The Kennedy-Schumer bin was a victory for “law and order,” proclaimed Senator Edward Kennedy after the Senate vote to crack down on protesters at abortion clinics. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Bill authorizes lengthy jail time and fines for entirely nonviolent conduct that “intentionally and physically obstructs the ingress or egress of another...

Jack Kemp, an unemployed bureaucrat who’s never run so much as a lemonade stand, recently started an expensive newsletter to tell other people how to run their businesses. “Let’s Make America Prosper Again . . . Starting With YOU!” he says in a flyer for his Jack Kemp’s American Entrepreneur. Send just $45 and learn...

The boy choir of Duke University has been done away with, apparently at the behest of one of the campus ministers, a woman who had never even attended any of the services at which the choir performed but who complained that the group was one of the “subtle and not so subtle vestiges of male...

Canada’s role in World War II was relived last year on Canadian national television via a mini-series entitled The Valour and the Horror. The second part of the series, Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command, was met by protests so widespread as to cause the whole series to be placed on the agenda of the Canadian...

Lady-writer Molly Ivins stamped her little foot in the Washington Post a while back and urged us to “ban the damn things.” “Ban them all,” she said, meaning guns, and she must have made her advanced composition teacher so proud by using colloquial words like “hooey” and passionate phrases like “just plain insane,” delivering blinding...

The Republican Party of Mr. M, my parents’ 94-year-old neighbor, and of novelist Henry W. Clune no longer exists. This became clear to me while talking to Mr. M in the garden he has kept since before the Flood. He cut some rhubarb stalks and remembered his 20th birthday, on Armistice Day, 1918. He was...

“Real life” crime shows are the latest rage on American television. Feeding on this fury, there is now for sale an encyclopedia of crime, where one can examine the “true stories” of deranged persons like Jeffrey Dahmer. The first book in the series is titled Serial Killers and was out in time for last Christmas....

“Fairness” has be come the de rigueur justification each time President Clinton or some member of Congress propose some grossly unfair action. Mr. Clinton says, for example, that it is only “fair” to increase the income tax paid by “the rich” by 16 percent (by raising the rate from 31 to 36 percent) because they...

Gays and Judaism were recently discussed in the summer 1993 issue of the Public Interest. Since the author of the article, Dennis Praeger, had been identified a few weeks before in Insight as a political conservative and Jewish traditionalist, one might have expected to find here an attack on sexual perversion based on Leviticus 18....

The obscene production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro perpetrated on a national audience by “director” Peter Sellars and his ensemble troupe in 1991 still bothers me, not least because the abomination has just recently been released on laser disc. More to the point, I am still trying to reconcile the expenditure of both federal...

Dr. Jocelyn Elders has been elevated to what the New York Times calls the Surgeon General’s “bully pulpit,” and President Clinton has uxoriously compared her to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yet Elders as the mouthpiece for the healing profession—not to mention the allusion to her in a pulpit—is grossly ironic. Her insensitive, sometimes spiteful public asides...

Wilsonian meddling in world affairs produces a corollary that other nations must abhor. American citizens not only take an active and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the “old country”—whether England or Poland or Haiti—they also insist on instructing the uneducated folk who stayed home on how to conduct their affairs in accord with the...

The answer is: Mohammed Farrah Aidid, The question is; Who is the latest Hitler? Yes, American policy in Somalia is a kind of jeopardy game, a lose-lose situation in which either the U.N. policy of coloring the globe blue will succeed or American lives will have been sacrificed for the sole purpose of revealing Bill...

Thomas Jefferson’s birthday went virtually unnoticed earlier this year, the 250th anniversary of his birth. Nothing is more indicative of how badly we Americans have squandered our moral capital and betrayed the substance of our history. We did have, of course, President Clinton’s inaugural journey from Monticello, though it is hard to imagine anything further...

Shortly after midnight on May 24, the ship Pai Sheng slipped into San Francisco Bay. With at least 200 people jammed below deck, the ship docked at Fort Point, at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. The 19th-century fort, built to guard the city against invaders and once a Coast Guard station. has long...

Public trust doctrine is the latest rage among law professors with a radical agenda. It challenges private ownership of natural resources and believes the state has the right to claim title to those resources in the name of the people. As Professor Robert I. Reis at the University of Buffalo School of Law notes, this...

“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe,” says the Holy Bible (Exodus 21:24-25). No criminal law ever written is simpler and more appropriate than these ancient Hebrew verses. Similarly, under Islamic law someone caught stealing can have his hand cut off....

Poor Denny’s. The South Carolina-based company, with 1,600 “always-open” family restaurants, has been blindsided. After years of serving cheap, decent meals to working Americans, it is under a politico-racial attack. The aggressors are the usual suspects: the central government, the national media, civil rights leaders, and a lawyer, Guy Saperstein, from Oakland, California. A New...

Bias crimes will no longer be tolerated in New York City, say the proponents of the city’s new “bias crimes” statute. Its sponsors call it one of the toughest such laws in the nation, and it will for the first time allow judges to award unlimited punitive damages to victims of bias attacks, as well...

Not since Pat Buchanan ran for President has the media hysteria reached the level brought on by the (aborted) nomination of Professor Lani Guinier to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. “Ms. Guinier Buys Into Calhounism” screams the headline attached to an anti-Guinier diatribe by neoconservative columnist Paul Gigot. “Quota Queen” shouts...

Political correctness has found a new champion on our college campuses. Professor Betty Jean Craige of the University of Georgia argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education last January that truth has not been subordinated to political goals in American higher education; students today simply “examine critically long-standing ‘truths’ about race, gender, and our civilization’s...

The American Academy of Religion should change its name to the American Unacademy of Ethno-Religio-Secular Fashions, if its call for papers for its annual meeting in Washington this autumn is any indication of trends to come. None of the classics, at least of Judaism, is going to find a place on the program. The section...

Superbowl XXVII last winter was unremarkable except for Michael Jackson’s halftime extravaganza. The climax of the performance was Jackson’s “Heal the World” anthem, which he dedicated “from the children of Los Angeles to the children of the world.” Much like the early 80’s hymn “We Are the World,” which Jackson composed with Lionel Richie, “Heal...

Eastern Europe’s recent “experiment” with socialism illustrates some useful principles about slavery. Slave labor is generally recognized as less productive than free labor, and with the collapse of the Soviet Empire it has become obvious that collective property (socialism) is less productive than private property (capitalism). From these premises several conclusions follow: not only that...

Regarding the inaugural “poem” . . . Joan Rivers. Atrium. A poet manqué without a poem. Or even a coherent thought. But sexually, racially, politically correct. Living proof Darwin is wrong. The fittest have not survived. Once mute. Now, unfortunately, speaking. Mind-numbing gibberish that would make Ferlinghetti puke. She a species that has not, alas,...

Howard Stern, New York City’s outrageous “shock jock” of station WXRK, was fined last year by the Federal Communications Commission. It was another example of the cultural double standard that is now so pervasive it would seem to have been written into law. Stern ran afoul of the FCC’s ban on “indecency.” One doesn’t have...

Federal voting procedures are now being challenged in ways that could undermine the very integrity of the franchise. And there is almost no public discussion of the issue and little effective opposition. The idea is to increase voter participation by relaxing voter registration procedures and qualification requirements. We are told that low voter turnout is...

Sacrifice, a word not often heard in the nation’s capital during the past dozen years, is being spoken by Washington politicians again. Since none of these gentlemen or ladies has been noticed even to observe Lent, much less to abstain from newly acquired powers, perquisites, and salaries, the rest of the country may be likened...

Gays in the military is a hot topic with the American people. I know this firsthand, for in addition to my law practice and my duties as director of the Heartland Institute of Missouri, I host a Friday afternoon call-in show on a St. Louis radio station. WGNU, notorious in St. Louis for having been...

The Baby-Boomer generation (heard that phrase much lately?) has now taken over government, along with everything else, and what a spectacle this turn of events provides us. If we use boomer members of the dominant media culture as a model for the generation’s sensibilities, and use the dominant media culture’s reaction to Bill Clinton as...

Jack Kemp was the great champion of freedom, according to official conservatives, whereas Dick Darman was the “Prince of Darkness.” In fact, whatever was wrong with Darman (President Bush’s budget director), Kemp was far worse. The Kemp-Darman battle came down to this: Kemp, a leftist Republican, constantly sought to expand the budget for his “war...

Downtown Manhattan is swarming with groups of educated, creative people bound to tell you who you are. Last year, for example, when I tried to catch the thriller Basic Instinct near Union Square, a gay group refused to let anyone see the film. They shut it down, by heaving stink bombs into the theater. Some...

The debate over gays in the military has highlighted the progressive impulse to look anywhere but to America for cultural truth. On talk shows and in editorials, Americans are urged to emulate “other industrialized nations” (read “increasingly decadent Western Europe”) that permit openly homosexual soldiers and sailors. Often praised is Holland, whose ponytailed, hairnet-coiffed legions...

The Big Chill generation came bouncing into town with all of the hoopla you could imagine—bright, in-your-face articulate, self-righteous, and pompous enough to remind us that they were people more likely to be found in bus stations than in airports and that this, in itself, somehow demonstrated their moral superiority. During their second week in...

Waco, as we go to press, stands for “We ain’t comin’ out.” Americans can and do make jokes about anything, particularly current events. That’s the good news. The bad news is that ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—nee Bureau of Prohibition and now part of the Treasury Department, today under Lloyd Bentsen, former U.S....

Offering Norplant in on-site clinics at public schools in Baltimore might seem like one of those evils that is necessary or even inevitable: this is, after all, a city where one in ten girls between the ages of 15 and 17 gave birth in 1990. But the language used by the plan’s advocates reveals a...

Regarding immigration, those like me who see it as an issue of economics and not of culture and who maintain that the American system has succeeded, and continues to succeed, in turning anyone in the world into an American owe critics of our view an answer to a simple question: Is there any class of...

As Pro-Lifers now face a monolithically pro-abortion federal government, it might be useful for them to look at last year’s Supreme Court decision about Guam. Despite robust opposition from Justice Anthony Scalia, the Court refused to hear Guam’s abortion case, which means the ruling of a California court striking down all of Guam’s restrictions on...

In the States and in the souls where Confederate flags still fly, they fluttered at half-mast last March for M.E. Bradford, gentleman, scholar, political thinker, and Good Old Rebel, who departed this world too soon at the age of 58. Yet the legacy he left to an America now being reconstructed to suit political correctness...

NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—is not unlike the notorious star chamber, where the king and counsellors of medieval England secretly meted out justice without concern for precedent. If Congress approves NAFTA, George Bush’s proudest diplomatic achievement, Americans can expect a heavy dose of star-chamber-style justice in the 21st century. For the average citizen, NAFTA...

Ron Brown was recently blasted by an organ that is usually quite friendly to Democrats, the New York Times. Its editorial page blasted Brown’s confirmation hearing for Commerce Secretary as a “bipartisan disgrace,” claiming it “amounted to an open declaration that companies with strong Democratic connections reserve the right to continue the attitude of greed...

As this article and this issue of Chronicles go to press, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee will be considering whether Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno is, by her character, fit to serve this nation as Attorney General. My own opinion is, no. In the 1988 Dade County, Florida, general election, I was Attorney...

The Japanese have been zealous in buying up American symbols: golf courses, movie studios. Rockefeller Center, the Mariners. Recently, however, they are beginning to learn that cosmopolitanism can be a two-way street. In January, American sumo wrestler Chad Rowan became the first foreigner to be awarded the rank of “Exalted Grand Champion.” Six feet five...

Gambling is a fool’s pastime, and a fool and his money will soon be parted like the proverb says, but gambling is also a disease. It’s in this capacity, as a sick person, that I beg all you councilmen and-women, elected officials and public representatives, not to bring this infectious scourge into your communities. It’s...

Switzerland has resisted the forces of centralization that seem to be sweeping Europe. Last December 6, in a referendum that was widely considered the country’s most important since it established its confederation in 1848, Swiss voters rejected a plan to help form a 19-nation European Economic Area in which people, goods, capital, and services would...

Newcomers to Arizona, among whom I count myself, are sometimes startled to discover just how liberal are the gun laws in one of the nation’s most conservative states. As long as it’s not concealed, carrying a gun is almost as acceptable to Arizonans as a saguaro cactus—although businesses may ask you to cheek your weapon...

The Schwinn Bicycle Company, which was run by the same family for 97 years, has gone bankrupt. No more Schwinn bikes? I remember mine, and brother Jack’s, and those I bought my children in the 50’s—visions of delight with their balloon tires, chrome springs, and coaster brakes. The last of my four children actually got...

New Jersey children better hold tight to their allowances because those legislative nannies in the Garden State are at it again. As of last July, kids under 13 who ride their bicycles without wearing a helmet are breaking the law. First-time offenders pay $25 to the state; second-time offenders pay $100. To a child, that...

H.L. Mencken, in 1923, noted the “amalgamation of the two great parties. Both have lost their old vitality, all their old reality; neither, as it stands today, is anything more than a huge and clumsy machine for cadging jobs. They do not carry living principles into their successive campaigns; they simply grab up anything that...

George Bush’s offer of $10 billion in loan guarantees to help Israel resettle Soviet and Ethiopian refugees may or may not have been a brilliant move for American diplomacy and domestic politics. It rewarded Prime Minister Rabin for partially halting settlement construction in the occupied territories and for showing greater flexibility in negotiations. Will it...