Joseph S. Fulda

Contributing Editor Joseph S. Fulda is author of Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism.

First, a terminological note: by "illiberal," I mean what is now called "anti-libertarian," as the word "liberal" - ever since the New Deal - has morphed into the opposite of its original meaning. The rather inelegant word "libertarian" was expressly coined as a substitute for "liberal" when the latter could no longer be used in its original sense without a modifier, such as "classical." "Illiberal," however, is still often used in its original sense, one of the many quirks of usage.

Worse than simple inelegance, the word "libertarian" has all too often come to be identified with variants of anarchism that expressly violate the Divine order. One might look at Deuteronomy 16: 18, but the entire matter is explained in depth in a secular source which is religiously informed to an astonishing degree, that is Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Both Paine and Thoreau have been widely misunderstood to advocate no government at all, when all they really assert is both that that was indeed the original design and also that it will be the end state of the world when the kingdom will revert to the Almighty alone. Listen to Paine on the original design:

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

. . . .

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security.

And, here is Thoreau on the end state:

I heartily accept the motto, - "That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, - "That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

When, then, will we be ready for it? Paine provides the answer above, "when . . . moral virtue [is sufficient] to govern the world." In the interim, however, we had better retain government, lest people swallow each other alive.

Second, another and more extended terminological note. The term "fruit," as used here, borrowed originally from Genesis, is borrowed further from the legal rules excluding evidence obtained from an illegal search or incidental to an illegal arrest. There are three well-known theories barring such evidence from consideration at trial, each with its own problems. The very first theory, endorsed unanimously by the United States Supreme Court back in 1886 in Boyd v. United States and reaffirmed unanimously in 1914 in Weeks v. United States is not well known and has since been overturned. That theory is that illegally obtained evidence not returned and then used against a defendant violates the privilege against self-incrimination. As the Court was fond of saying in those years, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments ran into each other.

In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case, Olmstead v. United States, on wiretapping, and as the telephone was then still a relatively new technology, over the objections of four justices, most notably Brandeis and Holmes whose dissenting opinions were eventually to become the law, declined to extend the rule to such cases. Nevertheless, the Court soon reversed itself and adopted their theory as to what was wrong with such evidence: Government misbehavior trickles down into the hearts and minds of the citizenry and if ratified by the courts will have predictably bad effects on the character of the citizens. After all, if the government can violate the law with impunity, why can't the ordinary Joe? One problem with this theory is that the Constitution nowhere declares government a teacher, a concept that both the Founders and the Framers would certainly have rejected. That said, government does, indeed, teach by its conduct, even though there is no support for the idea in the text of the Constitution, or the history of its framing and ratification. Listen to George F. Will in his Statecraft As Soulcraft:

[A] function of government is the modification of habits. . . . Law, obviously, has the important task of guaranteeing the minimal outward conformity with duties necessary for a liberal order. Law counteracts the diversities of a people, requiring at least the minimal harmony required for social peace. But those diversities also necessitate law concerned with values as well as actions - with mind as well as body. They necessitate law as a ratifier and stigmatizer, in which role law is a tutor.

While it is clear that I would not apply this idea as broadly as Will does, I endorse its essence, as a fact if not as good Constitutional law. As we shall see, this fact matters.

Eventually, the exclusionary rules were applied to the states in 1961 in Mapp v. Ohio, using "the incorporation doctrine," in which the core liberties of the original Bill of Rights are applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment, and operating under the now-commonplace theory that the rules' purpose was deterring police misconduct, first made completely clear in 1974 in United States v. Calandra. In the lower court ruling in 1961, Judge Cardozo raised a different objection, one that applies as well to the "government as teacher" theory. Cardozo wrote that it seemed unreasonable that because the constable blunders, the criminal should go free. Now as "misconduct" obviously excludes clear "blunders," Cardozo's objection was soon after 1974 addressed by the "good-faith exception" in two separate cases, one in 1979 and one in 1984. This theory remains the law, but it, too, is nowhere in the Constitution. Deterring police misconduct or, more generally, ensuring that the executive branches of government "faithfully" execute the laws and no more is the job of the legislatures.

A third, and most ingenious, theory has been advanced in the pages of the Wake Forest Law Review in 1998 by Professor Jerry E. Norton, based on various state-court decisions before Mapp as well as asides in various and sundry Supreme Court decisions. It is that by excluding such evidence all the courts are doing is restoring the status quo ante, and ensuring "due process of law," which most assuredly is in the Constitution, both as applied to the federal government and as applied to the states. Professor Norton makes clear that the main object of this theory is both undoing the wrong done by the illegal behavior and the integrity of the judicial process. As Norton admits, however, this theory, too, would not exclude obvious blunders, unless significantly modified - although this does not disturb him.

It does, however, disturb me, although it is the theory most solidly grounded in the text of the Constitution and in the entire body of jurisprudence - state and federal - from 1886 to date. Here then is my modification to his theory. Police who commit intentional misconduct involving illegal searches and illegal arrests cannot be trusted, should they be disappointed by coming up empty-handed, not to commit the further misconduct of planting evidence, which is hardly unknown, although not particularly common either. (A different legal paper, in an edited legal collection, recently suggests that tort liability for illegal searches and seizures, an alternative often suggested to the exclusion of evidence, cannot work for this class of officer, although it does not suggest the general theory advanced here.) Using such evidence therefore renders the entire judicial process suspect, a different violation of "due process of law" and yet one that preserves the "good-faith exception." Like Norton's theory, it has both due process and the integrity of the judicial process at its core, but unlike Norton's theory it does not always undo the wrong done by the illegal search or seizure and therefore does not always restore the status quo ante.

At any rate, evidence that is excluded is commonly known as the "fruit of the poisonous tree," and it is in just that sense that we use fruit here.

Third, as the preceding Libertarian's Corner showed, corruption need not be recognized as such by law to be such. Laws do not create ethical realities; at their best, they recognize them; at their worst, they pervert them. After all, a law is but a statement, if often one ponderously long, and statements by people cannot and do not create realities.

Fourth, politics differs crucially from logic. In logic, while a true statement can only validly yield further truths, a false statement can validly yield anything whatsoever. Politics is quite different. A man who is virtuous in private life may become rather easily corrupted by his entrance into politics. This, more than "all the wrong people enter politics" explains the deeply corrosive effect of the political vocation on character and the critical need for term limits; it also explains the often huge "disconnect" between a politician's private life and public actions, to which much of history bears witness. Both halves of this last sentence will now be illustrated with two recent examples from New York City.

Few people can lay claim to the gentlemanliness and all-around decency of long-time City Clerk and then Mayor David Dinkins. Yet, these very special qualities rendered him unfit to govern the jungle that was then New York. Upon his election, he stumbled from crisis to crisis, because he did not have the fortitude to stare naked evil - a tidal wave of street crime, much of it extremely violent - in the eye and deal with it as required. Instead, it often seemed as if he was paralyzed and stunned by what occurred on his watch.

He was succeeded by the often-ruthless Rudolph Giuliani, whose principal claim to fame prior to his election was the prosecution of not guilty defendants in his post as U.S. Attorney. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rarely overturns convictions handed down by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Mr. Giuliani had the dubious distinction of being so manifestly unjust as to witness key convictions overturned on appeal. Yet it was just this ruthless quality that in his new role as Mayor made New York City governable again. By the close of his second term, crime had fallen to levels absolutely no one had thought possible.

Enter Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose third term is the principal subject of this piece. During his first two terms, he largely (but not entirely) kept up the general program that Giuliani put into place, and crime even fell somewhat further. Then, something happened. In an act of unspeakable hubris, he violated the will of a large majority of voters expressed in two referenda that all city officials be limited to two terms. To get the City Council to pass a bill overturning the referenda, he in all but law bribed them by including them as well in a one-time exception to the law. Then, he bribed the voters by promising to empanel a City Charter revision commission which would put the matter before the voters a third time, after the election. The Council succumbed, the voters fell for it as well, only to reaffirm for the third time the city-wide two-term limit. Never mind that all this was within the law; it was nonetheless corruption and nonetheless accomplished by bribery.

I did not even consider voting for him the third time around, notwithstanding that he appeared to be the best candidate of those with a significant chance of winning. Because what he taught by his candidacy and his subsequent win is that the means justify the ends, even if the means involve de facto corruption and bribery. As this was no blunder, and threatened the integrity of the political process as well, I therefore excluded his entire candidacy from my radar screen in the hopes that if enough fellow citizens felt likewise, all three of the most promising justifications for excluding the "fruit of the poisonous tree" would hold. Government would not teach misconduct or that it pays; future misconduct would be deterred; the integrity of the political process and "due process" would be restored.

Yet, he did win, but the results of a "win" like this can hardly be expected to turn out as other than an outright failure. This is precisely because politics and ethics are so unlike logic. In some senses what he did was false - and if this were logic, anything at all could validly follow. As it is not, one can only expect further problems. The senses in which the word "false" might apply are two: He was false to his own character, as we will soon see, and what he did violated objective moral norms as well. The opposite is also true. David Dinkins, for example, won fair and square, and was true to his character as well, and yet rather than yielding only further "truths" in some sense, the results were a veritable disaster. What one can say of Rudolph Giuliani is a bit more complex. He is a man of obvious and great talents, and in one role he used them largely for the worse and in another largely for the better. This discussion helps account for the "disconnect" we referred to earlier.

Now, how exactly has Mayor Bloomberg failed? Let me count the ways. Quality-of-life offenses are up; street crime is up (although disguised by inaccurate statistics, which Giuliani would never have tolerated), and Mr. Bloomberg's third term has been otherwise marked by a series of fatuous and illiberal moves as his eyes wander from area to area doing damage wherever they turn. Yet, in his private life, by all accounts, he is a good man, yet another demonstration of the "disconnect" referred to above. His charitable and philanthropic giving is legendary; he serves for a mere one dollar as does his daughter; and the like. The only conclusion I can reach is that politics has had the corrosive effect on his character, also referred to above.

Four further examples of his outright failure in his third term as Mayor, culled from a much-longer list, suffice to make the point eminently clear: (1) All eateries are now graded from A to C by his infamous health department and its foolish commissioner. Many of the criteria used in this second-grade system of evaluation of entrepreneurs have little to do with health, but are disguised and therefore dishonest "revenue-enhancers." Pay the "fines" and correct the "problems" and the grades go up. (2) Fountain drinks sold in eateries will soon not be permitted to exceed twenty fluid ounces. Now, of course, drinking lots of sugar water is obviously unhealthful and a significant cause of obesity, which is itself a significant cause of premature mortality. But the ban applies to all drinks, but only at eateries, not in supermarkets, convenience stores, and the like. One huge chain has already prepared its answer to this foolishness. It has tripled the variety of drinks, and can be expected to lift all limits on refills when the cup-size decreases. (3) All trans-fats are banned in eateries as well. Now, the medical community is unanimously agreed that these are extremely bad for one. Yet entirely aside from the fact that this neither should be nor is the city's concern, it does not work, either! Virtually any oil when heated sufficiently (such as, of course, by deep-frying) becomes trans-fat. The Mayor is either unaware of this bit of biochemistry or simply cares about appearances. In all three cases, restaurateurs will either circumvent the regulations (and survive) or go broke? which doubtless does not really disturb anyone already a billionaire and who cares more about tourists and the businesses that cater to them than about New Yorkers and the businesses that cater to them. (4) The final example, however, dwarfs the rest. The Mayor got the state to foolishly cede authority over the public schools to an appointee reporting directly to him and answerable to him. The result of this cession has been a disaster. With some help from the New York State Board of Regents, although reading and math scores have in fact gone significantly down, the appearance is otherwise, as not merely have cut-off scores and the difficulty of the questions been allowed to fluctuate dramatically, but even the so-called "raw scores" are "adjusted." This is needed because "mainstreaming" efforts have put into virtually every classroom a significant contingent of special-education students, creating bifurcated classrooms that are impossible to teach - no one, anywhere, can teach simultaneously at two widely divergent levels; the best an unfortunate teacher in such a situation can do is teach towards a nonexistent middle, that is collect a paycheck but otherwise accomplish little.

Truly, one can witness the illiberal fruits of an office won corruptly. *

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

Once upon a time, oh so long ago, when professors had pretensions to learning, it was common for teachers of Political Science to read, and to insist that at least their graduate students read, relevant quarterlies, like Foreign Affairs. Pretty deadly stuff, we always thought, but nevertheless those were the publications where significant ideas were advanced, as anyone will admit who recalls the beginning of the Cold War and the famous "long telegram" from George Kennan in Moscow, ultimately published in Foreign Affairs in 1948 under the name "X."

National Affairs, Yuval Levin's quarterly, is in the tradition, printing sensible deadly articles with titles like "A Prescription for Medicaid" or "Reviewing Regulatory Review" to send one to sleep, but also, occasionally, a brilliant essay that reorients our thinking making us see old problems in new ways. So we have an essay by George Weigel in the Spring issue of National Affairs, "Reality and Public Policy," which makes us at least, think again about 1) our current policy dilemmas, and 2) how we think about the ultimate realities of our lives. Pretty heady stuff.

Mr. Weigel begins by pointing out the contemporary rejection of metaphysics, the study of the nature of first principles, and problems of ultimate reality, a study, of course, which assumes that there is a morally significant givenness to reality, as Mr. Weigel says, "a structure of Why Things Are that can be discerned " which "discloses certain truths about the way we should live." If we reject Things As They Are (Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings) then we cannot address the Way Things Ought To Be. Another way to put it is that democratic bodies (like Parliaments) have lost the knowledge, will, and wisdom to propose solutions to our public problems, and we see this here as well as in Europe - the same intractable problems, the same paucity of thought.

The author attributes this rejection of contact with reality to Gnosticism, an ancient cultural virus (it was an early heresy of Christianity) which has turned up, again and again, throughout history - but never so virulently nor so ubiquitously as it has become since the '60s. This is the essence of Gnosticism, the thing to remember: it seeks the good outside and beyond material reality; everything is determined by will, by desire. Those with knowledge - gnosis - are seers; the rest of us are stuck with obdurate nature of mundane material fact. We see this obviously in the utopianism of Greenism where the earthly paradise shall be magically attained by rejecting industrialism.

We also see this in the starkest terms in the so-called "gender" issue, which relegates the given reality of male, female to the absurd category of "cultural constructs." So the Spanish government in 2007 enacted legislation permitting people to change their sex simply by declaration, and Mr. Weigel quotes Pope Benedict quoting the Chief Rabbi of France who, on the occasion when the French president argued in favor of a same-sex marriage bill, wrote an essay comparing this with Genesis:

. . . being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God.

And Mr. Weigel adds:

To imagine that we live in such a self-created world is not only to imagine that we owe nothing to our given nature but also to believe that we owe no attention or response to the problems that arise when we ignore that nature. Such a warped sensibility not only makes a moral order impossible: it makes political order untenable, too.

We hope that answers in our minds the critics of conservatism who are always counseling us to avoid the so-called "social issues"; as Mr. Weigel points out, politics is the expression of culture.

We cannot exaggerate the importance of this essay as a clarifier of thought. Just as James Piereson's essay, "The Fourth Revolution" in the June 2012 issue of The New Criterion shone a revealing light on our mundane politics, Mr. Weigel's essay helps us, not only to clarify our conservative thoughts, but to strengthen them. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

There's a short piece by Peter Wehner in the 6/13 Weekly Standard, "They'll Always Love Obama," a sharp criticism of the nave conservative belief that the media are finally turning on Obama, which seems conclusive to us. We have been made uneasy recently by conservative claims that the recent scandals have opened reporters' eyes to the perfidy of the administration. Mr. Wehner begins with a New York Times story claiming that "the release of e-mails on Benghazi largely confirmed the White House account," and then proceeds to show how false the story is. Why is this so?

When [reporters] look at the president and his top advisers they see a reflection of their own background education and sympathies - and sometimes they see their former colleagues and even family members.

A second reason is because they "view his critics with contempt." And finally, reporters are happy with a large federal government, and "these scandals have the potential to deal a devastating blow to their progressive ideology."

This seems to us a remarkably astute view of the media today, and the article is sharp and concise, effectively recalling conservatives to sobriety.

In the last issue we mentioned a very stupid article in the March Commentary; well, the reader response was appalling because readers turned out to be worse than the article's authors - they wanted the GOP to drop any pretense to conservatism. Once the flagship magazine of neo-conservatisim, with a letters column that regularly featured policy intellectuals of a high order, Commentary has fallen on evil days. Sic transit gloria mundi - Thus passes the glory of the world. *

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I have always striven, within the limits of my means, to make the best hay possible: mow the grass when the blossom is still "in the boot," the bud enfolded within a leaf, when the whole plant is tender and sweet, as palatable and nutritious as it will ever be. That optimum moment, however, is but a moment, and thereafter the grass loses value as the stem grows to push the opened flower above the leaves, the flower goes to seed, the leaves wither, the plant dries to hard roughage. The idea is to mow the grass at its moment of perfection, dry it quickly, and get it into the haymow without shattering and wasting the leaves.

My own tiny effort mimics a larger one: in the sixty years I have observed farming, one technique after another has been developed to preserve the mown forage in a condition as close as possible to its freshly-mown state, from barn driers to hay conditioners to grass silage, and the achievement is impressive.

Exactly when this conception became conventional wisdom I do not know, but certainly by the 1920s because every farmer I worked for, most of whom began their careers then, thought that way, and I encountered only a few old-timers in Vermont who held to the view that grass increased in value with age, that the ripe seed head concentrated the plant's energy. It never occurred to me that one day I would farm in a place where the modern view was scorned with contempt.

We were objects of much curiosity when we moved to Cape Breton island in 1971, and people from miles around came to see what we were up to - and to comment thereon. It appeared that everything we were doing was destined to fail: tomatoes would never ripen, and as for fancy stuff like peppers and celery - they smiled with pity. Jersey cows? Not a chance, too delicate to stand the winters. But the staggerer was their vehement response to our June haying: It's too green! You'll never dry it! You'll have to burn it or throw it over the bank! Why did Cape Bretoners think this way? It took me sometime before I thought I had the answers, and I learned them not only by paying close attention to the farming I saw around me, but by my own struggle with the island's climate and soil.

Commercial agriculture, farming deliberately and consistently for a market, was never very big on Cape Breton. The dominant agricultural regime was to be found on the thousands of subsistence farms that produced enough to provide for the modest needs of the large families that worked them, with some sporadic local sales of what could be spared from home consumption. The major difference between these two forms stems from the fact that the commercial farmer has to meet the demands of the marketplace, while the subsistence farmer needs to satisfy only his own family and a few other people known to him. The buyers in the marketplace, distant and unknown, have no ties to the farmer, they care only about the product, and they can be very exacting. Competing with other farmers, he must meet the market's demands, and he must do so as efficiently as possible, keeping his costs down to make a profit. Driven simultaneously to improve his product and cheapen his methods, the commercial farmer is forced to be receptive to fresh thinking and new ideas; for him, farming is a developing process. On the other hand, while individual subsistence farmers may strive to do better, they have no strong incentive to do so, and their situation in a community of such farmers is very anti-innovation, static, traditional, conformist. How often have I head Cape Bretoners say, "It was good enough for my father and grandfather, so I guess it's good enough for me!" It is all too easy to produce something that "will do," something that will pass with an undiscriminating, undemanding audience. The farmers on the island worked hard, and within the limitations of their outlook and methods, ran their farms well - fields mown to the edges, fences kept up, buildings maintained. Their decline began at the turn of the 20th century, continuing gradually into the 1950s when, with the dying off of the last members of the last generation that had grown up in that regime's heyday, the decline became precipitant.

By the time we appeared, a diminished number of such farms were still extant - nearly everyone in the area kept a few cows, a horse, a pig, and some hens - but they were decrepit remnants. Nevertheless the basic pattern of Cape Breton farming could be discerned; what went on might be a sloppy version of past practices, but inadequate performance could not obscure the practice itself. They hayed late, beginning just as we were finishing. It was rarely feasible to start before the middle of June, but my neighbors waited another month, and in the past it was common to begin in August. We found haying records of the 1930s and '40s penciled on a partition in a derelict barn, and the earliest date was August seventh. Because the hay was mown so late, when it was tall and stalky, there was a lot of it - they still judge hay by its height - and they fed it out with a free hand. They had to, it had such negligible food value (two percent protein would be absolute tops). The cattle stood knee-deep in hay in the stables, and what they didn't eat was used as bedding.

The cattle that could live on such a diet were unlike any I had ever seen, all sizes and shapes and colors, rawboned, coarse, with thick skins and rough coats; unapproachable, they seemed hardly domesticated. But they were tough, they could survive on hay my cows wouldn't look at, they could stand the long, damp winters in lice-infested, dirty stables without windows, they could be turned out to water at a creek a quarter mile from the barn on a January day during a snowstorm. Of course they gave little milk, and not much beef either. I once met a drover who had been trading animals all over the island for nearly 50 years, and he summed up the quality of the cattle in a phase, "A barn full o' cows, and not enough milk for the tea!" But they sure were easy to keep.

And that, I think, had a lot to do with the agricultural regime. In such a marginal environment it is very hard to farm. Growing nutritious forage is difficult enough; making it into hay can be heartbreaking. Whereas if you cut it late, there's plenty of it, and it's almost dry when you mow it so you can just throw it in the haymow a few hours later and zut! There's the major farming job of the year done, thank Heaven. There's more to it, of course. Ignorance, for one thing, and the surly peasant's resistance to new ideas from outside, stubborn suspicion and mistrust, and I think there was another subtler factor involved: to take pains with farming, to strive year after year to produce the finest hay possible, to take pride in well cared for cattle requires a profound love of farming that was common in Vermont but which I never saw on Cape Breton. Perhaps it had to do with their past. Highland Scots were not farmers, a role that was thrust upon them, whether they liked it or not, when they got here. But I think it also derived from the grudging quality of the land. No matter what you do or how much labor you put into it, the results are disappointing, the rewards thin, and the farmer's spirit is sapped.

Most of the fields on our Cape Breton Farm had been regularly mown, but there had been no animals there for eight years, and for some years before that the manure had not been spread at all, just dumped around the barnyard. The grass in the fields was thin and weedy. The remedy seemed obvious; spread lots of manure and lime and watch the grass grow, as in Vermont. We had no idea how poor the soil was. Later, when I began to plow the land, I discovered places were the plow would go no deeper than four inches and the topsoil was only a thin dark smear at the grass roots. The fields didn't seem to respond much to our efforts, although the food value of the hay certainly increased, because the cows needed much less of it. This was a gain, but the fields were still too unproductive for our needs. They would have to be plowed and seeded. I had done some garden plowing with a walking plow, but I had acquired an old sulky plow by the time I tackled the fields. Learning to plow with horses was not easy for me, and it probably caused me nearly as much frustration and heartache as satisfaction, but it meant a great deal to me, and I learned much from the task.

Plow, plough n. 2. figuratively, tillage; culture of the earth; agriculture. -Johnson's Dictionary

November dusk:

plowman's call, jingling bells,

plodding hooves

faintly heard in thickening twilight.

Plowing is the primal agricultural act, the decisive disturbance of the land and its natural processes in order to introduce the artificial regime of agriculture. To abstain is to accept merely what the land will yield of itself, but when I turn the sod I am committing all my powers to a struggle with the land, to make my human mark on it, to make the land grow something it would never produce otherwise, to recreate the original act of agriculture. When I turn the horses' heads towards the field, I feel the apprehensive excitement of facing a hard contest, one which I myself have initiated, knowing that if I would be what I hope I am I cannot do otherwise, cannot shirk the contest, cannot avoid starting it.

I plow down native wild grasses - low in protein and productivity - replacing them with cultivated forages, timothy and trefoil and orchard grass and clover, to make the land more productive, to better feed the livestock, ultimately to provide more for myself and my family - at a cost, naturally, the cost of creation and maintenance. Because, unlike the native grasses whose demands upon the environment are small (hence, yield and value are small), the cultivars need enrichment, lime and manure and fertilizer, if they are to grow successfully in competition with tough native plants. Without that, new fields soon become "old fields" reclaimed by better-adapted indigenes. Agriculture is basically the creation and maintenance of artificial conditions of productivity.

If good plowing is such a satisfying act, nothing drives me to despair like bad plowing, and I've done plenty of it. There are the consequences: the hours of difficult discing next spring, the poor seed bed, the weed-choked field. One round lost to nature and all my own fault. Worse, however, is my sense of failure at the crucial act of farming, with the accompanying feelings of ignorance, stupidity, and inadequacy. Once, I began so badly that the field looked as if it had been struck repeatedly by lightning, with sods flung here and there, half-opened furrows, rolled-up furrows, shallow furrows, narrow and wide ones, every form of land wreckage. I tried every adjustment I could find on the sulky plow, pulled every lever, shifted the horses on the pole, all for naught. I struggled on, going out to the field every morning with desperation in my heart. After a week of tinkering, trying this and that with no real idea of what I was doing, I improved to a barely acceptable level, but I did not know what I had done to make the plowing so bad, nor how I had improved it. I was in the dark, ignorant of something crucial to my farming life.

"Sir, (said he) a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge." -Dr. Johnson, quoted by Boswell

Originally there must have been a manual that went with the plow, I thought, so I took a chance and wrote to International Harvester in Chicago, which led to a lengthy correspondence with the Corporate Archivist, identification of the model in a 1935 catalog, and finally the manual was in my hands. I went out to the machinery shed, manual in hand, and stared at the McCormick-Deering No. 9 plow, but I could see it would not be enough. It would be a help, but the manual presupposed a certain amount of plowing and mechanical knowledge, most of which was beyond me. Well, I thought, I'll do my best with it, I'll wrestle with the manual and the plow when the time comes in the fall. But in August there appeared a new neighbor who had a book with a chapter on sulky plowing, and he knew something about it himself. When plowing time came in November, he generously helped me set up and adjust the plow.

Next morning when I pulled the lever that lowered the plowshare, I felt the decisive moment had come. I called to the horses, and the coulter cut the sod, the point slipped beneath, the furrow slice rose firmly on the moldboard and turned over smoothly, rolling out behind in a continuous strip of brown earth. Keeping the horses straight, glancing anxiously back at the furrow bank, I drove on steadily to the end of the field. And there I sat, breathing deeply, looking back at the long, straight, unbroken furrow, satisfied that I was plowing again as a man should plow.

What I know of practical matters I have had to learn, often with great difficulty, by myself, awkwardly trying this and that, picking up clues, as with plowing, wherever I can. Consequently, I have no prejudices about knowledge - I'll take it wherever I can find it. Once, a neighbor's son was at the farm and he sneeringly asked if I were a "book farmer or a real farmer." As I tried to explain to the lout the value of knowledge irrespective of its source, I recalled his father's farm, a real farm: no manure is spread on the fields, which are tastefully edged with junk cars; haying begins in August and he doesn't cut the back swathe, so the woods encroach on the fields; the woods are a cutover waste. It is only those whose ignorance is bottomless who know so much that they can afford to be choosy about their sources of knowledge.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. . . . In the right state [the scholar] is Man Thinking. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Too often, country people are prejudiced against book learning out of envy and dislike: because the educated are often arrogant, snobbish, and absurdly impractical; because it seems the province of the rich and powerful; because the educated often seem so glibly superior. It is difficult to accept for it what it is, another form of knowledge which expands the horizons of our practical learning. Just as often, and with far less excuse, the educated are prejudiced against practical knowledge. I have known this question from both sides, having modest claims on learning in both spheres, but my position is disadvantaged because each side regards me as a member of the opposite camp. My neighbors, like the sneering young man, regard me as a silly eccentric, while educated visitors look upon me as a benighted peasant. Because I have some book learning I cannot possibly know how to farm; because I milk cows and shovel manure I have no culture and probably no intellect at all. On the whole, however, I count myself lucky, for I have been able, in ways not easily available to most men, to combine the so-called intellectual life with the so-called practical life, greatly enriching myself, becoming, I hope, Emerson's scholar.

Winter is upon us. The ground is iron-hard, but the first snow has not yet fallen. I look out the kitchen window, across to the plowed field.

Dark furrows

etch the land

under a dark sky.

In 1977 a sample of our hay was tested at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. It was the most nutritious (18 percent protein) hay tested in the Province that year.

The deed bears out the words. *

Barry MacDonald - Editorial

Breakthrough, Our Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy, by James O'Keefe. Threshold Editions, (c) 2013, ISBN 978-1-4767-0617-7, pp. 335, $26.

Too often we are frustrated paying attention to the news. The liberal media choose the issues, compose the talking points, and set the narrative. The liberal point of view spreads like a net over America.

It is frustrating that good-hearted friends living in the Midwest parrot liberal talking points - how do we wrench the power of driving the narrative away from liberals?

Arguments alone aren't enough; truth is lost in the weeds.

As a young man James O'Keefe found ways to expose the hypocrisy of the liberals in the media and in government, and he uses the methods of the fearsome community organizer Saul Alinsky (who was President Obama's hero).

Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals, A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Unlike Machiavelli's The Prince, which advised Renaissance princes on the best methods of getting and holding power, Saul Alinsky's purpose was to take power away from the "haves" and give it to "have nots" - the poor, the blacks, and Hispanics.

Alinsky didn't scruple overmuch about morals. He manipulated the people he organized, getting them to do "the right thing for the wrong reasons." Alinsky was above conventional morality. Polarization, demonization, and character assassination were his tools. What he thought was "the right thing" is different from what we think.

Alinsky outgrew Marxism but not revolution. He was a powerful revolutionary. In competent hands, Alinsky's rules are weapons designed to attack the establishment. Alinsky's rules suit our instantaneous media capabilities: a carefully staged action creates an event, spreading ripples, changing the political and cultural narrative.

What is needed is action. Action acquires power because it is brash. Action engages with panache and aplomb. It is new. Action is outrageous, hilarious; it seizes attention, it stuns. It cannot be ignored. Action transmits morals: creating villains and heroes. Action tears away the facade to expose hypocrisy.

If done systematically, action can bring down an establishment as it makes a mockery of pretentious and smug people who have set themselves up for a fall. People love an underdog and the comeuppance of the arrogant.

Saul Alinsky's rules do have the power to change the direction of a culture, but usually they are used by leftist provocateurs. But just like in war, when one side develops new technology or strategy sooner or later the other side co-opts them.

James O'Keefe's book, Breakthrough: Our Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy, reads like a detective or espionage thriller; it is unlike Alinsky's Rules for Radicals which is weighty with intellectual heft. James' book is about the experience of a young man brave enough to take on billion-dollar organizations that could sue him, and state and federal governments that could jail him, and the news media that could ruin his reputation.

His inspiration emerged when he was a student at Rutgers University where he encountered "the soft tyranny of academic life." He saw "patterns of corruption and hypocrisy," so he and like-minded friends started a newspaper, the Centurion, to counter it. The established campus paper, the Daily Targum, giddily celebrated a famous alumnus, Paul Robeson, who was a black athlete, actor, singer, but also a fervent Communist and a high profile supporter of the Soviet Union - Robeson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize by the U.S.S.R. James put Paul Robeson's face on the cover of his newspaper with the quote "Glory to Stalin," thus spurring the campus bigwigs to defend the indefensible.

Copies of James' Centurion were burned and stuffed in garbage cans, and he was told by the dean to be "respectful." People tried to dissuade him from his path, saying that he was ruining future job opportunities. But he had discovered his contrarian passion and set out to harass political correctness everywhere in a target-rich America.

James O'Keefe has perfected the art of the undercover sting, similar to the Dateline NBC series "To Catch a Predator," and the undercover work of Mike Wallace at "60 Minutes." James secretly records encounters carefully set up with liberal activists or power brokers. His aim is to expose hypocrisy and corruption, and he has been wildly successful.

There is joyful exuberance in hatching a plan of attack: proposing outlandish schemes, trading outrageous scenarios with his team - "What if . . ." "Why not. . ." - one imagines the laughter and the jokes. Then there is the refinement of the operation and the painstaking preparation. The appropriate laws have to be researched to narrow the focus to a sharp point, but also to avoid lawsuits or jail. The tools (various recording devices) and the props are selected; the props must be over-the-top to create the vital impact. The dialogue must be role-played with every possible eventuality considered. The process bears comparison to espionage.

When he describes the action itself, and its aftermath, it's clear that James is an adrenaline junkie. He lives for the excitement of the hunt, the kill (so to speak), and the public humiliation of his targets - just like pulling down their pants in public.

Then comes the broadcast of the video, which involves dealing with the media. Andrew Breitbart was an influential mentor and ally; James used Andrew's knowledge of media players as well as Andrew's web site. Fox News usually airs his videos, but not always. James has made many enemies, and through blunders here and there he became vulnerable to counter-stings and smears perpetuated by the media. Sometimes his contacts are afraid of supporting him; he is not always able to rely on his friends. On occasion he must launch a video on Youtube, a worldwide web site hosting many thousands of amateur videos of all types.

One of James' rules is "content is king," meaning "when the content is strong enough, the publicity will take care of itself." The impact will force the media, even against their will, to cover the video - and the media hate him for it. His videos cannot be ignored.

The "media-government complex" (James' term) has retaliated fiercely. After a botched sting of Senator Mary Landrieu's office in 2010 he and three others were thrown in jail and charged with a felony with a 10-year prison term. James recorded the event, showing no criminal wrongdoing, but because his video was erased while he was under arrest he was forced to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. He is on probation and not allowed to travel outside of New Jersey without permission.

Governors and State Attorneys General have threatened him with prosecution in response to various stings. James O'Keefe has a top-notch lawyer who has kept him from serious legal jeopardy.

Andrew Breitbart observed that conservatives may have their own media, including Fox News, a smattering of pundits, publications, blogs, and talk radio, but conservatives don't yet have the power to set and drive the narrative. They respond to the narrative the liberal media produces. James writes:

. . . the majors zealously guard the power to set the agenda. Protecting their right flank are the anti-journalists. These are the salaried staff of the numerous, well-funded attack dog blogs, and online journals-Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Media Matters, TPM, Politico, Mediaite - whose mission is to kill stories in the womb that do not fit their ideological agenda, and ridicule those they cannot kill. . . . One particularly unsavory strategy of the anti-journalists is to research the background of real journalists, citizen journalists included, to find some moment in time when they offended the gods of race, sex, class, and/or [sexual] orientation.

Over the years James O'Keefe has been relentlessly smeared. At a low point he wrote:

Felon! Terrorist! White supremacist! Racist! Pervert! Was this really worth it? If you work for a big news organization, you have all kinds of support systems to see you through even a major screwup, and at the end of the week you get a paycheck. I had none of that. My success had made me more enemies than friends, and recent events had cost me my friends, not all of them, but many. Beyond my sister and my parents, I was not sure there was anyone I could count on.

. . . I knew that I, too, had to surrender to God. If I did so, I could withstand the powerful forces aligned, fairly or not, against the citizen journalist. In my possession I had a series of tapes showcasing corruption at the New Jersey Education Association, a teachers' union. I asked myself whether I could justify taking the risks anymore, whether I could endure the lies of my enemies and the defamation of the machine. But I knew then that as long as I had my family and my faith in God, I was going to be okay. I immediately felt renewed. It was out of my hands now.

In a T.V. interview O'Keefe responded to a question:

I think one of my enemies is the mainstream media. I think one of my enemies is the media which selectively edit everything and selectively edit out the truth about many things, and willfully ignores subjects that they don't want to investigate. If the media [were] doing their job in this country, telling us the truth about public officials, telling us the truth about people and about events, then we'd live in a much better world.

One of James' most consequential operations was the taking down of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the 40-year-old, welfare-rights group with 500,000 members in more than 1,200 neighborhoods in 100 or so cities. ACORN seemed an untouchable institution, receiving multimillions of taxpayer dollars each year from their friends in the Democratic Party. ACORN morphed into the housing business, bullying bankers into giving home loans to people who couldn't afford them. ACORN used the Saul Alinsky playbook, specializing in intimidation.

Through Project Vote. ACORN hired thousands of marginal workers during each election cycle to register as many voters as possible, and also to fabricate phony registrations, with the purpose of overwhelming the electoral system. Matthew Vadum, senior editor at the Capital Research Center, estimated 400,000 ACORN registrations were thrown out in 2008. ACORN workers were convicted of voter fraud in at least twelve states. President Obama had long-time ties to ACORN. Speaking before the group on the campaign trail in November 2007 he boasted of running Project Vote and registering 150,000 new voters before he was elected to office. President Obama said: "I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career."

James O'Keefe and Hanna Giles came up with an idea: a pimp and a whore would go to an ACORN office seeking instruction on how to obtain housing for their operation. Hanna was a minister's daughter and she looked younger than she was. James was 25 years old and living in his parent's basement. They met on Facebook, and they refined their tactics for weeks on Facebook. James said of Hanna:

Only twenty at the time, she had the poise of a woman twice her age. Smart, athletic, attractive, she was not afraid to get creative.

James pinned a Sony Handycam to his satin tie, he borrowed his grandmother's chinchilla shawl, his grandfather's wide-brimmed derby, and his sister's Mercury Marquis with a missing hubcap. At the Dollar General he bought a cane and oversized sunglasses. To prevent people from saying "So what does that prove?" he reasoned that he had to be "extremely over-the-top." Thus was born one of his rules: Always use props.

James had done reconnaissance, going into the Washington D.C. ACORN office, taking an application, and casing the office as a bank robber would. James was broke all summer. He had to ask a friend for the gas money to Baltimore. On the way to the sting he had to take a longer route over the Chesapeake Bay to avoid paying tolls. James quotes Alinsky: "Tactics means doing what you can with what you have."

At the Baltimore ACORN office James talked to Shira and Tanja:

James: Is it against the law in Maryland? Prostitution?

Shira: Anything that the government's not getting our money from is always against the law. Let me get somebody here from taxes so they can talk to you. . . . Tanja, she wants to know how you can make it legal.

Tanja: Let me make sure there's a code for it, okay?

James: A code for prostitution?

Tanja: We might have to name this something else . . . [looking through tax forms] performance arts. Let's see. Independent artist. You could be that. . . . Your business is a performing artist, which you are, okay, so you're not lying. . . . So stop saying "prostitution."

James: Got it. . . .

James: What might complicate our taxes . . . is that we have a couple of girls overseas coming over . . . . There's going to be thirteen El Salvadoran girls coming into this house. And they're very young. And we don't want to put them on the books.

Tanja: On the other part of the return you can use them as a dependent. You can use them as a dependent, because they live in your house. . . . If they are underage and they are making money, you shouldn't let anyone know anyway. . . . Be careful. Train them to keep their mouths shut.

Saul Alinsky's rules were in play: The fourth rule: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules - ACORN staff were behaving just as they would on any given day. The fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon - using a chinchilla shawl, reckless bravado, and thirteen fictitious girls from El Salvador, James exposed ACORN's eager amorality. The sixth rule: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy - James and Hanna were having the time of the lives. The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. The exuberant personalities of ACORN's staff will live in video lore forever.

In Washington D.C. James and Hanna talked to two sisters Sherona and Lavernia Boone.

Lavernia: [If James became known as a pimp] . . . you will not have a career. You will be smeared and tarnished for the rest of your life to come. . . .

Lavernia: The money got to go in the bank. . . .

Sherona: When the police ask you, you don't know where the money is coming from. . . . We're looking out for you . . .

Lavernia: [Concerning Hanna] You're not saying what she does. She provides a service.

Hanna: That is what America is based on, goods and services.

In the Brooklyn office an Acorn worker instructed James and Hanna to bury profits in a tin and plant flowers around it to thwart the IRS. Her coworker said:

You can't say what you are doing for a living. . . . Honest is not going to get you the house.

In San Bernadino James and Hanna met Tresa Kaelke who "could have stepped right out of a Quentin Tarantino film." Tresa said she had once run her own service, and "I have some experience in how not to get caught."

Hanna: The guy I am supposed to be working for here just got a shipment of twelve El Salvadoran girls and they are between the ages of twelve and fifteen. . . . I would like to take them away from him and use them for myself . . . .

Hanna: [Johns] pay thousands of dollars more if they are violent with these fourteen-year-old girls. They are okay with guys hitting them if they get a little more money for it. If they are fine with that, there is nothing I can do.

Tresa: Again, it is how you want it to be run. Don't forget, you could mold this into anything you want. You can mold it to the level of decency or indecency.

Tresa sent James and Hanna across the street to a couple who advised them on how to set up a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization to disguise their operation.

Tresa: As soon as you leave I am going over to talk to the both of them and threaten them with their lives, because I can kill people.

James and Hanna executed stings on ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington D.C., Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego, and hit pay dirt every time.

Looking for a place to launch his videos, James O'Keefe met Andrew Breitbart. He and Andrew decided to launch the videos serially through Andrew's website BigGovernment.com. The more experienced Andrew became James' guide on dealing with the media. On seeing the Baltimore sting for the first time Andrew said: "You know they are going to say it was one rogue employee."

The launch of the Baltimore video caused a media explosion. James burst into the nation's consciousness. The New York Post wanted a photo and James and Hanna obliged them: "I had a picture from our walkabout in Washington with me in full pimp regalia and Hannah in high ho style." The photo made the front page two days in a row, one day under the headline "Nut Case." Always use Props!

ACORN responded just as Andrew predicted. On ABC News Alton Bennett, President of ACORN housing, and Mike Shea, Executive Director, insisted "This is not how we behave." They said their employees "undergo rigorous training" and are expected to "comply with the high standards for ethical behavior and compliance with the law." The video was "slanted to misinform the public," and then they really lied:

The people who made this tape went to at least five other ACORN Housing offices where they were turned away or where ACORN Housing employees responded by calling the police. That is not mentioned on the tape - it is part of a long-term plan to smear ACORN Housing for political reasons and provide entertainment in the process.

Andrew Brietbart said:

We deprive them of information . . . that way ACORN can't get the government-media complex to kill the messenger before the whole message gets out."

At this point Saul Alinsky's tenth rule comes into play:

The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is the unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign. It should be remembered not only that the action is in the reaction but that action is itself the consequence of reaction and of reaction to the reaction ad infinitum. The pressure produces the reaction, and constant pressure sustains action.

James and Andrew aired one video at a time, stunning the mainstream media and making use of Alinsky's third rule: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. The media were being played, and had no idea what was coming next. Characteristically, the media didn't press ACORN for explanations, but instead a New York CBS news crew did park outside James' parents' home, hoping to accuse someone of wrongdoing - thus revealing their bias.

After the San Bernadino video aired ACORN's top California organizer, Amy Schur, said the video was "a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened" and demanded that "the complete and unedited video" be posted. She was unaware the entire video had already been posted.

The mainstream media did everything they could to discredit James O'Keefe. Two Washington Post reporters accused him of racism, writing James:

. . . targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does . . . massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.

But the press could not undo the power of the videos (content is king). In a Democratically controlled House, minority leader John Boehner introduced the "Defund ACORN Act" and the bill passed 345-75, with 172 Democrats voting for the bill. The Democratically controlled Senate followed, voting 83-7 to defund ACORN. President Obama was forced to distance himself from his long-time friends. The legislation passed before the New York Times assigned a reporter to the story! Soon afterwards contributions to ACORN dried up and the powerful leftist institution disbanded.

The comedian Jon Stewart concluded his "Daily Show" segment, "The Audacity of Hos," asking

Where are the real reporters on this story? I am a fake journalist and I'm embarrassed these guys scooped me.

Because of his botched sting of Senator Mary Landrieu's office in 2010 and his misdemeanor conviction, James has been on probation for three years and confined to New Jersey. Also, James is now too famous to do stings himself, so he has formed a nonprofit organization, called Project Veritas, to train activists and direct operations remotely. James and his activists have stung many powerful liberals. Let's hope that we will see many operations for decades to come from Project Veritas - it will keep the left-wingers on their toes! James is still young.

James O'Keefe is not a revolutionary as Saul Alinsky was. He is a contrarian, a prankster, an adrenaline junkie, and a defender of our republican form of government. James surrendered his life to God; Alinsky never did. Saul Alinsky's rules are dangerous weapons; those who use them should take care they themselves are not corrupted in the process. Due to human nature, subterfuge is commonplace in the conduct of power and politics. Anyone in the game is vulnerable to corruption.

Realistically we cannot expect the use of Saul Alinsky's tricks by themselves to be influential enough to bring down the liberal agenda in America, because the liberal system is far too well entrenched, and there are far too many liberals in important positions. The liberals occupy the high grounds of American culture.

But the collapse of governance in Detroit, run by corrupt Democrats for over fifty years, presages the collapse of the welfare state. In concert with the visible crumbling of liberal governance, when it becomes obvious that liberal politicians and union bosses throughout the nation have lied, and cannot keep their promises, James O'Keefe's stings, when the public is attentive and aroused, could be used to awesome effect. Then might also come an opportune time for the conservative media to seize control of the news narrative.

One only wishes that the Republican Party weren't complicit in the maintenance of Big Government, but were instead genuinely seeking limited, constitutional government. And one wishes we had Republican leadership, oriented towards modest government, with a least half the courage and imagination of James O'Keefe. *

We would like to thank the following people for their generous contributions in support of this journal (from 5/25/2013 to 7/26/2013): Michael A. Alaimo, Ariel, William G. Buckner, Price B. Burgess, Edward J. Cain, Dino Casali, John D'Aloia, Robert Day, Joe Fetzer, Reuben M. Freitas, Judith E. Haglund, James E. Hartman, Catherine M. Heatley, William R. & Barbara R. Hilgedick, Charles W. Johnson, Kenneth E. Kampfe, Margaret M. Kelly, Herbert London, Albert D. & Norma J. Miller, Thomas L. Mitchel, Robert A. Moss, Donald J. Povejsil, David P. Renkert, Alvan I. Shane, Philip Stark, Jack E. Turner, Thomas Warth, Thomas H. Webster, Robert C. Whitten.

The following is a summary of the June/July 2013 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In "What the Case of Kermit Gosnell Says about Us," Barry MacDonald shows that the abortion doctor recently sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder is not unique in America.

Allan Brownfeld, in "Why Is the National Media Ignoring the Gruesome Murder Trial of a Philadelphia Abortion Doctor? Is Political Correctness at Work?" reports details of murders that the left refuses to face; in "Ten Years After Iraq, Debate Is Finally Beginning in Earnest about America's Role in the World," he writes about much needed soul-searching with the Republican party; in "The Assault on Ben Carson: Does Free Speech Exist for Black Conservatives?" he describes the abuse the brilliant neurosurgeon has been taking from the left; in "The Heckler's Veto and Speech Codes Threaten Free Speech at the Nation's Universities," he describes ugly tactics that make a mockery of our nation's most important freedom.

In "Mismatch: A Book with Sensible Proposals on Affirmative Acton," Herbert London reviews a book that offers solutions.

In "The EPA: The Worst of Many Rogue Federal Agencies (Parts I and II)," Mark W. Hendrickson details many instances where the EPA, in a rush to impose punishing and crippling regulations on industry, ignored or suppressed scientifically based evidence refuting their justifications for the regulations; in "Medicare: Did You Really Pay for That?" he describes how politicians have swindled the American people with promises that can't be kept, and the terrible consequences.

Paul Kengor, in "Well Done, Lady Thatcher - The Passing of the Iron Lady," remarks on Margaret Thatcher's victories over statist power inside and outside Britain; in "Ronald Reagan: Same-sex Marriage Advocate?" he cites why Reagan would not have wanted marriage redefined: reasoned, principled conservatism; in "Preserving Hugo Chavez," he compares the treatment given to Chavez's body to that given Vladimir Lenin: the left might be preparing a new saint.

In "Liberty and Order," A.W.R. Hawkins writes that order must be imposed upon liberty else appetites and passions lead to decadence, and a "free-for-all"; ours is a society decaying from a lack of moral order and faith in our Creator.

Philip Vander Elst, in "The Illiberal Face of 'Social Liberalism,'" writes of the brutal political tactics behind the homosexual marriage agenda, using the power of the state to destroy religious freedom.

In "Save the Males," Richard F. Doyle presents his latest book on Masculinity and men's rights.

Jigs Gardner, in "Letters from a Conservative Farmer - The Backlands," begins another adventure by taking a farm in the hard land of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

Jigs Gardner, in "Historians, the South, and the Civil War," revisits a subject he loves - strategy, culture, personality - the writing and writers of the Civil War.

In "Survey of Conservative Magazines: Whither Conservatism?" Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin review the ruminations of conservative writers on where the movement should go. They think many of these writers need courage.

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

That was the question of many editorials and articles in the conservative press after the last election, and we think it significant that little distinction was made between the GOP and conservatives, something that wasn't true a few years ago. The rash of articles telling conservatives how to win again in the future seems dumb to us; after all, a winning strategy is obvious, isn't it? Field a sound candidate who will articulate conservative ideas forcefully. That's not what we had last year, and we lost. Why Romney was the candidate and why he ran the campaign he did are matters that should be discussed and analyzed, because there seem to be some very stupid notions at GOP headquarters about how to run a campaign - witness the incredibly dumb handling of Sarah Palin in 2008 as well as the gutless Romney campaign.

But of course, conservative ideas have to be thought about, elaborated, and stated in compelling terms. For example, in a massive (53 contributors) symposium in the January issue of Commentary, Fred Siegel concentrates on problems in states, i.e., municipal bankruptcies in California and elsewhere.

California's cities and the state . . . offer a picture of the dangers ahead imposed by the power of public sector unions. . . . [what we need] now are knowledgeable politicians who can speak to the specifics of state and local problems while placing them in a conservative conceptual context.

He is not the only one to see the states as places where the conservative agenda can be advanced and from which conservatives can derive convincing arguments on the national level. In the 2/25 issue of National Review John Hood's article, "States of Conservatism," provides an interesting overview of conservative initiatives in several states. So there are many sources to draw on in elaborating conservative ideas, and we should actively work on them, beginning right now.

Generally speaking, contributors to the symposium fall into two groups: those who want the GOP to change its ways to accommodate what they see as the inexorable future - homosexual marriage, multiculturalism, and so on, and those who think conservatives should stick to their principles. This is true also of the several articles elsewhere. For instance, Christopher Caldwell writes in the 11/19/12 issue of the Weekly Standard, obviously criticizing Romney:

Where two candidates argue about values, the public may prefer one to the other. But where only one candidate has values, he wins, whatever those values happen to be.

That's a critique of Romney's practice, not of conservatism. But a number of the respondents clearly want conservatives to abandon social issues entirely. Many were embarrassed by Todd Akins. Well, we were annoyed, not embarrassed, but we didn't think he reflected the party. We think that such critics are made uncomfortable by conservatism itself.

Reading a symposium consisting of 53 opinions is a bore because bright ideas and sensible suggestions get lost in a sea of words. Those contributions that catch the reader's attention do so by their startling difference from surrounding opinions. So Dennis Prager stresses what he calls the "American Trinity": Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum:

Only if the American people are taught that the greatness of America is solely due to the unique American Trinity of Values - and also taught the mortal threat to those values that Leftism poses - will conservatism prevail.

It isn't really an answer to the question, but it makes us see the vital importance of conservatism, which, after all, is the point behind the symposium.

Evidently John Podhoretz, Commentary's editor, felt that he had not done enough with the subject because he returned to it in March with a five-point plan to "Save the Republican Party" by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, who say,

Prevailing political forces, as well as prevailing public attitudes, present enormous obstacles to the national success of [the] party.

Then the authors spend nearly two pages analyzing the political successes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, due, the authors claim, because they reoriented their parties "toward mainstream values" and shunned extremists. A puzzling claim, in regard to Clinton at least, because the Democratic party moved steadily leftward in those years, finally culminating in the most extreme leftist ever to become President: Obama in 2008.

After that, the five-point plan is revealed, and a pathetic plan it is. The first point is not controversial: focus on the "economic concerns of working and middleclass Americans" by campaigning against "corporate welfare" and for the breakup of the big banks. There follow anodyne ideas: educational reform, discouraging teenage pregnancy, improving infant and child health, encouraging "wealth-building and entrepreneurship."

The second point essentially advocates amnesty for illegal immigrants ("an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship"). The third point is so amorphous as to be meaningless: "Republicans need to express and demonstrate a commitment to the common good" by working "to reinforce the activities of civil society groups by involving them centrally in the next stages of welfare reform, in a robust agenda to overhaul our prison system." Sounds pretty gaseous to us. Then come social issues, mainly strengthening marriage:

Republicans need to make their inner peace with working with those who both support gay marriage and are committed to strengthening the institution of marriage.

Evidently the authors have not been paying much attention to the advocates of homosexual marriage if they think they want to strengthen marriage. This is all just baloney to obscure the fact that they want Republicans to get on the right sight of the homosexual agenda.

The fifth point is appallingly ignorant. "Republicans need to harness their policy views to the findings of science," which means acceptance of the hoax of anthropogenic climate change. This ignorance is what we have come to expect of conservatives, who immerse themselves in politics while ignoring the culture around them.

Such a silly article in an intellectual magazine like Commentary is depressing.

There is an odd, disturbing essay in the 3/15 Weekly Standard by Matthew Continetti, "The Double Bind," which claims that proposed Republican policies (as advocated in the Commentary article), like ending corporate welfare, are impossible because major conservative constituencies oppose them, so conservatives are damned if they do and damned if they don't. He makes much of an assertion by Irving Kristol in 1976 that Republicans are in trouble because the "party has never fully reconciled itself to the welfare state, and therefore has never given thought to the question of what a conservative welfare state would look like." For example, he wants to cut the "payroll tax and [increase] tax benefits for parents with children," an unexceptionable proposal that's been around for a while. His other ideas are equally anodyne and have been discussed in conservative circles for years, like "having consumers play a more active role in their health care," all of this imbedded in uplifting fatuous rhetoric:

Human beings are not faceless nomads choosing identities at will from a universal menu of options. Human beings are born into families, faiths, and nations.

Mr. Continetti seems to be arguing for a major transformation of the party:

The conservative welfare state is unachievable so long as the Republican party exists in its current form.

- but his proposals are vague and old hat, so where he wants the party to go is unclear, but it is almost certainly leftwards. Calling for a "conservative welfare state" at a time when it is becoming apparent in Europe and the U.S. that such a state is unsustainable, is quixotic.

Finally, there is the usual paean to Reagan who

. . . escaped a stagnant GOP by questioning the assumptions of the . . . party and challenging the priorities of its strongest constituencies.

We doubt it like hell, and we think nothing is more unprofitable than waving the Reagan flag, which we always take it as a sign of vapidity.

What we think really bothers all these "Whither" people is the almost universal scorn and contempt Republicans have endured from all quarters for the last decade or so. With all cultural institutions aligned against conservatism, loud in their scurrilous denunciations, it is no wonder that conservatives feel browbeaten.

The entire "Whither" enterprise is a sad commentary on our morale. We know what we have to do, and if we are sincere in our conservative desires we know we have to begin our work at once. We have to put forward our ideas at every opportunity, and we must spread the good news of our Review far and wide.

Postscript. Readers may recall our remarks at the end of our February column about "Singletons":

Affluence is at the root of the flight from marriage, hard times will reverse that trend. Remember you read it here first!

Mary Eberstadt, in "The Post-Welfare State Family" in the May 6 Weekly Standard, writes:

Might the dark ages of the welfare state end in a family renaissance? If the welfare states of the West finally do implode, it's hard to think of any institution but the family that could step into the vacuum . . . might there be earlier marriage and more of it, as the (unsubsidized) single life becomes less tenable? . . . Might the unreliability of the state lead people to look nearer for emotional and social sustenance - meaning less family breakup, maybe even a rise in the birth rate as insurance against the loneliness and uncertainty of old age? . . . the ongoing travails of the unsustainable state might yet refurbish the family nest somewhere down the road. *

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Backlands: Only oldtimers know the word and its meaning - an area not easily accessible but settled, near other places not in the back, places that are easily reached, in touch with things, up to the minute. A backlands is backward, rustic, mossbacked. Those who live there seldom use the word; it is their more fortunate neighbors who say it, and when they do they smile.

There is, in the middle of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, a large body of water, an arm of the Atlantic, called Bras d'Or Lake, and in its southwest quarter a peninsula juts into the lake, shaped like a fruit suspended from a thin stem, a neck of land seven or eight miles long, roughly three miles wide. Gravel roads wander along both shores, and halfway along one a narrow track turns inland to wind its way through the middle of the neck, serving the area called the Backlands from the beginning because it was landlocked, cut off from the lake by the farms on both shores at a time when access to the water was vital to rural Cape Bretoners as their highway, their source of fish, their livelihood. Until the 1950s steamers regularly plied the lake, and much of the commerce and ordinary transactions of the day moved by water. Farmers shipped milk on the morning boat, mail was carried, goods were shipped to market. Every farmer on the water set his herring and cod nets in season. As if being landlocked were not enough of a drawback, the lay of the land was daunting: a long narrow stream valley that quickly rose on either hand to wooded hills, rough irregular terrain honeycombed with the steep sink holes caused by the underlying strata of gypsum. There wasn't much flat land, too much of it was bog, and the woods were hard to get at.

The hardships of rural life on Cape Breton in the 19th and even in the 20th centuries are almost impossible for modern people to grasp. Every member of the large families labored from before dawn to well after dark, trying to wrest a scant living from poor soil, working in the woods by lantern light on winter mornings, setting nets under the ice on stormy winter days, trudging miles through snow to the store to get a bit of tea and tobacco, weaving rough blankets on a loom all day in an unheated room, threshing oats with a flail on the barn floor late into the cold winter nights.

By 1890, at the height of whatever agricultural prosperity Cape Breton was destined to know, there were ten small subsistence farms in the Backlands, farms which fed and largely clothed those who labored on them but produced little else: some cream was shipped, eggs and butter were traded at the store, a steer or a couple of lambs were sold to pay the taxes. Meager though the harvests were they required everyone's unceasing labor. It was a life sustainable only so long as there were no better prospects within reach, and by the end of the century those prospects, thanks to steamships and railways, were getting closer. Sons were leaving to work in the new steel mill in Sydney, the island's only city, or they took ship to go to Boston for factory work, and their sisters joined them to become maids, nurses, seamstresses. As soon as this exodus began - and bear in mind that these sons and daughters would be the most resourceful, the ones with most initiative - the little farms were doomed.

Doomed. Every day is a struggle to overcome entropy, to shore up order against the relentless tide of Nature's chaos, and in nothing is this so clear as farming. The hurried mower leaves the back swathe beside the wood and alder sprouts and spruce seedlings, wild raspberries and ferns fray the edges of the plotted land, manure is not hauled to the farthest field and clover and timothy go down before goldenrod, ragwort, and thistle; the unpruned trees yield only crabbed and scabby fruit. Every acre must be managed or it goes back to the wild. The poorest places, like the Backlands, were stricken at once. The children grew up and left, the old people died, and life dwindled year by year. It was like a country band: a couple of fiddlers, a horn player, a guitar or two, an accordion, an upright piano, perhaps a mouth organ. The tunes sounded up and down the narrow valley, echoing back from the hills, and if you were not listening carefully you missed the moment when one of the players dropped out, and then another; after all, the music continued, the dance went on. One after the other players vanished from the stage until only thin notes of a single fiddle could just be heard, fading and swelling on the fitful winds.

In 1971, wholly ignorant of all that, we bought the last farm recognizable as a farm off a side road in the heart of the Backlands. Working early and late, reconstructing fences, felling trees for lumber, rebuilding the barn, planting gardens, haying, cutting firewood, it was at least a year before we realized what we were up against. We had not had to build barns to withstand one hundred miles per hour winds, nor had we plowed fields of sour cold clay where topsoil was no more than a dark smear at grass roots; we had not lived through long dark damp winters so fatal to livestock; we had never lived in such a wild place where owls, ravens, weasels, foxes, hawks, mink, eagles, and bobcats rioted and feasted on our flocks. We had been spoiled by Vermont; now we would be put through a far harder school.

Growing in a marginal environment is wholly unlike farming and gardening elsewhere. Weeds, adapted to a low fertility regime, grow much faster than cultivars, which give much but require much. There is hardly any spring in Cape Breton; the cold clay soil barely warms til late June; it can't be worked when wet and breaks hoes when it's dry; it tenaciously shelters weed roots and drains very poorly. Pests and diseases find a happy home in marginal environments, fostering slugs and blights, and cutworms, hornworm, earworms, and fungi in their thousands and tens of thousands. It took tons and tons of manure, lime, and eelgrass to rejuvenate the fields, but in 1976 our hay had the highest protein content of any tested in the Province.

And without quite realizing it at first, we were turning an abandoned property into a beautiful farm. The gardens, grown for use - Jo Ann developed an herb business and we sold plants - as well as beauty, were photographed for national magazines, and thanks to the hard lessons she learned there, Jo Ann became a garden writer. But we failed to reverse the local fortunes: the few people here when we came left, and except for our place, the Backlands was empty. Insensibly, we became part of its history, the Last Stand.

The experienced eye could still discern the outlines of a field here and there, but alder and spruce and poplar were taking over, obscuring boundaries and edges, obliterating the labor of generations. The road was hardly maintained anymore. Beaver dams flooded it, trees met overhead, and roadside bushes brushed the rare intrepid car. There were two eagle nests in the valley, wildcats were seen in the road, great horned owls called back and forth from the dark woodlands. Hunters and trappers will keep coming to the Backlands, but soon the last vestiges of settled life would disappear.

Because we finally had to admit, in our late 60s, that we were no longer capable of making the hay, just the two of us and the horses. We had to sell the farm. It was a melancholy prospect. In thrall to the past from my earliest years, it led me blindly down ever-narrowing byways to this end, and I myself became part of the past, a relic and compendium of obsolete skills and antiquated notions. In another way though, it was not sad at all. I knew that the beautiful farm would quickly fall to ruin after we left, would never be farmed again, but nevertheless, we made it, we created it ourselves from very unpromising material. It was, I must insist, a work of art, and it will be remembered, if only in these words.

There is a moving poem by Robert Frost, "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," about the ruins of a burned out farm, the memories evoked by the scene, and the way the natural world encroaches on the site. The poem emphasizes the indifference of Nature to human loss and the poignancy of the poet's knowledge of it, but it also implies the healing quality of that indifference, as well as the power of the artistic vision that has made a beautiful work of art of an abandoned farm. It is too long to quote in its entirety, but here are the last two stanzas about birds nesting there:

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the aged elm, though touched with fire;

And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;

And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

One had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.

I would not compare myself with the poet or his achievement, but there is an analogy, however humble. With the aid of my beloved wife and children, I, too, made something beautiful from an abandoned farm. *

Richard F. Doyle

Richard F. Doyle has been an author and advocate of men's rights for decades. This essay concerns his book Save the Males.

Save the Males - Masculinity and Men's Rights Redux, by Richard F. Doyle. Poor Richard's Press, Forest Lake, MN, pp. 315, ISBS 987-1-4116-9633-4, pp. 315, paperback $15.

My newly revised (April 2013), thoroughly documented, conservative-leaning book Save the Males, describes how conformist modernism has negatively affected Western civilization, the family, children, and especially males.

This book attributes social deterioration and family disintegration largely to moral laxity and leftist thinking as well as to discrimination against men throughout government and society. It takes on highly sensitive issues such as welfare, feminism, and numerous other undesirable influences. It raises issues most people are unwilling to consider. Incorrect politically, it steps on many toes.

The book explains concepts and steps necessary to restore a sane, moral, and economically sound society. It proves conclusively that millions of in-home fathers are the best answers to crime - more effective than police and social workers.

Gender politics have been addressed at length, but seldom from the viewpoint of males. Lord knows, the viewpoints of females have been examined and broadcast exhaustively. I believe that there is a war against men, which is harmful to all of humanity, a problem bigger than "global warming" - or cooling, whichever currently occasions handwringing.

The axiom that women are more discriminated against than men in Western society is the greatest hoax going. Anyone who believes it is deluded. Feminists believe it. Feminists are deluded.

A primary purpose in writing this book is to disparage the all-too-common idea that males are the inferior gender. Men's sorry situation results largely from a combination of misplaced chivalry (or a perversion of it) and misandry, a near universal zeitgeist. These are elephants in the room that nobody notices, or pretends not to notice. These ideological blinders and the metastasizing of feminism have severely damaged society.

This book is an effort to distill the advice of good and intelligent people on gender, law, and family. It covers philosophic and political ground, ending with a serious investigation of morality: right and wrong, good and evil.

The book is available through amazon.com or kindle. *

Philip Vander Elst

Philip Vander Elst is a former editor of Freedom Today and his many publications include Power Against People: A Christian Critique of the State, IEA, 2008.

In his Preface to Animal Farm (1946), his satirical critique of totalitarian socialism, George Orwell declared: "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." A century earlier, John Stuart Mill said much the same thing in his famous essay On Liberty (1859), perhaps the most rigorous and eloquent defence of freedom of conscience and speech ever written. Today, by contrast, the noisy advocates of "social liberalism" - particularly "gay rights" activists and their supporters - have turned their backs on this great liberal tradition and show no hesitation in trampling upon the civil rights of their opponents, especially if these happen to be religious believers.

If anyone doubts this, I urge them to read The Homosexual Agenda, by Alan Sears and Craig Osten (Broadman & Holman, USA, 2003). This is an exhaustively documented American study that is disturbing on two counts. First, because it offers abundant evidence that the "gay rights" agenda is destroying religious freedom in the United States and other democracies. Secondly, because it shows, with chapter and verse, that militant homosexual activists are determined to use the power of the State to change public attitudes and enforce conformity with their practical demands. Equally disturbing is the extent to which these same activists are willing to employ "black propaganda" and intimidation to silence their critics.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the many examples of persecution and intimidation documented by Sears and Osten (see page references for the original sources):

* In Canada, serious limits have been placed on Christian broadcasters who take a biblical stand against homosexual behaviour. Focus on the Family, for instance, cannot air programmes that might portray homosexual behaviour in a negative light, or it will face sanctions from the Canadian Communications Commission (p.182).

* In Sweden, the parliament approved an amendment that bans all speech and materials opposing homosexual behaviour and other alternative lifestyles. Violaters could spend up to four years in jail. According to Annelie Enochson, a Christian member of parliament, Christians could be arrested for speaking about homosexual behaviour in churches (p.183).

* Yeshiva University is a private Orthodox Jewish college that adheres to traditional Jewish teaching that homosexual behaviour is sinful. Two lesbians who wanted to have access to married student housing for themselves and their partners sued the university after their request was denied. In what has chilling ramifications for the religious freedom of any person or organisation that holds to a biblical view of homosexual behaviour, the court has ruled against the university (p.80).

* [In] a 1987 article titled "The Overhauling of Straight America" and a 1989 book titled After the Ball . . . homosexual activists [Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen] laid out a six-point strategy to radically change America's perception of homosexual behaviour. These six points [include]: "Portrays gays as victims, not aggressive challengers" and "Make gays look good" and "Make the victimisers look bad." "We intend to make the anti-gays look so nasty that average Americans will want to disassociate themselves from such types" (pp.18 & 23). In After the Ball [they] wrote: ". . . our primary objective regarding die-hard homohaters of this sort [i.e., orthodox religious believers] is to cow and silence them" (pp. 186-187).

* In the early 1990s [in Colorado Springs, USA] rocks were frequently thrown through the windows of [Focus on the Family's] then-downtown headquarters . . . Focus on the Family employees were verbally assaulted in local restaurants by homosexual activists and their allies. As a result, employees were told for their safety to remove their nametags in public. Homosexual activists played a part in helping launch an expensive, time-consuming IRS audit of the ministry, which turned up nothing . . . Bomb threats were made on a regular basis to the ministry's headquarters (pp. 144-145).

* In 1993, the Hamilton Square Baptist Church in San Francisco invited a well-known pro-family leader to speak at the church. Radical homosexual activists stormed the church doors, pounding on them and screaming, "We want your children! Give us your children!" The church experienced a great deal of vandalism, and the San Francisco Police Department said it could do nothing to stop the rampaging homosexual activists. Dr. David Innes, the senior pastor, was told: "You have to understand, this is San Francisco" (p.147).

* The ultimate goal [of "gay rights" activists] is to not only restrict, but also to punish any speech that does not affirm homosexual behavior. As Cathy Renna of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation put it, "People often get their views from their religions, so we don't want the pulpit saying that gay is wrong" (p. 147).

* In their private meetings, homosexual activists boldly proclaim their goal to get children to reject their parents' beliefs. At a 1999 Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Educational Network (GLSEN) conference in Atlanta, the following comments were made: "The fear of the religious right is that the schools of today are the governments of tomorrow. And you know what, they're right" and "If we do our jobs right, we're going to raise a generation of kids who don't believe the claims of the religious right" (p. 47).

* Homosexual activists in California have begun to come up with ways to force private schools to adopt a pro-homosexual curriculum. In September 2001, Governor Gray Davis signed a bill that forces private schools that wish to compete with public schools in interscholastic sports to have an anti-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation (p. 53).

This pattern of persecution and intimidation revealed by Craig and Osten is now receiving fresh impetus from the international campaign to redefine marriage. According to the Christian human rights organisation, Christian Concern, hundreds of Canadians have faced legal proceedings for opposing same-sex "marriage" in the public sphere following its introduction in 2005.

Within five years of marriage being redefined in Canada, an estimated two to three hundred cases have been brought against individuals, mostly Christians, who have opposed same-sex marriage in the public sphere. The proceedings have been brought at employment boards, courts, and human rights commissions. A number of employees have been dismissed from their jobs because they have maintained conscientious objection to same-sex marriage. Businesses have been sued and churches have been threatened with sanctions over their religious beliefs.

Canada, moreover,

. . . is not the only country with same-sex marriage laws that has witnessed subsequent restrictions on religious freedom. Last week, new laws were introduced in Denmark requiring all Established Evangelical Lutheran churches to perform same-sex marriages." (www.christianconcern.com/our-concerns/social, Articles, June 12, 2012).

The persecution of dissidents in the cause of "gay rights" is also becoming habitual in Britain, as anyone who reads the newspapers or the reports of the Christian Institute (Newcastle), or visits the website of Christian Concern, can see for themselves. To quote only one of many recent examples documented by Christian Concern:

A Christian blog writer, who goes by the pseudonym "Archbishop Cranmer," is under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for posting an advert on behalf of the Coalition for Marriage [which] is campaigning to preserve the current legal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. . . . The complainants, including the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group, have described the advert as "offensive" and "homophobic.". . . Critics have noted that the Chairman of the ASA is Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, who is Vice President of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and a leading supporter of same-sex marriage" ("Writer Under Investigation for Advert Supporting Marriage," May 14, 2012).

What all this demonstrates is that far from representing a genuine movement of human emancipation, "social liberals" pose a serious threat to freedom. That was certainly the view of America's most prominent libertarian thinker, the late Professor Murray Rothbard. In an article he wrote as far back as 1993, advocating a libertarian and Christian conservative coalition of resistance to political correctness, Rothbard praised Christian conservatives for fighting back "against a left-liberal elite that used government to assault and virtually destroy Christian values, principles, and culture." If we valued personal liberty and therefore private property rights and freedom of association, Rothbard argued, we could not allow the State to enforce conformity with politically correct values in the name of "anti-discrimination" laws.

[These] new egalitarian "rights". . . are concocted at the expense of the genuine rights of every person over his own property; secondly, all this "rights" talk is irrelevant, since the problem of hiring, firing, associating, etc. is something to be decided upon by people and institutions themselves, on the basis of what's most convenient for the particular organisation. "Rights" have nothing to do with the case. And third, the [American] Constitution has been systematically perverted to abandon strictly limited minimal government on behalf of a crusade by the federal courts to multiply and enforce such phony rights to the hilt ("The Religious Right: Towards a Coalition," February 1993, LewRockwell.com).

America's most prominent libertarian novelist, the late Ayn Rand, was equally critical of the agenda of the "gay rights" movement, condemning as "hideous" what she considered their demand for "special privileges" from the government. In response to a question about her view of homosexuality, she declared in 1968:

I do not approve of such practices or regard them as necessarily moral, but it is improper for the law to interfere with a relationship between consenting adults.

In 1971, Rand reiterated this position, adding that in her personal opinion, homosexuality "involves psychological flaws, corruptions, errors, or unfortunate premises," concluding that homosexuality "is immoral . . ." ("Objectivism and Homosexuality," Wikipedia article).

The attitude to homosexuality adopted by such a leading libertarian figure as Ayn Rand, who was a strong atheist and extremely hostile to Christianity, clearly shows two things. First, that there is no contradiction between a commitment to tolerance and disapproval of what is being tolerated. After all, that is one of the key insights of traditional classical liberalism represented by thinkers like John Stuart Mill and F. A. Hayek. Secondly, it suggests that opposition to homosexual practice cannot be automatically dismissed as a hateful and irrational expression of religious "homophobia." There may be perfectly reasonable grounds for adopting a tolerant but negative attitude towards it.

So why do so many people of all faiths and none feel that there is something wrong with homosexuality, and that the encouragement and celebration of homosexual practice is undesirable? The answer should be (and once was) obvious. Whether you like to think of it as the pattern set by God or Nature, it is an undeniable fact that the human race is divided into two sexes, male and female, whose bodies are clearly complementary and designed to fit together for sexual reproduction. This not only implies that the natural and normal family unit ought to be based on the love and mutual commitment of a man and a woman, a mother and a father. It also implies, to be unavoidably frank, that the female vagina is the natural and proper recipient of the male penis, not another man's anus. To say all this is not to condemn homosexuals as individuals, or deny their right, in a free society, to live together and form partnerships, but simply focuses attention on common sense realities borne out by a mass of sociological and medical evidence.

Dr Linda Stalley, for example, in a 1997 paper entitled "The Homosexual Lifestyle from a Christian Medical Perspective," sets out the anatomical reasons why anal intercourse is inherently unhealthy and unhygienic as compared with vaginal intercourse, and many other medical studies reveal the above average physical health risks associated with homosexual behaviour. One report, for instance, found that at least 75 percent of homosexual men have had a history of one or more sexually transmitted diseases. Other studies reveal that both male and female homosexuals are more prone to mental and emotional disorders than their heterosexual counterparts, and suffer from higher levels of alcohol, tobacco, and drug abuse, as well as from higher levels of depression and domestic violence (see: "How Healthy Is Homosexuality?" available at http://www.perryville.org/2011/11/15/how-healthy-is-homosexuality/).

Consider, in conclusion, this sad and honest admission by Sir Elton John, speaking about the challenges his son, Zachary, will face growing up with two male parents: "It's going to be heartbreaking for him to grow up and realise he hasn't got a mummy" (dailymail.co.uk, July 17, 2012). Those currently resisting the government's intention of redefining marriage to include homosexual partnerships hope to protect other children from similar heartache. *

5

A.W.R. Hawkins

A.W.R. Hawkins is the Senior Opinion Editor and writer for the Alliance Defending Freedom. The Alliance Defending Freedom is an institution defending rights of conscience and religious liberty, partnering with more than 300 ministries and organizations, and thousands of Christian attorneys. The Alliance is based in Arizona.

In twenty-first century America, we are taught that liberty is a word that can mean different things to different people. Like a "Stretch Armstrong" toy of days gone by, it can be pushed and pulled first one way then another to become whatever we need it to be at the moment.

Therefore, some define liberty as the freedom to be anything one wants it to be while others define it as the freedom to express whatever one wants to express. Still others see it as the freedom to be left alone. And these are simply three among myriad of the most contemporary definitions.

Perhaps the only shared commonality in all these definitions is the idea that liberty is broad: it's a big tent beneath which everyone can relax in the shade and frame liberty on their own terms.

Because of this, one word we rarely associate with liberty is order - for order, by its very nature, seems to communicate constraint, and constraint, denotatively, communicates limitations.

So how can constraint and an indefinable, ethereal liberty ever be compatible? The simple answer is - they can't. Either we have an ordered liberty, such as our Founding Fathers intended, or we have some variant of a free-for-all, where you "do your thing," and I do mine, and no one is the worse for it (or so the purveyors of such liberty claim).

Experience has taught us better than this. But we ignore experience when it is to our selfish-benefit to do so. As a consequence, we find ourselves, both as individuals and as a society, completely cut off from our past. And this divorce from the past has left us ignorant - so ignorant, in fact, that we have yet to learn to be ashamed over it.

We teeter on the edge of an abyss, and instead of crying, we sing songs and clap hands and can't wait for the next adventure to start.

It is madness.

Russell Kirk would have seen such an approach to thinking about liberty and order for what it is - an attempt to turn the world upon its head and a far cry from what order or liberty truly mean. An honest reader can see this plainly enough by taking the time to digest The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays (ISI Books, George A. Panichas, editor.)

Through those essays, Kirk reminds us that liberty rests on order and that it's an order that cannot be divorced "from revelation, from right reason, from poetic vision, from much study, [or] from the experience of the species" if it is to be the type of order Founders like John Adams envisioned. Kirk contended that a diminishment of such order leaves us rudderless in this world, "at the mercy of will and appetite."

Sounds familiar doesn't it?

Because we have reached a point proving Kirk prophetic, our way forward is actually behind us. We must look back to and for the order that once sustained the liberty our nation has cherished.

And here we run into a problem, for we live in a time when looking back is not only unpopular, but even ridiculed. Today's mottos and mantras - like "forward" and "change" - do not inculcate a high opinion of the past. In fact, they indicate a flight from it. But we must know where we've been if we are to understand where we are going. And we must understand how we've been if we are to grasp how we ought to be.

Therefore, it behooves us to examine the order that was, and to embrace it, so that it might again be recognized as the order that is.

**********

Kirk maintained that the order that framed our liberty at America's founding had a strong spiritual component and that this not only provided integrity to liberty but even fashioned the culture of our nation:

Culture arises from the cult; and . . . when belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly. The material order rests upon the spiritual order" (italics added).

This is a point that many want to avoid because to see the link between the material and the spiritual is to justifying examining the spiritual in an increasingly secularized world.

But Kirk said this must be done. And it must be done with the understanding that a serious examination of the spiritual component of order includes a serious look at the moral component as well.

Kirk put his finger on this after taking deep and inquiring looks at the national landscape in 1990, when he wrote, "What especially ails modern civilization is the loss of religious vision out of which culture arises and flourishes."

John Adams understood this and took pains to set it before the founding generation and their progeny. In 1798, he made it clear that the Constitution, the cornerstone of our founding documents:

. . . was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams' point and Kirk's points are one and the same - the document set forth an ordered liberty for a people who understood (and understand) liberty is complimented by constraint, and both are underpinned by a recognition of the permanent and by faith in our Creator.

These are basic, foundational principles to which we must return if we would be free.

Sadly, in the twenty-first century, our ignorance has left us feeling intelligent, so we presume that our time is the best time, and perhaps - as crazy as it sounds - that our time is the only time.

We dismiss our forebears and their customs as "Victorian" and march triumphant into the next scene like little children playing war, but without understanding what war is or the toll it takes on the those committed to it. In so doing, we turn our backs on the very foundation upon which this house - this national house - has been built.

Kirk emphasized that we must grasp, rather than abandon that foundation if our society is to continue as it has been. For,

. . . if we ignore the subtle wisdom of the classical past and the British past, we are left with a thin evanescent culture, a mere film upon the surface of the deep well of the past.

This is something that we will still treat as culture, although it is not. Rather, it is a mean and meager imitation of the real.

The solution is to accept the fact that order is a critical component of all that has been passed down to us by that great generation of patriots that "mutually pledged" to each other "[their] lives, [their] fortunes, and [their] sacred honor."

As we learn from that generation of patriots - through books and through study - we interact with them. We interact with their ideas, their convictions, and their intentions, and we understand that society is no cold, static thing but a vibrant community of people tied together by the ordered liberty that overarches and undergirds all.

Think of an expansive house, magnificent to behold, made of fine brick and elegant fixtures. From the outside, one can see the door of rich wood and the plush curtains hanging behind the glass. Just from outward appearances, the home seems large enough to house 10 bedrooms, with kitchens, and dens, and playrooms beside.

How great a home it must be!

Now think of how quickly your amazement would turn to bewilderment, and perhaps even fear, if you stepped inside the front door - into what you expected to be a foyer - only to see you'd stepped inside a shell that wasn't really a house at all. Rather, it was just a faade - just the frame of a home no one had finished, an outward representation of something that had no core.

What a let-down (to coin a popular phrase). Here you were expecting magnificent rooms divided one from another by walls and doors and hallways. But instead you've stepped into a hollow structure that might not be able to stand when the April winds blow.

Interior walls would have ordered the house, by dividing one room from another, and would have also provided structural integrity, just as moral and spiritual order provides integrity to the liberty we enjoy. Yet without the walls, the home is just a setting for chaos and a container of space.

Such a house is our country, when order is neglected. Its traditions still appear in history books and on cornerstones of courthouses in small towns with enough regularity to give us the luster of greatness, but in reality we are a shell of what we appear to be because we lack the integrity that only order can give.

As the sixteenth century Anglican Priest Richard Hooker said, "Without order there is no living in public society, because the want thereof is the mother of confusion."

**********

So where do we go from here?

Kirk pointed to the historical insights of Christopher Dawson, indicating that "the recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order" have proven to be "the indispensable conditions of human recovery." Dawson held that these

. . . can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture that has existed at every age and on every level of human development.

This means our evanescent culture cannot be fixed by correcting voting patterns or social habits, just as our hollow home cannot be strengthened by adding shutters or a coat of exterior paint. Instead, we must get down to the root and there begin mending the spiritual and moral decline that has brought us to this point.

Kirk made this point by drawing on lessons he'd learned from his study of Edmund Burke:

Mere sweeping innovation is not reform. Once immemorial moral habits are broken by the rash Utopian, once the old checks upon will and appetite are discarded, the inescapable sinfulness of human nature asserts itself: and those who aspired to usurp the throne of God find that they have contrived a terrestrial Hell.

In other words, to pursue liberty in any way other than pursuing it at its spiritual and moral root is to pursue a pseudo-liberty that will not be any stronger (nor any deeper) than the various kinds of liberty currently offered to the American people. It is to pursue a plastic liberty rather than the real thing.

And in embracing these various types of plastic liberty, we deceive ourselves into thinking we are free when, in fact, we are being more and more enslaved to inward and unchecked passions.

Kirk put it this way:

It appears to me that our culture labors in an advanced state of decadence; that what many people mistake for the triumph of our civilization actually consists of powers that are disintegrating our culture; that the vaunted "democratic freedom" of liberal society in reality is servitude to appetites and illusions which attack religious belief; which destroy community through excessive centralization and urbanization; which efface life-giving tradition and custom.

Pay attention to Kirk's words. He was indicating that we are prone to deceive ourselves into thinking we are expanding liberty when we are actually killing it. And now, decades after he wrote those words, we dangle over an abyss yet smugly assume doing as we please in all cases at all times must be the essence of liberty. As a result, our appetites drive us to and fro as they see fit.

We are like the man in the iron cage from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress - we have thrown the reins of our lives upon the necks of our lusts, allowing them to lead us here and there at their whim.

This is not the behavior of men, it is the behavior of animals.

**********

A story from the American Civil War is instructive here. It is the story of a young mother who rushed out to see General Robert E. Lee as he was passing through her town during the war.

Standing by the road, she held her infant son up in her hands as Lee halted upon his horse, Traveller. She then asked Lee to bless her son, but he demurred. Instead, he looked at the mother and said, "Teach him to deny himself."

In other words, there will be no quick remedy today, ma'am. There will be no magic formula. Rather, the boy will succeed as others before him have - through discipline, rigor, and self-control.

This is where Kirk brings us as well: to a place where effort is required, and part of that effort is reigning in or denying ourselves.

He quotes Burke to make this point:

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.

There is an order intrinsic to liberty, and without that order it is not that we experience diminished liberty. Rather, it's that we experience a cheap imitation, which is really no liberty at all.

This order goes beyond the physical to the metaphysical: beyond the temporal to the permanent. As such, retrieving it requires looking back - and reaching back - rather than continuing to run headlong down the road.

Remember what Dawson taught us:

This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development.

**********

Liberty is the fruit of an ordered soul. And as Kirk so ably put it:

"Order" implies the obedience of a nation to the laws of God, and the obedience of individuals to just authority. Without order, justice rarely can be enforced, and freedom cannot be maintained. *