SEN. RICK SANTORUM V. SEN. BOB CASEY JR. – NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE ON WOMEN’S ISSUES AT ALL

Rather than engaging in ad hominem attacks on Sen. Santorum’s religion or on the Catholic Church, it behooves all of us to instead analyze the politics and electorate of Pennsylvania.  Ad hominem attacks are an abusive form of argument; proper arguments should address the merits of an opponent’s position, and refute the merits thereof, rather than attacking either the person, or a straw man, e.g. a caricature of the person.  Abusive argumentation has long been recognized, since the time of Aristotle, as a form of FALLACY, not entitled to serious logical consideration by rational minds.  Consequently, let us engage in some rational discourse on the merits of the question at hand and cease from ABUSIVE and FALLACIOUS ARGUMENTATION techniques such as ad hominem attacks and attacking a straw man.

Sen. Arlen Specter of PA

Let us turn, then, to the Politics of Pennsylvania (“PA”), and why it produces such conservative politics and politicians, especially conservative male politicians, and particularly conservative male catholic politicians recently.  It was for many years a bastion of moderate Republicanism, and indeed, until the 1930s, Philadelphia and the Union League were synonymous with the post-Civil War consensus that the Republican Party was the proper party for all educated persons to vote for in the Northeast.  Indeed, the city was so identified with core national Republican values that the Athletics even adopted an elephant as their team logo in the early 1900s, a symbol retained to this day by the Oakland Athletics, though it is dubious they know what Connie Mack was thinking when he adopted the symbol 111 years ago.

This consensus began to break down after the Great Depression and FDR, though it lingered on for many years as the so-called “Rockefeller-Eisenhower-Nixon” wing of the party, which was Northeast and moderate, and bipartisan with the Democrats on foreign policy, social security, fiscal & monetary policy and many other fundamental issues.  This consensus of course began to break down with the emergence of the Goldwater faction in 1964, which was opposed by the Scranton faction in 1964 (again led from PA), leading to Nixon re-assuming the reigns in 1968 and 1972.  With Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Ford took over and Rockefeller became VP, leading to a bitter fight between the Reagan and Ford wings of the party in 1976, and another bitter fight between the Bush and Reagan wings in 1980, finally emerging in victory both in nomination and election for the conservative wing of the Republican Party in 1980 for Reagan and the conservatives.  A new day had dawned in America.  But to some degree, the bipartisan consensus which had existed since FDR between the Democrats and the moderate Republicans was now endangered.

Nowhere was this tension more dramatically played out the past forty years than in PA.  PA was represented until 1991 by two stalwart moderate Republicans–Sen. Arlen Specter, a bipartisan member of the Warren Commission, and Sen. John Heinz, a moderate Republican loyal to the elderly and to Social Security.  These two Senators were cornerstones of what was, up to that point, a still very strong Northeastern moderate wing of the Republican party.  Both were solidly dedicated to bipartisanship, courtesy, gentlemanly behavior and getting things done on the Senate floor notwithstanding partisan differences.

This began to unravel slowly with the sudden airplane death in 1991 of Sen. John Heinz.

The Late Sen. John Heinz of PA

A sudden election was called in 1991 and an unknown political consultant was brought in from the South named James Carville to manage the campaign of an enormous

PA Sen. Harris Wofford with President John F. Kennedy in early 1960s

underdog, former University President and JFK kitchen cabinet member Harris Wofford, who was to stand election against former Governor Richard “Dick” Thornburgh.  At

Gov. Dick Thornburgh visits Centralia PA to inspect its ongoing Mine Fires in the 1980s

the time, Thornburgh had something like a fifty point lead in the polls, and tons of money.

James Carville - Wofford's 1991 PA Political Consultant

Sen. Heinz’ widow Teresa Heinz, now heiress in part to the Heinz catsup fortune, would then go on to marry Mass. Sen. John Kerry, in effect making him an instant near-billionaire and projecting him to the front rank of presidential contenders for 2004.  This nearly changed U.S. history, but Kerry’s bid failed.  Looking back, it is all too likely that a John Heinz bid for President would ultimately have succeeded in the long run just where Kerry failed–he had the looks, the charm and the moderate views to win.

Sen & Mrs. John & Teresa Heinz prior to his untimely death in 1991

This might have changed the entire course of the Republican Party and US History.

Sen & Mrs. John Kerry & Teresa Heinz Kerry; Her Money Inherited from John Heinz's Death in 1991 Nearly Made Kerry President in 2004

Returning to the 1991 election, Carville made universal health care an issue, and Wofford shocked the nation by defeating Thornburgh, becoming the first Democratic Senator from PA in decades.  At the same time, Carville’s work came to the attention of a bright young Governor from Arkansas with Presidential aspirations–one William Jefferson Clinton.  Carville’s conjunction with Clinton, and with George Stephanopoulos, on the 1992 campaign, documented in THE WAR ROOM documentary film, is now legendary, but all of this began in PA with Carville and Wofford.

It was during the Wofford campaign in 1991 that Carville legendarily quipped that “between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was Alabama in between,” referring to the fact that Pennsylvanians in all portions of the state except for Philadelphia & Allegheny county regions were pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, exceptionally elderly (the oldest voting population in the USA outside of Florida) and very church-going, as well as being one of the most demographically Catholic and ethnic voting populations.  In addition, PA has the lowest % of college educated persons of any state in the Northeast corridor–it is the prototypical location of high school educated union card carrying labor, and many of those voters were either Nixon Republicans or Reagan Democrats, but definitely not liberal Democrats.  Except of course for the two large cities, and even there, most of the male voters care more about football than about politics.

In 2008 Hilary Clinton carried nearly every county of PA v. Obama and won the PA Primary by running to the right of Obama

Fast forward to 1994.  The Clinton Administration has badly failed on its health care initiative, and Sen. Wofford has to stand re-election in his own right.  This time, he is the heavy favorite to win, but Carville is not working on the campaign.  Wofford is facing an unknown challenger–Congressman Rick Santorum.  No one, absolutely no one, is giving Santorum a chance of winning.  In fact, Santorum is given less chance of winning than Wofford was given in 1991.

What happens next shocks not only the nation, but PA as a whole.  Not only does the Republican Party and the Contract with America sweep the midterm elections in 1994, but Santorum runs unexpectedly strongly and defeats Wofford narrowly to win election to the United States Senate.

Part of the problem with Sen. Wofford is that he is intellectual, aloof and takes re-election for granted, whereas Santorum is hard-working, engaged, personable and likeable.  The rest of the problem is that Santorum is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and a church-going fellow, whereas Sen. Wofford is a Northeast liberal who is none of these things–consequently it is Santorum who fits the mold of what PA voters want in their candidate (except for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia).  However, since Santorum is FROM PITTSBURGH, the Western Part of the State votes for Santorum, especially as Wofford is from the Eastern Part of the State, thus negating any liberal sentiment emanating from Allegheny County.

Sen. Santorum wins re-election in 2000, and actually runs better in PA than does Pres. Bush, who loses the national popular vote as well as the popular vote and electoral vote in PA, while Santorum wins his election in PA, in effect demonstrating that Santorum as of 2000 is more popular than President Bush.

Now we fast forward to 2006, and to the election Santorum lost for Senate by a considerable margin, to Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.

Let’s examine why he lost this election.

First, Bob Casey, Jr. was and is the son of a popular, two term Governor of PA who was known throughout the state.  Second, Bob Casey, Jr. was from a prominent Irish-Catholic political family as well-known in PA as the Kennedys’ are known in Massachusetts and nationally.  According to wikipedia:

“Casey was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one of eight children of Ellen (née Harding) and Bob Casey, the 42nd governor of Pennsylvania. He is of Irish descent on both his mother’s^{[citation needed]}and father’s side.  Casey played basketball and graduated from Scranton Preparatory School in 1978. Following in his father’s footsteps, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1982, and received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in 1988. Between both college and law school, Casey served as a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and spent a year teaching 5th grade and coaching basketball at the Gesu School in inner city Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Casey practiced law in Scranton from 1991 until 1996.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Casey,_Jr.

This is the most perfect Jesuit, Irish-Catholic resume you could possibly have for running for office in PA–Scranton Prep, Holy Cross, Catholic University, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and a year teaching at an inner city catholic mission school in Philadelphia.  Sen. Casey is just the most perfect catholic prepster ever.

Next, Casey is pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, and as we see above, a church-going catholic just like Santorum–in fact, he’s Irish-Catholic, as opposed to Italian-Catholic, which in PA, is a real advantage politically, just as it is in Massachusetts and nationally.

Consequently, the same wedge issues that HELPED Santorum win in 1994 and 2000–the issues that appealed to the “Alabama” parts of PA that are pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, and church-going and conservative on social issues–were of no use running against Bob Casey, Jr. because Casey, if anything, ran to the right of Santorum on all those issues.  As noted by Casey’s wiki bio:

“In the Democratic primary, Casey faced two Democrats with more liberal viewpoints: college professor Chuck Pennacchio and pension lawyer Alan Sandals. Both argued that Casey’s views on abortion and other social issues were too conservative for most Pennsylvania Democrats. However, Casey easily defeated both challengers in the May 16 primary, receiving 85% of the vote….Abortion….Casey, like his father did, identifies as pro-life. He has publicly stated his support for overturning Roe v. Wade.^[29] From Casey’s election until Specter’s party switch in April 2009, Pennsylvania had the distinction of being represented in the Senate by a self-identified pro-life Democrat and a pro-choice Republican (Arlen Specter).  He supports the Pregnant Women Support Act,^[30] legislation that grew out of Democrats for Life of America‘s 95-10 Initiative. The Initiative and the Pregnant Women Support Act seek to reduce the abortion rate by providing support to women in unplanned pregnancies. He expressed support for the confirmation of both John Roberts^[31] and Samuel Alito^[32] for seats on the Supreme Court of the United States; these judges are believed to be in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. Casey also opposes the funding of embryonic stem-cell research.^[33]   However, Casey voted against barring HHS grants to organizations that provide abortion services, though such services may often not be central to the organization’s chief purpose.^[34] Casey also supports over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception,^[35] and has voted to overturn the Mexico City policy, which bars the issuance of federal funds to overseas organizations that perform or refer for abortions.^[36] The authenticity of Casey’s pro-life commitment has been questioned by some prolife sources.^[36][37]  In January 2010, a writer for CBN wrote, “I wouldn’t want to be Senator Bob Casey right about now. He is coming under enormous pressure from pro-life groups because they say the ‘Pro-life’ Democratic Senator has not stood strong on the abortion issue during the current healthcare debate.” Casey, according to the CBN writer, had recently gotten “an earful and then some from pro-lifers during a press conference held at the Pennsylvania Capitol.”^{[38]  ….”}  

Id.  Clearly, Casey ran to the RIGHT of both of his Democratic primary opponents, and then ran to the RIGHT of Santorum in the general election on the social issues, not to the LEFT as his past opponents had done.  Casey was like the Democratic Santorum–only smarter, more conservative, more polished, and a better version, and even more socially conservative and catholic than Santorum was.  Casey ran to the RIGHT of Santorum on the social issues, but to the LEFT of Santorum on the bread and butter, economic and labor issues.

This makes Casey’s election to the US Senate in 2006 very unique among all of the elections in 2006, even though it is clear that 2006 generally trended Democratic and it is pretty likely that Santorum faced an uphill battle in any event even if Casey had run as a traditional liberal.  But Casey was no traditional liberal.  No one on the editorial staff of the Huffington Post or the New York Times would endorse him for national office if they truly understood either his positions, or the positions of the PA electorate.  In truth, the PA electorate holds positions at variance with the Northeast liberal elite and the West Coast elite, excepting Philadelphia, State College and Pittsburgh.

The results of Casey’s strategies were very clear; he ran well to the right of Santorum on social issues, but ran as a Democrat on union and bread and butter economic issues, while still remaining pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-life, pro-church, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and pro-adoption.

In short, there isn’t a bucket’s worth of warm spit’s difference between these two candidates on women’s issues at all.  In fact, PA has NEVER elected a women to the United States Senate.  Ever.  Not even close to ever.

Only two women have even been nominated to run for US Senate in PA History and both have lost, one back in 1964, and more recently Lynn Yeakel, who lost a relatively close race to incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter following the Anita Hill hearings in the 1990s, but still she lost and then rapidly faded from sight and power.

PA is clearly not a state conducive either to women’s issues or to women running for office.  PA has never had a female governor, a female senator and only rarely has it had female congresspersons.   According to the Huffington Post, as of 2009, there were only two women in its entire Congressional Delegation.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/senate-guru/pa-sen-the-potential-demo_b_187357.html.   It is astonishing how limited women are in political power in PA.

PA is well to the right of NJ, NY, DE and all the other northeastern states with regards to women’s issues and specifically women’s reproductive health issues.  The state legislature is overwhelmingly dominated by men, especially religious and catholic men, and the men who serve there are openly sexist and demeaning towards women who serve in the legislature and create what is in effect a hostile work environment for women who are elected and choose to serve their constituents there.  Recently, one of the houses of the PA Legislature voted 2012 “The Year of the Bible” by nearly unanimous resolution, while also simultaneously voting to cut student financial aid and aid to all state universities by more than one-third in the very same session that they also authorized tens of millions of dollars to hire replacement football coaches to take over for Joe Paterno at Penn State.  Apparently male legislators have their priorities in PA.  And first rate Division I football in Happy Valley is really far higher of a priority than education for the poor or the middle class, apparently.

Sad to say, often the same holds true in many of the rural county courtrooms as well as many of the appellate courts, although there at least in the past few years, some progress has been made.  However, in the major law firms of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, men hold by far the reins of power and women simply do not have any share of either the partner proceeds or the political shares of power that lead to business and partner revenues.

In short, it is a boy’s club, and often, a man’s only club in PA, notwithstanding the lip service paid to equality and opportunity.  Things in PA are NOTHING like NYC or Boston or DC.  They are backwards by at least twenty to forty years.  Many of the female partners who do make it in Philly prefer working over in New Jersey or up in NYC whenever possible–they find PA courts and clients to be very stifling and sexist in the extreme, and in any case most of the business is elsewhere.

Perhaps the reader imagines this is exaggeration, or opinion?  Let us introduce some evidence!

This is an actual example of tactices used against a female candidate for office in Allentown PA reported in the Huffington Post which occurred in 2006 and again in 2008:

“When she ran for mayor of Allentown, PA in 2001, Siobhan “Sam” Bennett was already well-known in her hometown. A former PTA president, she was a pillar of the community, having founded, led, or served on the boards of various civic organizations. So she was completely taken aback by what happened during her first stump speech as a mayoral candidate. Standing before a room full of men, she began to deliver her remarks when the chair of the meeting interrupted her with a totally bizarre and inappropriate request: “Sam, I want to ask a question all the men in this room have been dying to ask you: Just what are your measurements?”

As Bennett wrote in the Huffington Post:

I was in disbelief. And if this wasn’t bad enough, a reporter who witnessed this unabashed display of sexism wrote an article about that stump speech–and didn’t even mention the incident.Unfortunately, that experience was only a hint of what would come my way….

The Opposition’s Vehemence

What came her way when she ran for Congress in 2008 was far worse. Bennett was facing a possible challenger in Pennsylvania State Senator Lisa Boscola, and Boscola’s chief of staff, Bernie Kieklak, was well known in political circles for posting no-holds-barred commentary in local blogs. The remarks he let fly about Bennett at one online site are indicative of the level of sexism and misogyny many women candidates face.

To convey the intensity of Kieklak’s over-the-top sexism regarding Bennett and his extreme vulgarity, his comments are reproduced in their entirety below with minimal censorship: Sammy Bennett is a phony political w_____e who gives good h_____d and makes cheap, blatant political opportunists look like Mother F***ing Teresa. Even her p___y is made of plastic.” [sic] [offensive language edited].”

http://womensissues.about.com/od/thepoliticalarena/a/Women-In-Politics-Sexist-Media-Sexist-Attacks-Hurt-Women-In-Politics.htm

Truly shocking, abusive behavior towards a female politician.  But run of the mill for PA, sad to say.  Welcome to the training grounds of Sens. Santorum, Casey et al.

In short, to be successful in politics as a female in PA, you have to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but about ten times as good as a man, and have a hide made of armor plated kevlar.   Morever, many notable male politicians (including a prominent past governor) are well-known for their womanizing and aggrandizing tactics towards females, which can most generously be characterized as “Clintonesque”.  Even though these matters have been reported, still they go on.

This is the environment from which both Sens. Santorum and Casey have emerged and from which they ran for office.

Here was the result of Sen. Casey’s running to the right of Sen. Santorum on Social Issues according to Sen. Casey’s wiki bio:

“On election night, Casey won the race with 59% of the vote, compared to 41% for incumbent Senator Rick Santorum. Casey’s margin of victory was the highest ever for a Democrat running for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania.^[11]Casey’s 17.4-point victory margin was the largest victory margin for a challenger to an incumbent Senator since James Abdnor unseated George McGovern by 18.8 points in 1980.”

Id.  However, the bio goes on to note that as Casey’s re-election approaches this year, he is beginning to distance himself openly from President Obama again in order to appeal to the conservative PA electorate, particularly with his blue-collar base in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton (Luzerne & Lackawanna Counties) who are very upset with the President’s performance on economic issues:

“Casey is up for re-election in 2012, and has stated that he intends to seek a second term in the Senate.^[12][13] His re-election prospects are uncertain. Observers have noted that as the election approaches, Casey, an early supporter of Obama, has “started to oppose the president outright or developed more nuanced responses to events that differentiate him from Mr. Obama. Analysts say Mr. Casey wants to put some distance between himself and a president whose job approval ratings in Pennsylvania are poor.”^[14] In October 2011, the National Journal noted that “the Scranton area is hugely important for 2012” for both Obama and Casey, but “the city has among the worst unemployment in the state, and it’s filled with the blue-collar Dems who weren’t very enthusiastic about Obama when he first ran for president. How Casey navigates his relationship with the president will speak volumes about his re-election prospects.”^[15]“

One cannot get away from one’s positions–a candidate is what a candidate espouses.  Sen. Santorum, like Sen. Casey, is a warm, charming and personable fellow.  Both are married with a number of kids–Casey has four kids, and Santorum has even more, and both their wives are full time stay at home moms.  Because that’s what they believe in, for the most part.  That moms and wives should stay at home and take care of the kids, that is.  And both of them are pro-gun, pro-second amendment, pro-death penalty, pro-life, pro-catholic, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, pro-adoption, and so on.  Indeed, it is very difficult to measure their differences on women’s issues or women’s health issues at all.

This addresses the issues, as opposed to attacking ad hominem or creating a straw man.  These candidates have espoused their positions and come to be what they are in large part, it is theorized and shown here, because of the electorate they spent a good deal of time cultivating–the uniquely conservative PA electorate.  Whether appealing to that electorate will work nationally in either Republican primaries or a National Presidential Election remains to be seen.  There has not been a President elected from PA since James Buchanan in 1856 (though Eisenhower famously took up residence near Gettysburg after he retired, and was considered an honorary PA resident, and his family still live in PA).  Perhaps with good reason.

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The Sayings of Kung Fu, the First Season

Reblogged from THE SOPHIST: TWO SIDES TO EVERY QUESTION:

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The Late David Carradine in Kung Fu as Kwai Chan Cain

From the Crane, we learn grace and self-control. The Snake teaches us suppleness and rhythmic endurance. The Praying Mantis teaches us speed and patience. And from the Tiger, we learn tenacity and power. And from the Dragon, we learn to ride the wind. All creatures, the low and the high, are one with nature.

Read more… 754 more words

reposted with new photos from 2008 [caption id="attachment_945" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="The Complete Kung Fu on DVD Starring the Late David Carradine"][/caption]

ATHEISM – THE WORST “ISM” OF THEM ALL

Prof. Richard Dawkins was it again in yet another publication, arguing for the indefensible proposition, Atheism. As History has demonstrated, perhaps more than any other “ism”, including Communism, Nationalism Nihilism, Anarchism, Fascism and Nazism, Atheism is very likely the worst “ism” of them all, because Atheism lies at the heart of all of the other “isms”. And, making this ever worse is the fact that Prof. Dawkins is a respected Biology Professor, that he writes to undergraduates and graduate students, and that he should really know better.

Prof. Dawkins’ argument this time was framed and cloaked in scientific syllogism and enthymeme, to wit, that the scientific laws of physics and evolution (1) explain everything, and there (2) leave no room, according to Dawkins, for the actions of God, ergo, (3) God does not exist. A broad and sweeping argument, to be sure, but does it stand up under any sort of critical analysis?

We’ll examine the deeper logical argument of whether this is a proof of God’s non-existence in a moment, but first let’s examine whether this is a proof at all of anything.

I. ARE THERE SCIENTIFIC LAWS?

Initially, are there “laws” of physics or “laws” of evolution? Here, Dawkins has problems right off the bat. Modern scientific epistemology is sort of torn between two schools—the Thomas Kuhn school of paradigms and the Karl Popper-Carnap school of incremental advance of science. Dawkins seems to be resurrecting the Popper-Carnap school of epistemology—and yet right now, the Kuhnian school is ascendant.

What Kuhn basically says is that all scientific laws amount to is a reigning paradigm, and that science is a social process among scientists—meaning that scientific laws are not laws at all, but simply the best available paradigms which meet the approval of the current scientific community. This of course is a terrible oversimplication of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and subsequent editions, but let’s assume for the moment that you’ve read Kuhn, or been forced to read Kuhn. If you’re familiar with Kuhn, you would not make a statement such as was made by Dawkins about “scientific laws” proving that “God does not” and “cannot exist” because in Kuhn’s model of scientific induction and epistemology, men make scientific laws, and not particularly accurately all the time.

But let’s assume for a moment you’re a Popper-Carnap style epistemologist of science, and you believe in the intrinsic accuracy of the scientific laws. Even then, Popper and Carnap et al., accept Hume’s causality arguments and attacks on scientific “laws”, to wit, scientific law cannot explain “causation” but only a sort of probability tending towards a value between 0 and 1; or as Popper would put it, if I drop a ball five thousand times, it will fall to earth each time, tending to prove the “law” of gravity, but I still can’t be one hundred per cent certain that it will fall to earth the five thousand and first time, because of the causal arguments of Hume. All I have done is prove an increasingly likely probability of that causal association such that I might term it a scientific “law,” but what is termed a scientific “law” is really a correlation coefficient with a high degree of associative character, a high degree of probability, according to epistemologists like Popper and/or Carnap.

Likewise, if I have risen from bead a thousand times and seen the sun rise, that is tending to a probability of one that the sun is at the center of the solar system, but does not guarantee that I will rise to see the sun on the thousand and first day, because there is still not a causal relation, only an associative one. This is readily conceded by even the most formal of scientific epistemologists like Popper and/or Carnap.

Consequently, Dawkin’s notion of scientific “laws” fails because of the underlying failure of scientific epistemology. And yet Dawkins breezes over both the Kuhnian problem of paradigms and the Humeian problem of causation in violently asserting the overarching and complete validity of scientific laws, in spite of the fact that nearly all philosophers and historians of science and all scientists themselves are nearly unanimous in believing that there are no such things as immutable “laws” of science.

The fact is, just as there was no reality in the Matrix, there is nothing valid or solid about scientific laws. Scientific “laws,” including the vaunted “laws” of physics and “laws” of evolution asserted by Dawkins, are subject to constant and considerable subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) revision by scientists, and subject to paradigm change every 25-30 years or so as Kuhn describes. The late Stephen Jay Gould advocated a theory of not-so-incremental not-so-Darwinian evolution, which would have represented a major paradigm shift in the so-called “laws” of evolution, and increasingly, many empirical findings dispute the original theories and paradigms advanced by Darwin, who was, after all, just a good 19th century naturalist, albeit a brilliant one.

In many respects it is Galton, the statististician and cousin of Darwin, who has proven to be the better scientist in certain respects, of our time, since it was he who coined the phrase “regression,” a phrase without which social science itself would hardly exist today. Nor should we forget Mendel, whose observations were the foundations of modern genetics. It is not Darwin only who was the founder of modern molecular biology; there were many founders, and while Darwin might have been necessary, he was not sufficient.

Moreover, all scientific laws are subject to incremental change in light of empirical data, and all scientific laws are not really laws at all in light of the causal issues raised by the Humeian critique.

So are there laws of physics and of evolution which leave “no room for God?” Of course there aren’t. Just to take one example, the Darwinian paradigm of evolution was that evolution was gradualist. Darwin rejected sudden changes, and also rejected Lamarckianism. But both of these paradigms are and have been in the process of being assailed and replaced in the face of modern scientific evidence and new theory making by new groups of scientists. First, sudden catastrophic evolutionary change has gained a great deal of currency, c.f. Stephen Jay Gould, supra. The theory of sudden events such as asteroids plunging to earth and causing mass extinctions, and the notion that there have been five mass extinctions in earth’s evolutionary history, has gained real traction among scientists. And even more recently, changes in somatic dna and living animals have been re-evaluated in light of better understanding of molecular biology, prompting a re-evaluation of the paradigm on Lamarckian evolution.

As for the “laws” of physics, string theory is still controversial, no one has yet attained fusion in any controlled conditions dozens and dozens of years after it was predicted to be able to be done, scientists don’t know if the earth is warming or cooling, and if it is warming, whether humans or climate change cycles are to blame, there is still controversy over what the fundamental particles are, civilian use of nuclear power has run up against a stone wall in the united states (putting most physicists out of work), and nuclear proliferation has become a worldwide problem, perhaps proving that physics is yet to be the messenger of Armageddon and the doom of the planet through worldwide thermonuclear war.

So basically, the claims asserted by Dawkins about the laws of physics and the laws of evolution are wrong, wrong as to scope, wrong as to paradigm, and wrong even as to the claim that there are laws qua laws.

II. SCIENTIFIC LAWS AREN’T LAWS, AND EVEN IF THEY ARE, THEY DON’T EXPLAIN EVERYTHING

Secondly, do Dawkins assertions about the laws of physics and the laws of nature, e.g. that they “explain everything” and “leave no room for God”, carry any weight?

The obvious answer is, in light of this line of reasoning, a clear no. First, it’s obvious that the laws of physics and the laws of nature, in their current states, don’t explain “everything,” or anything close to “everything.” What they currently do is what all scientific laws do—they explain what’s obvious and well-settled, which is about the 20% of science you find in undergraduate textbooks—and the more advanced stuff is continuously debated among grad students, professors and advanced institute people at science conferences on a constant basis, over the internet, in academic journals, etc. as the scientific process is an ongoing continuous process.

A scientist who is arrogant and believes he already knows all the answers is no scientist at all. Such a man could not be a scientist, because a true scientist never believes the scientific laws are settled, never believes that all the scientific questions are answered, or that all the scientific issues have been explained.

Were that all true, as Prof. Dawkins erroneously suggests, then there would be no need to continue to experiment or for NIH or any other world or international scientific group to continue with biology or physics experiements. If we already know everything, why bother with seeking new knowledge?

The answer, the obvious answer is, we DON’T know everything, and we need to know a great deal more. We actually know very little. What little we do know we know pretty well, maybe with a probability of .80 or so, maybe .90, but as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the Pauli exclusion principle, molecular orbital bonding theory, the Church-Turing thesis and Godel’s theorem famously remind us, there are also things we can’t know within the framework of science and that we have to take on scientific faith.

Just to take an example from freshman chemistry—the notion of an electron cloud, electron shell, electron atomic orbital or electron molecular orbital. A “smear” of electron energy. The notion of electron “tunneling”. We really don’t know where the electron is, we can only guess where it is. Quantum mechanics, wave version and matrix version. Elegant mathematics, but still, electron electron, where is the electron?

For all that we know, we don’t know where the electron is, or where the electrons are, except that we know what region they’re in within a 99% region of probability. Or so approximately. That’s a far cry from a scientific “law” of physics. If Dirac and Heisenberg and Born and all their famous brethren were here, right now, none of them would claim that quantum mechanics or even quantum electrodynamics were scientific “laws” of a certainty sufficient to exclude the existence of God.

To the contrary, these theories were advanced modestly and no grand claims were made for them, as anyone reading the original papers (they’re available in historical reprints and online) would know. The authors were humble and careful in their work. This applies to almost all of the so-called “new physics” of the 20th century, going back to the original great three papers of Einstein of 1905.

III. NONE OF DAWKINS ARGUMENTS ARE A PROOF THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST – LOGICAL FALLACIES IN DAWKINS ARGUMENT

So to return to the initial question of this essay, is Prof. Dawkins argument a proof of the non-existence of God?

The answer is clearly no, because Dawkins is committing the logical fallacies of either Denying the Antecedent and/or Denying the Consequent. His arguments consist of an he implied syllogism and an enthymeme as follows;

(1) The scientific laws explain everything in physics & evolution.
(2) Since everything in physics and evolution is explained by sciene, God explains nothing in physics and evolution
(3) Since God explains nothing in physics & evolution, God does not exist.

It should be relatively clear, once we reduce Prof. Dawkins’ argument to atomistic syllogism/enthymeme, that it is clearly flawed, and commits logical fallacy, but let’s examine the logical fallacies further.

Imagine if the argument was stated this way:

(1) Physics & Evolution are remarkable.
(2) Physics & Evolution are unexplainable.
(3) If there is a God, God can explain the unexplainable.
(4) God can explain Physics and Evolution.
(5) Therefore there is a God.

I believe this accurately fills in the blanks of the “straw man” enthymeme that Dawkins is attempting to set up.

Now let’s take some converses and contrapositives. Let’s say Physics and Evolution ARE explainable, as Dawkins claims.

Dawkins argument there is as follows;

(1) Physics & Evolution are remarkable
(2) Physics & Evolution are fully explainable by the Laws of Physics and the Laws of Evolution.
(3) If there is a God, God can explain the unexplainable.
(4) God cannot explain Physics and Evolution.
(5) God cannot explain one or more instances of the unexplainable.
(6) Therefore there is no God.

We should immediately recognize the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent/denying the consequent here. The converse/contrapositive of changing physics and evolution to negations and God explaining same to not explaining same does not negate god’s ability to explain the unexplainable, or God’s UNIVERSAL existence.

There are several flaws in the logic here.

First is the instantiative assertoric error committed by Dawkins. To the extent that he states that “God exists” or “God Does not Exist,” he concedes, at least in some schools of thought, the existence of God qua God, via the assertoric and instantiative schools of philosophic thought. These basically assert if I state “a unicorn is blue” that unicorns must exist, somewhere in some potential universe, because I have conceived of unicorns in my mind and named them, e.g. given them a class appellation and attributes.

While there is controversy as to assertoric and non-assertoric logics, the fact remains that Dawkins was not careful to set forth whether his argument was one or the other, consequently, the old medieval Aristotelian argument that God exists because he named God, conceived of God and gave God attributes in his argument, means that he cannot turn around and then argue that God does not exist, because by stating or implying God’s existence, he concedes the fact of God’s existence by instantiative and assertoric principles.

In making this argument, it is important to distinguish between the statements “God is God,” “God exists” and “God has attributes.” Note the first is ontological, the second ontological-metaphysical, and the third is lexical and goes to class definitions. But in all three cases, Dawkins falls into logical error, because by merely naming God, he implies that God is God, God exists, and that God has attributes. Dawkins falls into the trap of assertoric discourse, because somewhere, in some religion, in some world, in some universe, there is a God, because he has conceived of one and named him, and given him attributes, and attempted to negate him universally, which cannot be done by definition. Moreover, God may even control physics and biology in those other worlds or universes or existences, since Dawkins’ arguments don’t address those worlds, universes or possible existences.

Second, Dawkins’s conclusion of a universal negation of God’s existence, is proceeding illogically and fallaciously, from an antecedent of God’s inability to explain some unexplainable particular events, when all that is claimed for God is God’s particular ability to explain some unexplainable particular events. The fact that God cannot explain a subset of “some unexplainable particular events” such as the laws of physics and the laws of evolution, in this world, in this universe, in Dawkin’s religion, does not result in the negation of the proposition that God can still explain some other unexplainable particular events in any or all religions in any or all worlds, etc. One cannot refute and effect negation of a “some x is y” statement by a “some x is not z” statement.

This would be clearer using first order predicate logic and the universal and particular quantifiers—I’ll get to that in a second—but let’s stick to Aristotelian logic for the moment.

Let’s see why dawkins is wrong:

(1) Physics & Evolution are remarkable
(2) Physics & Evolution are fully explainable by the Laws of Physics and the Laws of Evolution.
(3) If there is a God, God can explain the unexplainable.
(4) God can explain the unexplainable for some things in any and all possible religions in any and all possible worlds in any and all possible universes and in any and all possible realities.
(5) God transcends and is outside the explanation of, the laws of Physics, Evolution and Science.
(6) God cannot explain Physics and Evolution in this world in this universe and in this reality.
(7) God can explain the unexplainable for some things in any and all possible religions in any and all possible worlds in any and all possible universes and in any and all possible realities, except for and other than, Physics and Evolution in this world and in this reality and in Dawkins’ religion.
(8) Dawkins claims there is therefore not a God.
(9) However, Logic says there still is a God, since there are still events etc. that God still can explain other than physics and evolution in this world, etc.
(10) Dawkins argument does not invalidate the universal particular “God can explain the unexplainable” etc.set forth in argument (4) because it does not negate it for all instances of substitution value for “God can explain the unexplainable, etc.” set forth in argument (4) and thus commits the dual fallacies of denying the antecedent/denying the consequent as well as committing a logical fallacy of erroneous invalidation of a universal particular in first order predicate logic.

Notice what’s changed here, and feel free to draw your own Venn Diagram.

Argument 3 states that God can explain some unexplainables for all possible things for all possible religions for all possible worlds in all possible universes and in all possible realities.

Whereas Arguments 6 and 7 are particular existential instantiators—they quantify only as to God’s ability to explain physics and evolution. Negating them only negates some of the class of unexplainables which God can explain. It’s a subset of what God explains, not all of what God explains. Consequently, negation of them is not invalidity of God, God’s existence, God is God, or God’s attributes.

Here it is held that God can still explain some other unexplainable for all possible things, in all possible religions, in all possible worlds, in all possible universes, in all possible realities. Dawkins’ negation argument is fatally flawed, because in order to invalidate a particular universal, you have to show it’s false for ALL substitution instances of the particular universal. Dawkins fails to do this, and consequently his argument is a fatal instance of logical fallacy of denying the antecedent/denying the consequent, one of the oldest and best known logical fallacies.

Third, and note this, carefully, the thrust of this essay, is that Dawkins has actually failed to prove propositions (2), (6) and (7). So really, he’s failed to prove his premises as well, and if the premises fail, the syllogism also fails because if the premises are false, so are the conclusions.

So to summarize;

1) God exists on instantiative, assertoric grounds;
2) God exists because Dawkins fails to prove God’s existential invalidity and commits logical fallacies of denying the antecedent/denying the consequent; and
3) God exists because Dawkins fails to prove the truth of the premises of his argument and therefore the conclusions fail.

IV. FURTHER LOGICAL FALLACIES IN DAWKINS ARGUMENT

Of course, it would be a miracle if atheists like Dawkins were to make a logical argument in favor of their conclusions. People like Dawkins like to get to the conclusion first, and then make strained and illogical arguments full of logical and illogical fallacies in order to get to their ridiculous conclusions. That’s why their arguments seem so silly and so contrived.

In addition to all the foregoing, Dawkins commits the fallacy of the appeal to authority—he claims that because science—physics and biology in this case, and in particular the laws of physics and biology—are so accurate and their scientists so wonderfully supreme—that we should give up going to church and instead worship physicists and biologists.

Of course, this argument, when put in this form, is utterly ridiculous. Let’s atomize it;

1) Currently, you worship God.
2) God has great authority.
3) The Laws of Physics and the Laws of Evolution have Great Authority, as do the Physicists and Biologists.
4) The Physicists and Biologists are always right, and God is Always Wrong, when it comes to Physics and Biology.
5) Physicists and Biologists are Therefore Great Men.
6) Therefore, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, you should Stop Worshipping God, and God’s Laws, and instead Worship Physicists and Biologists, and the Laws of Physics and Biology Instead.

Now when atomized in this fashion, you can see what a silly, foolish, ridiculous appeal to authority Dawkins’ argument really is.

In fact, it’s really no different than Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Caesar Augustus Octavian claiming that they were not merely men, but Gods walking the earth, and therefore men should worship them, because they were great, and they were always right about everything they did, because they had conquered the known world.

It’s precisely the same syllogism/enthymeme. Dawkins’ argument for worshipping science over God is the same argument that oriental kings have used for centuries for their divinity. It’s called the “appeal to authority.”

It goes something like this: “I’m in charge, I’m always right, therefore, worship me.” Notably, the early Christians rejected this argument wholesale and never, ever bowed down to either oriental or Roman monarchs, until the Roman Emperor became a Christian himself, and prostrated himself before God and Jesus every Sunday with the conversion of St. Constantine and his victory with the cross—“in this sign I shall conquer” (“nika”).

I seriously doubt that any clear thinking individual, including a scientist, wants to stop going to religious services and start bowing down to another scientist in lieu of God.

Maybe Dawkins wanted to be an oriental king in a former life.

VI. BELIEF IN GOD IS A MATTER OF FAITH, NOT LOGIC

Perhaps a couple of more points are in order.

First, faith in God is not a matter of rational or logical argument. Kantians and neo-Kantians, and many moral philosophers, have been influenced to a large degree by Protestantism, and especially the brand of Pietism which Kant himself espoused, all of which emphasize a close personal relationship between God and Man, unmediated by the Church or the clergy. This has led to the mistaken modern view that morality and even religion must be justified, somehow, by logical, rational or reasonable grounds.

This inference, which is highly Kantian (or neo-Kantian), only makes sense if you aren’t Catholic or Eastern Roman Orthodox; however, one billion people are Catholic and another 500 million are Eastern Orthodox, and all of those Christians believe in God because the Church tells them to, and salvation is through the Church and its sacraments, not through God or any personal relationship to God. God doesn’t talk to people in the Catholic or Orthodox churches, unless you happen to have been a saint or a prophet. And reasoning about God’s existence is entirely and totally unnecessary if you are Catholic or Orthodox, because God of course exists—why else would there be St. Sophia, the Eastern Roman Empire until 1453, or the Pope, or the Patriarch, or Constantinople, or the Crusades, or the Catholic Church, or the Seven Sacraments, or Communion, or Transubstantiation?

Likewise, if you are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, etc., you don’t need to think too much about whether there is a God either—it’s pretty much implicit with the territory. It’s a peculiarity of Protestant thought that we sit around thinking whether there is a God or not. Frankly, I have better things to do in Church on a Sunday morning than to think about whether God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit exist or not. Like remembering where I parked my car, or when the next church festival is.

Especially apt is that every year we have religious holidays, like Yom Kippur, Christmas, Easter, the Jewish New Year, Passover, that everyone respects with dignity and honor.

Those who are atheists shower disrespect and dishonor on those who would worship freely.

The founders of the USA put freedom of worship in the first amendment. They were silent as to freedom not to believe in god, and they never intended for atheism or lack of religion to be protected by the constitution, notwithstanding any court decisions of any kind to the contrary. theories of hla hart and decisions of church and state to the contrary, faith is a big element of socializing our youth to right and wrong, and i join those who call for a return of prayer to schools, and those who want faith-based programs for our troubled youth. crime rates are very high and a little prayer and a little church or services have been shown to be the only thing that can help troubled youth, as Prof. DiIulio has shown many times over.

Point being, belief is a matter of faith, God a big mystery, and really none of it has much to do with science at all. On top of which, the vast majority of people believe in God and go to church, and the vast majority of scientists, including famous scientists like Einstein, Newton, Pascal, to name but a few, believed in God and attended services. Even Galileo in the end was more worried about his mortal soul than his scientific theories, and ended up recanting before the church. It’s a modern conceit to see him as some kind of champion against the church. Galileo was a perfectly good catholic.

VII. ATHEISM WAS THE WORST ‘ISM’ OF ALL TIME

Finally, atheism has the most destructive of social movements in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. First advocated by the French proletariat during the French Revolution, it resulted initially in the French Terror and the killing of innocent tens of thousands and endless rivers of blood by means of the guillotine in the 1790s by the Directory, as famously described by Sir Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. The French Aristocracy was either killed or sent into hiding, and tens of thousands of intellectuals were needlessly and thoughtlessly butchered. Churches and clergy were shuttered and church properties seized.

But worse was yet to come under Napoleon. Even though one has to admire Napoleon as a military figure, Napoleon’s policies regarding the churches set in motion a series of consequences which were to have long-lasting and far-reaching effects. First were the hundreds of thousands if not millions who died in the Napoleonic Wars, the first true “World Wars” if you will. Second, Napoleon effectively dis-established the French Catholic Church and clergy; destroyed the Spanish Inquisition and seized the best lands of the Spanish Catholic Church, rendering that church impotent; hurt the Catholic Church badly all over Europe; and incited Nationalism of a secular character all over Europe, particularly in Italy, Germany and the Balkans.

Napoleon destroyed the settled character of the Catholic Church in Spain, France, Italy and many smaller countries, and left those countries in permanent political and social turmoil as a consequent result, turmoil that has persisted to the present day. France has been through five or six governmental and constitutional changes since the Revolution and lost her colonies and three different wars including the two world wars; Spain has been through a civil war and many political instabilities; Italy despite the Risorgimento remains a politically fractured country, albeit an economically sound one; and many smaller catholic countries remain marginal in the European sphere.

The orbit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Balkan States have been particularly unstable, leading to World War One due to Bosnian nationalism, and fractures between orthodox and catholic partisans in Croatia/Serbia and Ukraine/Russia during World War II which the Nazis exploited, along with fractures between catholics and jews with the Nazis exploited during World War II in Poland and other lands.

Atheism and nationalism were at the root of these difficulties; had the pre-1800 regime stayed in place, unaffected by the atheistic, nationalistic whirlwind of Napoleon, it is doubtful that a Bismarck or a Hitler, a Lenin or a Stalin, could ever have risen up from the ashes. Atheism was the spawning ground of dictators and communism, and of modern world war and of modern genocides.

In some places, nationalism was a good thing, such as the Lower Balkans, where Greece and Serbia and Bulgaria liberated themselves from the Ottoman Turk, but in Germany, secular atheistic nationalism eventually resulted in German military imperialism and the rise of the German military state, and, eventually, Adolf Hitler, who was himself quite the atheist at heart.

Atheism and disestablishment of religion weakened the German and Austrian churches and paved the way for the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the onset of World War I, and the Russian Revolution. The so-called secular states of Turkey and Iran, which for many years engaged in brutal internal repressions of their own peoples as well as ethnic progroms, were also based in part on the atheism and nationalism of the Napoleonic era and Russian Communistic era.

As we now know, the Iranian secular regime was swept under by a religious theocratic muslim regime in 1979, which has influenced many other Middle Eastern regimes in the same direction since then, and the Turkish regime is under heavy internal pressure to do the same, become expressly religious, muslim and theocratic again. But these are false theocracies manned by leaders trained for centuries in secular, atheistic violence and bloodshed, and not true religious leaders at all.

Soviet Communism was based on atheism, and hundreds of millions died under this regime, as documented by Solzhenitzyn in his Gulag Archipelago works. In 1937 & 1938 alone 500,000 priests were killed for the crime of being Russian orthodox priests.

More modernly, Chinse Communist atheism has resulted in the destruction of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhist shrines in the takeover and occupation of a sovereign nation since 1958, and the destruction of a religious nation and its thousand year old religious shrines, and the exodus of its highly respected religious leader, the Dalai Lama. The atheist Communist Chinese show no respect whatsoever for religion. They destroy religious relics in their own state as well, have destroyed the thousands’ year old cult of Confucianism in their own country, and do not tolerate the many catholics, Nestorians and other Christians and protestants attempting to worship God in their midst. Tens if not hundreds of millions have died in China, Tibet and other occupied regions over the issue of religion.

In short, Atheism has been responsible for the deaths of nearly a billion people on this planet since it was first officially sanctioned by the French Revolution in early 1789. It is a hideous doctrine and once in place, one responsible for moral indifference to the point of recklessness to human death and suffering.

VIII RELIGION AND FAITH EXPLAIN TO US WHAT IS RIGHT FROM WHAT IS WRONG MORE CLEARLY THAN LAWS ETHICS OR MORAL PHILOSOPHIES; ATHEISM RESULTS IN THE LOSS OF MORALITY AND AMORAL AND IMMORAL CONDUCT ON A VAST SCALE

One may wonder, why is Atheism responsible for the loss of morality, amorality and immoral conduct on such a vast scale as this? The reasons are fairly simple.

The moral philosopher or neo-Kantian may think it an easy matter to prove why the Holcaust or why a genocide or why the killing of an entire Church and its clergy is morally wrong and indefensible. Perhaps a lawyer may say it is a violation of international law. All of these words are nice words—but they are mere words.

And aren’t there always debates about this? Don’t the French deny killing anyone? And don’t the Turks deny an Armenian Holocaust? And the Germans admit a Holocaust, but never seem to do enough? And the Russians never seem to admit all their wrongs? And the Chinese say they’ve done nothing wrong in Tibet?

Morality and seeing right from wrong, it seems to me, cannot be a matter for moral philosophy, ethics boards or international legal commissions.

What is needed, in the end, are religious views to determine right from wrong. We know in our hearts what is right from wrong because we have a religious sense of things. No one is going to sit and read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and achieve some transcendental state of pure moral reasoning in the internet age; but it’s easy enough to go to mass or services and hear a sermon and let a priest or deacon explain with a story from the bible why this or that thing is wrong.

It would be my contention that without religion, without the Church and the Bible as frames of reference, we would not know, and I mean really know, that the Holocaust, Genocide, Extermination of entire churches and peoples and religions, are wrong and crimes against God and not merely crimes against humanity or laws.

The German people as a people made Nazism and state-sponsored atheism their religion for more than a dozen years, and consequently, amorality, immorality, and finally mass killing and genocide, seemed acceptable to them, first by degrees and eventually on a grand scale.

But this was not unprecedented. The same thing had happened before—in Revolutionary France—in Communist Russia—in Secular Turkey—anywhere that traditional religion was swept aside, a wave of butchery, savagery and killing swept the land, and the people forgot their first and foremost rule, thou shalt not kill.

The atheist has no moral compass. The atheist doesn’t believe in the ten commandments. The atheist kills one or many and feels the same about both. That is the bottom line. Atheism results inevitably in moral chaos and an utter loss of morality, leading to evil on a grand scale. All of the great killing sprees of modern history have been effected by godless states—atheistic states if you will.

Atheism is the worst ism of them all, because atheism is at the heart of communism, Nazism, socialism, fascism, all the other isms.

Religion tells us in Black and White, without shading, that these killings, these acts, these things are wrong.

Only the Atheist is capable of moral relativism in these matters.

Only the Atheist makes sophistical refutation of claims that he is a mass murderer.

IX. WHAT DOES THE BIBLE AND WHAT DOES GOD SAY ABOUT ALL THIS?

Compare these claims of moral relativism and legal defenses of state-sanctioned mass murder in atheistic states to what the Bible says;

Deuteronomy 53

1. And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the ordinances which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and observe to do them.
2. Jehovah our God made a covenant with us in Horeb.
3. Jehovah made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.
4. Jehovah spake with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the fire,
5. (I stood between Jehovah and you at that time, to show you the word of Jehovah: for ye were afraid because of the fire, and went not up into the mount;) saying,
6. I am Jehovah thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
7. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
8. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
9. thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I, Jehovah, thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me;
10. and showing lovingkindness unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.
11. Thou shalt not take the name of Jehovah thy God in vain: for Jehovah will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
12. Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy, as Jehovah thy God commanded thee.
13. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work;
14. but the seventh day is a sabbath unto Jehovah thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well as thou.
15. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and Jehovah thy God brought thee out thence by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm: therefore Jehovah thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.
16. Honor thy father and thy mother, as Jehovah thy God commanded thee; that thy days may be long, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee.
17. Thou shalt not kill.
18. Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
19. Neither shalt thou steal.
20. Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor.
21. Neither shalt thou covet thy neighbor’s wife; neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor’s house, his field, or his man-servant, or his maid-servant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s.
22. These words Jehovah spake unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them upon two tables of stone, and gave them unto me.
23. And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was burning with fire, that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders;
24. and ye said, Behold, Jehovah our God hath showed us his glory and his greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire: we have seen this day that God doth speak with man, and he liveth.
25. Now therefore why should we die? for this great fire will consume us: if we hear the voice of Jehovah our God any more, then we shall die.
26. For who is there of all flesh, that hath heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived?
27. Go thou near, and hear all that Jehovah our God shall say: and speak thou unto us all that Jehovah our God shall speak unto thee; and we will hear it, and do it.
28. And Jehovah heard the voice of your words, when ye spake unto me; and Jehovah said unto me, I have heard the voice of the words of this people, which they have spoken unto thee: they have well said all that they have spoken.
29. Oh that there were such a heart in them, that they would fear me, and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them, and with their children for ever!
30. Go say to them, Return ye to your tents.
31. But as for thee, stand thou here by me, and I will speak unto thee all the commandment, and the statutes, and the ordinances, which thou shalt teach them, that they may do them in the land which I give them to possess it.
32. Ye shall observe to do therefore as Jehovah your God hath commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.
33. Ye shall walk in all the way which Jehovah your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.

Note that the existence of God is proven beyond all doubt by the express words of Deuteronomy. This passage was dramatized several times in movies, most notably with Charlton Heston playing Moses in the 1950s Cecil B DeMille version of the Ten Commandments.

I’m inclined on faith to believe in it, and certainly more likely to believe in Deuteronomy and the Ten Commandments, and the word of the Lord God and Moses, than in anything Richard Dawkins writes down or brings down from his burning bush or his mountaintop.

Compare this to what Isaiah says in the Bible:

ISAIAH 2:4. And he will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Compare this to Matthew 5:21-22:

Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
22. but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment;

Compare this to what St. Paul says in the Bible:

Romans 6

1. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?
2. God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live therein?
3. Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4. We were buried therefore with him through baptism unto death: that like as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.
5. For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection;
6. knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin;
7. for he that hath died is justified from sin.
8. But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him;
9. knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him.
10. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God.
11. Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.
12. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof:
13. neither present your members unto sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
14. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under law, but under grace.
15. What then? shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? God forbid.
16. Know ye not, that to whom ye present yourselves as servants unto obedience, his servants ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteouness?
17. But thanks be to God, that, whereas ye were servants of sin, ye became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered;
18. and being made free from sin, ye became servants of righteousness.
19. I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye presented your members as servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present your members as servants to righteousness unto sanctification.
20. For when ye were servants of sin, ye were free in regard of righteousness.
21. What fruit then had ye at that time in the things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death.
22. But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end eternal life.
23. For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

–art kyriazis philly
home of the world champion Philadelphia Phillies
Monday 9/28/09

Sen. Arlen Specter Makes a Huge Mistake, Switches Parties, Joins the Democrats

Somewhere, Oliver Stone, the director of JFK, which mentions Sen. Specter by name as the originator of the “single bullet theory” as a junior member of the Warren Commission in 1964, is laughing over lunch in Hollywood.

And so is Prof. Anita Hill, a law professor at some estimable liberal law school these days.

I’ve had the privilege to be both a constituent and an acquaintance of Sen. Arlen Specter for many years, including being an acquaintance of his son (who is one of the finest trial lawyers in Pennsylvania) and his wife, who was for many years a member of the City Council in Philadelphia.

Sen. Specter is and was always a very nice fellow, approachable, charming, kind, gentle and very nice. He used to have lunch at mid-town Bookbinder’s when it was open back in the old days, and when it was campaign season, he’d make not one, not two, but usually three or four stops to our little local Greek-American fraternal organization meetings, which usually were held in out of the way motels in places like Shillington, PA, or Intercourse, PA, or Wilkes-Barre, PA, which Sen. Specter would find us at, come in, have some greek food, dance some Greek dances, and speak to us all about the Cyprus issue and anything else that was important to us. He literally would shake everyone’s hand in the place, and even speak some Greek, and he never was too busy to stop to pose for pictures with all of my aunts and uncles and anyone else who was there.

Sen. Specter really liked to campaign, and he genuinely liked people. He was and is a people person.

Needless to say, the other guy (or gal), the Democrat, never seemed to find us, though they were always chatty with the Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board or with their very important liberal donors or with the various advocacy groups like people united to give animals the vote or people united to allow wild dogs to run free in the other fellow’s backyard but not in mine.

The reason I mention this is I’ve met a lot of Presidential candidates (and Presidents) and other wannabe powerful senators, and none of them are or were as nice and as personable as Arlen Specter. Gary Hart was kind of scary. I did like John Glenn, he looked like a real hero, and although he was pretty boring, he was sort of a people person. I will say, Sen. Glenn actually looked like a President. Knowing JFK liked him was a real plus.

Sen. Santorum, I will say, he was very personable and friendly, even if his views weren’t. But Harris Wofford, who is supposed to be very famous and all, I went to an event to help promote him, but in person, he’s very formal and academic—not at all personable and at ease like Sen. Specter. I understand why Wofford lost his second election race in 1994–he’s a bit ill at ease around people.

Bill Bradley is another guy, very formal and ill at ease around regular folks. I understand why Bradley didn’t win a single primary when he ran for President. He doesn’t connect with people. I know he didn’t connect with me, and I only asked him a hoops question on the elevator one time, and the guy looked at me like I was from Mars, as if I was wasting his time or something.

I mean, the guy played with Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Dave DeBusschere on two of the greatest Knicks teams in history, and HE DOESN’T WANT TO TALK HOOPS???? ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? What, senator fancy schmancy suddenly isn’t an ex-ballplayer anymore? You can see why he didn’t win in 20 straight presidential primaries. A real stiff, Bradley. You never saw Bradley shooting hoops at the gym; Obama, by contrast, you always saw shooting hoops at the gym, and Obama was PROUD of being an ex-jock. I don’t have to tell you how that played out; people love ex-jocks, because America is built on two things, love of country, and love of sports. Well, also french fries, but that’s a topic for another time.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, a very nice guy. Rides the Amtrak all the time. Paul Tsongas was terrific. Very nice, very personable. Still, to this day, the late Paul Tsongas is the only guy to beat Bill Clinton in a national Presidential election (the 1992 New Hampshire Primary). There’s a legacy for you.

This is NOT a name-dropping exercise (I’ll same the Anna Nicole Smith story for another blog) (not as pretty as you would have thought, and way too much perfume).

Rather, the point is, if you want to be in politics, as a good friend of mine once pointed out, you have to “dance the polka.” That means you have to campaign, and you have to get along with people. Sen. Specter has stayed on since his first election to Senator since 1980 because he is a dedicated, famously dedicated, campaigner, who visits every county, goes to every event, campaigns from dawn to dusk and then deep into the night, and makes sure to visit every ethnic group’s event, whether you’re polish, Lithuanian, italian, greek, german, Iberian, spanish, Puerto Rican, Mexican, south American, etc.

He loves us all, no matter where we’re from, no matter what our party or ethnic group, he’s for us if we’re for him. I don’t know how to explain it, but Arlen is about you, so long as you are personally loyal to him. He’s not about party labels or ideology; he’s a people person to the max. And if you need something from his office, he’ll take care of it for you.

Also, Sen. Specter is FUNNY. We once had Judge Katz to speak at our urban debate tournament here in Philly in the early 1990s, and Judge Katz told a funny story about being debate partners with Sen. Specter at Penn. Later on, we had Sen. Specter at a similar event, and he told a funny story about being debate partners with Judge Katz at Penn. It was FUNNY.

It all kind of made you think, hey, here’s these two guys, smart debaters from penn, and here they are forty years later, cracking jokes and they’ve kind of made it by working hard and showing up on time. Truth be told, the two of them were NDT champions in 1951—but they downplayed that.

Arlen’s son is brilliant. He won a Harry Truman scholarship and attended prestigious college and law school, and is the foremost wrongful death attorney in Pennsylvania, and probably (other than his partner Tom Kline) the foremost specialist in wrongful death litigation in PA and maybe in the United States. Clearly Sen. Specter found time to be a good father. I like that about him.

And Sen. Specter’s close with his wife—anytime I saw him having lunch, he was with his wife. Again, I like that about him.

Guys like Gary Hart or Sen. Edwards are always campaigning alone, or worse, pretending to be happily married. But I guess we knew that about Sen. Hart and Sen. Edwards, but those stupid Democrats went and voted for them anyway.

I won’t even bring up Bill and Hillary and Monicagate. That only wasted four years of the country’s time and sent Al Gore down the tubes (or shall I say chads?) in Floridagate from easy election to electoral college defeat in a disputed election in 2000. If Bill had just been happily married, the democrats would have stayed in power for sixteen years in a row, in all likelihood.

Sen. Specter is happily married, has at least one great kid, and is a good family man.

Oliver Stone and Anita Hill may not like him, but you’ll never find Sen. Specter on a boat named “monkey business” or with an office intern parked on his lap. He’s about family, and about doing his job, 24/7. It’s one of the things you love about him.

Sen. Specter loves Pennsylvania. He can rattle off encyclopaedically the name of every county in the state; the names of every elected official in every county; and has amazing photographic memory of nearly everyone he meets.

For example, I’m friends with Jeffrey _______, who used to work for Sen. Specter back in the stone ages and whose family continue to contribute, and every time I see Sen. Specter, he asks me to say hello to Jeffrey. Now how does he do that, remember every time he sees me that I’m Jeffrey’s good friend? I find that amazing.

Anyhow, so I’m a big fan of Sen. Specter. I’ve made full confession. So let’s analyze his switch to the Democratic Party, which I believe to be a colossal mistake.

1) The biggest issue will be that the Democrats are closing in on sixty votes in the Senate, obviously. I’m not sure what’s going on in Minnesota and the Al Franken-Norm Coleman mess, but if the Democrats get another Senator before the end of the term, they would get a sixtieth vote. Currently, the Democrats now have 57 votes; they had 56, Sen. Specter was the 57th, and they have two independents, Joe Lieberman and one other, who caucus with the Democrats. That makes 59.

2) One highly overlooked impact of Sen. Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party will be on Judicial Nominees. Sen. Specter has sat on the Judiciary Committee for a long time, and has seniority; now that he’s sitting with the majority, that seniority together with his being the senior senator from Pennsylvania will give him key input into judicial nominees to the Federal Bench from Pennsylvania, as well as potential input on who becomes the next Prosecutor for the Eastern District of PA to succeed Patrick Meehan, a post coveted by many.

Sen. Specter’s newfound alliance with Gov. Ed Rendell and Vice President Joe Biden is highly suggestive, because sitting on the Third Circuit is Appellate Judge Midge Rendell—long suggested to be a candidate for the United States Supreme Court, and there are currently potential vacancies brewing on the Supreme Court with Justice Ginsburg’s recent illness and the indications from certain more senior Justices such as Souter et al. that they might consider retirement at this stage. President Obama may get to pick as many as three Justices this term alone, and the circumstances of Sen. Specter’s switch are highly suggestive of his proposing Third Circuit Justice Midge Rendell for a vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Now this would be a perfect selection but for one fact—Justice Rendell was, originally, a catholic (she may have converted or is a practicing Jew now) but the fact remains that her elevation to Justice Ginsburg’s spot would create a supermajority of six catholics on the Supreme Court. Others may think this is a non-issue, but I happen to think this might be a deal-breaker. I think one of the existing Catholic Justices has to step down before Rendell can step up. Or, alternatively, she has to affirmatively testify that she has converted to another religion altogether (such as Judaism) and is no longer a practicing Roman Catholic. If she says she has converted to Judaism, I think it’s a deal maker.

On more than one level, it’s a deal maker. And then, everyone wins—Gov. Rendell goes to Washington, when he can spend the rest of his days going to DC parties and being an influential Democratic Party lobbyist, Sen. Specter wins because he exerts his powerful influence, and Philadelphia and PA wins because they get yet a second Supreme Court Justice (they already have Justice Alito).

And, I think, Sen. Specter wins in another way—Justice Rendell is pretty moderate in her views—she’s not a ridiculous flaming liberal like some of the names being tossed around. She’s tough on crime, she supports homeland security, she’s pro-corporate, her background is as a corporate/bankruptcy attorney representing corporations at a large law firm, and I think her sensibilities will steer her to a good middle of the road direction on the court. She’s very likely to be a person that can unify disparate wings of the court and build consensus. Also, she’s a big patron of the arts here in Philadelphia—her work with mega-rich Gerry Lenfest is legendary—and I see her making a big splash in DC. It’s not an accident that Justice Souter retired the very next day after Specter’s announcement.

3) In addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sen. Specter will make a lot of appointments to the 3d Circuit and Eastern District Court of PA. There he’ll be working a lot with Gov. Rendell, and again, left wing liberals need not apply—Sen. Specter was a District Attorney, as was Gov. Rendell, and therefore, they’ll be looking for folks who are tough on crime. Supreme Court Justice Jane Cutler Greenspan of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would be an excellent choice for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and eventually possibly the Supreme Court. She’s very tough on crime and an excellent jurist. I think also here that outgoing DA Lynne Abraham will have some input as well; the Judges she’s liked over the years will have a leg up in the nomination process, while Judges who have favored defendants or who have been soft on criminals will not get any nods. This may have a perverse effect of creating a more liberal state judiciary for a while, but Sen. Specter probably wants moderate not liberal judges. In this he shares with Sen. Casey the same feelings—Sen. Casey is hardly a liberal democrat either. Again, once someone fills Souter’s spot, everyone moves up a notch, and more spaces get filled.

4) With Sen. Specter and Sen. Casey, Pennsylvania now easily has the two most conservative democratic senators in the entire us senate. Sen. Casey is anti-abortion, while Sen. Specter was a republican his whole life, is anti-crime, anti-labor and had a 55% ACU rating as recently as last term. They are very middle of road guys, hardly liberals in any sense of the word. They’re actually more conservative than a lot of southern senators. On the other hand, Pennsylvania had the oldest electorate this side of Florida, and Pennsylvanians like their Senators to be conservative, but not wacky conservative, so this is good.

5) The first reason I believe Sen. Specter has made a huge mistake is that right after he switched parties, the Republicans and Democrats made a mutual deal to strip him of his seniority. This is ridiculous and shows that the DEMOCRATS are not a real party with party loyalty, like the Republicans. The Republicans would never have stripped Sen. Specter of his seniority, no matter how many times he failed to vote with them, because they are all about loyalty and party. The Democrats, on the other hand, are more concerned with being liberal than with being party loyal, and a lot of them still are angry with Specter over Anita Hill. So they waited for him to change parties, and then punished him by stripping him of his rightful 29 years of seniority on the Judiciary Committee as a majority party member, which he now has a Democrat.

6) Reason #2 this is a mistake, is that the DEMOCRATS will not lay off of Sen. Specter in the primary or in the general election, no matter what President Obama says. Already, the DELAWARE COUNTY DAILY TIMES is rife with speculation that Congressman JOE SESTAK, 7th District PA (the same district represented by Ben Affleck in “STATE OF PLAY”) and coincidentally, my own congressional district, intends to run for U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, in 2010, as a Democrat. Obviously, he would have to run against Incumbent Democrat Sen. Arlen Specter, also a Democrat. This seems to mean nothing to Congressman Sestak, who is a noted friend of Bill & Hilary, and who raised more than a million dollars in 2006 to buy this particular congressional seat (he lives in Maryland), as I said at the time, in order to eventually run for Senator from Pennsylvania, and, eventually, for President of the United States.

Sestak’s ambitions are boundless. I guess this is a good time to note that Congressman Sestak has done nothing at all for the seventh district in his four years to date, and on the only issue that’s come up, which is the proposed expansion of the Philadelphia Airport, while he tells his constituents he’s doing something, he secretly is for the expansion, siding with Philadelphia Mayor Nutter and Governor Rendell, both fellow Democrats, that the expansion will assist the city and state, and bring jobs to the city and state. Sestak doesn’t care that the expansion and planes flying over Delaware County will tear the heart out of property values in the region for more than half of the residents of this densely populated area.

Why should he care? He’ll be Senator by then and long gone, in his game plan. His predecessor, Curt Weldon, a ten term congressman, was far more devoted to the interests of Delaware County. Sestak is a carpetbagger, a visitor, a temp by any political measure. He’s never lived in Delaware County except for a brief stay as a kid, and his ambitions to run for senate jive with the fact that he considers our little county nothing more than a way station on his path to bigger things.

7) Reason #3 this is a mistake. By leaving the Republican Party, Specter left a huge hole for someone else to run—namely Tom Ridge. Because Pat Toomey is unelectable in the general election, the mainstream Republican Party wants Ridge to run against Toomey in the Primary and beat him, and then run in the general election, because Ridge can beat either Specter or anyone else in the general election. Why not? Ridge is a Harvard grad, served in the military in Vietnam, is a son of Erie, PA, served ten years in Congress, and also served as Homeland Security Secretary. And he campaigns hard, and served two terms as a very popular Governor of Pennsylvania. Ridge is not the opponent Specter counted on by turning Democrat. This was a horrible miscalculation on Specter’s part.

The better move by Specter would have been to do what Lieberman did in Connecticut—if he couldn’t survive the Republican Primary—file and run as an independent in the fall against both the Democratic candidate and against Toomey, the looney right wing Republican. In this three way race, Specter would easily win, since the Democrat could only win left wing votes, Toomey would only win right wing votes, and Specter would capture the middle, which is where the general election is won. He would also be correctly identified by most Republicans and crossover democrats, correctly, as the incumbent in this scenario, and not as a traitor to his party. It worked for Lieberman and it would have worked for Specter.

8) The next reason Specter made a mistake, is because once Joe Sestak enters the Democratic Primary, there will be two Democrats from Philadelphia in the Democratic Primary. It will not take a genius like my old debate partner and classmate and political consultant Kenny Smukler to figure out that Sestak and Specter might split the Philadelphia vote, and thus a powerful figure from Allegheny County, or from the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton/Luzerne County area, could run in the primary as well and hope to capture the remaining counties of the Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre areas and win in a three-way race.

In fact, once Sestak enters the primary, it may draw out two or more candidates into the primary for this very reason. Consequently, Specter will find himself in an imbroglio in the Democratic Primary in 2010 far worse than that he found himself facing in the Republican Primary—instead of facing just one opponent, to the right, Specter may be facing as many as three to four opponents, from different regions of the state with different ideologies, with a volatile and unpredictable and unstable Democratic primary electorate in midterm that he cannot predict readily as to voter turnout or as to loyalty to Arlen Specter, newly minted Democrat.

And then, if he survives that inferno, he will be facing Tom Ridge in the general election.

In my view, Sen. Specter has made an error and jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Democrats aren’t like Republicans—they lack any kind of party loyalty and they will not be loyal to Sen. Specter or respect his many years of service.

Indeed, many Democrats will mock his age and fail to vote for him, because many Democrats are inherently disrespectful of age, authority and experience—this is precisely why they register as Democrats—they are anti-authoritarian and hate their elders.

While PA has an elderly electorate, and these elderly voters will respect Sen. Specter, the newer Obama voters, the younger ones, will not respect or defer to his competence or experience or age.

9) The next reason this is a big mistake and why I feel that Sen. Specter has changed parties, is that I fear this is the end of the road for the moderate Republican Party.

In 1964, Gov. William Scranton of Pennsylvania took up the cudgel against Sen. Barry Goldwater for the nomination of the Republican Party, and Goldwater’s conservative faction captured the Republican Party, which was the first indication that the sunbelt/conservative wing of the party would soon eclipse the moderate Northeast Rockefeller/Eisenhower/Nixon wing of the party.

Scranton was bitter about that loss, and spoke openly about the wrong direction that the party was headed in. Then Gov. Reagan emerged as a conservative contender, only to be headed off by the “new Nixon” in 1968, who attempted to straddle both the conservative and Rockefeller wings of the party by adding Spiro Agnew to his ticket.

However, Nixon governed from the middle to the left of the political spectrum, a fact that hurt him when he needed conservative support after Watergate.

President Ford was more conservative, but failed to head off a Reagan challenge from the right in 1976, and only barely got by Reagan’s conservative minions in the 1976 primary, and badly hurt by that split, lost in the general election to an unknown from Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

The next four years of Carter’s incompetence almost destroyed the country, and very nearly, the world with it.

Reagan came back in 1980, and this time, the conservative triumph was complete. They ejected the ERA from the platform of the Republican Party, went hard anti-abortion, and started courting evangelicals. Taxes were slashed fifty per cent and a new day was announced for the free market in america.

However, they maintained that there was a “big tent” and room for the 20 or so moderate senators (and many more Congressmen) in the northeast who helped vote all of Reagan’s laws in. The Republican Party as late as ten years ago still had a lot of Republican Senators and Congressmen in the Northeast and Midwest.

However, the Bush II Presidency seemingly changed all that, along with demographic shifts. The GOP party seemed to grow more conservative as its President grew less popular, and Karl Rove’s strategy of clinging to the base seemed to shrink the party nationally while winning re-election narrowly once and winning a mere electoral plurality in 2000 while losing the popular vote decisively in a disputed election that was far from Ronald Reagan or even Bush I’s mandate.

This last round of elections, in 2006 and 2008, represented the fulfillment of the Bill Scranton/Nelson Rockefeller prophecy of what would happen if the GOP became a regional conservative party and ignored the historical basis of the party as the party of the moderate, Northeastern industrialists and Midwestern businessmen, conservative on economics but liberal on social issues.

Perhaps some of the learned Senators have forgotten that the Union League is not a dining club, but was a League formed to assist African Americans with their political rights during Reconstruction from 1865-1876, and that many Philadelphian Republicans were proud to serve in same? That Lincoln freed the slaves? That Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington over to lunch? That George Bush I signed the ADA and the Civil Rights Reform Act? That Nixon proclaimed Earth Day, and formed the EPA and signed into law the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act? These were the actions of MODERATE NORTHEASTERN REPUBLICANS (ok, Nixon was from Whittier CA, but he was born a Quaker).

The party of William Seward, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, has always been expansive and revolutionary—never static and doctrinaire. The big tent must be re-established. It’s a sad day, and a sad comment on the current state of affairs in the GOP, when a great man like Sen. Specter, has to leave the party, because the party, he says, redolent of Reagan’s comment on leaving the Democratic Party in the early sixties, left me.

My assessment is that the damage is permanent, and will require drastic treatment. Unless the GOP moves back to the center, a third party that is centrist and is based in the Northeast and Midwest, willing to oppose Democratic spending and yet support corporate interests but is socially liberal and responsible and supports the environment, will emerge as a factor in American politics. This is inevitable. Already two independents sit in the U.S. Senate, and Sen. Specter is practically a third. That’s 3% right there of the national power.

What I’m describing, Joe Lieberman and Ross Perot have already done, and with considerable success I might add. The GOP may go the way of the Liberal Party in England and be supplanted by the other two parties if they are not careful, and be reduced to a kind of extinction.

10) Finally, with regards to Oliver Stone sitting in Hollywood, there is no prospect of Sen. Specter revealing who was on the grassy knoll, or who was telling the truth in the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas imbroglio.

It is worth noting, for the record, that in 1964, when he sat on the Warren Commission, Specter was still a DEMOCRAT, and that he switched to being a REPUBLICAN to run for Mayor of Philadelphia during the late 1960s and again in the 1970s. Next time he mentioned Sen. Specter in a movie, Oliver Stone should fact-check. The Senator he mocked in his movie “JFK”, was a card-carrying, LBJ-JFK supporting Democrat in 1964 working as part of the Philadelphia Democratic City Machine.

Moreover, I once met the late Gov. John Connolly, and he stated to the audience I was in, that he testified to the Warren Commission that he heard shots from the grassy knoll and believed there were more than three shots fired; the entire commission, not merely Sen. Specter, disbelieved Gov. Connolly’s testimony and concurred on the single bullet theory. Stone just has it wrong here. On this point, JFK is still a rocking good movie, though it’s clearly a work of fiction as to many key details, including Gov. Connally and Sen. Specter. On these points many other authorities concur, incidentally.

–art kyriazis philly/south jersey
home of the world champion Philadelphia phillies

The Irrepressible Conflict – Remembering Dred Scott – A Note from 1997

This is a letter to the editor I wrote back in 1997 debunking an article someone had written praising attorney general Jeremiah Sullivan Black, who notoriously served under President James Buchanan.

The author had said the Black was a nice fellow from Pennsylvania who had brought credit to his state.

I pointed out that Black was notorious in the history books for conspiring with Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger Taney to bring about the awful ruling in Dred Scott, which helped bring about the Civil War and the secession of the Southern States.

It’s important to note that as late as 1857, prior to Dred Scott, the Civil War might still have been avoided.

But Buchanan, Black and Taney, with the awful Dred Scott decision, pretty much made sure that the US was plunged into what one Republican of the day called “the irrepressible conflict.”

So here’s what I wrote back in 1997 on the subject. It’s of interest today, of course, since we now have our first African-American President, to consider Dred Scott in retrospect, since everyone agrees it was the single worst decision of the United States Supreme Court.

April 6, 1997

To the Editor:

Regretfully I must take issue with my colleague ____________________ article praising James Buchanan’s Attorney General/Secretary of State and former Pennsylvania Chief Justice Jeremiah Sullivan Black for his role in “saving” the United States during the secession crisis of November 1860-March 1861.

To preface, why must we care about this critical aspect of United States history? The answer is simple. Racism is, was and continues to be the predominant issue of our society. To paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois, the color line has been the dividing line of the 20th century.

One of the most shocking aspects of this society is the extent to which racism still permeates and soaks our society in its noxious fumes. Without an understanding of the historical context of the civil war, the end of slavery and of the events immediately preceding the civil war, we fall victim to fooling ourselves into thinking that lawyerly compromisers like Jeremiah Sullivan Black, who were prepared to accept slavery, accept Dred Scott, and accept the extension of slavery all the way to California south of Missouri as called for in the Crittenden compromise, were the moral or ethical equivalent of real heroes like Garrison, Sumner, Seward and Lincoln. The fact is that all the historical revisionism in the world cannot make a Sumner or a Lincoln of a man as limited and narrow in his views as was Jeremiah Sullivan Black.

It was Dante who said that the lowest places in hell are reserved for those who fail to take an ethical stand in times of crisis.

The truth is that the real heroes of those times were Garrison, Sumner, Seward and the so-called “radicals” who understood that law books and laws meant nothing when dealing with the moral wrongness of slavery and men in chains, sold as chattels. And yet, those individuals were vilified in their day, seen as extremists, radicals, far-left wingers–simply because they advocated the political and legal freedom and equality of African-Americans with all other Americans guaranteed to them in the Declaration of Independence, a position most eloquently argued by Lincoln in his debates with Douglas in 1858 and one which is clearly accepted today by the vast majority of law-abiding and freedom-loving Americans.

But what were those men but heroes taking an ethical and moral stand in a time of crisis? Isn’t this why we celebrate Lincoln, while James Buchanan is all but forgotten?

Unfortunately, there must be a historical litmus test applied to persons alive and practicing law and holding high office in the years when slavery was the law of this land. Simply because Black corresponded to the so-called safe middle and the racist, legalistic tenor of his times, exemplified in Dred Scott and in the subsequent 1858-59 prosecution of John Brown, Attorneys General like Jeremiah Sullivan Black can never be praiseworthy or praised historically, legally or ethically in retrospect. His actions were by and large wrong, they contributed to the death and suffering of millions of African-Americans, and they helped bring on the Dred Scott decision, the Harpers Ferry incident, the secession crisis and the Civil War, which in turn lead to the enormous bloodshed of the American Civil War.

Jeremiah Sullivan Black was hardly a Charles Sumner or William Seward to begin with. He was appointed Attorney General almost simultaneously with the announcement on March 6, 1857 of the Dred Scott decision, a decision which many historians agree was the product in part of direct and improper solicitations by Buchanan of individual justices constituting the Southern majority on the court, in order to persuade them to come up with a broader decision expanding slavery beyond its current territorial bounds. In those days, the Presidential inauguration was held on March 4, and therefore Dred Scott was announced just two days after Buchanan took office on March 4, 1857.

Was this timing mere coincidence? The best research suggests that it was not so.

Buchanan’s role, and by implication Black’s role, in doing nothing to criticize Dred Scott, and doing everything to bring about Dred Scott and to broaden its applicability, are reprehensible in historical hindsight. Moreover, the best evidence suggests that President-Elect Buchanan solicited the Southern Judges on the Supreme Court in early 1857 to deliver the broad Dred Scott decision in a deliberate effort to broaden the reach of slavery to a constitutionally protected level beyond the power of the legislative enactments such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska of 1854.

Historian Allan Nevins in his landmark work The Emergence of Lincoln 1950) advances strong proof of evidence of impropriety in communications between Buchanan and members of the Supreme Court in the days before the decision was announced; and the decision was announced on March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan was inaugurated.

The evidence as marshalled by Nevins and many other prominent historians suggests that Buchanan asked the Southern majority on the Court to decide Dred Scott broadly. The Oxford Guide to the Supreme Court specifically notes that Buchanan used an intermediary associate justice of the Supreme Court to convey his wishes to Chief Justice Taney that the Court rule broadly in Dred Scott, and that if they did so, the Buchanan Administration was prepared to enforce the decision legally and if necessary, by force.

As the attorney general appointed directly in the wake of Dred Scott, it was Black’s role specifically to defend and uphold Dred Scott, particularly in jurisdictions which up to that point had been considered “free” under the Missouri compromise and other laws separating free from slave.

As a defender of Dred Scott, and indeed, as Attorney General during the implementation of Dred Scott, Black’s historical role is nothing less than despicable. No just-thinking person in today’s world should have anything good to say about a man like Black given his actions from 1857 on in defending the Dred Scott decision. Black did everything in his power as Attorney General to defend Dred Scott, broaden the reach of slavery and thereby delay the emancipation of African-Americans in the United States.

It was this interference of Buchanan directly with the Supreme Court’s Southern wing which wrote the Dred Scott ruling which triggered William Seward’s famous speech “The Irrepressible Conflict,” delivered October 25, 1858 in Rochester, New York. Incidentally, ____________________ incorrectly cites the speech to 1850 at p. 66 of his article, a gross historical inaccuracy since the speech clearly post-dates and is in response to the Dred Scott decision.

In this brilliant speech, William Seward, a great man of history, sets out to demonstrate that “[t]he history of the Democratic party commits it to the policy of slavery. It has been the Democratic party, and no other agency, which has carried that policy up to its present alarming culmination.” William Henry Seward, “The Irrepressible Conflict”, The World’s Great Speeches (Dover 1973) at 295-96. After a historical exegesis, Seward continues;

“The Democratic party, finally, has procured from a supreme judiciary, fixed in its interest, a decree that slavery exists by force of the constitution in every territory of the United States, paramount to all legislative authority, either within the territory or residing in Congress. Such is the Democratic party….It is positive and uncompromising in the interest of slavery….” David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (U. of Chicago 1960) at 180-81.

The direct solicitation of Dred Scott by Buchanan was a charge made and repeated often in the days following Dred Scott, and in reading the primary sources today buttressed by historical research done more recently, there is no reason to doubt the contemporary conclusions that Buchanan wanted Dred Scott and sought it out. The charge was made at the time, the charge is made today, and frankly, the charges are true. If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, chances are, it’s a duck.

Seward’s speech should be read and re-read 100 times by all american citizens.

Black was no more and no less than a legalistic defender of slavery in his time. Given the chance to do something historically important, he chose to do nothing at all good and lots of things bad. Nothing he did or said can ever render him a hero.

Black was the kind of gutless wonder that belongs in those lower pits of Dante’s Inferno.

Nor can we allow to pass ____________________’s incomprehensible conclusion that “Buchanan and Black were right–abolitionist pressure did bring on the Civil War.” Buchanan was the key instigator of the secession crisis because Buchanan solicited the Dred Scott decision and then went out of his way (together with Black) to defend it and urge it on all Americans. Moreover, in historical hindsight, everything which the abolitionists did and said was completely and 100% correct and morally and legally justified.

The arguments and moral force of Sumner and Garrison and Seward are the only words from that period which ring true today. In dealing with slavery and comparable morally compelling situations (the German Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s comes to mind) there is no room for compromise or for hugging the middle.

What was needed was Lincoln’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s man of action. Instead, what we got in Buchanan and Black were a pair of Pennsylvania apologists for the Southern slavery regime.

Worse, Buchanan appears to have secretly intrigued to bring about Dred Scott and to secretly help his Southern Democratic slaveholding backers. By attacking the abolitionists, Buchanan and Black revealed themselves only to be apologists for a system of slavery which was inhuman, immoral and unconscionable.

Compared to the noble and dignified campaign of men like Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who struggled from day one against all odds to do the right thing and campaign for the freedom, dignity and human rights of African-Americans in this country, Black was a moral midget.

Senator Sumner in 1849 attacked the legality of segregated schools in Boston and coined the phrase “equality before the law.” Although Sumner lost the Roberts case, six years later the Massachusetts legislature outlawed racial segregation in all schools in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Senator Sumner’s statue dominates the entrance to Harvard University at Johnston Gate even today, across from Mt. Auburn cemetary. It should. Senator Sumner is and was a great man.

For those who believe that a man like Black can be excused by the times and by the thoughts of his fellow man for being unenlightened, a short time reading Sumner’s works and speeches should disabuse anyone of such apologias. Unrestrained by the times or by the thoughts of his fellow men, Sumner, a practicing attorney and Harvard law school graduate, saw the truth for what it was and spoke directly and clearly about what he saw as the moral and ethical quicksand of any legal regime supporting slavery. To his eternal credit, Sumner opposed not only slavery but also segregation. Consequently, if Sumner could come to those views in the midst of his century, then a man like Black cannot be excused for failing to do so.

Indeed, Buchanan’s (and Black’s) celebration of Dred Scott, and their defense of it on the grounds that it was the “law” was what drove Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates to derive that there was a natural law, a law from a higher source, that in times like these had to substitute for the corrupt and improper judgment of a few men on an individual Supreme Court acting in concert with what they perceived to be a corrupt President (and Attorney General) openly siding with the forces of slavery.

This appeal to natural law, too, is the central argument of John Brown in his final speech before the Court before receiving sentence–”This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right.” See John Brown, “On Being Sentenced to Death,” The World’s Great Speeches. (Dover 1973) at pp. 298-99.

We all know what John Brown was talking about. We know why he went to Harper’s Ferry on a virtual suicide mission, to liberate the slaves of the United States by force. John Brown’s death was a stirring call to action to many who had previously resisted force, and it scared the South deeply.

Jeremiah Sullivan Black as Attorney General also presided over the John Brown/Harpers Ferry incident of October-November 1859 and he did nothing during his Attorney Generalship to suggest that he possessed anything like the principled opposition to slavery which characterized Sumner, Garrison, Whittier, Garrett and other activists of the day. Nor did he ever evidence any understanding of the existence of a moral or natural law superior to the man-made law of his day.

Moreover, turning to the secession crisis period of December 1860-March 1861 which is the subject of _______________________’s piece, Black’s role during the secession crisis is not particularly worthy of praise.

In the first instance, Black’s views during these matters is a matter of public knowledge, since he carried on a virtually daily communication with the incoming Secretary of State William Seward, from December of 1860 to March of 1861. Seward visited Black freely during this time.

President Buchanan actually refused to meet with Seward, who was in charge of transition for Lincoln, and therefore Black played a go-between role between the incoming and outgoing administrations. The evidence suggests that Black’s main concern, far from saving the Union, was to avoid being prosecuted for treason by the incoming administration for the crime of cooperating too closely with the Southern states and particularly of conspiring with South Carolina to surrender Federal property in furtherance of a treasonous conspiracy.

Had Buchanan actually surrendered the forts and not followed Black’s advice, there is little doubt but that such a prosecution would have occurred upon Lincoln’s accession to power.

Compare this with modern Presidential transitions, and you readily see what the problem is.

Moreover, Black’s ideas on averting the secession crisis as expressed directly to Seward were less than praiseworthy. He spent one of their meetings asking Seward to compromise by having Seward accept, as a basis of settlement, simply the Constitution and laws as interpreted by the judiciary, a position which meant acceptance of Dred Scott.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with Seward’s and Lincoln’s views on the subject could not possibly have expected them to agree to such a “cave-in” of principle. It shows that Black assumed implicitly that no politician (even Seward or Lincoln) could possibly elevate moral principle over political expedience and thus highlights his true indifference to the moral enormity of his (and the South’s) crimes in carrying on and defending the institution of slavery.

In other words, even after the Southern states had announced secession, Black was still attempting to evangelize Republicans committed to the end of slavery on behalf of upholding Dred Scott.

Black also supported the Crittenden Compromise, which would have extended slavery to the area below the latitude of 36o30′ permanently in exchange for the Southern states returning to the Union fold, a policy which would have permanently institutionalized slavery in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California well into the 20th century.

The real hero in the Buchanan cabinet was not Jeremiah Black, a Dred Scott apologist and party hack who does not even merit a mention in the notes to David Donald’s landmark study of Sumner. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (U. of Chicago 1960).

Rather, the real hero was Edwin Stanton, who after becoming Attorney General and succeeding the inactive and pro-Southern Black, started meeting with Seward and advising him almost daily of the “treasons” being perpetrated in the Buchanan cabinet meetings.

It was Stanton who “leaked” to Seward the intent of Buchanan to essentially surrender the Southern forts (and specifically Ft. Sumter) over to the seceding South Carolinians, and by advising Lincoln through Seward, made it virtually impossible for Buchanan (and Black) to do anything other than the right thing and stand up for the Union. Henry Wilson, “Jeremiah S. Black and Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly (1870) at pp. 464-65.

Stanton, through his friend Peter H. Watson, kept Seward apprised daily of events in the Buchanan cabinet meetings. Stanton also met with Sen. Sumner and kept other apprised secretly as well.

Incidently, Black after the Civil War attempted to prove that Stanton had never discussed Cabinet meetings with Seward, but was later forced to admit that it was so. See David M. Potter, Lincoln and his Party in the Secession Crisis (Yale University Press, 1942) (5th printing 1967) at 252 et seq.

As a consequence, Seward was able to ask several congressmen to convene a Congressional select committee to look into the allegations of whether anyone in the Buchanan administration had improper connections with the South Carolina secessionists.

There is little question but that one of the implicit threats of convening the committee was to look into evidence for a possible criminal prosecution of Black, Buchanan and other pro-Southern members of the Cabinet in the event that Sumter and other forts were surrendered or less than vigorously defended. As such, Black in urging Buchanan to defend the forts from South Carolina acted not out of principle or out of devotion to the Union, but rather, out of calculated self-interest.

In short, Black wanted to save his own skin realizing that a new President and new Administration were coming into power and that wartime justice would soon be a reality. Trial and hanging for treason cannot have been far from Black’s mind in taking whatever actions he did to preserve the status quo of the South Carolina forts pending Lincoln’s accession to power.

Through this select committee and through the press Seward was able to circumscribe the Buchanan cabinet with a limited range of policy options so as to maintain the status quo until Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861.

It was this committee, together with the other actions of Seward and Stanton and others, which probably had the greatest influence on Black to persuade Buchanan to take actions to preserve the status quo. Buchanan’s (and Black’s) natural inclinations, as indeed he was accused of by the Republicans at the time, was to side with the South.

By contrast, in 1832, when faced with the nullification/secession crisis, also involving South Carolina, Andrew Jackson acted swiftly and decisively to muzzle and neuter the rebellion. Historians generally agree that there were many Southerners who did not wish to secede. The border states were still undecided on what to do and North Carolina and Virginia were not particularly willing to secede from the Union.

Strong action by Buchanan in December of 1860 and January of 1861 could have rallied the anti-secessionist forces in the Confederate states and stilled or stopped the secession crisis in its tracks. However, Buchanan did nothing of the kind, and but for the actions of Seward, Stanton and others which essentially orchestrated Black’s counsel, Buchanan would gladly have handed over all federal property to the South willingly.

Black did not like Seward and did not agree with any of the programs or plans of the Republicans. He saw nothing immoral or wrong about slavery. He also referred to Seward as the “Wolsey of the new administration” (a sarcastic referral to the Cardinal Wolsey of historical England) and later penned a famous work in part critical of Seward. See “The Character of Mr. Seward. Reply to C.F.Adams, Sr.” C.F. Black, Essays and Speeches of Jeremiah S. Black (New York, 1886).

Obviously the fact that Black continued to engage in debates with the New England liberals for years after the war demonstrates that Black was a man of limited moral and ethical sense who never understood the basic issue at hand, namely the moral and ethical wrongness of slavery.

Seward concluded his famous speech “The Irrepressible Conflict”, delivered October 25, 1858, as follows;

“I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty senators and a hundred representatives proclaim boldly in Congress today sentiments and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free state [New York], dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the government of the United States, under the conduct of the Democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and castle after another to slavery, the people of the United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the constitution and freedom forever.”

See William Henry Seward, “The Irrepressible Conflict”, The World’s Great Speeches (Dover 1973), at pp.297-98.

One can not imagine Attorney General Black or Secretary of State Black uttering those words of Seward, and indeed, Seward himself viewed Black together with Buchanan as “betrayers of the constitution and freedom”.

Nor can we forget Charles Sumner’s vigorous reply to Buchanan’s request that Massachusetts adopt the so-called Crittenden compromise;

“Massachusetts has not yet spoken directly on these propositions; but…such are the unalterable convictions of her people, they would see their state sink below the sea and become a sandbank before they would adopt those propositions acknowledging property in man.”

See Donald, cited supra, at p. 371.

Obviously, by contrast, Mr. Black celebrated Dred Scott, defended the Crittenden compromise, and as Attorney General and as ultimate prosecutor of John Brown, saw no problem morally, ethically or legally with the enforcement of laws and institutions designed solely to enslave others and keep them in a condition of slavery. That he counselled Buchanan to keep the South Carolina forts in American hands at the same time that he knew that William Seward (and Edwin Stanton), a Congressional select committee and others were looking directly over their shoulders and threatening to prosecute them after March of 1861 for treason, explains to a greater and more precise degree Black’s actions than any feelings of Black that the Union should be preserved.

Jeremiah Sullivan Black was presented a rare gift in life, the opportunity to be act rightly, to act moral, to be William Seward or Charles Sumner or Abraham Lincoln.

Given this opportunity, he chose to simply be Jeremiah Sullivan Black, just another Pennsylvania lawyer content to muddle through the middle rather than take a principled stand against what anyone could plainly see was wrong.

In his time, and in his day, Black was seen as a “betrayer” of freedom and of the constitution, and nothing advanced in ____________________’s article should lead us astray from Mr. William Seward’s well-developed and fully articulated conclusions of 1858 in that regard.

In his day, Black was derided and despised for his warm embrace of Dred Scott and Crittenden’s compromise, and it would be a waste of authorial energies to attempt to exhume his well-deserved historical internment.

In searching for Pennsylvanians to emulate, it would be wiser and better to dwell on the flower of Pennsylvania, our abolitionists and leaders of freedom like Garrett and Longwood and others who worked tirelessly for the end of slavery and for the equality before the law of African-Americans.

We have a proud and noble history of abolitionism and of many historical figures who risked their lives working on the underground railroad in the Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey regions.

Those are the local men and women whose works should be praised and discussed today. We cannot remind ourselves too many times of those great men and women who came before us. They were our Sumners and our Garrisons, our Lincolns and our Sewards. And that Martin Luther King studied seminary right here outside Philadelphia in the early 1950s.

If you have any questions, please kindly contact the undersigned.

Very truly yours,

By:
Arthur J. Kyriazis

AJK/vm
Enc.

Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
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