaucrats even to mention Europe's Christian heritage -- glaringly evident in a walking tour of just about any corner of the continent -- in their governing document, which speaks instead of the formative influences on Europe of the ancient world and the Enlightenment. (So much for the millennium and a half in between.)
In fact, scholars of medieval Europe have spent the past century overturning this hoary myth, cobbled together by partisans first of the Renaissance and later of the Enlightenment. Yet it is precisely this myth to which the architects of the European superstate appeal. (European bureaucrats with an anti-Christian animus? Who could have seen that coming?)
From the role of the monks (they did much more than just copy manuscripts) to art and architecture, from the university to Western law, from charitable work to the sciences (no, that's not a misprint), from international law to economics, Europe is deeply indebted to the Catholic Church, as I show in my book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. That's why John Paul II, speaking about the Church, told the Poles in 1991, "We were the ones who created Europe."
Catholic charity impressed even the anticlerical Voltaire, who spoke movingly in the eighteenth century of the spirit that inspired young Catholic women to enter the religious life and devote themselves to hospital work and the service of the sick. Yet the spirit of Catholic charity derived not from ancient Greek and Roman example, but from a Judeo-Christian conception of God: although He is pleased by ritual sacrifice (e.g., the Sacrifice of the Mass), He is also concerned about men's interaction with each other, and is pleased by generosity and good human behavior.
Thus during the centuries of Christian persecution we have numerous outbreaks of plague in which, to the astonishment of their contemporaries, Christians could be found aiding the very people who had persecuted them. Here, truly, was something new under the sun: the idea of lending sacrificial assistance to your enemies in the spirit of a common humanity would have been considered the height of folly in the ancient world, the Stoic tradition notwithstanding.
Cornell University's Brian Tierney has shown that even the natural rights tradition in Western thought has its origin not in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its seventeenth-century precursors, but in the work of twelfth-century canon lawyers.
Instead of the Gothic cathedral and the Pieta, consider what modern Europe -- too sophisticated for Christianity, you understand -- has to show for itself. In 1917, the French artist Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world when he signed a man's urinal and placed it on display as a work of art. A poll of 500 art experts in 2004 yielded Duchamp's Fountain as the single most influential work of modern art. (All too often, art experts spend their time laughing at the rest of us for not being sophisticated enough to appreciate the likes of Duchamp.)
Duchamp was a formative influence on London-based artist Tracey Emin (b. 1963). Emin's My Bed, which was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, consisted of an unmade bed complete with bottles of vodka, used prophylactics, and bloodied undergarments. While on display at the Tate Gallery in 1999, the bed was vandalized by two nude men who proceeded to jump on it and drink the vodka. The world of modern art being what it is, everyone at the gallery applauded, assuming that the vandalism was part of the show.
Emin's more notorious work, called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, consists of a tent on which are sewn the names of everyone she has slept with over the course of her life. (She includes not only her sexual partners but also family members from her childhood, as well as her two aborted children.) Emin is now employed as a professor at the European Graduate School.
Europe can also boast a cultural milieu that has brought forth a generation too self-absorbed even to be bothered to reproduce itself at replacement level. There, in the most literal sense of the term, is a dying civilization.
"I am not a Catholic," wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil, "but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded." That is a lesson Europe is in the process of learning the hard way.
-- Thomas E. Woods, Jr., author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
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You can take the abortionist out of the back alley, but can you take the back alley out of the abortionist?
Legalization of abortion in America was promoted in the 1960s and '70s with the argument that bringing it into reputable doctors' offices would keep women safe from the unprofessional "abortion butchers" plying their trade in back alleys. And legal abortion continues to be defended the same way today. The theory is that women need to be protected from the unscrupulous predators who would victimize them in their desperation, if abortion were outlawed. Conservative columnist Suzanne Fields summed up this strain of pro-choice argumentation thus:
". . . abortion is legal, and likely to remain that way in the first trimester because the majority of Americans want it that way. That doesn't make it right, but it does observe the reality. Many in this majority, probably most, would never have an abortion themselves, but they know about the back-alley abortions in the bad old days when women, such as a married aunt of mine, died at the hands of abortion butchers who prospered outside the law in the way bootleggers did during Prohibition."
Modern manufacturers and distributors of alcohol are a real improvement on Prohibition-era bootleggers like Al Capone. But there are some businesses that, no matter how you try to mainstream them, don't seem to clean up all that well. They never really become respectable. Instead, they tend to drag the mainstream culture down toward their own level.
Pornography is one of those industries. It's legal, it's everywhere, and it's overwhelming our whole culture's standards, as Ben Shapiro handily demonstrates in Porn Generation. But it still isn't the kind of career you want to talk about with your neighbors -- or even your own children. (See, for example, this Wired story about the how "the porn webmaster community" grapples with balancing career and family life.)
And abortion is another. Legalizing abortion didn't magically turn regular doctors into abortionists, or abortionists into regular doctors. Of course, many doctors were corrupted -- some in small ways, some spectacularly -- by the opportunities opened up to them by legal abortion. That kind of corruption is bound to happen in any situation where atrocities are suddenly no longer forbidden, and suddenly profitable. But while, thank heavens, the whole medical profession didn't sink to the level of the "abortion butcher," neither did the doctors now legally performing abortions really rise to the standards of the rest of the medical profession. The fact is, the kind of surgeon who wants to make his living killing babies (or who resorts to abortion because he can't succeed in any more reputable field) is not your average kind of doctor.
The bizarre case of Kansas City abortionist Krishna Rajanna, which you can read about -- but ONLY if you have a strong stomach -- on World Net Daily this week, is, it has to be admitted, not typical even of abortionists who get in legal trouble -- of whom there are significant numbers. (Click here to get to a page with links to news stories about "Abortionists in Trouble." As those links and this NewsMax story suggest, sexual assault seems to be the more usual kind of sleazy behavior they're involved in.)
Dr. Rajanna appears not to have been a fan of personal or clinic hygiene, and his ideas about how to dispose of the "medical waste" into which he had turned the babies he aborted were eccentric, to say the least. Gruesome details and links ONLY for folks who want to see what his clinic (and the inside of its refrigerator) looked like appear in this World Net Daily piece. The doctor's refrigerator was a portrait of the banality of evil: plastic bags, disposable cups, and cut-off milk cartons full of tiny body parts in one side of the fridge, a cake and a bottle of Dr. Pepper in the other.
The Kansas state board that regulates the practice of medicine has revoked Dr. Rajanna's license for not keeping his clinic clean. But even if he'd used a sterilizer instead of a dishwasher, and medical waste disposal containers instead of a toilet and garbage bags, he'd still have been in a very dirty business.
-- Elizabeth Kantor, Managing Editor
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Read Ben Shapiro, the author of Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future on "Rescuing the Porn Generation" -- an urgent project for those of us who care about the future of our society -- on World Net Daily.
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