Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Paul Weyrich’s Ordeal

(Reprinted from the issue of August 18, 2005)

One of the most distinguished conservative leaders in America needs our prayers. As I write, Paul Weyrich is scheduled to have both his legs amputated.

I first met Paul in 1980, when he was one of the chief figures in the emerging “New Right,” whose aim was to make a conservative movement that would be independent of the Republican Party. With Howard Phillips, he was known as one of the most original strategists of the movement. Both men were remarkable for their keen intelligence, scorn of the Republican habit of compromise, and fierce humor.

They weren’t interested in getting half a loaf. Both were real conservatives, immune to “neoconservative” distractions and seductions. Liberals loathed and feared them, while “respectable” conservatives tried to ignore them. (I couldn’t interest National Review in covering them even when they were making headlines in the liberal press.)

In recent years they have moved in somewhat different directions. Paul has urged conservatives to defer hopes for political victory and, in effect, to secede from American cultural life, concentrating on religious concerns. I last saw him a few years ago when he told me over lunch of his efforts to help Russian Christians shake off the heavy legacy of Communism.

Since then, he has been suffering from worsening health. I knew he was confined to a wheelchair, but I was shocked and saddened to hear of this drastic surgery.

It is heartening to know that in this hour of pain and peril, Paul has his Catholic faith, which he has served so well in public life, to sustain him.
 
Reservations about Roberts

I wrote recently that I wouldn’t make up my mind about Judge John Roberts until my bellwether, Howard Phillips, had spoken. Well, Howard has spoken. He hasn’t made up his mind.

But, like some other conservatives, he has been alarmed to learn that a few years ago Roberts, in private law practice, did pro bono work for a homosexual group. Howard isn’t opposing Roberts’s confirmation — yet — but he wants a good explanation.

So should we all. I can imagine cases where a group devoted to a reprehensible cause might have sound legal principle on its side, but this case was a little murkier than that. Roberts helped the group win a 6 to 3 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding an earlier court ruling that overturned a state law forbidding special legal protection for homosexuals.

So it isn’t only that Roberts helped a homosexual group, which would be questionable enough; he did so in order to help affirm what one conservative spokesman calls “an appalling act of judicial activism.”

Ironically, the three dissenters on the High Court were the three conservatives Roberts has been likened to: William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. Phillips says that in this matter, at least, Roberts sounds more like Anthony Kennedy than Antonin Scalia. It also calls in doubt his reputation as an apostle of judicial restraint.

When asked by a Senate questionnaire to recall his pro bono work in private practice, Roberts’s long reply didn’t mention this case — a victory at the Supreme Court that most lawyers would be proud to claim.

Still, I think it’s premature to compare Roberts to Kennedy, the only liberal who gives me the giggles. I can never keep a straight face when I remember his 1992 discovery, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, of a previously unknown constitutional right to define the universe. Until then I’d never realized just how much, in the right hands, those penumbras can emanate!


 
Down with Darwin!

The New York Times recently ran what it considered a reactionary article by Vienna’s Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, disputing the premise of Darwinism and affirming “the overwhelming evidence for design in biology.” That premise, of course, is philosophical materialism, even if Darwin didn’t spell it out.

Darwinism is an excellent example of how schoolchildren can be conditioned, as C.S. Lewis put it, to take one side in a controversy before they have realized it is a controversy at all. Aren’t we all materialists from the cradle nowadays?

The materialist habit of thought is very difficult to break. It assumes that the entire universe consists of atoms and molecules and nothing else. This means that mind, reason, intelligibility, and what used to be called the transcendentals have no separate existence. The good, the true, and the beautiful are only misleading words for our animal preferences. Anything divine is simply out of the question.

The obvious philosophical question is how merely material creatures, if such we are, could know materialism to be true? Can purely physical beings reach valid metaphysical conclusions? The most intelligent animals can’t even add two and two. There is far more than a “missing link” between ape and man.

Materialism can’t explain us, but we can explain materialism. It springs from man’s revolt against God, the desire to live without moral obligation to anything above our lower selves. Darwinism lays the groundwork for the false freedoms of war, sexual revolution, and every other human perversity. Its political offshoots include Communism, fascism, and liberalism. Its ultimate target is Catholicism.

Cardinal Schönborn has reminded us that the Church, while making room for a limited kind of evolution, still rejects the fatal principle of materialism.
 
Revisiting the Population Crisis

I recently read an alarming series of articles on global warming in The New Yorker, warning that it is so far advanced that worldwide disaster may engulf us all, man and beast, yea, even fish, even if the government makes an immediate all-out effort to avoid it.

Things have reached a desperate pass when liberals are warning us that even Communism can’t save us. But are things really so bad? I can’t help remembering that we were similarly warned about “the population crisis” 40 years ago.

Then too, it was urgent for government to act at once — I’ve noticed that the solution to every crisis is more, not less, government — before there was only one square foot of land for every human being on earth. (All of whom would be starving, of course.) So the government started funding Planned Parenthood around the world, and it has never stopped.

One reason liberals called Pope Paul VI “irresponsible” was that, in Humanae Vitae, he condemned the only thing that might yet save us: contraception. Today, as Europe’s birthrate has plunged far below even replacement levels and sardine-like crowding has not come to pass, the liberal loathing of Humanae Vitae is unabated.

So there was never a “population crisis” after all. So what? If there had been one, the Church would have been to blame.


SOBRAN’S agrees with Charles Peters: Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t have gotten us into war without help from the Republicans. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran