School vouchers violate the First Amendment of the Constitution—or so ruled federal District Judge Solomon Oliver, Jr., in early December. Cleveland’s voucher plan, authorized under state legislation, was nondenominational and permitted students, selected by lot, to choose a school participating in the program and to receive a grant from the state to subsidize the cost...

Gay marriage is once again in the news. This time, the rumblings come not from the Sandwich Islands, but the Green Mountains of Vermont. In a riding handed down right before Christmas, the state’s governing body, the Vermont Supreme Court, instructed the legislature to extend the benefits and protections of marriage to homosexual couples. The...

Truth, the saying goes, is the first victim of any war, but as NATO’s “action” in the Balkans has demonstrated, truth is under even greater attack in the “information age.” Today, history is not written by the victors once the smoke has cleared, but constantly evolves; each day’s truth is revealed by CNN, the ubiquitous...

If anyone ever doubted that DaimlerChrysler is now a German-controlled corporation, the recent demise of the Plymouth brand provides incontrovertible proof Plymouth, sold only in the United States, was the inexpensive core brand of Detroit’s Chrysler Corporation, America’s third-largest automaker in the post-World War II era. Introduced on the eve of the Great Depression in...

Pro-abortion and pro-centralization forces have won another victory in the battle over partial-birth abortion. As I detailed in this space last month, a three judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, breaking with other federal courts, upheld Wisconsin’s and Illinois’ laws against the procedure in October 1999. Planned Parenthood, the misnamed Hope Clinic...

Cultural genocide is a legal term sometimes used to describe the planned destruction of an ethnic or religious identity. The English, in solidifying control over their islands, did their best to obliterate the historical memory of Scottish Highlanders and Irish Catholics, and the national socialists of Bill Clinton’s party are doing the same thing here...

Vladimir Putin’s performance as Russian premier had, by the first of November, won him high approval. The ex-KGB professional, publicly tapped by Boris Yeltsin as his preferred successor, has begun to show the political acumen that attracted the attention of Yeltsin and his “family,” the presidential entourage, who are very worried about the anti-family coalition...

Pat Buchanan’s October 25 announcement that he would seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party was greeted with contempt by Republican commentators. After all, Buchanan has twice failed to capture the Republican nomination, and in his third time out, he barely registered in the polls. His moment had passed, they argued, or perhaps he’d...

The future of NATO looms large in the Clinton administration’s attempt to create an autonomous zone of American military presence and political influence in the Balkans that would be independent of the ups and downs of Washington’s relations with its Western European partners. By imposing its own post-Yugoslav architecture, this administration hopes to ensure that...

Partial-birth abortion is back in the news, and for the first time, there appears to be some hope for the pro-life side. Of all the extraordinary things that the United States Supreme Court has done in the past few decades, none matches its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion articulated a...

The Nobel Peace Prize is by now a running gag—or rather a running sore. Like the Prize for Literature, given nearly every year to an untalented anti-writer as obscure in his own country as he is in the rest of the world, the Peace Prize is generally awarded to failures, like the 1998 winners from...

Aleksandr Lebed, governor of the vast Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, shrugged off rumors circulating in late September that an ailing Boris Yeltsin would appoint the populist “combat general” as premier and then resign, leaving Lebed as acting president. The Krasnoyarsk governor claimed that the time may come when he will be “needed” to “clean up”...

Free Hawaii! One particularly annoying aspect of “Third Wav” politics is its proponents’ penchant for symbolic, feel-your-pain apologies. Tony Blair offered one to the Irish for Britain’s inaction during the Potato Famine; Bill Clinton delivered another to black Americans for slavery. Surely no good can come from such empty sentimentalism. Or can it? In 1993,...

The new millennium is still a year away, but in London, as elsewhere, the moment appointed for its celebration is that marked by the first appearance of those three mystically consecutive zeros in the calendar. Turnstiles at the vast Millennium Dome are oiled and ready to spin on January 1: click, click, click. Rather more...

Russian-American relations, commentators warned, would be damaged by NATO’s war in Yugoslavia, but the Clinton administration dismissed the idea. Russian anti-Americanism seemed a passing phase that would dissipate when media attention turned to the next international crisis. Events like Boris Yeltsin’s August 25 meeting with Jiang Zemin, in which Russia’s president accused NATO of “trying...

Britain’s defense policy prohibiting homosexuals from serving in the armed forces was recently struck down by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Formed in 1959 to enforce the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ECHR is a creature of the 41-nation Council of Europe. The court’s authority comes from the European Convention...

The presidential election is still one year away, but now is the time for American patriots of all stripes to reconsider their political attachments. Since the end of World War II, domestic opponents of the American Empire have struggled fruitlessly to contain its growth. As a philosopher friend recently remarked, we have no politics today...

The fighting in Dagestan was abating as of late August. Russian firepower had slowed the Chechen-backed Islamic militants, led by an international corps of Islamists, including Chechen “field commander” (read: “warlord”) Shamil Basayevaud the Jordanian professional militant known only as “Khattab.” They had seized 20 towns and villages in the mountainous region of western Dagestan,...

Flint, Michigan, is the birthplace of both General Motors and the United Auto Workers union (UAW), which makes the recent demise of Buick City, its last automobile assembly plant, more than a little ironic. In June, GM closed Buick City, idling 2,200 hourly workers at a plant that once employed 28,000 building Buick LeSabres and...

The teaching evolution is back in the news, in a case that the media—with their usual sensationalism—are comparing to the Scopes trial of 75 years ago. On August 10, Steven Green, legal director of the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sent a letter to the Kansas State Board of Education, threatening...

The FBI/BATF raid on the David Koresh home (not compound) has been the subject of controversy since the first day the BATF zealots tried to storm the house. All along, the FBI and the Justice Department have fabricated stories and information with an effrontery that would astonish even the Clintons: Koresh was stockpiling illegal arms,...

NATO has emerged victorious from the war in Yugoslavia, and the real power within NATO, the United States and its Armed Forces, has given the world a salutary demonstration of its ability to enforce peace and security in Europe. This, say Mr. Clinton’s pundits, was America’s finest hour since the end of World War II....

Janet Reno fears that her credibility has been damaged. Imagine that! Just because the federal government used “pyrotechnic devices” against the Branch Davidian compound? That might do it, given the Reno Justice Department’s insistence over so many years that no such devices were used: Except, well, it now seems that maybe that wasn’t quite 100-percent...

“Abortion Kills Children” their signs say. They are the indefatigable pro-lifers (or “anti-choicers”) who “peacefully” protest the barbaric practice of elective abortion in communities across America. Here in Rockford, they line up outside the Ft. Turner building (fittingly, an abandoned public school), carrying signs and sometimes more. While Dr. Richard Ragsdale celebrates the modern sacrament...

The Lenin mummy, by the time Chronicles readers see this, may already have been spirited from its Red Square pyramid, and the Communist Party of Russia (CPRF) may have been banned. In mid-July, rumors of such a scenario were circulating among the various pundits, crooks, politicos, cab drivers, and assorted hangers-on who usually pass leaks...

Modern egalitarianism can be mind-numbing, as two recent incidents—the first in the Southwest, the second in the Midwest—show. The first, of course, is the shooting spree at Columbine High School. Most of Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s victims were either Christians or athletes. The former were murdered simply because they were Christians. The killers asked...

Civil War reenactments are more popular today than at any time in the 135 years since “the late unpleasantness” came to an end. Recent news stories, however, have been less than favorable to reenactors. In these remarks, delivered to 14,000 spectators of the 1999 Gettysburg reenactment, Ronald F. Maxwell, writer and director of the motion...

L’Affaire Lewinsky, most of us thought, ended with the escape of our President in the United States Senate. As a particularly sweltering July turned to August, though, “all Monica all the time” junkies got their best fix in months. First, Linda Tripp, who is either one of the most evil betrayers of all time or...

I note with some interest the reference in Justin Raimondo’s “Matthew Shepard and the Thought Police” (Vital Signs, July) to The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno, and the American Jewish Committee. (There was Rockefeller money, too, in that study.) Mr. Raimondo undoubtedly knows (although your readers may not) that the study was a product of the...

Boris Yeltsin, so the conventional wisdom goes, is an impulsive Slavic peasant whose motives are as inscrutable as the enigma that is Russia. Some, probably most, observers also think Yeltsin is crazy. Not crazy like the holy fools of old Russia or the smug suits who make NATO policy. No, Yeltsin is simply considered senile...

Impeachment and Kosovo are behind us, and now we can get back to the important issues of “Social Security, affordable health care, welfare reform, the environment, and education.” President Clinton can get back to “running the country,” presumably for “the sake of the children,” so that “at the end of the day,” we can “prepare...

The U.S. Supreme Court ended its October 1998 term on June 23, the earliest closing date in 30 years. Anthony Lewis, writing in the New York Times, declared that the term “showed us a phenomenon that this country has not seen for more than 60 years: a band of radical judicial activists determined to impose...

Edmund Burke observed, two centuries ago, that “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which lends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.” In other words, all you grabby socialists, you confiscators of inherited property, keep your cotton-picking...

“Adopt a refugee,” the church bulletin urges. This Protestant church is encouraging each of its members to donate money, clothing, and personal items to the ethnic Albanian of his choice. On a marquee in front of an ornate Catholic church outside O’Hare Airport are the words, “Father, protect the refugees, in Jesus’ name. Amen.” An...

Myths are part of what makes us human; all peoples live by myths, some healthy, some destructive. Among the unhealthy beliefs that have been propagated amongst Americans are that the Constitution came from the gods; that the conquest and destruction of the Southern states was noble; that the Americans who fought and died in World...

The media told us that “critics warn bombing alone won’t budge Milosevic,” so when bombing alone did budge him, the media told us ’twas a famous victory. “It worked!” gushed Mara Liasson of National Public Radio as the G-8 peace accord was announced in early June. “Clinton is vindicated, and Gore is looking good again....

Constitutional lawyers like to tell the story (probably apocryphal, since it’s too good to be true) that, sometime in the 1960’s, when the Warren Court was engaged in its effort to rewrite the Constitution, one crusty old Harvard Law professor, upon reading the latest product from the Supremes, stormed into his constitutional law class, roared...

Slovakia’s presidential race was not big news in May, as the world’s attention was focused on NATO’s destruction of a small Slavic country to the south. The predictable first-round results pitted the controversial former leader of the fledgling democracy, Vladimir Meciar, against the ex-communist mayor of Kosice, Rudolf Schuster. Throughout his stormy career, Meciar, who...

Our cultural disorders weren’t caused by the Supreme Court’s prayer decisions—I’ll admit it. The implication that school prayer, by fortifying Young America, might have forestalled the rampage at Columbine High School, and those rampages preceding it—well, I wouldn’t push the matter too far, that’s all. Still, it’s nice to see the American Civil Liberties Union,...

“It can happen anywhere,” says Vice President Al Gore in his homiletic and halting manner. He is sitting on a panel across from Larry King and next to a psychologist and the Reverend Robert Schuller. Their topic is the murders in Littleton, Colorado. Candidate Gore is clearly taking advantage of this opportunity to promote a...

Bill Clinton’s favorite book is said to be The Meditations of the second-century A.D. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a plumpish volume of ethical jottings in crabbed Greek, disdained, apparently, by most early American readers as too idiosyncratic and obscure (one notable exception was the first Virginian, Captain John Smith). But it does not appear that...

Eric Harris, the dominant half of the trenchcoated psychopathic duo who rampaged through Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was the demented product of two enduring legacies of the Cold War: the consolidated super-school and the rootless military family. This is guaranteed not to be the conclusion of the sham National Dialogue that always follows...

Boris Yeltsin has been at it again, sacking Russian Premier Yevgeni Primakov and his entire cabinet, pushing the country to the edge of the political abyss. The phlegmatic Primakov, who resembles Jabba the Hut of Star Wars fame, had opened an investigation into the machinations of the “oligarchs,” the gangsters-cum-businessmen who have dominated Russia in...

Concealed handguns could have been carried by law-abiding, responsible citizens of Missouri under Proposition B, but on April 6, Missouri voters defeated the measure by a small margin (52 to 48 percent). To qualify for a concealed-carry permit, one would have had to be at least 21, have taken 12 hours of state-approved firearms training,...

“Visual politics” seems an apt description of our current regime. Since most Americans acquire their news by television, those making news or seeking to communicate it must do so visually. Since television has not really formulated its own vocabulary, however, its visuals owe a debt to the movies. It is a commonplace to speak of...

The NATO airstrikes against the Republic of Yugoslavia have suddenly precipitated us 60 years back. We find ourselves faced with events which strangely resemble the aggression directed by Germany, first against Czechoslovakia, then, with the aid of the Soviet Union, against Poland. It was striking to hear President Bill Clinton compare his “essentially humanitarian” action...

The “Kosovo Standard” may be the unseen danger in the U.S./NATO military intervention in support of the KLA and, presumably, in favor of their political ambitions. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart has confessed that the alliance is fighting for the “autonomy and self-government of the Kosovo Albanians.” In other words, the United States and its...

Wars, according to the one-dimensional view of world history favored by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, are caused by bad or mad men. Once we, the almighty, self-appointed arbiters of worldwide justice, determine who the bad guys are, we can go in, blow them away, and make the world safe for democracy. This approach is...

Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows, but that’s nothing compared to constitutional amendment. A few weeks ago, I found myself testifying before the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, and on the panel with me, testifying in favor of the Flag Protection Amendment, were a former Miss America, a holocaust survivor, an African-American bishop,...

American troop deployments in Kosovo were the subject of a debate in the House of Representatives on March 11. A resolution authorizing President Clinton to contribute U.S. ground troops to a NATO peacekeeping mission in the troubled province was supported by 219 members, just one more than a majority. While the vote cut across party...