Reflections  

Global Warming Strikes Back! — According to Variety, "Twentieth Century Fox has won an auction for [the rights to produce] 'The Day After Tomorrow,' a Roland Emmerich-directed disaster extravaganza about global warming that creates hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and the onset of the next ice age, penned by Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff."

Now why is it that global warming is always connected with tragic consequences? Isn't it just as possible that global warming would cause milder winters, rain in deserts, and longer growing seasons in famine-stricken areas?

The apocalyptic tones used by environmental "scientists" remind me of the warnings of witch doctors in Tarzan movies while demanding that the white heroine be offered to the volcano god. When Pat Robertson claimed that a hurricane headed toward Disneyland was God's way of punishing the Mouse for his tolerance of homosexuals, people laughed. But when Al Gore claimed the same hurricanes were nature's way of punishing greedy people for their reliance on the internal combustion engine, he was heralded as a genius.

And anyway, how can global warming cause earthquakes? Maybe the movie will explain. — Tim Slagle

Back to the Libertarian Party — When I heard that Harry Browne, David Bergland and Michael Cloud had been invited to speak at the LP's convention this summer in Indianapolis, I could scarcely believe it.

You recall the case: as reported in the after the LP discovered that national director Perry Willis was working for Browne and his campaign for the party's presidential nomination in clear violation of the party's long established, obviously necessary rules, it decided to keep him on, provided he agree to do no more work for Browne. Willis agreed. Then he, Browne, and others conspired to keep him working for Browne, while secretly paying him by laundering funds through the bank account of another Browne staffer. When this was found out, Willis confessed and argued that the success of the libertarian movement required that he continue to work for both Browne and the party, which justified his violating his contract and lying to keep the violation secret, and Browne promised a full explanation. But when it became clear that party activists were not buying Willis' ends-justifies-the-means argument, Browne decided simply to refuse to say anything about the subject, refusing even to answer questions posed by the LP's national committee. The committee responded by condemning Willis, Browne and the others involved in the conspiracy, including Bergland and Cloud, and announcing a policy of refraining from doing any business with them until and unless they offered a satisfactory explanation of what had happened.

So you can see why I was surprised to hear that Browne, Bergland and Cloud have now turned up again, as invited and presumably honored speakers at the party's convention. I called LP national director Steve Dasbach to verify the story, and he immediately did so. I asked him whether Browne had finally agreed to answer the questions that party chair Jim Lark had been trying to ask for the past year and whether the party had changed its policy against doing business with Browne and his cohorts. Dasbach responded that neither event had happened. Instead, the party's staff had concluded that having Browne et. al. speak at the convention "does not constitute doing business with them because we are not paying them."

Who decided all this? Dasbach told me that the decision to invite them had been made by an "ad hoc" committee of party employees, consisting of himself, political director Ron Crickenberger, Marti Balcom, Nick Dunbar, and Diane Pilcher. The committee had "wrestled" with the decision, he said, because of concern that it might violate the party's policy of not doing business with Browne, and passed it on for approval from party chair Lark.

There was "no good option," he said, but the committee decided to let Browne speak at a luncheon open only to those who buy the most expensive convention package, and even those delegates "choose or not choose to attend," so party members unhappy with the whole nasty business would have an option not to hear Browne. He added that the party had "a tradition" of inviting its past presidential nominees to the convention following their campaigns, though he noted that it hadn't invited Andre Marrou, the nominee prior to Browne to the convention after his loss. (And hadn't invited Ron Paul, its nominee in the previous campaign, either, although Dasbach did not mention this.) And Dasbach said that Willis would "absolutely not" speak at the convention.

When Browne's new enterprise had attempted to rent the party's mailing list for fund-raising purposes, the party had invoked its no-business-with-you policy. Now it was having Browne and his cohorts speak at its convention, where they would surely attempt to raise funds, without having answered any questions about their subversion of the party or expressing even the slightest remorse. I wondered whether the party would have simply given its mailing list to Browne had he asked, on the theory that this was not "doing business" because no money would change hands. Apparently, the party is willing to give Browne opportunities that it will not sell to him.

One longtime party observer I spoke with said, "Well, the party's talent is pretty thin," and I think he was onto something. Browne and his coterie raised a lot more money that any other campaign team and money is what pays the salaries of the party's staffers. And Browne was a glib spokesman for the party. Apparently, LP officials value these talents enough to overcome any qualms about Browne's past deceit and involvement in defrauding the party. I have long been surprised by the number of the party's leading figures who have told me privately that what Browne and his campaign did was horribly wrong, but who have never publicly criticized Browne or his staff. I don't know their motives, but I have to wonder whether they too liked the money that Browne raised and the glib public face he provided the party. But possibility that rank-and-file members of the party will vigorously protest the presence of Browne & Co. on the speaking platform at their party's convention could make the upcoming convention an interesting one.

This decision had one consequence for me. I had to kill two reflections I'd written for this issue of Liberty. One praised the chairmanship of Jim Lark, who had generally shown good judgment in dealing with the Browne matter, and had seen the party through some difficult times. The other suggested that all candidates for national chair pledge to keep Dasbach as national director. — R.W. Bradford

Crusades and jihads — There has been much discussion recently about the impact of the Crusades on the Islamic psyche, and with it, a lot of nonsense. The general view among the chattering classes is that medieval Islam was advanced, wise, and peaceful, whereas Christian Europe was violent and initiated the war on Islam. This view is not new. More than a century ago, in Nathan the Wise, German playwright G.E. Lessing portrayed both Jews and Muslims as fair and peace-loving, and only the Christians as devious and violent.

In one scene, Saladin's sister, opposing a liberal edict of the Muslim rule, asks why "Christians are here, when Muslims are not there." That, of course, is historical nonsense. Prior to the launch of the first Crusade, to regain the Holy Land, Muslims invaders had already conquered Spain and were in southern France, had conquered Sicily, and were attacking Christian Europe from the east as well.

Of course, Christian Europe was violent; it was a violent age. But the violence was not limited to Christians on Muslims. In fact, during the Crusades, there are numerous examples of European violence against other Europeans, while Muslims were no slouches in that sphere either. In the fall of Acre, for example, after promising safe passage to conclude a truce, Muslims broke their words and slaughtered every Christian man and child, saving only some of the women to use as sex slaves. If Christians need to apologize for the excesses of the 12th and 13th centuries, there are reciprocal apologies due. — Adrian Day

Boob tube — I happened to catch just a little of the Sam and Cokie show on ABC. The topic at that moment was the question of arming commercial airline pilots. Cokie was dead against the idea: she was "terrified" at the thought of guns on the airplane. She would be afraid of a "nutty pilot with a gun"!

Even before George Will could speak, George Stephanopoulos reminded her that the pilots controlled the airplane and she had already trusted them with her life when she boarded the plane. A "nutty pilot" didn't need a gun to kill her and everyone else on board, which was, of course, the whole point. George Will then pointed out that the objective would be to defend the cockpit in order to land the airplane in the event of a terrorist takeover of the passenger compartments.

Cokie then said something like "What good is it to land a plane full of dead people?" Sam came to her rescue to change the subject before it could be said that a plane full of dead passengers is be

tter than a plane full of dead passengers and the destruction of the U.S. Capitol building or White House, for instance. It goes to show, among other things, that if you are the beautiful, Wellesley-educated daughter of a U.S. Congressman you can get paid millions of dollars to be a fool on American network television! — Jim Ross

Conversation with an ex-priest — I phoned a friend, a former priest, now an architect, the day after Monsignor Eugene Clark delivered his arch-conservative homily at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan.

Monsignor Clark, Edward Cardinal Egan's stand-in when Egan was called to Rome to see the Pope, pontificated from the pulpit at St. Patrick's: "We know — we won't mention it outside the cathedral — we are probably the most immoral country, certainly in the Western hemisphere, and maybe the larger circle."

Those words were spoken from the most prominent Roman Catholic pulpit in New York City, a pulpit not far from what used to be the World Trade Center, before other clerics half a world away decided, too, that America was at the bottom of the international morality pile.

"What's his standard?" asked the former priest. "We're worse than countries that chop off a woman's head for adultery, worse than countries that are chopping off hands for stealing? We're more immoral than nations that target parts of their own populations for starvation? Worse than China, with people in prison for political beliefs? What's his standard for morality?"

On top of blaming America, Monsignor Clark pontificated at St. Patrick's that gay men shouldn't be allowed to be priests, and that the idea that people are born gay is simply "not true."

"How does he know?" asked the ex-priest. "How does he know that people aren't born gay? Those urges are natural, for them, as natural as a heterosexual man's urges for a woman."

"There is no evidence whatsoever that men who are homosexual are any more a threat to boys than men who are heterosexual are a threat to girls," says Fred Berlin, MD, a member of a top-level commission appointed by Bernard Cardinal Law to set guidelines for the church response to abuse allegations. If Berlin, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, is right, will Monsignor Clark recommend that straight men also not be allowed to be priests?

Why, then, the reported 4-to-1 ratio of involvement with boys over girls in the current priest scandal? "It's mainly a matter of access," explains the former priest, "sexism in the church. You didn't have girls' choirs 20 years ago, when most of these cases we're hearing about happened. There were no altar girls. Only boys helped in the sacristy. It was a male environment, like prison. The homosexual activity in the jails doesn't mean that most of them are gay."

The issue we're dealing with, he says, more than anything, gay or straight, is male sexuality. "For a lot of men, whether it's due to conditioning or animal instinct, to be a true male means to be dominant, to have the power. Women are talked about as 'castrating,' for instance, when they want equality. For some men, if they don't feel that superiority, that power, they go lower, to a 30-year-old, or to 20 or 15. It's the 25-year-old husband hitting on the babysitter, or Hugh Hefner with his mansion full of bunnies."

It's the male ego that drives it, he says. "They want someone submissive and adoring. For women, it's the opposite. They seek equality, or someone stronger. There aren't millions of women who see a mansion full of dummies as the ultimate turn-on."

In 1970, a study commissioned by the American bishops said that two-thirds of priests were immature psychosexually. Many go into the seminary right out of high school. Add the prohibitions on them getting any experience, plus the fear, guilt, and raging hormones, and the access to children — and, if my friend's right, the domination dynamics of male sexuality — and we shouldn't be surprised at what's happening. What other outcome, given this mix, would be more likely?

"In my six years in the seminary, there was nothing taught about sex, except the prohibitions. Celibacy for nuns and priests, no birth control, no masturbation, no premarital sex, no gay sex, the Virgin birth — all of it saying that the pinnacle of living is not to have sex. You don't learn how to express yourself sexually with another person. And when the urges come, when they become too strong, where's there to go? To where you feel safe? To where, in fact, it's the most dangerous?"

And the church won't change, he says. "When the Church began, it was about caring, solace, community and unity. Now it's divisive. Now there is panic because they are losing their kingdom."

He explains how he began to rebel after hearing his first confession. "A woman with five kids whose husband had three jobs came crying, saying she was going to use birth control. I was supposed to say her husband could get a fourth job, that God would provide. Instead, I told her birth control was okay. A young couple came crying, broken-hearted at the death of their baby who had not been baptized. They cried that their baby would never see God. I couldn't tell them to believe the church. The line around my confessional went around the block, but I was creating my own church. I knew I would have to leave them, that I would be leaving them with someone else, so I told them they didn't need the church to tell them right from wrong, that they could think for themselves." — Ralph R. Reiland

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