Introduction

THE EVER-QUOTABLE G.K. CHESTERTON ONCE WROTE that "Modern toleration is really a tyranny"-it made people fear to say what they thought-as he put it, "I may not say that Buddhism is false" even though "that is all I want to say about Buddhism." Hence the title of our lead article, in which Ellen Wilson Fielding does . . . well, what she does so well: Ellen has the knack of getting inside an argument, to put things in a way that makes you wonder why you never thought of putting it that way yourself. For instance:

The vast majority of those who won freedom for us under Washington, and gained for us a new birth of freedom under Lincoln, and defended those freedoms abroad in World War II, did not have on their minds the right to put to death the unborn, or hasten the death of the old, or sanction marriages of homosexual couples.

Without question what she says is timely: we now "tolerate" things unthinkable just months ago? Yes, there were sex scandals in the White House back when they never made front-page news: an old joke was that, when Woodrow Wilson proposed to Edith Galt (who as First Lady ran the nation after Wilson's stroke), she was so thrilled "she fell out of bed"-only Insiders heard that kind of thing, and of course it was funny, there are "clean" dirty jokes. But now, with the incumbent president's "alleged" sins the staple of night-time TV, who's laughing? Perhaps the Funny-Men themselves: freed from all restraints, they can now make us tolerate prime-time porno-speak.

As. Mrs. Fielding makes plain, bad ideas have consequences: we "tolerate" what we don't believe at the cost of destroying belief; re homosexual "marriage" she says "How can we be husband and wife and family if these words have expanded so far that they have burst the boundaries of their definitions? What does it then mean to be husband and wife and family?" Quite right again. You will note that she also quotes Mr. Gary Bauer, about whom much more follows, and concludes with another Chesterton gem that neatly sums up her case.

Next Maria McFadden takes up a different kind of toleration that directly affects families: the "Day Care" craze. Time was when most people thought that parents knew best how to raise their own children-or ought to-it was their job (in America, it was traditionally considered a God-given responsibility?). But we now live in The Age of the Expert, who Knows Better. Actually, anti-parentism is a stock feature of utopian ideologies: Lenin baptized the "give me the child and I'll give you the man" nostrums once used to damn Jesuits! Ironically, the current popularizer is the mother of only-child Chelsea: Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village may be her way of explaining why somebody else should stay home and bake the cookies for your kids!

Seriously, Maria tackles a serious national problem: both economic and cultural pressures have put young mothers into the workplace; whereas government could alleviate those pressures (current tax policies discriminate against intact families!), Big Brother prefers to spend on "child-care" bribes intended-as the prescient Mr. George Gilder wrote a quarter-century ago-to "usurp the last bastion of human privacy and individuality: the home." The mother of two preschoolers herself, Maria has no doubt that Mother Knows Best what the state cannot know, much less buy.

Can anyone stop Big Brother? Whenever the government makes "free money" available, it seduces support, even from some "conservative" politicians pledged to oppose statist encroachments onto "family" affairs. But Mr. Gary Bauer, head of (among other things) the aptly-named Campaign for Working Families, stands adamantly opposed to federal Nannyism, so much so that he is now considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in the year 2000. Bauer's agenda also includes opposition to abortion, which of course interests us, so we asked Mr. William Murchison, our intrepid contributing editor, to interview Mr. Bauer.

Murchison begins with the obvious question: "Gary Who?" Bauer's is not yet a household name, nor does he immediately conjure up a "presidential" image in person-indeed, he projects a very thoughtful persona-in many ways Bauer is the perfect opposite to the "Tall, Dark and Vacant" image of the likely Democratic leader, Mr. Al Gore. In short, Bauer will contend in the marketplace of ideas, and you get an insider's view into his thinking here.

The next obvious question is: Can any "outsider" make it? Except for Wendell Willkie-really a desperation Moon-shot at an unbeatable Franklin Delano Roosevelt-modern major parties have restricted their choices to candidates with an established political base, however useless (as Senator Bob Dole's proved to be). But in 1992 Pat Buchanan seriously challenged that received wisdom: running as an established image-personifying hard-core conservative ideas-he scrambled the whole political scene, fatally wounding (it certainly seems in retrospect?) the incumbent President George Bush. The beneficiary was Bill Clinton who, ironically, had the weakest political base since Kansas Gov. Alf Landon was sacrificed to FDR in 1936.

Four years later, Mr. Steve Forbes launched another idea-driven challenge to orthodoxy; his mistake was a one-idea ("Flat Tax") agenda, but it was enough to scuttle Buchanan's surprisingly-successful second effort. Forbes, unmistakably planning a second try himself, has wisely expanded his agenda deep into the "social issues," most notably abortion, which is why we interviewed him (see our Fall, 1997 issue). But Gary Bauer was already there: his impeccable antiabortion credentials go back to his days as Ronald Reagan's bright young policy expert; nor has Bauer ever wavered in the tempered-but-tenacious advocacy of his "social issues" agenda. So what you get here is a strong dose of the Right Stuff, from a battle-hardened professional-a politician "without portfolio" as the British might put it-who means what he says. As it happens, just the other night (and a fortnight after we got Murchison's interview copy-these pesky quarterlies take time to get out!) we happened to switch on C-SPAN and there, at a forum in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, was Gary Bauer, just as sharp in TV's "virtual reality" as he is on our pages here-a preview of national debates to come.

We then switch abruptly "overseas," first to England and Ireland, then far over the waters (plus the Great Victoria Desert) to Western Australia. We begin with our faithful English correspondent, Lynette Burrows, who herself begins:

Maybe you have even read about it in your newspapers. The Countryside March in London on Ist March, 1998, was the biggest march ever staged in Britain. Never mind that some of the media immediately said that it was "almost as big" as the anti-nuclear marches of the early 1980s. That was just typical liberal-left bunkum. As a helpful police spokesman informed the Daily Telegraph, they used to claim half a million supporters every time they had a demonstration but, in reality, there were never more than 90-odd thousand people involved . . .

Actually, the big march did get considerable attention from our media, but the TV films that night "covered" just the grand spectacle, not the reasons why, as Mrs. Burrows puts it, "whole villages" descended on London, "leaving just the Church Warden and the retired policeman to act as Home Guards whilst they were away." Now-Senior Citizens may recognize "Home Guards"-after Dunkirk, England's defense was largely in the hands (or merely the minds?) of "ordinary Britons" who dug out old trench helmets, shouldered a grouse-shooter, and swore to defend their sceptered isle to the death. That was the spirit that mobilized a counted 280,000 Yeopersons to parade proudly through the capital with honor (neither the streets nor parks were befouled, not even a flower trod down!).

If we wax "corny" it's because it really is a grand story, told by a journalistic artisanette-it's certainly unlike anything we'd get "over here"? Imagine such an extravaganza to defend The Hunt: surely only a tiny fraction of the throng (translated to U.S. numbers, it would be close to 1.5 million) has ever hunted down a fox-but the symbolism was perfect, Tony Blair's New Labour regime would ban hunting precisely to dramatize its neo-Marxist contempt for Old England-the Labour-chic slogan is Cool Britannia now. To put it in Ad-Speak, these are the same folks who brought you abortion, euthanasia, condomania, Gay Lib, the lot. Sin is what you do to animals, unless of course you smoke-some transgressions remain unforgivable! The same kind of unregenerate Left-utopians are now ascendant in Ireland as well; those with fond memories of "Catholic Ireland" would be amazed to read the venomous Church-bashing featured endlessly in Ireland's "national" newspapers. Need we add that "abortion reform" is the stick of choice to beat the dogmas with?

Just as it happened over here in the '60s, the drive to legalize abortion is being fueled by Hard Cases. The first was the 1992 "X Case" of a 14-year-old girl who claimed rape (by a "Friend of the family") and swore she would kill herself rather than have the baby. She was "granted" a London abortion. Now another case involving a 13-year-old-but that's the story you get here from Denis Murphy, a young Dublin writer, who is very much involved in it all; in addition to giving you the facts, he provides a first-hand account-also as it happens over here-of the internecine warfare among Irish "pro-life" groups. So it's rather a sad story-the never-born baby who caused it all is lost in the political battles, his "child-woman" mother was likewise exploited, and now reportedly "heavily medicated" in a psychiatric hospital-for Irishpersons who lust to join the Modern World, this case is a Great Leap Forward.

Next we take a great geographic leap, all the way to Western Australia, where by a macabre twist the never-born baby was the focus of the story-his wouldhave-been mother tried to keep him in the family fridge until she could arrange a proper burial!-again, you get the story from another of our far-flung correspondents, Melinda Reist, who flew out to Perth, beyond Western Australia's great deserts (well over 2,000 miles from Melbourne) to do the on-the-spot reporting. As you will see, Australia's "choice" spokespeople can exceed even our own in brutal indifference to human life in the womb. We suspect that most Americans know little about what goes on "Down Under"-we think you will learn a great deal from Mrs. Reist, we're delighted to have her aboard (and amused: but for the FAX machine, her piece would have been in the next issue!).

Of course nobody needs to be told that indifference to the unborn is rampant back here-there's so much of it that we cannot possibly "cover" the story. But once in a while a particular pundit is exceptionally crass, for example Richard Cohen, a featured columnist in the Washington Post, that pillar of "choice" (provided you don't smoke). Full disclosure compels us to admit we live in mortal terror that Cohen will someday write something we agree with-in which case we'd have to re-examine our entire intellectual rationale-up to now we've been spared the trauma. So we were hardly surprised that, in his Christmas Day column, Cohen sneered at the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to make his point that every woman has "control over her life"-she could have had an abortion, etc. Imagine how pleased we were when our old friend Professor James Hitchcock picked up on that column for one of his own (he is syndicated in Catholic diocesan papers). So we did the obvious thing, and asked Hitchcock if he would expand on his Cohen come-uppance for us, which he has graciously done, in his usual style (which is, roughly, to beat the tar out of his opponent). Years ago there was a subway poster-ad here in Gotham for a brand of rye bread that featured a feathered Native American saying "You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy's." You don't have to be RC to enjoy this one.

You do have to have a strong stomach to get through our next article-in fact it isn't an article at all, nor can we vouch for its accuracy. What happened was, a colleague directed it to us: it had been sent to him because he's publicly associated with opposition to euthanasia; he thought we should consider it. We did, and contacted the "author"-his original draft hid nothing, if it isn't a true story about real people, he has invented calumnies beyond belief. But we had a narrative that-given current realities-could well be true and, to an editor, is one helluva story. So, with names and places changed, we give you the chance to read it yourself, and make of it what you will.

We conclude with a major piece on the "popular" Professor Steven Pinker, by Mr. Andrew Ferguson, an editor of The Weekly Standard (in which this article first appeared). Regular readers will remember our special section "Infanticide Chic: Professor Pinker's Peculiar Proposition" in our last issue (Winter '98), in which we detailed how he used (or was used by?) the New York Times to in effect argue for infanticide in "hard cases"-much as abortion was promoted in the '60s; in our judgment, the more Pinker's Darwinist nostrums are exposed, the better, so we are glad to reprint Mr. Ferguson's solid reporting job here.

We haven't left ourselves much room for appendices, but we do have some very good ones. Fittingly, the first (Appendix A) is an Expert Opinion on the selfsame Professor Pinker by the expert, England's Paul Johnson, whose latest blockbuster (1,088 pages) is A History of the American People. In Johnson's opinion Pinker is . . . well, to quote from Chesterton again, "Pre-historic" means exactly that, we don't know-Johnson rightly questions how Pinker & Co. "draw such confident conclusions" from the unknown.

Next Columnist John Leo takes on the recent failure of the Grand Old Party to take a, well, grand stand on the matter of "partial birth" abortions (Appendix B). Then we detour into the "Cloning" debate (Appendix C), with a feisty piece by Mr. Brian Brown, who asks a good question: "Where's the Outrage?" Cloning indeed outrages humanity but, as Brown says, inhumanities like abortion have paved the way for such "scientific" transgressions. With Appendix D, we come back to the themes of this issue: Columnist Paul Greenberg opinionates on the "first state-approved, physician-assisted suicide" under an Oregon law that, Greenberg says, could make death Big Business.

Finally (whew-this is quite an issue!) we give you a grotesque description of a new "Suicide Kit" available for just $30 (Appendix E)-order now and you won't need Dr. Kevorkian-we spotted it in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle (March 1 ) because we always look for anything by Columnist Debra Saunders who, despite her uncongenial pro-abortion stance, is otherwise acerbicly accurate, as you will see. We also hope you will see another issue as good as this one next time-it won't be easy, but we'll do our best.

J. P. MCFADDEN

EDITOR

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Spring 1998
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