As an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, I find that much of what is said by the so-called “religious right” and “religious left”—to put it charitably—leaves a lot to be desired and is, ironically, un-Christian. This summer, on NBC’s Today program, the head of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, said: “What we’re trying to do is not...
The Assault on Denny
The assault on Denny’s restaurants, a chain beloved by middle Americans and serving a million customers a day, helps us understand the real meaning of civil rights. Flagship, the chain’s parent company, was forced to settle a group of lawsuits—choreographed by the Justice Department, the NAACP, and Saperstein, Mayeda & Goldstein of Oakland, California—for $54...
Virulent Propaganda
“There is no God, and if there was. She made a mistake.” That statement came from a colleague of mine during a class in philosophy. That is also the extent to which most public college students will hear the “G” word mentioned during their years of “higher” education. Recent polls have shown that 89 percent...
When Mexico Defeated Ireland
When Mexico defeated Ireland in the July World Cup soccer tournament, some 5,000 “fans” turned Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park, California, into a riot zone. Radical politics, not sports, lay at the heart of the riot. Some 300 police officers were called to the scene, and according to one news account, when the “fans” reached...
It Came to Pass
Guideposts magazine devoted the opening pages of its April issue to reminiscences about its founder, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who died last December, on Christmas Eve, at the age of 95. Dr. Peale had been world-famous for his relentless optimism, his “strong belief in the power of prayer” and “strong belief in God,” and, most...
You’re Out
Jack Kemp is out, as far as we California College Republicans are concerned. On June 18, we overturned our previous endorsement of Jack Kemp for President in 1996. This reversal of position has been two years in the making. When Kemp was originally endorsed two years ago, it seemed that he was the unquestionable heir...
Just Passed
Though the Crime Bill just passed by Congress toughens federal sentencing provisons and makes more federal crimes subject to the death penalty, it is irrelevant to people longing for safer streets and neighborhoods. Also largely irrelevant is the proposal to make more offenses federal crimes. There may be more federal crimes, but there won’t be...
Latest Infatuation
The Flintstones is the latest example of Hollywood’s infatuation with cartoon characters. Because a cartoon is not reality, one is expected to suspend belief and therefore judgment. Ever since Mickey Mouse became a culture-hero of the young, it has been hard to know where fantasy ends and reality begins. Neither is a cartoon myth, and...
Society is to Blame
Patti Davis, Reagan’s little girl whose nude body graced the cover of the July Playboy, has finally settled down, gotten her act together—and written a novel about bondage. Yes, bondage. And it’s titled, well, Bondage. Discussing her book on the NBC Today show with interviewer Katie Couric, who noted that it’s about people “totally out...
Long Over
April will be long over when you read this, but what an amazingly fecund 30 days it was this year. April was “Child Abuse Prevention Month.” The first week of April was “Read Aloud Week,” the last week was National Library Week, the 28th was “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” (which was very hard...
Sweeping the Country
The term limit issue has been sweeping the country. Since 1990, voters in 15 states have used the petition and referendum process to impose term limits on their state legislators. Earlier this year in Illinois, term limit supporters filed 437,088 petition signatures from almost every county calling for a statewide referendum on term limits. The...
Mixed Signals
Rudolph Giuliani in one of his first actions as mayor of New York City, eliminated a controversial set-aside program that had been instituted in 1991 by the Dinkins administration. Considering the extent to which the use of quotas now permeates American society, any victory for the merit system is reason for celebration. The policy in...
Pushed Only So Far
Violent crime in California dropped for the first nine months of 1993 over the same period in 1992, reported attorney general Dan Lungren last winter. But statistics are of no comfort, and Lungren knows it. During the same press conference he even said so: “The reason people are more worried today than they ever have...
A Tragic Loss
A Washington Post story earlier this year began, “Gunfire erupted among a group of teenagers in a hallway at Dunbar High School.” Here was yet another tale of teenagers and guns in our nation’s capital, of shootings at school, of another day when class ended not with the ring of a bell but with the...
PBS Hucksters
PBS hucksters Biff and Muffy bleated “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” from my TV and radio a couple of weeks back. They’re volunteers who run infomercial plead-athons on WTAX (KTAX west of the Mississippi). Looking weary after a dreadful day in the operating room or maybe on the trading floor— and even though their Pierre Gardins were...
Dishonesty of the Media Establishment
O.J. Simpson is now the most famous human being upon the planet. The details of the case can be of no interest to anyone intellectual enough to enjoy a game of “Co Fish,” but the debates, private as well as public, it has spawned will haunt us for some time. From fairly early on most...
Student Radical Activity
Student radical activity is alive and well at American universities. Of course, it is difficult to be a radical when so many radical ideas of the 60’s and 70’s—including feminism, institutionalized egalitarianism, Marxism, messianic environmentalism, race theories, deconstructionism, Lacanism, and moral relativism—are ensconced in what passes for higher education today. But student radicals will try,...
Site of Cultural Conflict
Stanford is adding to its fame as a site of cultural conflict. When a disturbance broke out during the showing on campus last May of a short film about grape pickers and the perils of insecticide, local print media played up the claim that viewers had chanted “Beaners Go Home” during the ten-minute film. In...
Becoming Clients
Students are becoming clients at an increasing number of public colleges. Indeed, staff members consider them “caseloads.” Programs such as “Economic Opportunity Funds” (EOFs) exist as pork barrels, doling out patronage to middle- and upper-middle-class employees, enforcing racist and sexist personnel policies, and acting as politburos. Administrators and staffers openly display their feelings of superiority...
Thicker-Skinned
Four years at Harvard have made me much thicker-skinned than I used to be. To be sure, it was more than a little unsettling when my freshman dormitory held a mandatory sensitivity session at which each student was forced to say: “Hello, my name is . . . , and I’m gay.” But after seeing...
The Stuff of Nightmares
Military involvement in Haiti is the stuff of nightmares. In comparison, the oil and arms blockade, reinforcements in the Dominican Republic, and sanctions against commercial airline traffic from Port-au-Prince occasion mere despair. President Clinton’s prodemocracy broadcasts delivered via helicopter-borne bullhorn and Quebec-trained Haitian police (fresh from human rights seminars) are but passing comic moments. No...
Expanding Every Day
The definition of racism is expanding every day. For example, some New Jersey residents say a community that erects anticrime walls and gates, common in California and other states, is guilty of racism, no matter who lives there. But don’t we have a right to self-protection? In Georgia, a drugstore chain is accused of racism...
Eugéne Ionesco, R.I.P.
Eugéne Ionesco’s death on March 28 was hardly noticed by the American press. While European newspapers ran two-page spreads on the renowned playwright—whom they variously referred to as “prince of the absurd,” “dynamiter of conformisms,” “genial dramatist,” “old child,” and “melancholy watchman”—the New York Times marked the event with only a standard obituary. But alas,...
“Unchallenged Orthodoxy”
Feminist jurisprudence, Philip Jenkins said in these pages, has been governed by an “unchallenged orthodoxy” when the issue is rape. It is that “women did not lie about such victimization, never lied, not out of personal malice, not from mental instability or derangement.” Believing the self-proclaimed victim of rape has indeed evolved from ideological faith...
Reducing Expenditures
Fleet Financial Group. New England’s largest bank-holding company, made big news when it fired 3,000 people and reduced its operating expenditures by $300 million. In addition, employees no longer get certain small perks, and even its best customers will pay fees that used to be waived for them. Analysts chalked it up to “corporate downsizing,”...
A Man of Letters
Russell Kirk’s death on April 29 deprived both the world of letters and high-toned American conservatism of one of its premier representatives. Author of numerous studies on topics ranging from constitutional law to economics and creator of Gothic mysteries and ghost stories, Kirk left behind a corpus testifying to his rich learning and literary gifts....
Karl Hess, R.I.P.
Karl Hess—one of the supplest and most creative political thinkers of post-Republic America—died on the same day as Richard Nixon did. His memorial service in Kearneysville, West Virginia, was attended by zero living presidents, which was meet for a man whose conscience impelled him to quit the Power he had once served. Vimful, curious, raucous,...
Bad For Your Health
Cigarette smoking is bad for your health. But so are automobiles, candy bars, fast food, martinis, television, and even sunshine. Since the days of James V and I, we have heard about the dangers of tobacco. So why all the fuss surrounding the cigarette industry this spring? Even more absurd than Representative Henry A. Waxman’s...
Wind in Their Sails
Pro-Family lobbyists on Capitol Hill had a strong wind in their sails last March: the phrase “H.R. 6” had become a verb, meaning “to unleash a tsunami of angry phone calls, letters, and faxes from concerned citizens.” H.R. 6 was a bill to reauthorize (at increased funding levels) the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)...
Academic Charlatanism
Academic charlatanism these days includes not only defenses of plagiarism and violent campaigns of intimidation against proscribed opinion. These symptoms of the bankruptcy of humanistic learning worry some and find celebration among others. But who on either side of the fault line in the academic humanities can find grounds to defend giving degrees in subjects...
Cognitive Dissonances
Only lucky strikes and a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis could resolve the cognitive dissonances of the Clinton administration. One newspaper I saw on March 25 carried a story about hearings on regulating tobacco alongside another story about Dr. Jocelyn Elders’ opposition to banning tobacco products. Since then FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler has been ranting...
R.I.P. Richard Nixon
Few people know that for eight years Richard Nixon presided over the first federal program using the leverage of government contracts to open jobs for minority workers. In 1953, President Eisenhower, acting on the advice of a task force in the Truman administration, issued an Executive Order declaring that all government contractors must not “discriminate...
A Real Heartbreaker
Washington Post readers are accustomed to pansexual propaganda, from exposes of Middle America’s “homophobia” to adoring reviews of feminist plays (as if the five million people in the Washington area were clamoring to squeeze into fetid little theaters to see their values trashed). But even battle-scarred Post readers must have winced one day late last...
Polarizing Attitudes
In South Africa the negotiations between F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela and the subsequent election of the latter as president had an unexpected and wholly unknown prelude. In 1969, I was teaching at South Africa’s University of Potchefstroom, the very center of Afrikaner conservative forces. I was the only non-Boer professor in a Boer...
A New Campaign
Donna Shalala, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently said at a press conference: “We have the knowledge and the technology to prevent the spread [of AIDS]. What we have lacked until now is the political will.” The press conference was held to introduce the latest government-sponsored nightmare: a series of commercials,...
Consequence of Budget Cuts
Yetta M. Adams, an eccentric and meddlesome bag lady, died on a bench outside the concrete walls of the Department of Housing and Urban Development last winter. If this had been the 80’s, her death would have been cited as a consequence of budget cuts, greed, and flint-heartedness. But thanks to a friendly press and...
Our Immigration Problems
Our immigration problems briefly received national attention last year when boatloads of illegal Chinese migrants landed on American shores. Yet, because many of these illegals made bogus claims of political asylum, some political leaders spoke as if asylum abuse were the only real problem. Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) set the record straight when he observed...
A Tempting Sport
Clinton-bashing is a tempting sport, as indicated by the phenomenal popularity of Rush Limbaugh. But like everything that is too easy, it has its pitfalls. It will be a fruitless enterprise if it merely succeeds in tearing down Clinton to make way for a lackluster Republican administration only marginally better on the critical issues. Clinton’s...
This Weimar-Like Time
“All artists,” my old friend Ed Abbey was fond of saying, “should have their lips sewn shut.” Certainly, to judge by current trends in the art world, many ought to have their fingers broken, their easels burned, their chisels hammered into plowshares. Witness, to name but one instance, last summer’s Kulturfest in sunny San Ysidro,...
An Inelegant Place
Vancouver was a stately if inelegant place when I last visited it 26 years ago. The harbor was a breathtaking sight, although the downtown area was rundown and the architecture undistinguished. Still, Vancouver was memorable because it was a city framed by mountains, with extraordinary vistas and a congenial climate. It had a rare calm...
Manifest Incompetence
The spying of CIA operative Aldrich Hazen Ames and his wife Maria del Rosario Casas Ames—who have been accused by the FBI of working for the Soviets and later the Russians—is significant for reasons that have escaped the Establishment press. Republican Senator Dole and Democratic Senator DeConcini and many others should think twice before denouncing...
Money-Sucking Machines
Riverboat casinos are giant money-sucking machines. A $30 million riverboat casino operated by Harrah’s can suck in $200,000 a day from bettors, assuming a typical daily loss of $50 per customer. This kind of highstakes betting used to be called gambling. But liberals have come up with a new name—”gaming.” It was formerly recognized as...
Political Subdivision
Secession, or at least political subdivision, is looking increasingly attractive to many Americans. Both ideas were long considered outre, even unacceptable. But as the Civil War, our last such great experiment, recedes into history, the cries to break away, or at least to break up, are growing louder. CALIFORNIA: Lalaland is the home of full-spectrum...
Elvis is Alive
Elvis is alive at a museum in Wright, Missouri. When I drive by a sign reading “He lives!” in rural America, I often have difficulty telling whether it refers to Jesus or Elvis, but in Wright a huge billboard assures motorists on Interstate 70 that the phrase refers to the one more influential in American...
Elvis Is Everywhere
Elvis is everywhere. But where two or more fans are gathered, devoted to his memory, weird manifestations are possible. Some years ago I bought a pair of black leather pants in an after-Christmas sale, even though the fit was suspect. I found one dry cleaner in Roanoke, Virginia, where the seamstress willingly altered leather. As I...
The Morrison Cult
Jim Morrison would have been 50 years old last December 8, and as the world press reported, the rock star’s final resting place, the Gothic Cimetière Père Lachaise in northern Paris—where Balzac, Chopin, and Oscar Wilde are also buried—has become a cult attraction for a new generation of young Americans. American novelist Douglas Coupland describes...
The Present Climate
When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
Where Have You Gone?
Joe DiMaggio, where have you gone? One could add Babe Ruth, Bobby Hull, and Dick Butkus. On good days American sports stars were treated more as gods than as mortal heroes, but on bad days they were booed mercilessly by fans. Booing is a grand old American tradition, but like nearly everything that’s traditional, it’s...
A Federal Responsibility
Immigration is exclusively a federal responsibility, but all states, like California, must pay for federally mandated medical, educational, and social services for immigrants. As Newsweek recently reported, 10.4 percent of all new immigrants received welfare in 1990, as compared to 7.7 percent of native-born Californians, and each immigrant welfare check was on average more than...
Follow the Money
The California Teachers Association (CTA) and its allies raised $17 million to defeat Proposition 174, California’s school voucher initiative, which proposed granting parents a voucher worth as much as $2,600 that could be applied to tuition at public or private schools. Ironically, this special interest didn’t even have to break a sweat: the campaign budget...