SOBRAN'S -- The Real News of the Month April 2007 Volume 14, Number 4 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Subscription Rates. Print version: $44.95 per year. For special discounted subscription offers and e-mail subscriptions see www.sobran.com, or call the publisher's office. Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue. CONTENTS Features -> What Obama Can Do The Sobran Forum -> Religious Human-Rights Discrimination? Cartoons (Baloo) "Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue FEATURES What Obama Can Do (pages 1-2) So Barack Obama has Big Momma on the canvas. When it comes to fundraising, he has essentially beaten La Hillary at her own game, nearly matching her $26 million but with far more donors. And since we're all a wee bit tired of her, he's the sentimental favorite. It's the young underdog versus the aging Ueberfrau. When you're the brawny Goliath, you can't play for a tie. A draw with skinny little David can't be spun as a "moral victory." If the bookies are picking you to squash him like a bug, you'd better not let him embarrass you. Obama has already beaten the point spread. This can only sap the Clinton team's morale and give prospective donors grave doubts. Obama is on his best behavior. He's running as Bill Cosby, not Richard Pryor, as if he's afraid of seeming uppity and would rather be safely solemn. Too bad. Think of the fun he could have by abandoning strict propriety and tweaking Hillary a bit: "Mrs. Clinton, if elected president, would you return at least some of the White House furniture you and your husband made off with?" "Mrs. Clinton, you are known as a feminist leader. What steps would you as president take to protect female White House interns from harassment in the workplace?" "Mrs. Clinton, it has been said that if you win the presidency, we will have a known sexual predator back in the White House. Care to comment?" These are the sort of questions the public would remember long after her answers, supposing she could answer at all. But such playfulness just isn't Obama's style. In a more serious vein, however, there is something else he can do, something unexpected that would enhance his stature. He can call on President Bush to resign from office. Many Democrats would like to impeach Bush but don't dare to try. For one thing, they think it's too late, and they have a point. Bush has less than two years to go, and impeachment is now a long, slow process, almost as protracted as a presidential race. This is regrettable; it should be no harder than overriding a veto -- a short debate and a vote, followed by summary dismissal, if warranted. In essence, it's the firing of a servant, a public servant, for abuse of his office, compounded, in this case, by gross incompetence. But he could still have his pension and other lavish perks usually denied to a disgruntled former employee of the U.S. Government. In other societies, honor has imposed much sterner penalties on disgraced rulers: suicide, beheading, hara-kiri. Obama wouldn't be asking Bush to fall on his sword; he'd merely be urging him to behave honorably for the sake of the country. Is a single act of honor too great a sacrifice to demand of a man who has sent so many others to die? Nor could Obama be easily accused of partisan motives. At this point Bush has become a burden to the Republicans and an asset to the Democrats. If he stepped down, it would help his own party more than their opponents. And most patriots would be relieved. Last fall's elections amounted to a national no-confidence vote on this president. If he were a prime minister under a parliamentary system, he would already be gone. We can assume that Bush, being Bush, would not resign. In today's politics, the very idea of honor is, as they say, outside the box. But by asking for his resignation in the name of honor, Obama would set a new standard for politics, in the sense that everything old is new again. Such a gesture would have deep resonance and inspire serious discussion. Bush could hardly ignore it. And it would earn Obama great respect. Honest Republicans might join him, agreeing that Bush's presidency can no longer be salvaged. The shadow of dishonor would fall across the remainder of Bush's term. As it should. But the decks would be cleared for a new Republican presidential candidate in 2008, one who had kept his distance from Bush. The big loser would be John McCain, who not only supports the Iraq war but, as 60 MINUTES has just shown, lies about it even more brazenly and preposterously than Bush does. Obama has the chance to win the gratitude even of Americans who have given up on voting. THE SOBRAN FORUM Religious Human-Rights Discrimination? by Lawrence A. Uzzell (pages 5-6) [Author's Note: Among the secular human-rights watchdogs, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has a far better record than Amnesty International at taking religious freedom seriously. An essay in HRW's world report (http://hrw.org/wr2k5/religion/index.htm) grapples seriously with some of the fundamental principles at stake and shows a refreshing openness to self-scrutiny. The following article from THE PUBLIC JUSTICE REPORT includes my commentary on the pluses and the minuses of HRW's thinking. THE PUBLIC JUSTICE REPORT is published by the Annapolis-based Center for Public Justice (www.cpjustice.org), which in its own words is "committed to public service that responds to God's call to do justice in local, national, and international affairs. We believe Christians should contribute to the renewal of political life."] In 1997, when Russia enacted a law restoring state control over religious life, Human Rights Watch worked harder than any other secular human-rights organization to warn the world. The leaders of the New York-based organization, unlike their counterparts in Amnesty International, showed by both word and deed that they took religious freedom seriously as one of the fundamental human rights protected by international law. But Human Rights Watch, like many other groups, still wants the state to favor certain secular belief systems over religious ones. If governments follow its standards, they will treat religious believers as second-class citizens by comparison with preferred minorities such as feminists and homosexuals. The latest annual WORLD REPORT of Human Rights Watch includes an important essay by staffers Jean-Paul Marthoz and Joseph Saunders titled "Religion and the Human Rights Movement." The two suggest that there may be a "schism between the human-rights movement and religious communities." That formulation is problematic, implying that there is a single "human-rights movement" with a uniform creed rather than a range of pro-freedom ideologies with serious disagreements among themselves. But the authors deserve credit for being open to self-scrutiny. They ask, "Is the 'liberal' human-rights movement in fact implicitly imperialistic?" They rightly warn, "The secular human-rights movement sometimes sees conservative religious movements as an artifact of history and itself as contemporary, ahead on the 'infinite road of human progress and modernity.' ... Rather than trying to enshrine the human-rights project into different faiths and cultures, of trying to legitimize human-rights norms within religions and not alongside or against them, human-rights activists might be tempted to dismiss such faiths and cultures as obstacles to economic or human-rights modernity." On issues such as the French and Turkish governments' bans on Muslim head scarves, Marthoz and Saunders clearly come down on the side of individual religious conscience against state-imposed conformity. They also acknowledge the role of religious believers as allies of secular activists on issues such as ethnic cleansing in Sudan. However, they see the "high points of this convergence" as already a decade behind in the past. They observe, "Essential disagreements appear increasingly to pit secular human-rights activists against individuals and groups acting from religious motives ... on issues such as reproductive rights, gay marriage, the fight against HIV/AIDS, and blasphemy laws." Marthoz and Saunders are undoubtedly right that "the list of contentious issues is growing." But they need to reflect more about why this is so. After all, it is not the traditional Christians, Jews, or Muslims who have changed their positions about the issues mentioned. On most of these questions the views that Human Rights Watch sees as "fundamentalist" have been shared by nearly all cultures in nearly all periods of history until the very recent past. By taking for granted that the latest avant-garde trends on these issues are unquestionably and universally superior, Human Rights Watch commits its own form of "fundamentalism": the complacent assumption that the present is always wiser than the past. Such chronological provincialism is as irrational as geographical provincialism; a truly cosmopolitan human-rights movement should transcend both. Indeed, closer study of why the "contentious issues" are growing would suggest that it is the secular left that has changed -- by becoming less pluralistic. The left wing of the human-rights movement used to call for government neutrality on issues such as homosexuality, but now it seeks to harness government power to suppress Christian and other critics of avant-garde lifestyles. Marthoz and Saunders commendably declare that "the human-rights movement should do more to defend religious freedom," and that this defense should embrace even "those who would threaten liberal conceptions of rights if they were in power, so long as they do not physically attack or otherwise impinge on the rights of nonbelievers." But unfortunately, their organization does not consistently observe that standard. Like so many on the secular left (unlike secular libertarians on the right), Human Rights Watch fails to make the crucial distinction between banning an activity and declining to subsidize it. It seems uninterested in the rights of citizens who as a matter of conscience do not want their tax payments used to finance the distribution of contraceptives or the performance of abortions. Especially striking is the failure of Human Rights Watch to discuss the institution of secularized, monopoly government schools -- by far the most powerful institution in the western world for indoctrination of captive children into beliefs that their families do not share, at those families' own expense through compulsory tax payments. It is difficult to believe that secular human-rights advocates would be silent if it were a matter of traditionalists coercively indoctrinating the children of modernists rather than vice versa. Marthoz and Saunders rightly acknowledge that "it would be inappropriate for the human-rights community to advocate for or against any system of religious belief or ideology." But at the same time they praise the interreligious dialogues sponsored by UNESCO, such as its 1994 Barcelona conference with its ambiguous call for individuals and communities to stop teaching "that they are inherently superior to others." Human Rights Watch is far too knowledgeable about today's repressive governments not to realize that such governments often accuse groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses of illegally "inciting hatred" simply because they teach that their own religion is true and others false. Secular activists should be more explicit in affirming a religious entity's rights to speak out robustly against beliefs that it considers heretical and to define its own membership requirements. To deny a religion the right to enforce its own internal discipline on those who voluntarily affiliate with it is in effect to deny it the right to exist. Religious believers should also have the right to denounce activities that they consider immoral. That right, which the English-speaking world used to consider self-evident, is now under attack in places such as Canada, where Christians have been brought to court simply for reaffirming the teachings of their sacred texts about sexual morality. A Saskatchewan newspaper publisher was fined for publishing a paid advertisement that quoted Bible passages condemning homosexual behavior. Activist judges are turning Canada into a place where a citizen cannot publicly state his disagreement with the homosexualist agenda; only one side of the debate enjoys full freedom of speech. To the best of my knowledge the leaders of Human Rights Watch have neither specifically endorsed nor specifically opposed this ominous development. The concept of freedom, like that of equality, unfortunately lends itself to utopian abstractions. At times the human-rights activists of the secular left sound like the disciples of Ayn Rand on the right: both tend to see freedom in flat, one-dimensional terms. They underappreciate the role that traditional communities such as churches and families play not as threats to freedom but as guardians of it. Without such "intermediate bodies," the individual is left naked and defenseless against the state; moreover, neither the individual nor the state can effectively replace those bodies as producers of certain public goods. As the ATLANTIC MONTHLY famously admitted in 1993, "Dan Quayle was right" in proclaiming the superiority of traditional, two-parent families for securing the long-term well-being of children. Five decades earlier Aldous Huxley, who in BRAVE NEW WORLD saw even more deeply into the future than his contemporary George Orwell, suggested that "as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." If today's governments agree to give newly invented sexual rights priority over rights tested by centuries of historical experience, we will end up with not more freedom but less. Reprinted with permission from THE PUBLIC JUSTICE REPORT, Third Quarter 2005; www.cpjustice.org. Lawrence A. Uzzell has been president of International Religious Freedom Watch (www.internationalreligiousfreedomwatch.org) since 1998 and has authored numerous articles on religious freedom in the Soviet Union in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, and elsewhere. Mr. Uzzell worked for the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee, and the Senate Education Subcommittee, the National Institute of Education, and the Heritage Foundation. He was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in freedom of conscience in the Soviet Union and was vice president of the Jamestown Foundation from 1991 to 1995 studying the political and economic developments in the former Soviet Union. Mr. Uzzell was Moscow Representative for the Keston Institute from 1995 to 1999 during which time he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for articles on Russia's 1997 law restoring state control over religious life. In February 2006, a stroke impaired his language skills somewhat, but he has resumed writing and research projects on religious and historical subjects. He can be contacted at Lauzzell@aol.com or at 73 Patchwork Lane, Fishersville, Virginia 22939. CARTOONS (Baloo) http://www.sobran.com/issue_cartoons/2007-04/2007-04- cartoons.shtml REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian") (pages 2-4, 7-12) * A Coriolanus in Our Future? (March 8, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070308.shtml * Family Values, Roman and Republican (March 5, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070305.shtml * The Shakespeare Bigots (March 22, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070322.shtml * I Remember Sandy (March 23, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070323.shtml * My Other Sandy (March 29, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070329.shtml * An Enemy of the People (March 26, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070326.shtml * Happy Easter! (April 5, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070405.shtml * The Science of Expertology (April 12, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070412.shtml * The Arab Solution (April 16, 2007) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070416.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All articles are written by Joe Sobran, except where noted. 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