SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
November 2004
Volume 11, Number 11
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Ambiguous Catholic
-> Notes from Limbo (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> Reality and Divinity
-> Philip Roth's Happy Ending
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
{{ Emphasis is indicated by the presence of "equals"
signs around the emphasized words.}}
The Ambiguous Catholic
(page 1)
Someone has to do something about those Catholics.
I'm sure you know the ones I mean. John Kerry will do for
illustration here. After the second presidential debate,
I wished for a new watchdog organization to dog Kerry
with commercials -- Former Altar Boys for Truth, perhaps.
Late in that debate a woman asked Kerry how he would
respond to a voter who, believing abortion to be murder,
asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars
wouldn't be spent for abortions. Kerry's long reply
began: "I would say to that person exactly what I will
say to you right now. First of all, I cannot tell you how
deeply I respect the belief about life and when it
begins." A strange way to phrase it; but he went on: "I'm
a Catholic -- raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy.
Religion has been a huge part of my life, helped lead me
through a war, leads me today." Again, odd words. Was he
going to answer the simple question?
"But I can't take what is an article of faith for me
and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that
article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew,
Protestant, whatever." Notice that Kerry, nearly 60 years
old, hasn't learned, or affects not to know, that
Catholic teaching on abortion is =not= an "article of
faith," that is, a revealed truth; it's a simple
application of natural law, shared by many non-Catholics
-- agnostics, atheists, Jews, Protestants, whatever. Even
altar boys used to know the difference. And =all= the
state laws on abortion struck down by the U.S. Supreme
Court had been passed by =Protestant= legislatures.
Kerry went on showing, and sowing, confusion for
several minutes. He never answered the question, but he
implied, by sheer evasion (he digressed about "my wife,
Teresa," "options," "constitutional rights," "unwanted
pregnancies," et cetera), that he had every intention of
using tax money for abortion. He finally ended: "And I
truly respect it." By then I wasn't sure what "it"
referred to. Bush smiled that he was "trying to decipher
that."
Kerry spoke for many ambiguous Catholics,
particularly in politics, who claim affiliation with
Catholicism only for the purpose of distancing themselves
from it, acting superior to it, and even misrepresenting
it -- but =never= for the purpose of actually bearing
witness to their alleged faith.
In the postdebate commentary, hardly anyone remarked
on Kerry's mendacity. Maureen Dowd of the NEW YORK TIMES,
usually quick to pounce on politicians' tricks, quoted
Kerry's words about legislating his faith with full
approval, reserving her scorn for the bishops who were
"salivating" for a ban on abortion. Falsehoods about
Catholic doctrine are never identified in the press as
errors, gaffes, distortions, or outright lies.
Miss Dowd herself occasionally mentions her Catholic
girlhood. For example, when sneering at Mel Gibson a few
months ago, she mocked the Stations of the Cross as a
"12-step program" (she was only off by two). Kerry has
referred to "Pope Pius XXIII" (off by XI). It isn't as if
it would take much research to get these things right.
Catholic teaching, practice, and history aren't exactly
secret. So how has the Church in America recently managed
to produce so many ignorant anti-Catholic bigots?
Notes from Limbo
(page 2)
This month I write in suspense. By the time you read
this, you will know what I, as of this writing, don't:
the election results. So this issue is in the nature of a
time capsule. It does appear that either George W. Bush
or John F. Kerry will win the presidency, but they are
running so close, AOTW, that the tension is terrific,
though either result is revolting. The only consolation
in prospect is that the winner's margin is likely to be
so thin that he won't be able to claim a popular
"mandate."
* * *
Do I sound pessimistic? AOTW, I'm still in the race,
but let me anticipate the postmortems by confessing that,
after being excluded from the presidential debates, I'm
having trouble mobilizing my base, and my chances of
victory will depend entirely on turnout. Being a realist,
I'm drafting a concession speech, just in case.
* * *
"Does the U.S. need the draft?" asks TIME magazine.
Wrong question. The real question is whether military
conscription is just, and the answer is no. Both Bush and
Kerry came out against it during the campaign, and the
House voted it down, 402 to 2, so the matter appears
settled -- for the time being. But as long as young men
are still required to register for the draft, the coffin
hasn't been nailed shut. And as long as the U.S.
Government keeps acting as an empire, we can't be sure
the issue is dead.
* * *
A lawyer named Douglas T. Kendall, writing in the
WASHINGTON POST, raises an alarm about Justice Clarence
Thomas: he doesn't seem to believe in stare decisis, the
principle that judges should be bound by precedents.
Maybe it's a good principle in general, but it can hardly
apply to constitutional law, where it would mean that the
most extravagant past rulings of "living document"
jurisprudence would remain virtually irreversible. Which
appears to be just what Kendall wants. After all,
justices are sworn to uphold not their predecessors, but
the Constitution itself. There's a difference.
* * *
About half the celebrities in the United States have
died this month: actor Christopher Reeve, actress Janet
Leigh, comedian Rodney Dangerfield, photographer Richard
Avedon ... am I leaving anyone out? Since I don't want to
write an all-obituary issue, I'll content myself with
remarking on Reeve's obits. Yes, he struggled bravely
with his horrible injury, but I doubt he'd be hailed as a
"hero" if he hadn't become an advocate for stem-cell
research on human embryos.
* * *
Oh yes, Jacques Derrida, the French father of the
famous -- or is it infamous? -- school of
"deconstruction," has also died. Nobody seems to know
quite what deconstruction is, but it has still, or
therefore, excited furious controversy. My impression is
that it's the idea that every text potentially contains
the opposite of its apparent meaning. Put simply, =all=
documents are living documents.
Exclusive to electronic media:
Oh no! Not another Shakespeare biography! Yes,
Stephen Greenblatt, doyen of the "New Historicism," has
produced another reshuffling of the sparse facts about
the wrong guy, WILL IN THE WORLD (Norton). No surprises,
lots of surmises. And even the surmises are a bit
shopworn; for example, Greenblatt speculates that the
Stratford man wrote THE MERCHANT OF VENICE after
witnessing the grisly execution of a Jew, before a
jeering crowd in 1596. Trouble is, the play had already
been written by then, and by somebody else. It's a good
rule of thumb, when writing a biography, to begin by
making sure you have the right guy.
Reality and Divinity
(pages 3-4)
C.S. Lewis begins his classic MERE CHRISTIANITY with
five short chapters under the heading "Right and Wrong as
a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." He points out
that we all have a moral sense that points to the divine.
Strictly speaking, it doesn't prove God's existence, but
it can't be reduced to any mere social or psychological
cause. Every attempt to explain it away only requires a
further explanation. Even small children appeal to this
sense when they quarrel ("I had it first!"). So do rulers
of nation-states when they feel the need to justify,
excuse, or deny their crimes.
Lewis developed this insight further in THE
ABOLITION OF MAN, the book that began my own reconversion
to Christianity when I read it as a college student. It
was a quiet little argument that all men accept the same
basic moral principles, citing the teachings of the great
religions as illustrations. Again, he wasn't trying to
prove too much; he merely called attention to a dimension
of ourselves that contradicts the dominant philosophies
of our time, materialist, reductionist, positivist,
nihilist. Lewis denied that men are only "trousered apes"
who can be comprehended in Darwinian, Marxian, or
Freudian categories.
Most educated people aren't systematic philosophers,
but their minds are apt to be confusedly dominated by
some smattering of these philosophies, which have been
considered "advanced" for the past two centuries or so.
Human behavior is routinely explained in terms of
supposed evolutionary needs; at times we read that our
"instincts" are formed by this or that "evolutionary
purpose," though the theory of evolution was developed in
order to dispense with the very idea of "purpose" in
nature. Darwin presupposed nature as a blind force. But
the notion of something like design -- even Providence!
-- keeps creeping back in.
This broadly materialist view has even had its
impact in art and esthetics. Modern painting and music
have tried to dispense with the whole concept of beauty,
which is dismissed as "subjective" and "conventional"
rather than as an intimation of order in the universe. At
the low end of popular entertainment, love is reduced to
lust, morality to revenge, and religion, when it appears
at all, to superstition and hypocrisy.
Even modern theology has tried to accommodate itself
to the respectable materialism, eliminating the
supernatural, revelation, and absolute divine
commandments. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich did
away with the Living God, who intervenes in our lives,
and substituted a more refined (and less demanding)
Ground of Being; somehow I wasn't surprised to learn,
after his death, that Tillich himself had led a life of
frenetic adultery. Why not? He had nothing to fear from
the Ground of Being.
In the same spirit, the "higher" biblical criticism
has eliminated miracles not only from the Old Testament
but from the Gospels. Even the words of Jesus are now
subject to skepticism. Apparently the early martyrs died
for myths. The "historical" Jesus was a proto-liberal
social reformer, whose real message St. Paul and the
Evangelists failed to understand; the Church buried it in
fantastic dogma and empty ritual.
One great fruit of this philosophy has been the
modern state, of limitless power and undefined authority,
circumscribed only by hostility to Christianity -- the
absolute "separation of church and state." In the famous
words of Dostoyevsky, "If God does not exist, everything
is permitted." He might have added, "particularly to our
rulers." In a world without essences, where even human
nature is in doubt, where anything may turn into anything
else, it's only to be expected that government should
keep changing unpredictably, according to the whims of
rulers. Such changes are dignified as part of the process
of evolution, as when our jurists speak of the U.S.
Constitution as "living" or, yes, "evolving."
Modern law has been heavily influenced by what are
called "the social sciences," which themselves are almost
wholly products of the materialist philosophy,
particularly behaviorist psychology, whose premise is
that man, being a mere animal, has no free will. Having
no fixed nature either, he is the creature of his
environment, which it's up to the state to reshape --
according to the "findings" of social science.
Against this gigantic system of circular thinking,
it's refreshing to hear Samuel Johnson's defiant growl:
"We =know= the will is free, and there's an end on't."
Johnson, a good Christian, was a champion of simple
intuition and immediate human experience against
seemingly sophisticated argument: "When speculation has
done its worst, two and two still make four."
Two months ago, in these pages, I found solace in a
magazine article discussing a little-known subject: the
difficulty of turning young men into soldiers. The author
had found that it's surprisingly hard to overcome the
natural reluctance to kill other human beings. In a word,
conscience -- the recognition of natural law -- is a
"problem" in the eyes of the military. I think Lewis
would understand.
Last month, I was also cheered by a British finding
that even the youngest infants prefer pretty faces to
ugly ones. Here was experimental refutation of the
modernist conviction that beauty is unreal. We =know=
it's real, as Johnson might say, and there's an end on't.
These examples illustrate that we know and respond
to good and evil, the beautiful and the repellent, even
when we can't explain why. These things are innate in our
nature, no matter what theorists may say.
Jesus Christ didn't argue. He didn't offer proofs of
God's existence. He rebuked those who demanded proof in
the form of miracles. Instead he spoke truths that those
with faith would recognize as true the moment they heard
them. He blessed those who were immediately receptive.
His audacious claim of divinity, of direct intimacy
with "my Father," of being "the way, the truth, and the
life," of having the authority to forgive sins, had no
precedent. "No man comes to the Father but by me": as
Lewis says, all this was so shocking that it left, and
leaves, no room for a middle position. To call Jesus a
"great moral teacher," as if the Beatitudes were mere
platitudes, separable from his claim to divine authority,
won't wash. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my
words will not pass away." So far, at least, they
haven't. Perhaps they serve some "evolutionary purpose"?
In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as in Homer,
Plato, Cicero, and in ancient literature generally, the
reality of the divine is assumed. God and "the gods" are
spoken of matter-of-factly, with no felt need to prove
their existence or to justify appeals to our immediate
sense of the true, the good, the beautiful. These are
taken for granted as aspects of being itself. It's only
modern materialism that has called them into question and
reduced them to mere opinions, doubtful because beyond
the reach of the senses.
Lewis once explained his own faith in an excellent
image. He said he believed in the sun not because he
watched it rise, but because he saw everything else by
its light. Skepticism can always make plausible arguments
against the good, the true, and the beautiful; but
without these transcendental conceptions, our minds are
paralyzed by doubt, and we get nowhere. Or rather, we
find ourselves at the mercy of their opposites: evil,
falsehood, and ugliness -- all of which eventually find
social expression in political tyranny.
Since the Enlightenment, as it dubbed itself, the
beginnings of the Age of Faith have been scornfully
dubbed "the Dark Ages." Historians have long since
abandoned this epithet, but it persists as an image in
the modernist mind. The grain of truth in it is that
these centuries after the dissolution of the Roman
Empire, when power was decentralized, aren't as well
documented as heart could wish.
But today a fuller and richer picture of the period
is emerging, and the "Dark Ages," the six centuries
during which barbarian Europe became almost entirely
Christian, were a time of profound though quiet moral and
spiritual progress. We can't precisely date the
discrediting or outright banning of such routine and
ancient pagan practices as infanticide, abortion,
pederasty, slavery, and divorce, but by the High Middle
Ages -- when the lights came back on, as it were -- they
had either disappeared or receded almost to the vanishing
point. A new standard of human conduct had displaced
them: the Christian standard, centered in the virtue of
chastity and symbolized by the Virgin.
To the modernist mind, the Dark Ages remain an era
of reaction and stagnancy, and "progress" is now measured
by the return of the very evils Christendom had
vanquished. Modernism reserves its deepest hatred for
chastity, which even the ancient pagans honored (as in
the virgin goddesses Diana and Vesta).
And yet, even in an age of confused hedonism, modern
man still bears indirect witness to the natural law that
can never be wholly expunged from the human heart. Angry
men still insult each other's mothers; soldiers still
rape the enemy's women; sexual degradation, symbolic and
physical, remains a basic means of conquest and
humiliation, transcending mere bodily pain. Everyone
understands this. What is it but indirect testimony to
the dignity of the person in its sexual nature, which
materialism otherwise tries to deny? The violation of
chastity is still felt to be more deadly than murder
itself. How can you violate something that doesn't exist?
Deep in his heart, modern man knows what his
ancestors knew. But modern philosophies have helped him
pretend not to know it.
Philip Roth's Happy Ending
(pages 5-6)
Philip Roth's new novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
(Houghton Mifflin), has gotten more publicity than
anything he has written since PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. The
premise is as explosive today as sex was in 1969: Nazis
take over the United States in 1940.
This "alternate history" is narrated by a character
named Philip Roth, an adult who was a little Jewish boy
in Newark at the time of the imaginary events.
Roth-the-author has said in interviews that little Philip
is faithfully describing the actual Roth family up to
1940, when the story becomes fictional, and he surmises
what the impact of a pro-Nazi regime might have been
like, especially for his family and neighbors. In many
ways, it's brilliantly done. Roth has rare talents for
dialogue, mimicry, and parody; he gives every character a
distinctive voice, including creepily suave bureaucrats
and namelessly moralistic NEW YORK TIMES editorial
writers. (Some things never change.)
In this story, Charles Lindbergh, aviator, national
and worldwide hero, "isolationist," and "anti-Semite," is
drafted to run for president of the United States as a
Republican. Promising to keep America out of the European
war, he defeats Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide.
Somehow it goes without saying that this would have
been a terrible turn of events. And it seems to follow,
in Roth's imagination, that Lindbergh's putative
anti-Semitism means that he would have used his
presidential power to do the Jews a bit of no good. But
Roth's Lindy doesn't go in for violent persecution;
instead, he creates an Office of American Absorption
(OAA), whose goal is not to exterminate Jews but to
assimilate them peacefully, turning them into "real"
Americans. Under the OAA's Just Folks program, little
Philip sees his adored big brother Sandy assigned to
spend a summer working on a Kentucky farm. Nobody
suspects what the reader is expected to assume: that Just
Folks is an innocuous-seeming prelude to concentration
camps.
To the horror of his parents, Sandy enjoys his
summer sojourn. He comes home loving farm life and
admiring the kindly farmer he lived with. He feels
muscular and manly, speaks with a slightly Southern
accent, and savors pork chops, bacon, and ham. Only 13,
he argues violently but intelligently with his father,
and won't abide criticism of President Lindbergh from
"you people" -- the urbanites he now despises as "ghetto
Jews."
Sandy isn't the only Jew to find Lindbergh
inspiring. So does Aunt Evelyn, his mother's impetuous
sister; and so does Aunt Evelyn's employer, the
fast-talking Rabbi Lionel Bergelsdorf, who becomes
Lindy's foremost Jewish apologist, enraging other Jews
who see him as an opportunist. Sandy is so articulate
that Aunt Evelyn and the rabbi enlist him to make
pro-Lindbergh speeches, until his parents crack down.
After some bitter family fights, Sandy is rescued by
puberty: an interest in girls displaces his interest in
Lindbergh.
But the picture otherwise darkens gradually for the
Roth family. Soon the Lindbergh administration gets cozy
with Nazi Germany, and in many states there are
anti-Semitic riots which Lindbergh does nothing to
discourage. America's most famous Jewish journalist,
Walter Winchell, is assassinated when he begins leading
opposition to Lindbergh. Jews are at once heartened by
Winchell's courage and terrified by his fate.
At this point some skepticism is in order. Roth
tries to justify his imaginings (or fantasies) through
the unusual step of adding to his novel an appendix of
real-life historical information, including the text of
Lindbergh's notorious 1941 Des Moines speech to the
America First Committee, the chief anti-war (or
"isolationist") group in the country.
But that speech won't bear the weight Roth puts on
it. In the first place, as he himself points out, he has
to put the speech back a year, to 1940, in order to fit
it into his story.
Far worse, Roth ignores what Lindbergh actually
said. The thrust of the speech was an attack on Roosevelt
for seeking to involve the United States in war by
"subterfuge." Lindbergh also noted that British and
Jewish interests were seeking U.S. involvement too, but
this he pardoned because he found those interests
understandable: The British were at war with Germany; as
for the Jews,
It is not difficult to understand why
Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi
Germany. The persecution they suffered in
Germany would be sufficient to make bitter
enemies of any race.... No person with a sense
of the dignity of mankind can condone the
persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But
no person of honesty and vision can look on
their pro-war policy here today without seeing
the dangers involved in such a policy, both
for us and for them. Instead of agitating for
war, the Jewish groups in this country should
be opposing it in every possible way for they
will be among the first to feel its
consequences.... A few far-sighted Jewish
people realize this and stand opposed to
intervention. But the majority still do
not.... Their greatest danger to this country
lies in their large ownership and influence in
our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and
our government.... We cannot blame them [i.e.,
the British and the Jews] for looking out for
what they believe to be their own interests,
but we must also look out for our own.
The rest of the speech took a different tone.
Lindbergh did blame Roosevelt, very severely, for
betraying the American interests it was supposed to be
defending. Roosevelt had won reelection in 1940 on a
platform promising to seek peace, which he had never
intended to do.
So this was Lindbergh's "anti-Semitism": pointing
out that the Jews' interests, as most Jews understood
them (albeit wrongly, in his opinion), were at odds with
America's interests. Sure enough, the headlines the next
day roared "Lindbergh Attacks Jews." Nobody has seemed to
notice, from that day to this, that he'd "attacked" the
British in the same terms, nor that his chief target was
the unprincipled deceiver in the White House.
Yet Roth assumes, when it comes to "anti-Semitism,"
that the sky's the limit. Once a man commits it, whatever
"it" is (mild criticism will do), he can be presumed
capable of any crime against Jews. There are no degrees
of "it." Annoyance, distrust, genocide -- they're all the
same thing, "anti-Semitism."
One is surprised to see Roth, who is himself capable
of wittily mocking Jewish delusions, falling for this
ethnocentric fallacy. People (including Jews, though you
wouldn't know it from this book) make ethnic slurs all
the time without following them up with violence; and
Lindbergh was such a high-minded man that it's hard to
imagine him committing a crude slur even in private. Roth
posits a whole American population capable of fanatical
cruelty. He never seems to question or qualify the vulgar
equation, fostered by Roosevelt, of "isolationism" with
pro-Nazism.
What's more, it would have been wildly out of
character for the Lone Eagle to seek political power, let
alone to use it to persecute. He preferred a private,
even reclusive life, especially after the kidnap-murder
of his infant son. Roth's OAA is the sort of thing
Roosevelt would have created, and did in fact create;
he's the one who put Japanese-Americans in concentration
camps. There is simply no warrant for supposing Lindbergh
was capable of such a measure; this fiction has no roots
in the real man. Making all allowance for literary
license, it's a kind of defamation. Yet Roth keeps
Roosevelt, despite his record, as the inviolate
democratic hero of THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA.
The possibility remains that Roth, an inventive
ironist, has constructed a huge spoof, though in
interviews he seems to take his novel's implausible
premise quite seriously. Here I'm going to give away the
ending; at least I'm going to try. Roth has made it so
involuted that the reader -- this one, anyway -- can't be
quite sure what is happening.
The key event is that on October 7, 1942, amid
mounting protests and violence, President Lindbergh
simply gets into The Spirit of St. Louis and flies away.
He is never seen again. His fate remains a hotly
discussed mystery sixty-odd years later; that is to say,
today.
Then it gets confusing. Mrs. Lindbergh calls off the
search for her husband within a week and announces,
though she has no legal authority, that she is
countermanding his disastrous measures. Then, again in
defiance of the U.S. Constitution, a presidential
election is held in 1942, and Roosevelt is elected to a
third term, only to be arrested, as is Mrs. Lindbergh
herself -- yet more inexplicable events. Anyway, it all
ends happily: the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and
America gets into the war after all.
How could this happen? Roth, the character, cites
one account: The Nazis have controlled Lindy all along!
How? It was they, on the verge of power in 1932, who had
kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, substituting the body of
another baby, badly decomposed, to fool the FBI. They
raised the real Charles Jr. as a good little Nazi,
ignorant of his parentage, while using their possession
of him as leverage over his father, who is acting under
their orders when he gets into politics and begins
persecuting Jews. So the great patriot is actually a
"Nazi agent"!
Far-fetched? Sure. The only source for this tale is
a supremely dubious one: Rabbi Bergelsdorf, who may have
dreamed it up to get himself off the hook with his fellow
Jews who hate him for having fawned on Lindy. Or so we
are invited, or at any rate permitted, to guess. A
patented Roth enigma. (Bergelsdorf never existed, by the
way; Roth-the-author made him up.)
As for that happy ending -- Roosevelt and war --
well, Roth has told TIME magazine that the book is
"optimistic," because, after all, the Lindbergh
presidency "never happened." That's one way to look at
it. Another might be to note, less happily, that hundreds
of thousands of Americans wound up dead, Stalin won huge
stretches of Europe, and the nuclear age arrived. But
that would be ethnocentric.
NUGGETS
MULTICULTURAL SEASON'S GREETINGS: A local TV station has
wished its viewers "a happy and blessed Ramadan." In due
course it will no doubt wish them a happy Hanukah, a
happy Kwaanza, and, for anyone else it may have
overlooked, unspecified happy ... "holidays." (page 7)
STUMPER: FOX NEWS Blowhard Bill O'Reilly is being sued
for sexual harassment by his own producer. She says he
"forced" her to have phone sex with him. I don't have a
dog in this fight, but I must say I find the act she
alleges hard to visualize. Did it involve bondage? Cell
phones? I hope my dear readers are as baffled as I am.
(page 11)
NICOLE PRIVACY UPDATE: When we last heard from Nicole
Kidman, she was publicly wrestling with the problem of
protecting her "privacy." At the time she was appearing
stark naked in a movie =and= on the Broadway stage. Her
latest film shows her bathing, nude of course, with a
10-year-old boy. The solution to her problem continues to
elude her. (page 12)
Exclusive to electronic media:
NOW HEAR THIS: Bob Dylan, perhaps the premier symbol of
the Sixties, has been misunderstood. He's now broken his
long, enigmatic silence with a surprising memoir,
CHRONICLES (Simon and Schuster). Judging by reviews and
excerpts, it's a charming and quite unpretentious book.
Dylan disclaims such worshipful accolades as "voice of a
generation." He just wanted to write songs. He confesses
he was out of touch with the kids who adopted him as
idol-spokesman.
WORKS OF FAITH: One final word (I hope) about John Kerry.
Late in the campaign he came up with a retort and rebuke
to George W. Bush's religious appeal by quoting the
Epistle of James: "Faith without works is dead." Kerry's
own "faith," he affirmed, was expressed in his lifelong
support for, yes, Big Government. So if you rack up the
highest liberal record in the U.S. Senate, you're only
doing the Lord's work.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Diversity -- The Real Thing (September 16, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040916.shtml
* Equality Run Amok (September 21, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040921.shtml
* Notes of a Former Couch Potato (October 5, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041005.shtml
* Secession, Anyone? (October 7, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041007.shtml
* Death of a Comedian (October 12, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041012.shtml
* Diane Speaks His Piece (October 19, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041019.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]