On December 20 the Supreme Court of Vermont, a small New England state often described as a colony of Massachusetts because of its commitment to political correctness rather than to Yankee morals like the neighboring state of New Hampshire, decided to throw out Scripture, natural law, human history, Kant’s categorical imperative, and the declared will of a majority of the other states, as well as of the U. S. Congress.  It declared that homosexual couples have the same rights to benefits and equal treatment before the law as married heterosexual couples.1  The exalted court has not yet decreed that such a union be called marriage.  But no doubt that will come soon.  We may imagine a new “marriage” ceremony, a parody of the language of the Book of Common Prayer:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the presence of the Spirit of the Vermont Supreme Court and in the face of this company to join this man and this other man (or:"font-family: Times New Roman; ">  this woman and this other woman) in legal matrimony, which is an honourable estate, established by the Court and regulated by its decrees, and to be held in honor by all men...

(The original text speaks of “the presence of God” and says, “holy matrimony... established by God, regulated by His commandments...”)

The decision of the Vermont court will profoundly affect law and society in the United States.  Some will say that it spells the death-knell for marriage, at least for the kind that is established by God, and ultimately for the family.  This istrue, but our interest here is to illuminate two factors that made this decision possible:  first, a hitherto unimaginable hubris and arrogance on the parts of courts, which substitute their will for God, for Nature, for the wisdom of the ages, for anything and everything that might set a limit to the absolutism of their judicial power.  Second, the fact that the Constitution, a human document written by men two hundred years ago according to the best wisdom and judgment of their day, is thought to have absolute, quasi-divine authority for any and all issues, and is authoritatively interpreted, as with a supernatural authority, by a tiny number of unelected human judges.

It is virtually inevitable that the public discussion that will ensue following this mandate will deal with formalities, trivia, relative merits, and utilitarian considerations of social impact. What will be overlooked is that when a court makes a decision of this kind, it is arrogating to itself authority and power virtually unheard of in human history.  It reminds us of the unfortunate King Herod of Scripture, who did not say it of himself but accepted it when his audience cried out, “It is the voice of a god and not of a man.”  Herod was stricken by God and died (Acts 12:20-23).  Where our judges are concerned, we too are crying, “It is the voice of gods and not of men.”

The Intoxication of Power

Nothing better demonstrates the intoxication, the incredible human arrogance of what Raoul Berger called the imperial judiciary than the decision of this Vermont court.  Unless its judges are unbelievably ignorant, mentally dense, totally blind to all history, philosophy, religion and ethics, they cannot fail to be aware of the fact that by this decree they are writing off all that purports to be the Word of God in the Bible, and incidentally the words of Mohammed in the Koran (which we need not presume that they know), the wisdom of six thousand years of human history, the ethics of the greatest thinkers of humanity, the common sense of the ages, and the expressed will of human legislatures and popular referenda.  And by what authority?  By the authority vested in them by the very people and institutions their decree mocks and renders impotent.  The implication of such a decision, in other words, is that they are wiser than all the prophets, saints, jurists and scholars of the past, know what is right and good better than all of the legislatures and popular referenda of history, indeed that their word is not merely law, but Law, higher than any other human decision, higher indeed than the Torah, that it surpasses the Word of God if indeed any thing other than their own Word can be called God’s.

In his book La tête coupée (The Severed Head), Aaron-Arnaud Upinsky speaks of the fundamental lie of democracy as it exists in the U.S.A. and many other places:  “Majority means minority;  the general will means the will of one.”  Nothing could better illustrate this truth than this decision of the Vermont Court.  We have experienced such judicial hubris more than once, for example in Roe v. Wade, in which seven justices of the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the laws of fifty states and doomed, as of this counting, perhaps forty million unborn human beings to prenatal death by medical intervention.  We experience “the will of one” today when President Clinton endorses and protects even the most atrocious and gruesome of abortion procedures, against the will of the Congress, the people, and the official organs of the medical profession, giving reasons that he must know to be lies.  The United States are a rich country, our people well-off, our military power unchallenged, and we do not yet take public notice of the transformation of our society from something resembling democracy to something identical to tyranny.  We will only notice if and when the bubble bursts and the money runs out, and then it will be far too late, for tyranny will be well established and the habits of popular rule so forgotten that they will be impossible to revive.

The Word of the New God, Interpreted by the New Priests

If an omnipotent and omniscient God had given us on tablets of stone a complete and total set of laws and rules for all of the life of his creatures, it would be only reasonable and prudent to consult them for all of the decisions to be made in life.  Jews and Christians believe that God indeed has given us an authoritative Word, and to varying degrees we seek wisdom to be found in this word for our daily decisions, but we do not believe that the Bible answers every question, not even in the realm of human conduct.  Believers may seek, with varying degrees of devotion and skill, to derive from Scripture principles of conduct that resolve issues not explicitly covered, but as the questions are more removed from things explicitly covered in the text, contraception for example, our ability to say with assurance precisely what God requires diminishes.

If in our social order we ascribed such practical lawmaking authority to the Scripture and to its interpretation by chosen prophets, priests, and scholars, we would be deemed a theocracy, and properly so.  Those Christians who want the Word of God to be decisive for virtually all moral questions of society are called theonomists:  theos, God, sets the nomoi, the laws, and where God’s Word is not explicit, his interpreters can fill in the gaps.

Is not this precisely what is happening with our justices and judges, with the significant exception that they do not consult what is claimed to be the Word of God but the Words of Man, treated as though they were of divine origin and possessing all authority on earth, and perhaps in heaven as well?  Our judges make decisions, set aside old laws, and demand new laws on the basis of a document treated as though it were divine, the Constitution.  This Constitution, a brief document of only a few dozen pages, by no means covers everything, but it is assumed that every question must be answered in conformity to it.  This requires interpreters, infallible interpreters who can declare precisely what the Constitution says, by inherent implications evident to them if not to others, whose every word must be obeyed.

If the Constitution actually had been infallibly inspired by God and intended by him to contain, explicitly or implicitly, the answers to all human questions and if God had appointed interpreters endowed with divine wisdom to tell us what it means when its text is not explicit, then it would make sense to obey it and its interpreters in all things, even when, like God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, it might seem to violate human reason and emotion.  This is precisely the way the courts treat the Constitution:  as though it were inspired by God and they were constituted his infallible interpreters.  But in fact the Constitution was drawn up by men, not by God, by men acting on the best insight, wisdom, and principles they knew, to a large extent basing their insights on biblical wisdom, but never claiming to be writing inspired Scripture.  The interpreters, the justices and judges, are not appointed by God, but by men, in some cases by men whose moral character and judgment are self-evidently corrupt and in every case by men whose judgment is only human and fallible.

The bulk of the Constitution was drawn up at a time when the United States numbered only thirteen and their population a bit more than three million.  Why should we assume that their wisdom, their decisions, have eternal validity?  Why should we assume, for example in Roe although countless other examples could be chosen, that the will of nine, or actually, of seven old men can explicitly tell us what God’s Word in the Bible does not explicitly tell us, namely, that it is a woman’s right to demand the destruction of her unborn offspring?  Why should we assume that their decision, not that of Congress, nor of legislatures, nor of churches, councils, or popular referenda, is correct, is binding on all Americans for all time?  Are we not treating the men of 1789 as gods, their words as divine, and the judges of today as infallible interpreters?  Of course, the words of the Constitution and the decrees of the judges will not be binding for all time, for a later Supreme Court could modify or abrogate the decisions of a present one, as has sometimes happened.2  But then who are the new justices, the ones who can correct our understanding of divine wisdom, and how do they come to power?  They are appointed by one man, the President, and in the case of the last two justices, by a President whose moral judgment is incredibly flawed and who himself was chosen by slightly less than one quarter of the eligible voters, or slightly less than half of those voting.

There are two ways in which all this can be thought to make sense.  The first is the postmodernist way, in which all speech, all communication, every law is simply a vehicle for exerting power.  On that assumption, those of us who dislike what is being done must resort to power, even to armed force, to impose our own will.  Either that, or else resign ourselves to being ruled by the sovereign will of others.  The second way to understand it, which is perhaps the more likely, inasmuch as the theory of unfounded arbitrary power would be officially repugnant to all who do not have it, is the assumption that without realizing or acknowledging it, we are treating the Constitution as the inerrant Word of God and the justices as his infallible prophets.  Whichever we choose, we affirm the words of Upinsky:  majority means minority, and the general will means the will of one.

VAE VICTIS  

“Woe to the vanquished!” Fifty-five years after the end of World War II, this ancient curse has taken on new significance with the agreement—or should we say, capitulation—of German industry and the German government to demands for “compensation” to the survivors of the workers compelled to work as slaves or virtual slaves in German industry and agriculture during the war.  In an agreement “worked out” between industry, the government, lawyers for the claimants, and U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstadt, the Germans agreed to pay ten billion German marks, or about 5.5 billion U.S. dollars.  Thus, half a century after the event, oppressors—or rather their successors—are being called to account for injuries done to the oppressed.  Or to put it more accurately, the successors of some of the oppressors are being called to account for injuries done to some of the oppressed.

If one asks, which “oppressors,” the answer is, the victi (vanquished) of 1945, provided that they have meanwhile accumulated sufficient resources to make the project of compensation worthwhile.  If one asks, which “oppressed,” the answer is, “those who enjoy media attention, the advocacy of influential attorneys, the ability to elicit menacing threats from American local and state governments, and can count on the intervention of the U.S. State Department in the person of Under Secretary Eizenstadt.”

One might suppose that the vanquished Germans had already drained their cup of woe in 1945 and the years following:  the entire nation in ruins, virtually one-third of its territory amputated and given to a conqueror (the U.S.S.R.) and its unhappy satellite, Poland;  the remainder carved up into four occupation zones;  eleven million Germans expelled from their ancestral lands in an earlier version of what is now universally abhorred as ethnic cleansing.  German industry, to the extent that any of it survived the bombs and bombardments of the war, was dismantled and plundered in the form of reparations.  At the war’s end, there was little indeed left on the territory of ruined Germany that could be used as reparations or to compensate survivors of Nazi exactions.

The only booty left for the conquerors consisted of human beings.  (The victims of oppression were not yet considered.)   In ancient times, it was common for conquerors to take slaves from among their prisoners and conquered people.  In the enlightened twentieth century, slavery called by that name is no longer tolerable (except, of course, in a certain Muslim-ruled African country).  But the reality still exists.  Do we call it slave-taking when prominent German rocket scientists such as Werner von Braun were brought to the West, to the United States?  No, von Braun and his colleagues were well paid and well treated, so they were not slaves in the usual sense, although, like the Jewish historian Josephus when captured by the Romans, they had hardly any alternative to throwing their lot in with that of their conquerors.  Those without scientific or engineering brilliance to offer could provide labor.  German soldiers, captured in combat or surrendered to overwhelming forces, were denied the internationally guaranteed status of prisoners of war and transformed in an early manifestation of Newspeak into “disarmed enemy forces.”  Hundreds of thousands of such “disarmed enemies” were kept on as forced laborers, as it were, in lieu of reparations in violation of the Geneva Convention for months or even years after Germany’s surrender and subjugation.

If at the war’s end, Germany lay in ruins and many of its best workers were taken, voluntarily or under constraint, to serve the victors, there was little sympathy for the sufferings of the German nation and its people.  “They brought it on themselves.”  Indeed, although that was not true of every individual German, it was certainly true of the country as a whole.  Even observers with sympathy for the sufferings of the vanquished, impoverished, exiled and hungering Germans would have to say, “They are lucky it’s not worse.”

Finally, Deep Pockets

Now, more than half a century after the war, Germany has been rebuilt.  The aid furnished postwar West Germany under the Marshall Plan helped to start the rebuilding, but clearly the Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle, was wrought primarily by the Germans themselves.   Germany, risen like the phoenix from the ruins, now has deep pockets.  Germany is strong, productive, and rich, and now, fifty-five years after its reduction to rubble in World War II, it can be called to account, or dare we say plundered, in the name of survivors of its earlier tyrannies.  Whether one calls it compensation or plunder depends on who is talking, the victor or the vanquished.

German industry and the German government, as noted, have been persuaded to offer ten billion marks compensation to those survivors.  This agreement was worked out not between the offenders and the offended, most of whom are no longer on earth, but between those who have rebuilt Germany, who now have money, and the attorneys and officials speaking or claiming to speak for the injured.  The award was secured with the aid of the aforementioned State Department official Stuart Eizenstadt, a man who also played a key role in the exaction of 1.8 billion francs from Swiss banks.  In the case of the Swiss banks, the settlement was not awarded in any court, but was extorted from the banks by threats to stifle all Swiss commercial activity in various American cities and states, threats which if carried out would have ruined the Swiss economy.

It is a bit unusual that a claim for justice, fifty-odd years after the offenses, has to be paid primarily by persons who were not even on earth when the offenses were committed.  What has prompted the sudden willingness of the German government and German industry to give ten billion marks?  Are there threats, expressed or implied, to force the Germans once again to attempt to atone for the sins of their fathers?  Germany can pay, and Germany is dependent upon American trade and favor.  Thus Germany, like Switzerland, will pay.

So far, the indignation is selective.  Switzerland was vulnerable, because it is small and not protected by alliances.  Germany was vulnerable, because it was guilty, or at least a previous generation of German fathers was guilty.  Other countries, for the time being, remain unmolested by this quest for compensation, but as this modern gold rush continues, it is easy to envisage other targets.  Until shortly before the end of World War II, neutral Turkey supplied Germany with the chromium that was essential for its war machine, but Turkey so far has not been accosted.  Turkey is a member nation in NATO, an ally in NATO’s war against Yugoslavia.  Neutral Sweden, which unlike Switzerland is a member of the United Nations and prominent in U.N. projects, also supplied Germany with necessary material for its war production.  Sweden, for the time being, has not been molested.  Italy was Germany’s ally until it was partly overrun by Allied invaders and allowed to change sides.  Italy has not been bothered.  Perhaps these and other lands will offer future targets for the surviving victims and their champions.

Unequal Weights, Unequal Measures

Why Germany?  Why these, and not others?  Is it simply the old proverb, Vae victis?  Germany stands out among historic oppressors, although perhaps not so distinctively as one might think. Paramount among the crimes committed by the German nation was the systematic genocide directed in the first instance against Europe’s Jews, but also against other “lesser breeds.”  Millions not condemned to systematic extermination were imprisoned, degraded, and systematically exploited in labor camps, prisons, in factories and on farms in the futile effort to save Germany from the wrathful vengeance of most of the rest of the world.  But Germans are not the only perpetrators of large-scale genocide in this century;  one of the pioneers was Turkey in the genocide of its Armenians, a fact of history that it is politically incorrect for NATO members to mention.  Nevertheless, Germany for the moment is the target of opportunity.

Let us look at the record.  The evocation of evils committed by others does not exonerate the Germans, but perhaps it may put them in perspective and cast doubt upon the justification of a selective effort to right old wrongs.  In World War II, violence evoked counter-violence, crimes counter-crimes, oppression counter-oppression.  For Germans and foreigners resident in Germany, no distinction was made by Allied bombers between combatants and civilians.  For German cities and towns, no distinction was made between military targets and civilian housing.  In a series of air raids without precedent, population centers and urban populations were targeted;  Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden were only three of the most spectacular examples of the attempt of the Allied air forces to wipe whole cities from the face of the earth, exterminating tens of thousands of their inhabitants in the process.3  If there were a scale by which to weigh crimes against humanity, those committed by the Germans would outweigh those committed against them by the Allies.  Nevertheless, there is much that was done by the Allies that also merits the name of crimes against humanity, especially but not only in the last days of the war, when the Germans were no longer capable of effective counter-measures, and after the war, when the conquered people were at our mercy.  Additionally, it should not be forgotten that the Soviet Union actually ran up a greater toll of human victims than the Nazis did, although it was not all done in the context of the war against Germany and not selectively directed against one race.4

Will surviving German prisoners detained in the Soviet Union, France, Britain, or the United States be able to sue those countries for compensation?  Will the German and Italian prisoners of war who were put to work in the farms and vineyards of Michigan be able to recover something from their former employers?  Will the owners of buildings, homes, palaces, museums, schools and hospitals destroyed in mass area bombing in Germany—not to mention Japan—be able to demand restitution from their former conquerors?  Was it somehow morally more acceptable for the R.A.F. and the U.S.A.F. to kill 50,000 German civilians in the ludicrously named “Battle for Hamburg”5 than for the Germans to put 50,000 unwilling Poles and Frenchmen to work in their industry?  Shall Japan be forced to compensate thousands of Korean women pressed into military brothels, and yet have no claim against the United States for the fiery deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own civilians?  War is war, of course, and atomic raids are not the same as gas chambers in concentration camps.  But does it make so much difference to those exposed to violence against which they had no defense?

Right Every Wrong?

The current, successful assaults on the Swiss and the Germans are regarded by some as justice at last, by others as plunder.  When the search for lost bank accounts began, it was plausible to see justice at stake.  Where there are identifiable living account holders or proper heirs, ordinary justice demands payments.  When demands proliferate, amounts escalate, and irresistible governmental pressure is applied before a case can be adjudicated, it is no longer justice that decides, but power.

This situation, like the Kosovo crisis to which we have devoted much attention, lends plausibility to the postmodernist assertion that what is called the pursuit of justice is merely the exercise of power.  The world at the end of the second millennium, after a century’s flirtation with ideals of international law and universal justice, seems closer than ever to exemplifying the old adage that might makes right, that justice is just the will of the stronger party.  Perhaps the quest for compensation (or plunder) will now be satisfied with hundreds of millions of Swiss francs and ten billion German marks.  Or perhaps the age-old auri sacra fames, the sacred hunger for gold, will go on to find new vulnerable targets.

Once fully launched, there is no evident limit to the game of compensation for past national wrongs.  It has been suggested, at least somewhat seriously, that the United States should compensate the African-Americans alive today for the slavery imposed on their progenitors.  What about compensating Mexico for the loss of half its national territory, or Georgia for Sherman’s march and Virginia for Sheridan’s devastations?  Where will it end?  Is the question for compensation truly a quest for justice?  No country is innocent;  all have dirty hands, some dirtier than others, even much dirtier, but no one’s hands are clean.  As long as the United States, victorious, remain “the only superpower,” as we so glibly call ourselves, our country will probably not be summoned to pay up.  Vae victis, pereat justitia.6

AGGRESSION THEN AND NOW  

“Orthodoxy, “ someone said, “is my doxy.  Heterodoxy is your doxy.”  Aggression, we all know, is wicked and forbidden in the international community.  Aggressors are evil, and evil must be punished.  But who is the aggressor?  Who is the perpetrator, who the victim?  In 1939 Poland was a medium-sized country;  was it plausible to think that Poland attacked the German Reich?  Finland was even smaller:  was it plausible to think that Finland threatened the U.S.S.R.?   Even if the official propaganda organs of the dictatorships made those claims, how could anyone not under thought control take them seriously?  It should not be such a puzzle:  late twentieth-century Americans have accomplished it too.  Former Yugoslavia, now consisting primarily of Serbia, is a small country, but the mighty nations of the West, led by the world’s only superpower and our willing NATO allies, contrived to believe that Serbia was the aggressor.  Modern Israel is smaller still:  can Israel, surrounded by at least potentially hostile powers, be plausibly cast in the role of oppressor and aggressor?  Plausibly, perhaps not;  practically, yes, for that is what is happening.

It was easier in the 1930’s and 1940’s.   Germany, Italy, and Japan were easily identifiable aggressors.  Who are the aggressors today?  Some say NATO, but only those who take seriously the Constitutions  of the United States, France and Germany, the NATO and UN charters, and the traditional Christian just war doctrine agree.  Russia in Chechnaya, perhaps?  That is a different story, for as Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us on evening television, the Russians are nefarious, rather like the Serbs.  But Serbia is vanquished, and Russia, however little we like her conduct in Chechnaya, is rather too big to bomb.  Who is left?  Israel remains, that strange little nation that seems to some the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, the harbinger of the Last Days, and to others an interloper, the invader of lands that rightfully belong to others.

It is Israel that is the culpable aggressor today, at least if one is to judge by the usual media treatment of Israel’s ongoing entanglement with the Palestinians.  What are the facts?  Israel did not even exist prior to 1948.  A small strip of land was designated for a new state by a United Nations resolution, but Israel went on to take and occupy land largely occupied by Palestinian Arabs.  Many fled;  most of them wound up on the west bank of the Jordan, in territory conquered later but never annexed by Israel.

Almost every nation, with the possible exception of some aborigines in an undiscovered island, occupies territory that previously belonged to someone else.  The land that Israel now occupies was won, so to speak, fairly and squarely, in wars launched by the Arabs.  How long does it take for conquered land to belong rightfully to the conqueror?  How long has Königsberg been Russian, Danzig Polish, Lwów Ukranian?  A bit longer, in the first two cases, than Israel’s claims to its present border, a bit less long in the case of Lwów.7

Thirty, forty, and fifty years after Israel’s victories and the associated land-taking, Palestinians and Syrians are making increasingly intense demands for the restoration of those territories—notwithstanding the fact that the Arab world possesses immense tracts of land on which the exiled and disinherited Palestinians could be resettled8 and gigantic oil wealth with which to finance such resettlement.  Why not resettle the displaced Palestinians?  They might not immediately like it, of course, but if they had been resettled decades ago, their lives would have been far better than they actually are today.

Such resettlement is wrong, is it not? “Ethnic cleansing,” is it not?  It depends on who is doing it.  Following World War II over ten million German inhabitants of historically German lands—East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania—as well as of ethnically German parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, i.e. of the Sudetenland in the new C.S.S.R., were forcibly “transferred” to the remaining territories  of war-ravaged Germany.  Germany—prudently, we may say—refrains from making any claim for the restoration of her lost eastern territories, and Poland, the unwilling beneficiary of those transfers, likewise refrains from asking for the return of Lwów and the western Ukraine, historically Polish.

Why should it be taken for granted in Washington and elsewhere that only tiny Israel must “restore” lands taken in wars, wars that Israel did not start, territories that come not from aggression perpetrated, but from aggression repelled?   Not merely the Golan Heights, but even large segments of Israel proper are claimed by its defeated former enemies.  Why the Golan Heights and not Königsberg?  Vae victis is the answer for Königsberg, but not for the Golan;  there it is Vae victoribus.9  The United States government, despite the much-discussed activity of the Jewish lobby and the presence in the administration of many highly placed persons of Jewish extraction, seems ready to demand that Israel at the very least yield the Golan to Syria.  Does the administration see it as a question of true justice?  If so, then why not Königsberg?  Or is it merely a question of power, la volonté du plus fort, the will of the stronger, and the Arabs have both more people and a tremendous amount of the world’s oil?

If it is really that we, the world’s only superpower, find it expedient to respect power rather than justice, let us at least admit it.  And let us cease in our attempts to arbitrate the destiny of smaller nations, of Israel, of Serbia, of Taiwan.

Lest in our attempt to be wryly humorous, we have been unclear, let it be said that we encourage neither the reclaiming of Königsberg by the Germans nor of bits and pieces of present-day Israel by the Arabs.  But if it must be, let the American Southwest be Mexican, Miami Cuban, and Québec French again.

IN ADDITION TO WHICH   

*  The nation’s most highly visible Southern Baptist layman, President Bill Clinton, has joined the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago in accusing his denomination of acting to “perpetuate ancient religious hatred.”  This declaration by the Chicago body, written by its president, a rabbi, came as a shock to Christians everywhere, particularly as it was apparently endorsed by Francis Cardinal George, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, a member of the Council.  Cardinal George knows full well that it is the duty of all Christians, Catholics included, to preach the Gospel to everyone, “to all creation” (Mark 16:15), not to leave out adherents of certain religions.  Reproached by evangelicals who have been working with him in the group Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the Cardinal has indicated that of course he favors evangelization, but at the same time wants to preserve good relationships with leaders of the Baptists’ target communities—a desire that may not be all that easy to achieve.

To have Mr.Clinton join in denouncing Christians for doing what their Lord requires them to do and in characterizing evangelism as the perpetuation of ancient hatreds is perhaps not surprising in one who has previously scorned the admonitions of the S.B.C., the Pope, and Mother Teresa in his zeal for abortion, and spurned the pleas of the Pope, several Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, and the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches to cease or at least pause in his war on Kosovo. But this is the first time he has accused Christians of fomenting hatred as Christians.  Paige Patterson, president of the 15.8 million member Southern Baptist Convention as well as of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, made a striking rejoiner:  “Apparently, because the President has very few convictions, he harbors deep resentment against those who do.”  Clinton’s animosity to common Christian convictions was expressed by White House spokesman Joe Lockhart.  Patterson added, “I would say that the President or his press secretary or both have once again demonstrated that the one thing for which they have no regard is truth.”

*  In an unrelated incident, at a Christian conference outside Geneva last November, this editor ran into one of what we have called the President’s four evangelical Court Jesters, one of the men summoned by the president to help him deal with the Monica Lewinsky situation.  A former Bible teacher asked the Jester whether he was still in contact with the President.  He replied that they talk together every two weeks or so.  “How is he doing?” the teacher asked.  “He’s coming along,” was the reply.  Reproached by this editor for saying that a man who continues to endorse partial birth abortions is “coming along” in any spiritually meaningful sense, the Jester turned and walked away.  Would he have still said “coming along” if he had heard the President’s harsh words for his fellow Baptists?

*  On a television spot devoted to the campaign against cigarette smoking, the President had these few words to say:  “Talk to your kids.  They’ll listen.”  Perhaps he should have added, “And tell them, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’”

*  In our desire to help politicians to avoid the power of strong language and to restore truth, we offer the candidates a few rhetorical questions with which to reply to obnoxious journalists.  When one asks, “Should abortion be a litmus test for Supreme Court appointments?” answer, “Should we have justices who do not respect all human life?”  If another says, “Can a gay be President?” reply, “Haven’t we established that it is acceptable for a moral degenerate to be in the White House?”  And when asked, “Do you support an anti-abortion constitutional amendment?” answer, “Can it be good for a nation to kill one-quarter of each new generation?”

*  Dr. Billy Graham, the man who has preached the Gospel to more non-Christians than anyone else in history, has added his voice to that of President Clinton in criticizing the leadership of his own denomination, the Southern Baptists, for specially “targeting” Muslims and Hindus for evangelization.  The Southern Baptists, a quintessentially American denomination, have adopted a very American way to plan strategy and to organize procedures in their attempt to fulfill part of the common Christian task, the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).  Such planning and tactics are foreign to the leadership and to many members of the so-called “mainline” denominations, and it is not surprising that they are uncomfortable with them.  Even so, it is perplexing that any Christian should express opposition to a protect of bringing the Gospel to those outside the faith.  In Graham’s case it is particularly remarkable, as his own ministry exemplifies as no other does some distinctively American elements of strategy and organization.

*  On January 4th Brian Peterson was released from prison after serving most of his two-year sentence for participating in the killing of his newborn infant son.  The mother, given a slightly longer sentence, still has a few months to serve.  Meanwhile Mrs. Linda Tripp is being threatened with a five-year jail sentence for illegally recording telephone conversations with Monica Lewinsky.  These are interesting times.  We see what the nation values.  Miss Goldberg’s baby was killed, Miss Lewinsky’s privacy violated.  Diverse weights and diverse measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord (Proverbs 20:10).

Not, it seems to the justice system.

ENDNOTES

1 That we must add the word “heterosexual” to “married” shows how far Newspeak and thought control have triumphed in the American media and mentality.

2 The Constitution can also be amended by a vote of two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress, ratified by three-quarters of the states.  In this case too we would be assuming that the once divine wisdom of the men of the past can be altered by an even more authoritative and divine wisdom of the men and women of today.

3 The success of the R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. in devastating German cities in the face of constantly diminishing opposition, despite its questionable contribution to the defeat of Germany, was shortly to be imitated by the U.S.A.F. against a weakened Japan.  A series of devastating incendiary raids against tightly populated cities was followed, in August of 1945, by the extermination of perhaps one-quarter million Japanese in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

4 Stalin, we may recall, forcibly removed the Chechens, suspected of pro-Nazi leanings, from their homeland, an abuse now used to justify Chechen claims for independence from Russia.

5 When armadas of hundreds of bombers attack a civilian target virtually devoid of defenses, it is counter-intuitive to call it a battle.

6 Woe to the vanquished, let justice perish.

7 Lwów, variously spelled Lvov or Lviv—or Lemberg when it was Austrian—in the western Ukraine, only came under the U.S.S.R. after World War II, and Ukraine came to exist as an independent nation only after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Prior to that, the land for centuries belonged either to Lithuania, to Poland, or to Russia.

8 “Resettlement,” as we have noted elsewhere, is another term for what is called “ethnic cleansing.”  It all depends on who is being resettled and who is doing the cleansing.

9 Woe to the victors.

Notes on Sources

For “False Gods,” see the Tampa Tribune, December 21, Sec. 1, p. 2.  The report did not give details about the number of judges voting for and against the decree.