Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
November 2000
Volume 7, No. 11
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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Features
THE MOVING PICTURE
(pages 1-2)
New York's Governor George Pataki, signing a hate
crimes law, observed that if Germany had adopted such a
law, the Holocaust might never have happened. I'm
starting to understand how some people could think
Prohibition would stop folks from drinking.
* * *
One of the many mysteries of this year's
presidential race is why George W. Bush never mentioned
Al Gore's view that the internal combustion engine is the
greatest threat to the survival of the planet. Gore's
weirdly apocalyptic views on the environment are no
secret: he published them in his book, EARTH IN THE
BALANCE. But of course Republicans don't read, and the
wish "O that mine enemy had written a book!" is lost on
them.
* * *
On the other hand, Gore would probably have denied
that he wrote the book. He lied just as shamelessly about
everything else. Not even Bill Clinton has told so many
whoppers that were certain to be exposed. It's the
*childishness* of Gore's lies that stuns you and
distinguishes him from Clinton. He's like a little kid
who makes things up on the spot without stopping to think
whether they can be checked out.
* * *
Three good friends of mine -- Howard Phillips of the
U.S. Constitution Party; the Libertarian, Harry Browne;
and Pat Buchanan -- ran for president this year; as I
write, it looks as if none of them will win the White
House. The media, naturally, have given them very little
coverage, and they were excluded from the televised
debates. Too bad, because all of them, unlike Bush and
Gore, had important messages, spoke in complete
sentences, and felt no need of prevarication. I'm proud
to know such honorable men, and I only wish more people
had gotten to know them. But under our system, only the
richest candidates qualify for free publicity.
* * *
The only lesson I can draw from this year's election
is that direct political activity is essentially a waste
of time. In the end you can only hope that the lesser of
two evils -- the two major parties -- will defeat the
other and thereby stave off the worst possibilities for
the moment. Only Christ can save this country. Secular
institutions, by themselves, naturally fall into decay
and, unless spiritually revivified, are soon beyond
repair; it's too late to restore the U.S. Constitution,
desirable though that might be. But if Christian
influence increases in the general culture, one
conversion at a time, some of the good effects will
eventually seep into politics. That is the most we can
really hope for: the gradual taming of power by religion.
* * *
The latest riots in Israel remind one of Golda
Meir's sanctimonious declaration: "We can forgive the
Arabs for killing our children; we can never forgive them
for forcing us to kill their children." In the same
spirit (more or less), I can forgive Al Gore for making
me hate him; I can never forgive him for making me like
George W. Bush.
* * *
Kathleen Schwicker (you'll remember her as Kathleen
Willey) is suing Bill Clinton, his aides, and the FBI for
violating her privacy by releasing her personal letters
to him. Clinton hoped to refute her charge that he'd
groped her in the Oval Office by showing the public that
she had written warmly to him even after the alleged
assault. But as Ann Coulter has observed, those letters,
in which Mrs. Willey (as she then was) was angling for a
government job, may have been a subtle, ostensibly
friendly means of reminding Clinton that she had
something on him, if she should ever care to go public
with it. In any case, he and his underlings broke the law
by releasing them.
* * *
"Nothing appears more surprising to those who
consider human affairs with a philosophical eye," wrote
David Hume, "than the easiness with which the many are
governed by the few." So true; and I've often wondered
why. I suppose it's easiest when the rule of the Few is
called "democracy."
* * *
Speaking of the power of the Few over the Many, the
Boy Scouts of America are rapidly becoming a certified
Hate Group. A Manhattan school district has forbidden its
schools to sponsor Scout troops to protest the Scouts'
"discrimination" against homosexuals, following the lead
of school districts in San Francisco and seven other
cities. Meanwhile, the federal courts are figuring out
pretexts for extending "civil rights" protection to
homosexuals without all the bother of legislation. In San
Francisco, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has
delayed the deportation of a Mexican transvestite with a
ruling that "gay men with feminine sexual identities" may
qualify for political asylum here if they are persecuted
in their native lands.
* * *
And a Virginia man named Ronald Gay has shot seven
gay people in a gay bar, killing one of them. It seems he
was sick and tired of being teased about his name. He
prefers to call homosexuals "faggots." I can't condone
his action, but I wonder what I would have done if they
were called "sobrans."
* * *
Bureaucracies, like courts, can be a convenient
means of circumventing democracy. The Food and Drug
Administration has approved the marketing and sale of the
abortion pill mifepristone, a/k/a RU-486. So the
legitimation of abortion continues, without any avenue of
popular appeal. We don't know who makes these decisions,
and it seems futile to oppose them. A basic strategy of
the tyranny of the Few is to make the operations of
government incomprehensible to the Many.
* * *
The New York race for the open U.S. Senate seat
turned into a duel over who loves Israel most. Both
Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio campaigned on the
assumption that the Empire State's voters cared more
about Israel than this country's interests, and nobody in
the media dared to point this out. You mustn't *say*
that American Jews have "dual loyalties," but it's
perfectly acceptable to take it for granted.
* * *
Frank Sinatra's daughter Tina has revealed that her
father did an "errand" for Joe Kennedy, asking Chicago
mobster Sam Giancana to help Jack Kennedy's 1960
campaign. Giancana later felt betrayed when Kennedy
cracked down on organized crime; Sinatra had to soothe
him and make amends. These poor naive Italians had to
learn it the hard way: you deal with the Kennedys at your
own risk.
* * *
Several of our readers have asked how my grandson
Joe's district all-star baseball team fared in the state
championship tournament. Alas, they were eliminated,
winning one game and losing two; one fatal run scored
when the team's fine third baseman slipped on the wet
grass in the final inning. Joe did well in several
appearances as a pinch-runner, stealing bases and scoring
runs without making any outs.
THE GORE LEGACY
(pages 3-4)
This month I write not knowing the outcome of the
presidential election, though with dark forebodings of a
Gore victory. I hope this is as wrong as my prophecies
usually are; after all, I'm the guy who predicted that
Clinton wouldn't even be renominated in 1996, to mention
only one of my memorable forecasts. Rest assured,
however, that I will ascertain the winner in time for our
next issue, even if it means reading a newspaper. All I
can say at this point is not that I hope Bush won, but
that I hope Gore lost.
What would (or did) a Gore victory mean? A Gore
legacy. And that would chiefly mean, as it appears,
several appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. Court
appointments are now among the richest spoils of
presidential elections. Republicans don't fully
appreciate this, but Democrats do. The High Court changes
the ground rules of politics and therefore decides what
politics can decide.
In the mid 1930s the Court correctly struck down
major features of the New Deal as unconstitutional.
Franklin Roosevelt, bent on usurping powers not granted
by the Constitution, decided to solve the problem by
increasing the number of justices on the Court. His
court-packing scheme shocked even his fellow Democrats.
In those days the Constitution was taken very seriously,
and everyone understood that Roosevelt was trying to
destroy the independence of the judiciary by making it
subordinate to the executive branch.
His own explanation was that the three branches of
government were like a team of three horses, one of which
wasn't pulling its share of the load. The image betrayed
his dictatorial mentality: it was the duty of all three
branches to work as one. The separation of powers was a
mere inconvenience, not a vital principle of liberty.
Like his friend Joe Stalin, he wasn't about to let it
hinder him.
Though the furious reaction made him drop the
scheme, the Court soon came around anyway. It began
finding his usurpations tolerable, and several justices
retired or died; soon he was able to staff it with his
own cronies, and by 1940 it was not only ruling his way
but effectively striking down not new legislation, but
inconvenient provisions of the Constitution itself, such
as the Tenth Amendment, which was declared a mere
"truism."
From that point on the Court adopted a new mission:
stripping the states of their traditional powers. This
was done in the name of the Bill of Rights. Using the
Fourteenth Amendment as its pretext, the Court found that
the Bill of Rights had been "incorporated" and was now
binding on the states as well as (or more than) on the
federal government. Segregation, public-school prayer,
unegalitarian voting districts, obscenity laws, bans on
the sale of contraceptives, customary arrest procedures,
laws restricting abortion, and capital punishment were
all deemed violations of the Constitution. The reasoning
was shaky, but it didn't matter, because the state
legislatures were helpless against the federal courts.
Checks and balances didn't apply.
To its delight, the Supreme Court discovered that it
could dictate vast changes in the American way of life.
It made this discovery during the relatively conservative
administration of Dwight Eisenhower, when it was still
dominated by Roosevelt and Truman appointees; its boldest
move came in 1954, when it ruled that racially segregated
schools were unconstitutional. It soon proceeded to
overturn local obscenity laws and then to enforce a novel
interpretation of the separation of church and state.
Both popular protest and scholarly criticism were
unavailing; the Court was on a roll. Some of the most
trenchant criticism of the Court came from conscientious
liberals like Alexander Bickel. But most liberal
intellectuals liked what the Court was doing and provided
propaganda support in the media.
The Court's expanded role came as a great relief to
liberals in the U.S. Congress, who could now let the
Court carry the unpopular parts of the liberal agenda
(and nearly all the Court's "historic" rulings were
unpopular) while disclaiming responsibility. Elected
representatives could have what they wanted without
voting for it, explaining to angry constituents that the
Court was merely doing its job of "interpreting" the
Constitution, albeit in undreamed-of ways.
We are often reminded that the justices of the Court
have frequently surprised the presidents who appoint
them. Actually, this tends to be true only of Republican
appointees, such as Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry
Blackmun, Sandra Day O'Connor, and David Souter, all of
whom have joined the Court's liberals in the mission of
overturning state laws. It is hard to think of a
Democratic appointee who has turned out to be
conservative, with the very partial exception of Byron
White, one of the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade. And
even that wouldn't have shocked John Kennedy, who had
named him to the Court in 1962. Democratic appointees
from William O. Douglas to Thurgood Marshall to Ruth
Bader Ginsburg have generally voted just the way they
were expected to.
Far from checking the centralizing tendencies of
Congress, as Alexander Hamilton envisioned, the Court has
joined Congress in usurping and centralizing power, while
weakening the states. By making itself the enforcer of
the Bill of Rights (minus the Tenth Amendment, of course)
*against* the states and unconscionably broadening the
meanings of such phrases as "establishment of religion,"
"freedom of speech [and] of the press," "unreasonable
search and seizure," "due process of law," and "cruel
and unusual punishment," inventing rights (e.g.,
"privacy") that are nowhere in the text (but which
allegedly lurk in its "penumbras"), and ignoring the
obvious and traditional meanings of other clauses, the
Court has enormously increased its own arbitrary power.
It no longer finds meanings *in* the Constitution, it
imposes meanings *on* the Constitution. This is the
famous idea of the Constitution as a "living document."
And an increase in the power of the U.S. Supreme
Court is also an increase in the power of the federal
government over the states, local governments, and
individual citizens. If every law made at every level is
subject to arbitrary veto by the Court, which is what the
current situation amounts to, we are living not under
federalism, but under precisely the sort of monopoly
government the Constitution was designed to prevent. This
is what liberalism, a variant of socialism, aspires to.
Like all forms of collectivism, it views the total
unification of power as "progressive" and the division
and dispersion of power as "reactionary." It senses that
the original constitutional design is its mortal enemy,
and it will take any measures necessary to defeat the
idea of "original intent."
As long as the liberal regime prevails, the rule of
law is dead; without a Constitution construed according
to reason, tradition, and literal and logically
inescapable meaning, government becomes lawless. The
current interpreters, who can make the document mean
anything that suits their purposes, cease to be bound by
the past or by any higher authority than themselves; they
become all-powerful, in the same way that the Soviet
regime was all-powerful when it could rewrite history,
blanking out the inconvenient parts.
In the first of this year's presidential debates, Al
Gore said he believed that the Constitution "grows with
our country and with our history." This was his way of
endorsing the Living Document. George W. Bush charged
that Gore, if elected president, would appoint "liberal
activist judges" -- which was true, but feeble and trite.
Bush didn't explain what he meant or why liberal
activists are objectionable. Gore meant that he views the
Court as an institution for mandating the liberal agenda,
not for interpreting the Constitution with fidelity to
its inherent meaning. Bush knew this, but didn't know how
to say it -- and didn't comprehend the gravity of the
issue.
The Republicans, and most conservatives, still
haven't fully grasped the role of the federal courts in
the liberal modus operandi. Bush's father had no idea
what he was doing when he named David Souter to the
Supreme Court; he never bothered looking into either
Souter's views on abortion or his judicial philosophy. So
the elder Bush got the kind of "surprise" Republicans
usually get and Democrats rarely get when Souter turned
out to be a rabid liberal, earning the lavish praise of
the NEW YORK TIMES.
Those who have a sense of humor (I lost mine some
time ago) may be amused to reflect that liberals tried to
block Souter's confirmation, as they had blocked Robert
Bork's and tried to stop Clarence Thomas's. They
suspected Souter of conservatism. Now they know they
needn't have worried; but at least they showed again that
they understood the stakes. It can't be overemphasized
that *constitutional politics is more fundamental than
electoral politics,* because the Constitution -- or at
least its prevailing interpretation -- sets limits on
what electoral politics may do. And liberals have learned
to achieve their goals through bogus interpretation.
Conservatives, on the other hand, haven't learned
that controlling the interpretation of the Constitution
is all-important and that the Constitution, faithfully
construed, would be a fatal obstacle to most liberal
designs. So, in contrast to the Democrats' street-
fighting against Bork and Thomas, Republicans supinely
voted to confirm Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
thereby ensuring further constitutional erosion.
Much as I yearn for Gore's defeat, Bush's victory
wouldn't guarantee good judicial appointments. He shows
every sign of being his father's son, and he could easily
inflict another Souter or two on us.
So although I can't tell you who won the election
(you may be able to pick that up from other sources) I
can tell you why it mattered.
THE WORDS AND DEEDS OF CHRIST
When I was a much younger man, I almost worshipped
Shakespeare. He seemed to me almost literally "inspired,"
the most eloquent man who ever lived. And he nearly
filled the place in my life that Catholicism had briefly
occupied after my teenage conversion.
When I returned to the Catholic Church in my early
thirties, I began to see him differently. As a
professional writer myself, I still admired him
immensely, realizing how impossible it was that I should
ever emulate him. But I no longer regarded him as a god.
I had another god -- namely, God.
I began to marvel at the words that were truly the
most inspired ever uttered: those of Christ. As a writer
I felt honored when anyone quoted me or remembered
anything I'd written. But Christ is still quoted after
2,000 years. An obscure man, he wrote nothing; we have
only a few of the many words he spoke during his life,
not in the Hebrew or Aramaic he spoke them in, but
translated into Greek and thence into English.
His words have a unique power that sets them off
from all merely human words. Even two removes from their
original language, they still penetrate us and rule our
consciences. They have changed the world profoundly. He
didn't just perform miracles; he *spoke* miracles. The
words we read from his mouth are miracles. They have a
supernatural effect on anyone who is receptive to them.
One proof of their power is that we also resist
them. Sometimes they are unbearable. Like some of the
early disciples who fell away, we are tempted to say:
"This is hard stuff. Who can accept it?" It's the natural
reaction of the natural man, fallen man.
Great as Shakespeare is, I never lose sleep over
anything he said. He leaves my conscience alone. He is a
tremendous virtuoso of language, but much of his beauty
is bound to be lost in translation. (I apologize if this
offends our German readers; Germans believe that
Shakespeare in English was really just raw material for
Schiller's great translations.)
By the same token, nobody ever feels guilty about
anything Plato or Aristotle said. They spoke important
and lasting truths often enough, but never anything that
disturbs us inwardly. We are never *afraid* to read
them. We aren't tempted to resist them as we are tempted
to resist Christ. The sayings of Confucius and Mohammed
haven't carried over into alien cultures with anything
like the force of Christ's words. They may be very wise
at times, or they wouldn't have endured for many
centuries; but still, they are only human.
But all this raises a question (and here I apologize
for offending our Protestant readers). If the Bible is to
be our sole guide, why didn't Christ himself write it?
Why didn't he even expressly tell the Apostles to write
it, as far as we know? Why did he leave so much to
chance? Yet he said: "Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away." And so far this
certainly appears true, though we know of no measures on
his part to see to it that his words would be preserved.
He seems to have trusted that they would somehow have
their effect by their sheer intrinsic power, just as he
trusted that his enduring the humiliation, agony, and
death of a common criminal would confound every human
expectation and fulfill his tremendous mission.
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the Redemption was an
even greater miracle than the Creation. I've often
wondered just what he meant by that, and I think I'm
starting to see. The human imagination can readily
conceive of God *creating* the world. The human race has
many creation stories and myths; every culture seems to
have its own. But nobody imagined, no human being could
ever imagine, God becoming a human being and redeeming
the human race by submitting to utter disgrace,
unspeakable physical pain, and death, ending his life in
what appeared even to his disciples to be total futility.
The greatest genius who ever lived could never have
foreseen or supposed such a story. It was absolutely
contrary to human common sense. It came as a total shock
even to the devout and learned Jews who were intimate
with the Scriptures and prayed for the coming of the
Messiah. The Apostles who had repeatedly heard Christ
himself predict his Passion, his destiny on the Cross,
failed to comprehend it when it actually came to pass.
When his words were fulfilled to the letter, instead of
recognizing what seems to us so obvious, they fled in
terror. (As we would done have in their place.)
The New Testament Epistles were written by men who
had seen Christ after the Resurrection. A skeptic might
dismiss St. Paul's vision as a hallucination, but Peter,
John, and James had seen Christ's Passion and afterward
met him, conversed with him, dined with him, touched him.
They didn't deny their own desertion and loss of faith at
the time of his death, just as the ancient Israelites
didn't play down, in their own scriptures, their many
defections from the true God; it was an essential part of
the story.
Nor did the authors of the Epistles keep reiterating
that the Resurrection was a fact, as if it were in doubt.
They simply treated it as something too well known to
their hearers to need further proof. They were prepared
to die as martyrs in imitation of Christ; Christian
suffering, not writing, was to be the chief medium of the
Good News for the rest of the world.
Christ's words, in their minds, were inseparable
from his deeds. He had founded an organization, which we
call the Church, and he had told and shown the Apostles
how to go about their mission when he was no longer
visibly present. It seems to me fatally anachronistic to
suppose that distributing literature, in the form of what
we now call the Bible, was to be a prominent part of this
mission; that was impossible before the printing press,
surely a great technological advance but one that had no
role in the life of the Church before the fifteenth
century. The Apostles had -- and could have -- no
conception of books as we know them, easily mass-produced
and cheaply purchased. Before Gutenberg, every book had
to be copied by hand, carefully preserved, awkwardly
used. Reading itself was a special skill.
The life of the Church, as prescribed by Christ, was
sacramental. He never told the Apostles to write books;
he told them to baptize, to preach the Gospel, to forgive
sins, and to commemorate the climactic moment of his
ministry before the Passion, the Last Supper. He
delegated his own authority to them and left much to
their discretion, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
That is why Catholics give so much weight to tradition;
we aren't privy to all his instructions to the Apostles,
but we trust that they knew what they were doing when
they formed the Church in her infancy.
In one respect Catholics are more fundamentalist
than the fundamentalists. We take the words "This is my
body" and "This is my blood" very literally. So did the
first hearers who rejected the "hard saying" that eating
his flesh and drinking his blood was necessary to
salvation; he didn't correct the impression that he meant
exactly what he seemed to be saying. Even a current
writer, the professedly Catholic Garry Wills, rejects the
traditional Catholic doctrine that the priest who
consecrates bread and wine converts them into the very
body and blood of Christ. Christ's words, as I say, still
provoke resistance. And this is why I believe them.
What greater proof of his divinity could there be
than the fact that he is still resisted, even hated,
after 2,000 years? Nobody hates Julius Caesar anymore;
it's pretty hard even to hate Attila the Hun, who left a
lot of hard feelings in his day. But the world still
hates Christ and his Church.
The usual form of this hatred is interesting in
itself. For every outright persecutor, there are
countless people who pretend not to hate Christ, but
subtly demote him to the rank of a "great moral teacher,"
or say they have nothing against Christianity as long as
the "separation of church and state" is observed, or,
under the guise of scholarship, affect to winnow out his
"authentic" utterances from those falsely ascribed to him
-- as if the Apostles would have dared to put words in
his mouth! And as if such fabricated words would have
proved as durable as "authentic" ones! (Try writing a
single sentence that anyone could mistake for a saying of
Christ for even a century.)
Most secular-minded people would find it distasteful
to nail a Christian to a cross, though there have been
exceptions. They prefer to create a certain distance
between themselves (or "society") and Christ, to insulate
worldly life from the unbearable Good News, so that they
feel no obligation to respond to God's self-revelation.
An especially horrifying concrete application of this
insulation of society from Christianity is the reduction
of the act of killing unborn children to an abstract
political "issue," a matter about which we can civilly
"disagree."
Pretending to leave the ultimate questions moot,
they actually live in denial of and opposition to the
truth we have been given at so much cost. What was
formerly Christendom -- a civilization built around that
central revelation of God to man -- has now fallen into a
condition of amnesia and indifference.
Even much of the visible Catholic Church itself has
defected from its duty of evangelizing, which begins with
transmitting Catholic teaching to children. Ignorance of
Catholic doctrine in the "American Church" is now both a
scandal and a terrible tragedy.
The Vatican recently offended its Protestant and
Jewish partners in ecumenical "dialogue" by reiterating
the most basic claim of the Catholic Church: that it's
the One True Church, the only sure way to salvation.
Apparently the tacit precondition of "dialogue" was that
the Church stand prepared to renounce her identity. And
we can well understand why some people might get the
mistaken impression, even from certain papal statements
and gestures, that this was a live possibility. But it
was a misunderstanding that had to be unequivocally
cleared up before any honest conversation could occur.
Christ always has been, still is, and always will be
too much for the human race at large to accept or
assimilate. Exactly as he said he would be. The world
keeps proving the truth of his words.
Nuggets
OF INTEREST: Forrest McDonald, one of the finest living
American historians, has just published STATES' RIGHTS
AND THE UNION: IMPERIUM IN IMPERIO, 1776-1876, a
sympathetic study of the Southern cause. McDonald's
criticisms of Lincoln have been attacked by Walter Berns
in the WASHINGTON TIMES as "mistaken and offensive."
Offensive? Berns doesn't explain what the Southern states
were supposed to do when the federal government violated
the terms of the Constitution. Secession may have been a
futile cause then and a lost cause now, but that doesn't
mean it wasn't a good cause. (page 9)
A PERSONAL NOTE: Warm thanks to my old friend Taki, my
favorite Greek writer since Homer, who has praised this
newsletter in his column in the NEW YORK PRESS. (page 9)
YANKEE, COME HOME: The Usual Suspects are calling the
Yemen suicide bombing of the USS Cole an "act of war."
No kidding! Well, since the perpetrators are dead and
their accomplices are unknown, it's hard to know whom to
retaliate against. But possibly the bombers considered
the presence of American destroyers in their part of the
world -- as in most parts of the world -- something other
than evidence of our peaceful intentions. Would we be so
widely hated if we stayed home and stuck to defending our
own borders? Are the world's Muslims wrong to feel that
the U.S. government is making war on Islamic
civilization? The modern liberal regime is at war with
*all* traditional societies -- and is shocked when those
societies are ungrateful for its efforts to subjugate
them. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
END OF AN ERA: Gus Hall, perennial head of the U.S.
Communist Party and four-time presidential candidate, has
died at 90, nine years after the collapse of his beloved
Soviet Union, at which time he was still defending Stalin
and deploring Mikhail Gorbachev's betrayal of
"socialism." Among Gus's tips for tourists: "If you want
to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea."
BULLETIN: The U.S. Constitution is in blatant violation
of the First Amendment! It says it was adopted "in the
*year of Our Lord* one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-seven." Why hasn't the American Civil Liberties
Union called our attention to this clear endorsement of
Christianity?
Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12)
* The Stopping Point (September 5, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000905.shtml
* Do We Need the First Amendment (September 7, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000907.shtml
* Untold Stories (September 14, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000914.shtml
* Staying in the Muddle (September 19, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000919.shtml
* The Death Penalty (September 26, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000926.shtml
* Freud and the Constitution (September 28, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000928.shtml
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.
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[ENDS]