SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month

July 2003
Volume 10, Number 7

Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
  -> After Liberation
  -> The Moving Picture
  -> Land of Hype and Glory
  -> Jurisprudence in Tongues
  -> Panning Peck
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted



FEATURES

After Liberation
(page 1)

     If you had no high hopes for the war on Iraq, it's 
hard to be disappointed by the outcome. The United States 
won, of course, with few American casualties (and an 
unknown number of Iraqi ones). Saddam Hussein is gone, if 
not dead, and to that extent Iraq has been "liberated," 
but the promised democracy hasn't materialized.

     The American occupation has put democracy, free 
speech, and freedom of the press on indefinite hold. The 
Iraqi dinar has shown surprising vitality, so much 
stronger than the dollar that the U.S. forces are 
printing dinars; that is, flooding the country with 
counterfeit money, {{ thereby impoverishing its 
people. }} A few dozen American troops have been killed 
in sporadic attacks, and the early signs of welcome have 
vanished; but the situation seems fairly stable.

     The United States seems neither stronger nor safer 
than it was before the war. {{ Iraq's alleged but vaguely 
defined "weapons of mass destruction" didn't appear 
during the war and haven't been found since it ended. The 
suspicion grows that if they  }} ever existed in any 
meaningful way the U.S. and British governments grossly 
exaggerated them and any threat they posed. The impolite 
term "lying" has crept into the media, especially in 
England, where the press is relatively untamed.

     The Bush administration keeps insisting that the 
WMDs *did* exist and *will* be discovered, but it and its 
defenders have changed their tune: they now say the 
important thing is the "liberation" of Iraq, citing the 
mass graves of Hussein's victims as proof that the war 
was warranted. The implied (and also vaguely defined) 
connection between Hussein and "terrorism" has been 
abandoned. It's not clear what the "preemptive" war 
preempted.

     Maybe Bush didn't exactly lie, but he clearly 
asserted a certainty he didn't have and wasn't entitled 
to. Congress will inquire into whether he was misled by 
the intelligence services; he almost surely wasn't. The 
problem wasn't the information he received, but what he 
did with it. He told the American public it was 
definitive proof of Hussein's aggressive intentions.

     It wasn't. But Bush has counted on us to take his 
word for it then, and not to ask too many questions now. 
And it would be awkward for a country that supported the 
war in advance to withdraw its consent after an 
overwhelming victory, wouldn't it?

     The Republican Party hardly seems republican, in the 
original sense of the term. It worships Bush with an 
almost royalist piety. {{ It has adopted the old view 
that "the king can do no wrong" -- which never meant that 
he was infallible, only that he could never be held 
liable for anything. }} It doesn't matter what the war 
cost, or whether the reasons given for it hold water. 
What counts is that Bush won, and his political position 
is stronger than ever. There is no opposition or even 
significant criticism of him within his own party, or 
within what now passes for the conservative movement.

     Only the Left now occasionally raises the kind of 
questions conservatives used to ask, and there isn't much 
Left left. Even Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton have been 
tamed, along with the rest of the Democratic {{ Party, 
which has all but conceded next year's elections. }} The 
few "issues" that separate the two parties are matters of 
detail, not principle.

     For the time being, it's Bush's world. But what a 
dull world!



The Moving Picture
(page 2)

     Senator Strom Thurmond has finally died, at 100. 
Given the recent experience of Trent Lott, the eulogies 
were among the most carefully worded in modern history. 
Thurmond was one of the few politicians who was old 
enough to remember what the Constitution once meant, but 
he invoked it chiefly for racial purposes and seldom let 
it stop him from delivering Federal pork to South 
Carolina. Let the record show that he could be 
principled, on occasion.

*          *          *

     Beating our own Supreme Court to the punch (see 
below), a Canadian appeals court has legalized same-sex 
"marriage." Prime Minister Jean Chretien approved the 
decision and announced that the government won't appeal 
it. "You have to look at history as an evolution of 
society," he explained, equating a sudden rupture of 
tradition with benign gradual development. Just like our 
own Supreme Court.

*          *          *

     Led by Al Gore, liberals have decided that what they 
need is a Rush Limbaugh. They're working on it, hoping to 
come up with a hugely popular talk-radio host. Good luck, 
guys. They'll also need a few hugely popular liberal 
issues, which will take some doing, since the essence of 
modern liberalism is its alienation from ordinary people. 
Hence its need to achieve "social change" by judicial and 
bureaucratic dictatorship. Liberals have already turned 
most of the hot-button issues over to conservatives. So 
now they want to try demagogy? A little late for that.

*          *          *

     Maybe the key to the condition of liberalism today 
is the concept of evolution. Liberalism is no longer a 
fighting faith, and liberals sense this. Their agenda 
rouses little enthusiasm, and it would take more than a 
liberal Limbaugh (if such a being were conceivable) to 
change that. Since they can't hope that the masses will 
hit the streets to do battle for liberal ideals, they 
settle for hoping that, if told that liberalism is an 
evolutionary certainty, people will simply accept it. 
Once a creed that inspired, liberalism is now merely 
something we must resign ourselves to.

*          *          *

     The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Hispanics now 
outnumber blacks and are thus America's largest minority. 
But "Hispanic" is a linguistic category, not a racial 
one: it embraces whites, blacks, and descendants of 
American (and Central American) Indians, and refers 
chiefly to Mexicans but also to Cubans, Puerto Ricans, 
and actual Spaniards. Since nearly all of them are in 
this country voluntarily (in many cases illegally), it 
will be awkward to argue that they are oppressed. Do you 
become an Instant Victim just by crossing the border 
nowadays? Or do you also have to speak Spanish?

*          *          *

     The death of Katherine Hepburn was followed only a 
day later by that of Buddy Hackett. Was this coincidence 
or grief? The two had a long-standing romance that was 
widely known throughout Hollywood. But Hackett was 
married to someone else, and his wife refused to divorce 
him, so the affair had to remain discreet. Meanwhile, the 
Hepburn-Hackett team continued to enchant the world in 
romantic comedies, until -- wait! I've got him mixed up 
with someone else. Sorry. Disregard.



Land of Hype and Glory
(pages 3-4)

     The musical CHICAGO continues not only to delight 
but to fascinate me, particularly the character of Billy 
Flynn (played in the movie by Richard Gere), the lawyer 
who turns an adulterous murderess into a celebrity. Billy 
knows how to use both the press and the courtroom to make 
his client, Roxie Hart, a celebrity. Her criminality 
would be nothing without his public-relations genius. 
With his help, she becomes the darling of Chicago.

     Billy is a hilarious addition to the great American 
tradition of the con man. The type is not unknown to 
Europe, but he came into his own in nineteenth-century 
America and is still with us. Hollywood preserved him 
most memorably in W.C. Fields, Frank Morgan, and Walter 
Matthau.

     Visiting in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was 
amazed by American enterprise. Unencumbered by history, 
its memories, and its legacies, Americans started from 
scratch. They didn't need authorization or permission 
from state or church; they had no pedigrees and knew 
little about their own ancestors. Their energies, 
desires, and ambitions had free scope, and they made the 
most of it. They could start their own businesses, even 
their own religions. Government was minimal. Even 
churches belonged to the realm of the market. To a 
European observer this was a breathtakingly new world of 
possibilities.

     In Europe the new and the ancient live side by side; 
the ancient is familiar, not exotic. But in America to 
grow old is to become obsolete; nothing lasts long enough 
to become venerable. In time everything is either updated 
or replaced by something newer. Americans commemorate 
things -- movies, for instance -- that are less than a 
century old. Even the meaning of the U.S. Constitution 
isn't fixed; the courts and politicians continually 
update that too. This is, after all, a country that can 
regard the Kennedys, third-generation scions of a 
bootlegger (who remains the only enterprising member of 
his clan), as its royal family.

     Tocqueville found Americans agreeable and polite, 
because in such a fluid society, without stable 
hereditary status, success depended on pleasing others: 
socially, commercially, politically. The customer was 
always right. There were no aristocrats here, only 
tycoons adopting aristocratic airs; and few great (that 
is, rich) families maintained their status for more than 
two generations. None outside the Old South did it by 
owning land.

     In this situation it was inevitable that 
advertising, with all its attendant hyperbole, should 
play a leading role. It wasn't long before advertising 
itself became an independent industry, in which accuracy 
mattered less than hype. Hype has also become the style 
of our politics, in which money and advertising are 
central.

     The obverse of the slogan that the customer is 
always right was P.T. Barnum's discovery that a sucker 
was born every minute. From a certain perspective, the 
customer and the sucker are one and the same. This is the 
perspective of the proverbial snake-oil salesman.

     As America moved westward, the huckster became a 
familiar figure, whether he was selling patent medicine, 
the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, or some simulacrum of 
high culture. He became a great source of native American 
humor and satire. Mark Twain captured him in the Duke and 
the Dauphin, who go from one frontier town to another 
bamboozling hicks with, among other things, bogus 
versions of Shakespeare. Twain was also among the first 
to see that politics was the natural habitat of the con 
man.

     Later Meredith Willson would give us a similar, if 
more beguiling, cultural predator in THE MUSIC MAN. 
"Professor" Harold Hill appears as a lovable, almost 
benign character even before he is reformed by love for 
Marian the Librarian. Even his scheme -- selling band 
instruments and uniforms -- is fairly harmless.

     We can't really wish his comeuppance; after all, in 
America most of us are salesmen of one sort or another, 
and the con man is our cousin. We don't want to disown 
him entirely, especially if he is having fun. He's part 
of our national life and its distinctive energy, even a 
figure of nostalgia.

     All this has its dark side too. Willy Loman, in 
DEATH OF A SALESMAN, fails tragically because he can no 
longer sell himself; he can't huckster with conviction. 
If the customer is always right, and if the suckers 
aren't buying, he has only himself to blame. And so he 
does, taking his own life.

     The con man wasn't just a frontier figure; he was 
built into the nature of America itself. Sinclair Lewis 
saw him in the respectable businessman and, of course, 
the itinerant preacher, Elmer Gantry, a lecherous 
hypocrite who answers to no bishop, but makes do with 
only a Bible. H.L. Mencken feasted on religious 
hypocrisy, but, like Twain, found democracy itself a rich 
field for con men. Intellectuals loved Mencken's scathing 
treatment of fraudulent politicians as long as most of 
his targets were Republicans, but he fell from favor when 
he turned his satire against Franklin Roosevelt.

     Mencken would be appalled, but probably not 
surprised, at the veneration Roosevelt still receives. 
The real subject of his scorn was not the con man but the 
willing suckers, the American people, whose cultural 
level never ceased to decline (and still hasn't). Mass 
education has failed to improve things; on the contrary, 
it has only made them worse. Today the suckers have been 
to college; but they're still suckers.

     In fact academic and intellectual life have 
presented new opportunities for con men, especially in 
the social sciences. Margaret Mead's "discoveries" about 
uninhibited sexual life in Samoa turned out to have been 
fabrications; so did Alfred Kinsey's even more 
influential "findings" about sexual behavior in America, 
which became Holy Writ for the sexual revolution and the 
homosexual movement. Both Mead and Kinsey professed to 
offer only empirical, "value-free" data, yet these bogus 
scientific breakthroughs continue to have vast impact on 
American sexual norms long after their exposure as lies.

     Almost any lie can be sold to the educated public, 
as long as it is packaged as scientific and 
"progressive." More recently, an academic con man named 
Michael Bellesisles wrote a history of gun ownership in 
America, purporting to overthrow the mythology of a 
traditional "right to bear arms." It transpired that his 
research was almost entirely forged, but not before 
liberal intellectuals had hailed him for a major 
achievement in correcting common beliefs. There have been 
a number of similar academic swindles, nearly all of them 
perpetrated by leftists and Marxists.

     No brief survey of the subject would be complete 
without a mention of Bill Clinton, arguably the most 
successful con man in American history. Clinton didn't 
offer a single grand falsehood; rather, his assertions 
turned out to be a tissue of lies -- about everything 
from his boyhood to "that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Only his 
allegedly brilliant wife, who presumably knew him best, 
professes to have believed them all.

     Yet Clinton is hard to hate. He had the true con 
man's gift of incessantly charming gab -- what the late 
Michael Kelly called his "serial sincerity." Even when 
you knew he was lying, you couldn't help feeling that he 
meant it. He lied from the heart. Clutching his Bible as 
he escorted his wife to church, wiping away a tear as he 
spoke from a pulpit, gazing steadily and nodding 
sympathetically at interlocutors, he was the real thing: 
the true American fake. We shall not look upon his like 
again.

     Truly, Clinton was the man without a pedigree. He 
was born William Jefferson [!] Blythe, but there is even 
some doubt about his paternity; his mother was a barmaid, 
and her husband was apparently overseas nine months 
before Bill was born. (Mr. Blythe seems to have lacked 
Bill's knack for avoiding military service.) Eventually 
Bill took his stepfather's name and developed his own 
genius for talking his way into power and out of scrapes.

     As a boy in Arkansas -- we have his word for it -- 
he (with his little friends) boycotted buses in 
solidarity with Rosa Parks, wept at Martin Luther King's 
"I have a dream" speech, and shuddered when black 
churches were burned by Klansmen. Everyone has his own 
favorite Clinton yarns, but these are mine. Even as a 
child in a segregated state, he had already, precociously 
and independently, acquired the views and feelings that 
would be mandatory when, many years later, he went to 
Yale.

     Only one country could have produced such a man, and 
it's a pity that Twain and Mencken didn't live to see 
him. They did, as it were, prophesy him.

     One writer saw early on that Clinton was the stuff 
of which comic novels are made: Joe Klein, who captured 
him perfectly as Jack Stanton, the rascally presidential 
candidate, in the anonymously published PRIMARY COLORS. 
Too bad this funny book was upstaged by the uproar about 
its authorship, then about the movie that was made from 
it; it's not only a shrewd portrait of Clinton, but a 
witty comment on American democracy in our time. The 
suckers we have always with us.



Jurisprudence in Tongues
(page 5)

     Something strange happens to people when they get 
appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. They cease to think 
and talk like normal human beings. They become possessed 
by the Zeitgeist, which speaks through them in spooky 
accents, issuing preternatural calls for national 
transformation, uninhibited by tradition, precedent, or 
even logic. This prophetic spirit has been busy lately.

     First Sandra Day O'Connor issued a majority ruling 
in favor of affirmative action in state-funded college 
admissions policies. Using the magic words "diverse" and 
"diversity" fifty times, she called for realizing "the 
dream of one nation, indivisible" -- apparently 
forgetting, in her mystical transports, that it was the 
U.S. Constitution she was supposed to be ruling on and 
quoting the Pledge of Allegiance instead.

     Nor did she bother explaining how "diversity" -- a 
euphemism for discrimination against whites -- will 
achieve the promised wonders; but never mind. It would be 
an indignity to subject the prophetic spirit to such 
nitpicking.

     The Constitution doesn't forbid the states to fund 
schools and colleges or to dictate any admissions 
standards they happen to choose. But O'Connor didn't make 
her case on this ground; she assumed the authority of the 
Federal Government, and of the Court, to review and judge 
the states' actions in this area. It so happens that she 
approves the principle of racial preferences, discreetly 
applied (with certain arbitrary exceptions).

     But the Court wasn't finished. Three days later it 
ruled that a Texas law against homosexual sodomy was 
unconstitutional. This time the prophetic messenger was 
Anthony Kennedy, like O'Connor a Reagan appointee who has 
grown in office. He too disdained to quote the text of 
the Constitution, preferring to quote himself.

     In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which 
reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, Kennedy, a nominal Catholic, 
wrote, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define 
one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the 
universe, and of the mystery of human life." This woolly 
philosophizing has been widely lampooned -- in his 
dissent, Antonin Scalia mockingly referred to it as the 
"famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage" -- but Kennedy is 
so proud of it that he repeated it in his sodomy opinion.

     This kind of reasoning, to call it that, can lead 
anywhere. If abortion is somehow an extension of a right 
to define the universe, Scalia is quite sensible to 
apprehend the future applications of a "right" to sodomy. 
The lower courts teem with Anthony Kennedys; a Canadian 
court has just ruled that the law must recognize 
"marriage" between people of the same sex. It can happen 
here, and probably will.

     What's so appalling about O'Connor and Kennedy is 
the utter triteness of their minds. They seem to have 
studied metaphysics at the feet of Hugh Hefner, yet they 
regard themselves as pioneering thinkers, philosophic 
guardians of the Republic, entitled to reshape old 
institutions to suit themselves. Their opinions are thick 
with ill-digested cliches; and they get their cliches 
from the wrong people. O'Connor claims, in the teeth of 
every known opinion poll, "broad" public support for 
racial preferences, and Kennedy claims an "emerging 
awareness" that his benign view of homosexuality is 
correct -- though, again, the polls show otherwise. Both 
are avatars of what's loosely called "elite" opinion, 
though the supposed elite is now a dwindling liberal 
minority that still mistakes itself for an avant-garde. 
One might as well seek the leaders of tomorrow in an old 
folks' home.

     Both rulings are nothing more than solemn judicial 
whims, inspired by fading trends. In both cases narrow 
majorities decided that the Court's recent interpretation 
of the Fourteenth Amendment, already fantastically broad, 
still isn't broad enough to suit them. It just keeps 
emanating penumbras, which, as Kennedy's opinion 
illustrates, are rapidly approaching infinity. No state 
law is safe from the Court. The Tenth Amendment, with the 
whole federal structure it expresses, is dead. Scalia 
quipped that Kennedy's defining-the-universe dictum may 
turn out to be "the passage that ate the rule of law."



Panning Peck
(page 6)

     Monumentally handsome, Gregory Peck, who has died at 
87, acted like a monument. Movies, even good movies, 
could be made around him, but they never seemed to be 
made by him. Like all monuments, he was an impersonal 
presence. He belonged more on Mount Rushmore than on the 
screen.

     In real life, he was as decent as he appeared in his 
films. Those who knew him all agree on this. He was 
dedicated to liberal and charitable causes, but he was 
conservative in demeanor, and if, during his lifetime, 
Hollywood fell into aesthetic depravity, it wasn't his 
fault. He stuck to an old code of propriety, and most of 
the characters he played were irreproachable by any 
standard. He always seemed to be playing himself. The 
trouble is that that wasn't a very interesting character.

     Peck couldn't pass for Hamlet or even Stanley 
Kowalski. Or Sam Spade, or Norman Bates, or Rhett Butler, 
or a Capra hero like Mr. Deeds or Mr. Smith or John Doe. 
Atticus Finch, yes, of course. A lawyer of humorless 
rectitude, tailor-made for Peck. But who can recall the 
name of any other character he played? (Captain Ahab and 
Doctor Mengele don't count.)

     The congenitally noble Atticus, in TO KILL A 
MOCKINGBIRD, was really no different from most of the 
roles Peck played, except that he didn't carry a six-gun. 
Otherwise he was hardly distinguishable from the 
crypto-gentile Peck impersonated impersonating a Jew 
(implausibly) in GENTLEMEN'S AGREEMENT. In both roles, 
Peck played a mere symbol, showing up the stereotyped 
bigots around him.

     Late in his life Peck did a televised interview in 
which he reminisced about his long career, but said 
nothing about the craft of film acting. He left one with 
the impression that he'd never given the subject a 
thought. This was remarkable, since his career overlapped 
with those of some of Hollywood's greatest actors, men 
who really knew their business. These included Bogart, 
Stewart, Tracy, Brando, and Montgomery Clift.

     I want to stress that these were *film* actors. 
Stage acting has its own tradition, growing out of 
Renaissance rhetorical theory and practice, which put a 
premium on large gestures and vocal projection. The 
camera and the microphone made the older style obsolete, 
by picking up the slightest gestures and the subtlest 
intonations. Modern film acting is, accordingly, intimate 
and naturalistic.

     {{ Nobody understood this better than Brando. He 
achieved powerful effects by scratching his chest and 
digging wax out of his ears while speaking on camera. 
Artifice, to be sure, but artifice that made other actors 
seem artificial. }}

     Peck never grasped this. He persisted in a stagy, 
declamatory style of acting that never permitted intimacy 
with the camera (or the film audience). Some of his 
movies were good more in spite of, than because of, his 
inflexible performances. Hitchcock, famous for minimizing 
the need for acting in cinema, knew how to use him in THE 
PARADINE CASE.

     All this is not meant to attack Peck, but only to 
call attention to a certain quality of conventional 
Hollywood histrionics that he exemplified with unusual 
longevity. The really gifted Hollywood actors understood 
one thing Peck never grasped: that film acting means 
reacting to the other actors. Tracy wasn't an especially 
"versatile" actor; he "played himself," if you will, as 
much as Clark Gable did; he seldom "disappeared into his 
role." But he spoke every line with conviction, because 
he spoke it in exquisitely sensitive response to the way 
other actors had spoken *their* lines. And this is the 
essence of real film acting.

     Consider Clift. He is now nearly forgotten, but he 
was as original as Brando. His career was brief; he was a 
troubled man, alcoholic and homosexual, his beautiful 
face was smashed in an auto wreck, and he died young. But 
no actor was ever more sensitive to the camera. {{ In 
Hitchcock's I CONFESS he is a priest framed for a murder 
he didn't commit; he knows who the culprit is, but the 
seal of the confessional forbids him to say so; and when, 
under a detective's interrogation, he realizes that he is 
the prime suspect, his darting eyes and halting voice 
betraying both innocence and implication, we witness a 
near-miracle of film acting. }}

     Clift was so disarming because he could let his 
interlocutors get the better of him without losing his 
control of the viewer's sympathy. Even in showing 
weakness, he remained the dominant actor in the scene. 
Only Anthony Hopkins, as far as I know, has managed to do 
this as well. It's a very rare effect.

     Peck never achieved it, nor ever tried to. For him, 
acting meant speaking his lines resonantly, never getting 
the worst of an exchange; he hardly seemed to be 
listening to the other characters at all. They held no 
interest or surprise for him. He was an extremely good-
looking man, and the function of the other actors was 
only to make him look better. Even when playing a Nazi 
monster like Mengele (as if to prove he could be someone 
besides Atticus Finch), he conveyed mere villainy rather 
than evil. If he ever illuminated a character, I must 
have missed it.



NUGGETS

CONFESSION: I'm writing in a swoon tonight. My stereo is 
playing my favorite passage of music in all the world: 
the slow second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. 
I discovered it in high school, have listened to it 
countless times since, and have never tired of it. I've 
said it before, and I'll say it again: when he was in the 
mood, Beethoven could knock off a symphony with the best 
of them. (page 4)

DE HAUT EN BAS: At the Mideast peace talks, the Israeli 
daily HA'ARETZ reports, President Bush explained his 
recent actions thus: "God told me to strike at al-Qaeda 
and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at 
Saddam, which I did ..." (page 8)

ADIEU: No sooner had Strom Thurmond gone to his reward 
than Lester Maddox followed him. My Confederate flag is 
at half-mast. (page 8)

WILD ABOUT HARRY: On a recent Saturday I dropped in on 
Borders Books and found a line longer than I'd ever seen 
even during a Christmas rush. What had brought out the 
intellectual community in such force? Ah, but of course: 
the woman ahead of me reminded me that the latest Harry 
Potter book had just been released. Maybe I should title 
my next book HARRY POTTER AND THE SECRET OF SHAKESPEARE. 
(page 9)

DR. COHEN'S DIAGNOSIS: Ann Coulter, says columnist 
Richard Cohen, commenting on her new book TREASON, "has 
lost her mind." For a guy dealing with a victim of mental 
illness, Cohen's diatribe is strangely tinged with moral 
indignation. He even likens her "nutso archconservatism" 
to -- what else? -- "traditional anti-Semitism." Where's 
liberal compassion when you need it? (page 11)


Exclusive to the electronic version:

AH, THE USES OF EVOLUTION! A NEW YORK TIMES editorial 
alleges an "evolving popular opinion" in favor of gay 
rights. Got it? If it doesn't exist, just say it's still 
"evolving" and act as if it's already a reality. The Gray 
Lady's star girl columnist, Maureen Dowd, condemns 
Justice Antonin Scalia as a "stegosaurus" who yearns for 
"an airbrushed Fifties America that never really existed" 
for his dissent in the Court's pro-homosexual ruling. You 
don't have to refute his argument, it seems; just accuse 
him of belonging to the past, while denying that that 
past was real. The implication, of course, is that nobody 
in his right mind believes in permanent norms of conduct. 
Our only duty is to keep up with -- and to anticipate -- 
our (liberal, of course) evolutionary destiny.

THE BISHOP'S "WIFE": In New Hampshire, Episcopalians have 
elected, subject to approval of the national convention, 
their first openly homosexual bishop, V. Gene Robinson. 
Robinson has long since divorced his wife (they have two 
daughters) and is shacked up with his boyfriend -- 
without benefit of clergy, so to speak. The Episcopalians 
have been evolving so fast for so long I'm surprised that 
this is a first. I'd assumed that by now it was part of 
the job description. 



REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)

* Now They Tell Us (June 3, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030603.shtml

* Hillary's Abiding Commitment (June 10, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030610.shtml

* Did Bush Lie? (June 17, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030617.shtml

* Attacking the Rich (June 19, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030619.shtml

* Celebrating Diversity (June 24, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030624.shtml

* The Court versus Federalism (June 26, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030626.shtml


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All articles are written by Joe Sobran

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