Culture Clips - October 18, 2005
Religion and the Court
Harriet Miers’ faith tells us nothing about how she will rule.
The world will learn a lot more about Harriet Miers in coming weeks, so we're not going to join the pack already chasing her back to Texas. But one strategy that the White House would be wise to drop is its not-too-subtle promotion of both her religion and her personal views on abortion.
In case you haven't heard, Ms. Miers is an evangelical Christian who is personally opposed to abortion. A main White House talking point is that she fought to reverse the American Bar Association's position supporting abortion rights. We are supposed to believe — wink, wink — that this means Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative who would oppose the likes of Roe v. Wade. The National Right to Life Committee has already endorsed Ms. Miers. ..
In 1987, following the defeat of Robert Bork and the withdrawal of Douglas Ginsburg, President Reagan was contemplating his next appointment. On the short list leaked to the media were Laurence Silberman and Mr. Kennedy, both then appellate court judges. Judge Silberman was a well-known judicial conservative, but some right-to-life activists worried that he might be personally pro-choice on abortion.
Judge Kennedy, on the other hand, was something of a blank judicial slate. But he was a Roman Catholic who let everyone know he was personally opposed to abortion. "The right-to-life people were solid behind Kennedy," the San Francisco Chronicle quoted one conservative as saying at the time. "They were gung-ho for him."…
And we know how that turned out. Justice Kennedy continues to be a devout Catholic, as most recently described in a profile in The New Yorker. But he was also one of the three Republican-appointed Justices who fortified Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. ..
Meanwhile, whatever Judge Silberman's personal views on abortion are, no one familiar with his judicial record doubts that he would have voted to overturn Roe in a New York minute. To put it bluntly, the right-to-lifers let religion and personal views on abortion color their judgment about Judge Kennedy, and they bamboozled themselves.
In recounting this history, we aren't equating Ms. Miers with Justice Kennedy. We have no idea what Ms. Miers thinks about Casey, or any other Constitutional issue. The point is that what matters aren't Ms. Miers's personal views on abortion or what church she attends. What matters is what she thinks about the judiciary, and specifically whether she believes it has the limited, Constitutional role that the Founders intended. The White House could help its credibility if it focused on that question and stopped touting her religious beliefs.
Opinion
Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007409
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Spurning
Not
all of us cherish ties to past traditions. "
He believes this gap between transnational elites and the patriotic public is growing. Huntington knows whereof he speaks: He's been at Harvard for more than half a century.
This
gap is something new in our history. Franklin Roosevelt spoke fluent French
and German and worked to create the United Nations, but no one doubted
that his allegiance was to
But
in the later stages of the Vietnam War — a war begun by elite liberals
— elites on campuses began taking an adversarial posture toward their
own country. Later, with globalization, a transnational mindset grew among
corporate and professional elites. Legal elites, too: Some Supreme Court
justices have taken to citing foreign law as one
basis for interpreting the
"A nation's morale and strength derive from a sense of the past," argues historian Wilfred McClay. Ties to those who came before — whether in the military, in religion, in general patriotism — provide a sense of purpose rooted in history and tested over time. Secular transnational elites are on their own, without a useful tradition, in constructing a morality to help them perform their duties.
Most Americans sense they need such ties to the past, to judge from the millions buying books about Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson and other Founding Fathers. We Americans are lucky to live in a country with a history full of noble ideas, great leaders and awe-inspiring accomplishments. Sadly, many of our elites want no part of it.
Michael
Barone
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/michaelbarone/2005/10/17/171489.html
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Classroom Warriors
The
cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools
of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five
years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education:
Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and
dispositions." What are "dispositions"? NCATE's
prose made clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes that guide a
teacher toward a moral stance. That sounds harmless enough, but it opened
a door to reject teaching candidates on the basis of thoughts and beliefs.
In 2002, NCATE said that an education school may require a commitment
to social justice. William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford,
wrote last month that education schools "have been given unbounded
power over what candidates may think and do, what they may believe and
value."
NCATE vehemently denies that it is imposing groupthink, but the ed schools, essentially a liberal monoculture, use dispositions
theory to require support for diversity and a culturally left agenda,
including opposition to what the schools sometimes call "institutional
racism, classism, and heterosexism." Predictably,
some students concluded that thought control would make classroom dissent
dangerous. A few students rebelled when a teacher at Brooklyn College
School of Education showed Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 in class
and dismissed "white English" as "the language of oppressors."
Five students filed written complaints and received no formal reply from
the college. One was told to leave the school and take an equivalent course
at a community college. Two of the complaining students were then accused
of plagiarism and marked down one letter grade. The two were refused permission
to bring a witness, a tape recorder, or a lawyer to meet with a dean to
discuss the matter.
John
Leo
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/johnleo/2005/10/17/171490.html
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Divided They Fall
Elizabeth
Marquardt’s book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of
Children of Divorce, tells the poignant story of kids trying to
make sense of their worlds after divorce. Even when the parents are conscientious
and loving, the children still struggle to resolve conflicts that are
usually an adult responsibility, not a child’s.
She surveyed 1500 adult children from
divorced families and conducted intensive interviews with 71 others. The
questions about family rules illustrates the divided inner
moral lives that many of these young adults recalled from their childhoods.
Of those whose parents had a “good divorce,” only 58% agreed that their
“parents’ household rules were the same.” By contrast, parents having the same set of rules was the norm for children
of 94% of happily married parents.
Small children going between two households have to devote energy and ingenuity trying to figure out what to do. One parent is penny-pinching and saves even small amounts of leftovers, while the other parent thinks nothing of scraping half a plate of food down the garbage disposal. In one household, people ignore the phone during dinner, while the other parent places a priority on jumping up to respond. Children Between Two Worlds have to ask themselves, “How do we do things around here?” in a way that children in intact families seldom do. As Marquardt puts it, “When parents are married they have to find some way of merging contrasting values such as these, and some may never firmly sort it out. But no matter how they handle it, the disagreement about whether to answer the phone during dinner is their responsibility, not their child’s.”
Jennifer
Roback Morse
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/JennniferRobackMorse/2005/10/17/171499.html
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