Oxford University Press, perhaps the most prestigious English language Bible publisher (although far from the largest), brought out The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version on September 11. After “more than five years of steady work,” the editors, according to Oxford University Press Senior Editor for Bibles Donald Kraus, sought “to expand the richness...

The California Civil Rights Initiative was headed for trouble from the start. Conceived by two California professors, Glynn Custred and Tom Wood, the CCRI is a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would bar public agencies and schools from discriminating in favor of women or minorities. In other words, it would kill affirmative action...

The New Sexual World Order is taking shape, thanks to the Peace Gorps, the United Nations, and the U.S. Congress. In late September, Dr. J. Ricker Polsdorfer, the Peace Corps’ director of medical services in Africa, was fired for promoting abstinence as a method of preventing AIDS. Dr. Polsdorfer’s crimes, according to the Peace Corps...

High Country News, the environmentalist newspaper founded by Tom Bell, a former rancher, in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970 turned 25 this year, and since the weekend of September 8 was forecast to be a fine one I decided to attend the anniversary celebration. HCN has been based for about a decade or so in Paonia,...

Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age Is In Us, has long been regarded as an enforcer of far-left orthodoxy. But in recent months, Cockburn has taken an unorthodox stance on such issues as the militia movement, the “county supremacy” movement, and federal police power. When...

Senator Bob Packwood, a left-wing Republican, enjoyed the support of Republican bigwigs, including Senator Robert Dole, until he crossed the path of left-wing Democrat Barbara Boxer, who finally brought him to book for molesting women. Ironically, Packwood was a darling of the feminists. On abortion, he was Mr. Reliable. He supported federal funding for Planned...

ABC News recently broadcast contradictory stories about the Balkans War. The first story highlighted a press conference where NATO personnel denied that Americans were engaged in warfare and that any Serb civilians had been killed during the thousands of round-the-clock sorties conducted by NATO forces. Reporting this “news” without a hint of skepticism, Peter Jennings...

Ross Perot has thrown his hat into the ring, or at least halfway into the ring, since the billionaire has only promised to use his wealth and fundraising abilities to start a party which may or may not put him at the head of the ticket. The week before, another billionaire, Steve Forbes, announced that...

The Mexican bailout was a bipartisan scheme, meaning that its details were kept shrouded in secrecy. The White House and the congressional leadership conspired with the banking industry, and Alan Greenspan even telephoned Rush Limbaugh and ordered him to support it. Limbaugh did not need to be told. Almost alone, Senator Alfonse D’Amato started looking...

When Senator Jesse Helms was in his prime, one newspaperman described his crusades on the Senate floor as “stompin’ trompin’ ultra-right action.” Ultra-rightists of the Helmsian kidney were not offended, and most were despondent when the most reliable man on the right went into ideological hibernation during the Reagan-Bush years. Helms went after a few...

NAFTA will fail a thousand times before its advocates beg forgiveness. Not that an apology should be accepted, but justice requires, at least, that they admit their complicity in the century’s biggest intergovernmental financial seam. NAFTA led (thanks to the Republican leadership) to a $50 billion American bailout of Mexico, the loss of the dollar’s...

The contract with America is clearly expanding the power of the federal government, and if you don’t believe it, take a look at yet another piece of legislation that will supersede local statutes and ordinances across the 50 states. It’s called the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995, and it’s part of the GOP...

Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut have come under fire from the United States Commission on Civil Rights. According to a startling report to that body from the Connecticut Advisory Committee last January, faculty at these two institutions in particular “resist efforts to diversify curricula and adapt to the changing composition of the student...

The President of these disunited states has been busy lately with his usual bait-and-switch tactics, ones which have made the newspapers more than ever exasperating to scan. Recently, the administration had three different Bosnia policies in one day, and the newly proposed Clinton budget was a split-the-difference maneuver that aped the Republicans. The President is...

Dear Senator Jesse Helms, I can only ask if maybe the press again missed your wry wit when they reported that you had called the rescue of Air Force Captain Scott F. O’Grady “something out of a storybook.” I agree. It had everything but Lassie greeting the chopper. Marines landed 50 meters from him. (What...

Human fetuses “can make your skin smoother, your body stronger, and are good for the kidneys,” says a doctor at a hospital in Shenzen, China. In an effort to exploit this discovery, London’s Daily Telegraph reports, a growing number of Chinese doctors arc selling aborted babies to hungry consumers. Frightened by the specter of overpopulation,...

Sodomy and the lash, according to Winston Churchill, were the outstanding features of the British Royal Navy. The United States Navy will be at least half-British, if the American courts have their way. The homosexuals’ battle plan to gain acceptance, which includes taking dates to the Officer’s Club, now involves 100 or so discrimination claims...

Bob Dole is the last of the Taft Republicans, according to Murray Kempton—if only it were so! Isolationists (that is, Middle Americans who do not want our sons or brothers sent to die or kill on foreign sands) cherish Dole’s remark in his 1976 vice presidential debate with the dreary Mondale: “I figured up the...

The National Academy of Sciences, in a 500-page tome, has redefined poverty. Since 1963, the definition of poverty has been based on a family with two children and the family’s cash income before taxes and what they spent on food. In 1963, a family earning below $3,100 was “poor.” Now the figure is $14,228. Because...

“Open the files!” demands Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. And right fully so. The files in question involve the federal government’s attempt to entrap Qubilah Shabazz into a conspiracy to assassinate Farrakhan, who has long been accused of involvement in the 1965 murder of Shabazz’s father, Malcolm X. Federal prosecutors suddenly agreed in May...

Michael Westerman’s memorial service was held on March 4, appropriately enough on Confederate Flag Day. My friend and fellow Southern Leaguer, Jack Kershaw, and I arrived shortly before noon at the designated meeting-place in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, just north of Nashville on I-65. The sky was late-winter pale blue, and against it, from the throng that...

The Japanese army tortured and murdered American prisoners of war in the 1940’s; most people know this. But not many people are aware that Japan—in contrast to Germany, which apologized to former POWs and paid millions of dollars in reparations—refuses even to admit publicly that its military violated basic standards of decency, not to mention...

The April bombing in Oklahoma City told us a lot about ourselves and how we respond to adversity. When a bomb destroyed the federal building in that city, politicians and journalists were swift to place the atrocity in some kind of wider context, offering interpretations which ranged from the accurate to the vulgar. In the...

Concealed guns were the topic of a recent marathon hearing in the Texas State Legislature. In the middle of the hearing, one Suzanna Gratia suddenly marched over to Senator Royce West, pointed her index finger at him, and cocked her thumb. “Tell me. Senator,” said the good-looking chiropractor about a fellow nearby, “would you like...

When Jack Kemp ducked out of the presidential run, who really regretted it? Mostly, leaders on the left. He was their foil to the other Republicans. When Kemp yelped at voters for being insufficiently loving of the urban poor—nobody, not even Jesse Jackson, can mau mau like Kemp—the media could complain that others aren’t “reaching...

The Southern League, which was founded in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in June 1994, seeks to advance the social, cultural, economic, and political wellbeing and independence of the Southern people. According to Southern League President Michael Hill, the South, though it has been subsumed by the American Empire, remains a distinct historical entity: “The South has its...

The contract with America is looking more and more like an election-year gimmick. Consider the strange alliance that Representative Henry Hyde (R-IL) has made with freshman Representative Lynn Woosley (D-CA) to federalize the collection of child support payments. If Congress ever passes the “Uniform Child Support Enforcement Act” as part of the COP’s “welfare reform”...

Gordon Kahl was a simple farmer who became famous for not filing income tax returns. Imprisoned and hounded by IRS agents who never did prove he owed any amount of money, Kahl and his son were involved in a shootout with police. The son is still serving a prison sentence, but the father was surrounded...

The NEH has provided me with several substantial (and highly competitive) grants, and so perhaps I should maintain a discreet silence in the current debate over the proposed abolition of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. (Strictly speaking, I am not the recipient, but rather the Principal Investigator...

When Chronicles talks, people listen—at least in New Zealand. I have had my allotted 15 minutes of total fame, all because of a couple of paragraphs snatched by the Kiwi press out of a little piece of mine (Letter From Inner Israel, “Sorting Out Jew-Haters“) printed in these pages in March. Readers will recall that...

Entitlements are leading the country headlong to insolvency. These include a whole range of programs such as Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, Medicare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamps, etc. Some entitlements are “permanent appropriations,” which means the money to pay for them is automatically appropriated and distributed to whoever meets the...

The November election revealed a populist upsurge of repugnance against Washington. In the current two-party system, this upsurge could only take the form of support for the Republicans. If the Republicans are interested in real reform, they will act as statesmen and not politicians. A statesman is one who understands and pursues the long-range best...

The murder of Michael Westerman, age 19, of Elkton, Kentucky, allegedly by four young black males, should alarm anyone who publicly displays pride in his Southern heritage. Westerman, the father of infant twins, was gunned down as he drove with his wife between Guthrie, Kentucky, and Springfield, Tennessee, on January 14. According to Robertson County...

New York has finally elected a governor who supports the death penalty. In all likelihood, it was George Pataki’s support for capital punishment, not his undistinguished political career, that secured his victory over the liberal incumbent, Mario Cuomo, who had vetoed a death penalty bill in every one of his 12 years in office. During...

John Paul II has finally made it. He’s right up there with Adolf Hitler and The Computer. On January 2, he joined the ranks of heroes and villains honored as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Oddly enough. Time did not go out of its way to portray the Holy Father as you would expect....

If a man could be judged only by the friends he has kept and the enemies he has made, Murray Rothbard was one of the best men produced by the American right. Some of Murray’s friendships go back, without interruption, to the 1950’s, and his collection of personal enemies constitutes a rogues’ gallery of conservative...

Christmas is the time when the bureaucrats and judges who rule the United States launch their perennial war on Christianity. A recent skirmish in Boulder, Colorado, may give a hint of future directions the war may take. Boulder is a secular university town with several government agencies and “nonpolluting” computer industries, run politically by a...

Universal suffrage has long been the left-wing ideal, because of its egalitarian symbolism and redistributionist result. Those “nonpartisan” groups bugging people to “vote for the candidate of your choice” aren’t doing liberty and property any favors. The wider the franchise in a collapsing social order, the more property is up for grabs. Thus an ominous...

An election footnote. Ron and Nancy Reagan must have thought long and hard before campaigning against Oliver North. After all, the 11th commandment, “never criticize a fellow Republican,” may be the only one this show-biz duo hasn’t broken. But campaign they did, Ron by calling North a liar in the primary and Nancy by repeating...

Proposition 187, California’s famous (or infamous) proposition to deny public services to illegal immigrants and their offspring, encouraged at least one member of Virginia’s General Assembly to propose similar legislation in this year’s session. The stout-hearted fellow’s name is Warren E. Barry, and he represents Fairfax County in Virginia’s Senate. For some time now, the...

I first met Erwin Knoll in a Turkish restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, where he had been editing the Progressive since 1979. One of Erwin’s younger colleagues asked me several times in the course of lunch what could possibly interest a right-winger in such a magazine. As leftist as the Nation in many respects, the Progressive...

Susan Smith, confessed murderess of her own children, tells us a great deal about what is going on in a society where too many children growing up in broken homes are exposed to violence and even murder. What kind of mother would kill her own children? According to the press, the case of Susan Smith...

When the election returns showed Republicans in charge of Congress and Washington, D.C.’s Marion Barry with an insurmountable lead in the race for mayor, there was only one thing to do: uncork the Jack Daniels and celebrate. Statehood for D.C. went down the tubes. In electing Barry again, the city’s seething underclass was thumbing its...

The November elections were hailed as a great GOP victory long before the votes were cast, much less counted. For Mr. Clinton, the Republicans’ victory came as a shock. The economy seems in good shape, employment figures are up, and even the Haitian fiasco turned out better than could have been expected. So what is...

The Balkans war seemed to be coming to an end in mid-December as we went to press. Trying to sort through the lies, misinformation, and distortions for the fragments of truth in the international press requires the patience of an archeologist and the imagination of a poet, but some things seem fairly certain. For several...

Bill Bennett seems determined to illustrate the old saw that generals are always fighting the last war. As the infantry struggles to arrest the invasion of special privileges for sodomites, now comes the order from the rear to give up the current battle and engage a “new” enemy; divorce. Speaking to the Christian Coalition in...

Welfare benefits for illegal aliens must be eliminated, said Californians, and with Proposition 187 they did just this. Voters thus reaffirmed a basic principle of common-sense public policy: foreign lawbreakers should not be entitled to live off the earnings of productive citizens. Surely everyone can agree on this much. Not quite. Bill Bennett and Jack...

Solzhenitsyn has finally returned to Mother Russia after 18 years in the United States. Given that he did more than any other individual to help bring down communism, it is strange that so many Americans are still puzzled by this man and unfamiliar with his work. This is partly due to Solzhenitsyn’s decision to live...

With Christopher Lasch’s death last March, our society lost a probing and principled critic. According to one by now standard biography, Lasch started his career as an antiwar activist and Marxist-Freudian synthesizer and by the end of his life had moved to the right with a defense of traditional communities. There is truth in this...

The Tenth Amendment is alive and well in Ohio. On June 28, right before the state legislature recessed, Representative Michael Wise and Senator Grace Drake introduced into the Ohio General Assembly “House Concurrent Resolution No. 44” with 27 house cosponsors and 3 senate cosponsors. The resolution was referred to the House Committee on Economic Affairs...