If you are looking for a reason to vote for Ralph Nader, the way both parties are handling the “gay marriage” issue should give you lots of data. John Kerry, when asked his opinion of “gay marriage,” looks like a dog getting a bath, as Chris Hitchens puts it. Kerry says he personally opposes “gay...
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Cultural Suicide
Tonight, dear friends, is the eve of the Feast of Albertus Magnus. “Who he?” would be the response of most people who have gone to school since the end of World War II. Names like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, Cicero and Cato, Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede, while they may echo distantly...
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Cultural Suicide—May 2004
PERSPECTIVE Cultural Suicideby Thomas Fleming Multiculturalism and Western self-loathing. VIEWS America in Europe, Europe in Americaby Claude PolinA shared disease. Europe and Americaby Srdja TrifkovicIdentity of decrepitude. Dreams of Old Placesby Anthony BukoskiA personal essay. NEWS Europe’s Population Implosionby David A. HartmanA diagnosis. Strange Bedfellowsby Wayne AllensworthBush and Soros unite against Georgia. REVIEWS Smear Campaignby...
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Helping U.S. Manufacturing
The U.S. economy has shown strong signs of a turn-around. The President’s tax cuts have helped Americans turn an important corner. Many parts of our economy have regained their strength and have surged ahead with new vitality. However, too many Americans need jobs. Many of these jobs have gone overseas, the result of outsourcing and...
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Sodomy and the ELCA
“Gay marriage” may be on the political back burner for the moment, as Karl Rove is busy crafting phrases that will appease Christian-conservative Bush backers this fall while appealing to homosexual swing-voters with promises of “civil unions” (a.k.a. legalized “gay marriage”). In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA), however, the pot is fixing to...
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JUST SAY NO!—April 2004
PERSPECTIVE Tax Slavery by Thomas Fleming For a conquered people. VIEWS Revolting Taxation by David Hartman How federal taxation usurped federalism. Tax-and-Spend Politics, Bush-style by Doug Bandow Outgunning the Democrats. NEWS High Marginal Tax Rates on Saving Hurt Us All by Stephen J. Entin Bush's incremental reform. The Naked Truth of Tax Policy by ...
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“Economic Law” versus Catholic Social Teaching, Part III
Part II) on Tom Woods’ article “The Trouble With Catholic Social Teaching” have generated much discussion, on this site and elsewhere—a healthy sign, it seems to me, that many conservative and traditionalist Catholics are trying to grapple with the Church’s consistent social teaching rather than simply bracketing it and substituting some form of conservative economics....
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“Gay Marriage”
From Genesis to Revelation, by Way of the New Yorker At the beginning of 1999 . . . my wife Cathleen Schine, announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me. She had to leave, she had to get away for a new life, for she had mysteriously changed in her affections ....
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(Con)fusion on the Right
For the last year or so, neoconservatism has been the subject of an astonishing number of discussions, examinations, and denunciations by the far and “mainstream” left as well as by the right, soft and not so soft. The reason for the scrutiny, of course, is that you cannot expect to engineer an entire war, concoct...
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Mel and His Critics
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ opens in theaters on Ash Wednesday (February 25). It is too early to tell whether Gibson has achieved his aim of creating an artistically compelling account of the last 12 hours of Christ’s life that is also faithful to the Gospels, although those who have previewed the film...
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Straight Eye for the Queer Guy—March 2004
PERSPECTIVE “Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man” by Thomas Fleming From Frodo to Elijah Wood. VIEWS Boys Will Be Boys by Roger D. McGrath (If given half a chance.) “Gay Marriage” by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. From Genesis to Revelation, by way of the New Yorker. NEWS Marriage and the Law by Stephen B. Presser Time for a ...
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“Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”
My father believed in progress almost to the end of his life, when changing his mind would scarcely have made any difference. Like most liberals, he regarded traditional institutions as so many barriers to man’s continued improvement, and yet, like most good men who are liberals, his head was contradicted by his heart: He despised...
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Beyond Nipplegate
Another Superbowl has come and gone, and this one was a real bodice ripper. While the game was one of the closest contests in the 38-year history of the quest for the Vince Lombardi Trophy, most of ...
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Carl F.H. Henry, R.I.P.
The greatest intellectual leader of the evangelical movement of the 20th century quietly passed away in his sleep at a retirement home in Watertown, Wisconsin, on December 7, at the age of 90. A scholar with the heart of an evangelist, Dr. Henry represented all of the strengths of the new evangelicalism, while exhibiting few...
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Charity Begins at Church
December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.” The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...
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Enthusiastic Democracy
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
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Masters of the Universe—February 2004
PERSPECTIVE Charity Begins at Churchby Thomas Fleming Christian welfare. VIEWS George Soros, Postmodern Villainby Srdja TrifkovicNGO’s, behold your god. The Church and NGO’sby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.“Shall I crucify your king?” NEWS What Empire?by Sean MoirThe proliferation of U.S. military bases. The Tobin Taxby Cliff KincaidThe NGO plan to fleece America. REVIEWS Shine, Republicby H.A. Scott...
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The Education of George Bush
I used to wonder at the deep melancholia to which Evelyn Waugh was subject in the last years of his life. “Papa,” his eldest daughter Meg would plead with him, “why are you so unhappy?” Waugh’s misery, verging on despair, struck me as unwarranted. He had, after all, great literary success, a large and creditable family,...
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The Cabal Strikes Back
Ever since the exposure in the mainstream media last year of the neoconservatives as a fifth column that engineered the present boondoggle in Iraq, dragged the United States into a foreign war for the transparent benefit of Israel, and concocted what are now known to have been lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and...
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Defining Left and Right—January 2004
PERSPECTIVE The Conservative Search for Order by Thomas Fleming The triumph of the ancien régime. VIEWS The Education of George Bush by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Not by George Bush. Consumption Taxes, Property Rights by Scott P. Richert Notes toward the restoration of property. NEWS It’s Springtime for Hitler in Europe by Leon T. Hadar Is Europe anti-Israeli and antisemitic? See, ...
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The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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Hating Babies, Hating God
When I sat down to write this article, Google reminded me that, when it comes to the issue of contraception, the stakes are very high. To check the date of publication of Dr. Charles Provan’s important work The Bible and Birth Control, I typed “Charles, Provan, Bible, Birth Control” into the mother of all search...
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Apocalypse Now
“If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” American evangelicals, according to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “are the Israelis’ best friend in the whole world.” In return, they dubbed him “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” That so many are still surprised by those statements indicates that, by and large, those...
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The Consent of the Governed Revisited
Americans have lost the habit of constitutional government. Judges hand down commands derived from their own personal revelation, in the teeth of law and majority rule, and are tamely obeyed by millions. A President, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, announces his intention to commit the blood and treasure of the...
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Night Thoughts for the Middle-Aged
About Schmidt Produced and distributed by New Line Cinema Directed by Alexander Payne Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from Louis Begley’s novel The Quiet American Produced by William Harberg and Stefen Ahrenberg Directed by Phillip Noyce and Robert Schenkkan Screenplay by Christopher Hampton from Graham Greene’s novel Distributed by Miramax Films Bulletin: Hollywood...
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By Their Clichés, You Shall Know Them
At least since September 11, the buzz-phrase for every investigation has been “connect the dots.” Republicans were highly imaginative in connecting the dots between Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, while Democrats preferred connecting the dots between Enron executives and the Bush administration. Donald Rumsfeld, who has raised this kind of...
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The Grinch Who Stole Kwanza
The political plum on last year’s Christmas pudding, so to speak, was l’affaire Lott, which, erupting at the birthday party for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond in early December and continuing until Trent Lott’s less-than-voluntary resignation as Senate majority leader three weeks later, threatened to ruin Kwanza for just about everybody. The Lott crisis was an...
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Small Is Beautiful
The City of Rockford is broke. That does not mean, of course, that it is insolvent or bankrupt; after all, it is rather hard for any government with the power to tax to end up in that position (though some occasionally do). Like so many other cities of its size today, however, Rockford has projected...
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Same Old Song and Dance
President George W. Bush painted a pleasingly simple black-and-white picture of the world in his State of the Union Address on January 28. It was a choreographed political speech with several statements of strong intent rather than a factual assessment of the nation’s current “state.” That America is strong and resolute, while Saddam Hussein is...
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Remember From Whence Thou Art Fallen
“Forget about Europe!” shriek the neo-isolationists. “Only Britain and Israel matter. We saved the French twice in one century, and they still think they have a right to follow their own foreign policy.” Americans used to have somewhat longer memories. When General Pershing arrived in Paris in 1917, his aide and orator declared, “Lafayette, we...
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Divided Loyalties—April 2003
PERSPECTIVE Remember From When Thou Art Fallen by Thomas Fleming Lessons from Old Europe. VIEWS
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Target: Iraq—February 2003
Perspective Imperialism From the Cradle to the Grave by Thomas Fleming Mesopotamia, the graveyard of empire. Views Our Yesterday and Your Today by Michael Stenton A tale of two empires. The Justification for War by Srdja Trifkovic It’s the oil (and the ...
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Taking the Kwannukah Out of Christmas
A Christ-free Christmas, which has been the goal of the American ruling elite since before World War II, has finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, been reached. At corporate “holiday parties,” references to ...
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Athens and Jerusalem—April 1996
Vol. 20, No. 4—April 1996 PERSPECTIVE Athens and Jerusalem by Thomas Fleming Where neopagans go wrong. VIEWS With the Nietzscheans of Naumburg by Curtis Cate Mediocrity and the West. Ancient Greek Religion by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones How it differed from Christianity. Monotheism vs. Polytheism by Alain de Benoist The neopagan critique. The Twilight of the Sacred by Thomas Molnar The Christian difference. OPINIONS Scholarship and ...