THE WANDERER, APRIL 1, 2004
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Is The Pledge Unconstitutional?
The U.S. Supreme Court is now hearing arguments that the
phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is an
unconstitutional attempt to establish religion.
Of course one trembles any time the Court is asked,
or even given an opportunity, to decide a matter of
principle. Soon, no doubt, it will be ruling on whether
"marriage" means marriage. To paraphrase the noted
semanticist Bill Clinton, I suppose it depends on what
"means" means. Since the Court has long since redefined
"human life," it's hard not to consider its other rulings
anticlimactic.
"Under God" can be considered an establishment of
religion only by stretching the idea of establishment
absurdly. The Constitution merely forbids Congress --
nobody seems to notice that "Congress" is the first word
in the Bill of Rights! -- to adopt or impose a national
sectarian religion. Otherwise, the Founding Fathers spoke
freely about God and recognized the importance of
"religion," by which they meant Christian worship in
general.
The really objectionable words in the Pledge are
"one nation, indivisible," which actually are contrary to
the Founders' intentions. The Pledge was written by a
northern socialist minister, whose name escapes me, late
in the 19th century. The purpose of the Pledge was to
indoctrinate children with the idea that the United
States was a monolithic body -- a consolidated
nation-state -- from which no individual state could
withdraw. The war over secession was still a recent
memory.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
wrote that the United States "are, and of Right ought to
be, Free and Independent States." He would later add that
they had never surrendered their sovereignty to the
Federal Government, particularly to the Supreme Court;
unless they could reassert their sovereignty by seceding,
as a last resort, they would be at the mercy of federal
tyranny.
This is one important, yet unlearned, lesson of
Roe v. Wade. If the states had retained the right to
secede, the Court wouldn't have dared impose such an
outrage on them, denying them the power to defend the
unborn from physical violence.
The Civil War destroyed the sovereignty of *all* the
states, North as well as South, and when this final
defense of the states perished, it was only a matter of
time until the defense of the unborn perished too.
Arbitrary judicial power was one result of that war,
which is now remembered as a noble and picturesque memory
rather than the horror it was. The U.S. Constitution now
means whatever the U.S. Supreme Court, that unpredictable
oracle, decides it means. It's called a "living
document," when in truth it's a dead letter.
The Clarke Revelations
Emerging facts about the Iraq war continue to
embarrass the Bush administration. Richard Clarke, former
head of President's Bush's national security staff and
its counterterrorism expert, has published a memoir
titled AGAINST ALL ENEMIES, in which he relates his
frustrating struggle to direct the War on Terrorism
against al-Qaeda, while his higher-ups, including Bush
himself, were determined to wage war on Iraq. Clarke
insisted that Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein, was
behind the 9/11 attacks, and in July 2001 he warned that
a major al-Qaeda attack was imminent; but he and other
experts were brushed aside.
Clarke supported the War on Terrorism, but not the
war on Iraq. By grim coincidence, the Madrid bombings
have just indicated that he was right. The Iraq war did
nothing to stop terrorists and may even have strengthened
them. Clarke did think the war on Afghanistan might
damage al-Qaeda, but Saddam Hussein's regime had nothing
to do with it.
According to Clarke, the neoconservatives, led by
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were obsessed
with hitting Iraq, Israel's chief enemy, and resisted
Clarke's focus on al-Qaeda. He quotes Wolfowitz asking
dismissively, "Who cares about a little terrorist in
Afghanistan?"
Wolfowitz calls this a "fabrication," but it rings
true. The neocons, as well as the Bush team, were
obsessed with Saddam. Al-Qaeda didn't even qualify for
the "axis of evil," a conceit of the neocon speechwriter
David Frum used in Bush's 2003 State of the Union
message. North Korea could somehow be linked to 9/11, but
not al-Qaeda.
Bush himself pressed Clarke to find links between
al-Qaeda and Saddam, but he was clearly more interested
in the latter than the former. True to form, the Bush
circle is now trying to portray Clarke as some sort of
Clintonite dove, but he was eager to attack what he saw
as the real problem, and he'd also served under Ronald
Reagan and the first George Bush. He confirms, in richer
detail, what Bush's former treasury secretary, Paul
O'Neill, has also disclosed (only to be contradicted and
defamed by the Bush circle).
The inside story of the Iraq war is a tale of
bungling and deceit. No wonder that Uncle Sam is now
seen, around the world, as Yosemite Sam, always firing
wildly and missing the target. And no wonder Spain has
now rejoined what the Bush team calls "Old Europe":
France, Germany, Belgium, and the Vatican, all of which
are skeptical of America's ability to handle the growing
problem of terrorism without making it worse.
The Lesson That Wasn't Taught
During the somewhat raucous and rancorous campaign
against Mel Gibson's movie, various writers, like Charles
Krauthammer, accused Gibson of defying Vatican II by
reviving "the lesson that had been taught for almost two
millennia: that the Jews were Christ-killers."
Funny, I was catechized before Vatican II, and I
don't remember that lesson. It's not in the Gospels, the
Creeds, the Church fathers (as I know them), or papal
teachings; I don't recall any mention of it in St. Thomas
Aquinas or Dante. Odd that a doctrine allegedly so
central in Christian history -- and so hard to reconcile
with the Christian principle of personal responsibility
-- should be so elusive. Yet Krauthammer says it resulted
in "countless Christian massacres of Jews."
So where is this notorious "lesson"? As a lover of
English literature, I did a bit of spot-checking. Even if
it was never an official teaching of the Church, it might
have shown up in popular literature. I searched three
famous Christian works whose villains were Jews. They
accuse Jews of many things, but not of killing Christ.
First was "The Prioress's Tale," in THE CANTERBURY
TALES of Geoffrey Chaucer. It's the story of an innocent
child whose throat is cut by a band of Christian-hating
Jews. The tale shows Jews in an ugly light, but there is
no mention of their bearing guilt for the crucifixion.
Even more bizarre is THE JEW OF MALTA, ascribed to
Christopher Marlowe and dating from around 1590. Barabas,
the Jew of the title, is a figure of almost farcical
malice. He hates Christians so much that he walks abroad
at night poisoning wells; when his own daughter converts
and becomes a nun, he poisons her too, along with her
whole convent. The play pulls out all the stops to make
Barabas pure evil; yet there is no suggestion that he is
a "Christ-killer."
And of course there is Shylock in Shakespeare's
MERCHANT OF VENICE. He hates Christians and tries to
claim his "pound of flesh" from one of them. The
Christians call him many names -- "cutthroat," "wolf,"
"misbeliever," "dog" -- but it never occurs to them to
call him a "Christ-killer."
I might cite other works now considered
anti-Semitic, such as Charles Dickens's OLIVER TWIST, but
why go on? To say that this slander against Jews was ever
a major feature of Christian doctrine or popular culture
is itself a slander.
+ + +
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