Editorials

...The advocates of a freeze would do well, however, to recall another wave of citizen discontent and impatience that rocked the nation a few years ago...

...But this side of pacifism, that discussion demands a close examination of the details...

...Already there are not one but several freezes...

...it is their religion that reveals there is a cosmic drama...

...Many legislators were convinced that such activity had actually cost the lives of U.S...

...For the vast majority of citizens who were up in arms about their taxes, the end result will probably be greater tax inequities than before...

...The rejection of religion may not be a sufficient condition but it is definitely a necessary one for women's real freedom and equality...

...That other movement was known as the "tax revolt...

...Stabilizing deterrence...

...Gornick makes this argument but the way in which she does it...

...The comparison may be uncomfortable but nonetheless instructive...

...policy, they argue, has been skewed by our longstanding reliance on the threat of a nuclear first strike to deter a Soviet conventional victory in Europe.We should reverse ourselves and formally renounce this first-strike option...

...It will never be otherwise...

...Western feminists, continued Gornick, know better than to expect much evolution from Islamic law...

...These arguments would be more convincing were it not that Moscow has other reasons to want off the armaments treadmill - economic crisis, for example, and unrest in Eastern Europe - and were it not for the fact that the Reagan team itself seems badly in need of incentives to abandon a lingering hope of establishing nuclear superiority...

...Ever since the Enlightenment, the notion that the rejection of religion is an essential step toward human emancipation has become, among a segment of the well-educated and the half-educated, a matter, if you will, of faith...

...We must turn away from religion altogether...

...When senators with qualms about the measure as it stood offered a clarifying amendment to the tough measure already passed by the House - an amendment that stated exactly this limitation - they were soundly defeated...

...Recalling how nineteenth-century American feminists debated liberal versus illiberal interpretations of scripture just as the Egyptian feminist was now doing with the Koran, Gornick quoted with approval Elizabeth Cady Stanton's brusque dismissal of the whole discussion: "This is nonsense...

...Details are what experts use to smother promising infant ideas and to contain all discussion of arms limitation within the ranks of their own "priesthood...

...Let us be generous and credit Congress with good intentions when it passed the bill making it a crime to disclose the identity of covert agents, but nonetheless grant also that the bill is ill-considered and badly drawn...

...Gornick correctly, she is saying that the oppression of women is rooted neither in Islam nor in capitalism but in religion plain and simple...

...The Reagan administration argues that only the prospect of new American weaponry will convince the Soviets to accept real arms reductions, and a freeze would relieve Moscow of this concern...

...and though perhaps as many would shrug off Ms...

...What Congress wanted to guard against primarily was the activities of such former agents as Philip Agee and even more of writers like Louis Wolf, editor of the Covert Action Information Bulletin, which systematically publishes agents' names telephone-directory style with the declared purpose of impeding foreign intelligence operations...

...as a young girl she was the victim of female circumcision, i.e., "surgical" removal of the clitoris...

...THE SPY BILL We all know what hell is paved with...

...But even if one agreed with the premise of the tax revolt, the results were dismaying...

...but it would be inaccurate to maintain that only the administration has been guilty of sloganeering...

...the idea of woman as an instrument of man's honor or dishonor . . . springs from a religious notion in which equality for woman and service to God cannot co-exist...

...The legislative and constitutional proposals it spawned threatened - in some cases, still threaten - either to work mischief or not to work at all...

...She evinces no sense of saying anything the least bit startling, at least for American women if not for Arabs...

...The hardening of missile sites in the sixties and the maintenance of submarine invulnerability are common examples of such "good" weapons development that a freeze might rule out...

...This is not mentioned merely as another cautionary example of unanticipated consequences, but as a reminder to the freeze movement that "God is in the details...

...This means covert agents, whether called military attaches or whatever...

...Preventing the further growth of this overkill is not, therefore, as crucial as seeing to it that none of this stockpile is ever put to use...

...Now if we are reading Ms...

...An American draft...

...An important segment of American feminist leadership, no doubt...

...Senators Kennedy and Hatfield are sponsoring a resolution truer to the original version, but even in its case different interpretations have arisen among congressional sponsors...

...The new proposal deserves serious discussion...

...At the core of the tax revolt was a proposition that was wrong...

...and its European allies than on the Soviet bloc, Moscow may feel it has most to gain by standing pat...

...You can't put a position paper on a poster or in a letter to your senator...

...Unfortunately for the leadership, well over ninety percent of American women profess an attachment to religion...

...One suspects that interviews with marchers would reveal half a dozen other conceptions of the freeze, ranging from a highly formal treaty negotiated with the USSR to a virtually unilateral renunciation by the U.S...

...Will future Woodwards and Bernsteins end up behind bars...

...First of all the good intentions...

...navy to provide supplies and reinforcements...

...Senators who objected to the broad wording of the bill argued that such criminal conviction should be possible only if proof were presented of "intent to impair or impede" intelligence operations, but the bill's supporters refused to accept this wording...

...security...

...That the struggle to distinguish oppressing and liberating elements in traditional religions is a futile one, befitting a more childish phase of feminism, is something that "we" now know...

...Some celebrate this fact...

...Despite local inequities like the California real-estate tax that started it all and despite the keen pain felt by taxpayers at precisely this time of the year, we do not believe that, for an advanced industrial society, Americans are taxed too much...

...The spy bill has strong White House support and after a House-Senate conference is almost certain to become law...

...While Secretary Haig is wrong to dismiss it by vastly exaggerating the difficulty of defending Europe by conventional means, those who think there is merit in the Bundy-Kennan-McNamara-Smith idea are obliged to ask exactly what it would take to assure deterrence in Europe without relying on nuclear weapons...

...As it now reads, civil liberties lawyers say it would even permit prosecution of any journalist who exposed a CIA agent engaged in criminal activities within the United States, something we know has been done in the past...

...others would change it-will change it, we believe...

...Without pretending that every citizen can become an expert, the freeze movement is going to have to match its attention to the horrors of nuclear war with equal attention to the details of preventing it...

...Now between the nuclear freeze movement and the tax revolt, we see at least one fundamental difference...

...More than one hundred legal scholars have denounced the spy measure as patently unconstitutional, and it is hard to disagree with them...

...Despite the abuses of recent years, every nation of any size has legitimate intelligence needs which require undercover officers...

...Arms control could no longer be left to the arms controllers, especially these arms controllers, many of whom had led the successful assault on SALT II...

...It, too, was catapulted into the headlines by a California referendum...

...The final Senate vote for the legislation the New York Times editorially called "the spy bill wrapped in the flag" was 90 to 6 - a tally that did not reflect the bitter division that in fact existed over the bill...

...The response that the nuclear freeze proposal has met - hundreds of endorsements from New England town meetings, well over half a million signatures demanding a freeze referendum in California, marches and meetings in scores of cities, support from mainstream political and religious leaders and perhaps from as much as sixty percent of the public - signals a new, and we believe realistic, awareness of the dangers of nuclear war and of the need for a meaningful negotiation of arms limits...

...We" have been there and "we" have come through to Elizabeth Cady" Stanton's verdict, "This is all nonsense...

...ANOTHER PAROCHIALISM Vivian Gornick is an intelligent and interesting writer who has been addressing feminist issues for many years...

...Is the freeze movement wiser to call for a blanket halt or to distinguish between stabilizing and destabilizing developments...

...Since the freeze movement will inevitably exert more pressure on the U.S...

...Gornick or others like her to surrender their piece of the Enlightenment tradition for the tactical advantage of the women's movement...

...Incentives...

...One wonders who this "we" really is...

...Unfortunately virtually all new weapons proposals are offered under this rationale...

...For there to be an effective arms control agreement between East and West, for example, reliable intelligence is needed to assure compliance on both sides...

...Happily for the sake of American freedoms, the courts in deciding constitutionality do not pay much attention to intentions, no matter how good...

...Many women, as indeed many men, are aware of the ways in which traditional religion has limited women to the role of subordinate actor in the cosmic drama...

...It helped elect Ronald Reagan president...

...A greatly strengthened U.S...

...The Reagan administration, however, has forced us to think about it...

...So the authors of the freeze deliberately strove for simplicity: no more warheads, no more missiles, no more strategic bombers or submarines, no more testing, no more production, no more deployment - and all of this to be bilaterally observed and completely verified...

...It is worded so broadly that even some of its supporters acknowledge that it could be used to prosecute reporters who seek to expose real abuses or crimes by intelligence agents or informers, including former agents such as Edwin P. Wilson and Frank E. Terpil who are said to have trained terrorists in Libya and engaged in other illegal activities...

...But her own explanation was simpler yet...

...Facing up to details is also demanded by criticisms of the freeze proposal raised in quarters friendly to arms control: Verification...

...Coping with people like Agee and Wolf within the framework of the First Amendment is not the easiest thing in the world, involving as it does the traditional tension over the balance between press freedom and national security, but it should not be impossible either...

...That end is served by those weapons developments which assure each nuclear power that nothing can be gained, and everything may be lost, by a sudden first use of nuclear force...

...One bold proposal, for example, which has nothing at all to do with a freeze, has been advanced by McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert McNamara, and Gerald Smith, all veterans of national-security debates...

...Despite these terrible experiences, the author refused to reject Islamic society and law in toto as the source of Arab women's subjection, and she resented Westerners who do so...

...The author of that book, an Egyptian woman physician, novelist, and feminist, had not only been persecuted and jailed for her efforts on behalf of women...

...All religious structures posit man as the living godhead with woman as his obedient servant...

...About a month ago she reviewed a book in the New York Times Book Review on the conditions of women in the Arab world...

...It, too, enjoyed numerous local successes - and quickly developed into a national movement for various constitutional limitations on federal spending...

...That alternative struck Ms...

...intelligence officers abroad and seriously imperiled U.S...

...Some testing and much production of nuclear arms and their delivery systems simply cannot be monitored without the kind of on-site inspection that the Soviet Union, and sometimes the U.S...

...Which most of us, for understandable reasons, would rather not do...

...But details, alas, will out...

...What is noteworthy is not that Ms...

...Details are what prevented the warm feeling stirred in the public heart by SALT II from ever igniting into the fire of effective political support...

...Reagan will probably sign the bill, but the sooner it is tested in the courts, the better...

...No one should ask Ms...

...The bill was first offered to the Senate with the assurance that prosecution was intended only for people like Agee and Wolf whose "main direction" was to expose the identities of American intelligence agents...

...Their proposal raises a host of questions, as they knew it would...

...We must turn away from religion altogether...

...too, have always resisted...

...of any weapons systems now under consideration...

...Gornick, as it does us, as implausible...

...Comtek's determined secularism as would be offended by it, it is, for both sorts of women, another irritant decreasing their confidence in the ultimate direction of the women's movement...

...What price a Watergate-type journalistic investigation now...

...At the core of the nuclear freeze movement, on the other hand, is a proposition that is correct: the world runs a growing risk of nuclear conflagration unless something is done about it...

...The Egyptian author's predicament "reminds us of where we have all come from...

...Details, of course, are in part what the nuclear freeze proposal wants to avoid...

...As freeze proponents make clear, the superpowers already possess more than enough weapons to blow humanity to smithereens...

...What is wrong with the bill...

...That is not a new argument...

...Under the new law, anyone found in violation could be imprisoned for up to three years and fined up to $ 15,000 for each offense...

...Senators Jackson and Warner, with White House approval, have introduced a "freeze" resolution in Congress with loopholes large enough to fly a B-l bomber or an MX missile through...

...But a movement that doesn't get beyond slogans would be as unhelpful as a publication that doesn't get beyond headlines...

...As a Marxist, she prefered to blame capitalism...

...But that she can so casually assume secularism as the common platform of American feminism betrays an insensitivity, in fact a parochialism, that goes some way in explaining the resistance which is retarding the struggle for women's equality and dignity, not in the Arab world, but in these United States...

...It is tempting for editorialists to be hypercritical about popular movements' need for clearly envisioned and communicable objectives - and in effect to restrict politics to insiders...

...But in either case it is precisely their religion that makes them any kind of actor in the cosmic drama...

...It may be possible to abolish the practice of circumcision, but...

...Later in this issue, Bryan Hehir notes the sloganeering of one Reagan official...

...Thus the astonishing growth of the movement for a nuclear freeze...