Editorials

...Their silence, and ours, only reinforces that prejudice more deeply and damagingly...

...Louis (June 7-10) addressed relations between bishops and theologians in an unusually forthright manner: "I think that the church in the United States suffers from too many anxious, warning voices that would divide the bishops against theologians...

...Do unqualified or marginally qualified people get hired and promoted as the result of affirmative action...

...President Bush called the memo "disgusting...

...Each year since such numbers have been compiled, they have jumped, more than tripling since 1985...

...Robert Dole (R-Kans...

...Now, eight years later, white firemen have persuaded a majority of the Supreme Court that they should be allowed to bring suit against the city of Birmingham because the consent decree discriminated against them...

...In his address, Archbishop May also expressed reservations about an article in Commonweal ("Audition for Tragedy," April 21) which said that Vatican criticisms of U.S...

...and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu said it was inappropriate and unfair, its innuendo "wrong...

...In the end, everyone will be better off without affirmative action programs...

...It read in part: "Since the process against Father Curran began at The Catholic University, the CTSA has repeatedly stated its conviction that Father is a Catholic theologian esteemed by his professional colleagues...

...demonstrated that he is a large man who seldom raises his voice...

...The Court's decision in this and other recent civil rights cases marks a retreat from its role as the nation's conscience...

...No doubt they do...

...from its jailhouse Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Efforts to bridge the great racial fault line in our national history depart from a color-blind ideal...

...ET CETERA HOW SOLID SOLIDARITY...

...Those are high-minded and important sentiments, expressed none too soon...

...A Polish visitor to Commonweal's office prior to the election predicted that abortion would emerge as one such issue...

...BISHOPS LOVE THEOLOGIANS The keynote speaker, Archbishop John L. May, at the Catholic Theological Society meeting in St...

...Hardly was our visitor out the door when a news report from Poland echoed those predictions (New York Times, May 29, 1989...

...In contrast to the atmosphere of fear and suspicion engendered by such accusations, he pointed to the positive collaboration of bishops and theologians on diocesan boards as well as at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which included cooperative work on major pastoral letters on the economy and on war and peace, as well as on the nine-year effort to develop a set of guidelines for resolving doctrinal disputes between bishops and theologians...

...wrote "Letter from Birmingham Jail," affirming his commitment to nonviolence and integration between blacks and whites...

...Lieutenant Carl Cook, president of the Black Firefighters Association, contests two of his counterpart's assumptions...

...Even at their most successful, affirmative action agreements can only be a rough gauge of fairness...

...Perhaps the goals originally set will be honored...

...Foley is a closet homosexual, the new speaker responded that he was not concerned about such partisan attacks on himself, but that he was intent on "restoring the House to a measure of cooperation and conciliation between the two parties...

...It does so again today...

...in dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the decision would subject efforts to remedy past discrimination to a "never-ending stream of litigation and potential liability...

...Frank, on the other hand, was vilified, his name used as casually and malignly as had been Willie Horton's in last year's campaign...

...whites everywhere continue to benefit from past discrimination while blacks continue to suffer from it...

...The city of Birmingham is 55 percent black...

...Birmingham's 490 white firemen may not discriminate, but their predecessors in the Birmingham fire department and elsewhere did...

...In fact, the bishops adopted these guidelines at their semi-annual meeting [June 16-19] where Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscom, chairman of the drafting committee, remarked, "I would like to think that the Curran affair might have had a different outcome if such a process had been in place...

...court decision in the case of Charles Curran...

...In a country where contraceptive pills and devices are scarce, abortion has become the standard means of family planning, and half of all pregnancies end in abortion...

...This is lamentable...

...Birmingham, Alabama: in 1981, after seven years of litigation, the city government signed a consent decree pledging to hire and promote blacks in the municipal fire department until their numbers approximated their proportion in the civilian labor force...

...Birmingham f irehouse From the Birmingham jail to the Birmingham firehouse could be the subtitle of a yet-to-be written history charting the rise and fall of the struggle for racial equality in the United States...

...Martin v. Wilks does not overturn the Birmingham consent decree and an out-of-court settlement between the city and white fireman may resolve their complaints...

...a liberal and a homosexual-and implying that Mr...

...Poland's liberal 1956 law allows abortion for economic or medical reasons...

...Our visitor observed that absent previous political debate or serious church discussion of public policy on contraception or abortion, there was likely to be a muddled and acrimonious political controversy at some future point...

...But many of them-Catholic politicians and Christian Democrats-were refused places on the Solidarity ballot for their cooperation with the Communist government during Solidarity's illegal days...

...Legislative remedies have been promised by members of Congress, but in the present atmosphere enacting civil right legislation may prove hard going...

...Foley...

...The effort to redress the balance may seem to discriminate against today's white workers, but are they actually worse off with goal-limited affirmative action plans than they would have been had their jobs been open to blacks from the beginning...

...Birmingham, Alabama: the site in 1963 of lunch counter sit-ins, picketing, and protest marches against segregation...

...appraised it as "garbage...

...Interestingly, in an interview prior to the election, Cardinal Jozef Glemp said: "In this question [of abortion] we would not like to stir society's passions...

...We are referring, of course, to Congressman Frank and to homosexuals in general...

...theologians went unanswered during the archbishops' meeting with the pope and curial officials this past March...

...True enough...

...By missing a chance to address such a widespread and brutal prejudice when it reared its head so clearly in the Foley-Frank case, leaders of both parties failed their responsibility...

...We think an honest and more thorough analysis of the matter is necessary for all...

...One of the major achievements of affirmative action agreements has been to help blacks make up not for lack of qualifications but for past discrimination and the always unacknowledged role that "family" and "the old boys' network" play in securing jobs and promotions for friends, children, nieces and nephews, the unemployed neighbor down the street...

...The Justice Department joined in the decree, which was approved by the federal court...

...Justice Stevens's prediction that the decision would seem to permit interminable legal action against such consent decrees is ominous...

...Over the past decade-and-a-half, neoconservatives have argued that whatever short-term advantage there may be in monitored attempts to redress past discrimination, the long-term consequences will be to further stigmatize their beneficiaries by labeling them second-rate and even "unqualified" for the positions they have reached...

...First, Birmingham's black firemen are qualified: there has been no significant increase in lives or property lost to fire since the affirmative action program went into effect...

...Just prior to the June 4 election parliament took up a bill to revoke the 1956 law and to impose penalties on those who perform abortions as well as on women who have them...

...there were more than 7,200 reported incidents of violence and harassment against homosexuals, ranging from verbal abuse to homicide...

...the net effect being finally to discourage blacks and civil rights organizations from exhausting their resources by defending them...

...THE NATION'S CLOSETS In his first day in office as the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas Foley (D-Wash...

...In essence, the Court has ruled in Martin v. Wilks that affirmative action agreements, even those approved by the courts, are subject to challenges from those who subsequently charge discrimination...

...The pervasive prejudice against homosexuals is not often or openly spoken of by governmental leaders in this country, even though the effects of that prejudice are evident in each year's statistics...

...The cardinal and Lech Walesa also issued a joint statement urging that abortion be kept out of the election campaign, as apparently it was...

...Just as unqualified and marginally qualified people get hired in the "meritocratic" world...

...The Republican National Committee's memo deserves to be included in next year's list...

...It is this rough gauge that the Supreme Court seems to be withdrawing...

...Outside Lee Atwater, who initially defended the memorandum (Atwater is chairman of the Committee, the architect of George Bush's hardball 1988 presidential campaign, and the man who made Willie Horton a household word), the outcry on behalf of Speaker Foley was immediate and loud...

...members of minority groups and society as a whole will enjoy the fruits of their success and the benefit of their "real" skills...

...Lieutenant Charles Bush, head of the Birmingham firefighters' union that brought the suit, argues, "we would be the last people to say that there wasn't ever discrimination in Birmingham....But we aren't the people who did it...

...Second, "when I hear white firemen use terms such as qualified and fairness in criticizing affirmative action, I just have to laugh, because those terms don't apply to the bureaucracy that runs the department and from which they benefit...

...But there was/is another victim and another constituency far more seriously maligned by the Committee's smear than Mr...

...According to Archbishop May, this silence did not represent, as the article claimed, a vote of no-confidence in the scholarship of theologians, but rather: "I suspect that the reason that no one pursued this issue in defense of the theologians in the United States is that the soundness of our relationship with you [theologians] seemed so obvious, so taken for granted, so unquestionable among us...

...In response to a Republican National Committee memorandum comparing Mr...

...Birmingham, Alabama: the home of Bull Connor, the police chief who set dogs loose on peaceful civil rights demonstrators...

...Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that consent decrees were binding only on the original parties...

...We have to have a system that stresses more than numbers and race...

...Among other matters, the theologians also confirmed at their annual meeting the statement of John P. Boyle, the president of the CTSA, on the Washington, D.C...

...Qualifications have to be part of it" (New York Times, June 14,1989...

...Even worse, they claim, the existence of such programs may "tar" members of the group who have "made it on their own...

...Diverse political tendencies are discussed by Kenneth Moore on page 391 of this issue...

...So lamentable that in weighing candidates for coming appointments to the Supreme Court, the Bush administration and Congress ought to consider whether the Reagan counter-revolution has not swung the pendulum further than is tolerable in a society that still has so much of its racist past to redeem-and which today more than ever bears the cost of despair and frustration born from that past...

...It's an argument worth considering if for no otherreason than to observe how neatly it skips over the point that Lieutenant Cook makes: in exactly what proportion does merit enter into the always subtle and often highly personal calculations that go into hiring and promotion...

...Foley's record to that of Barney Frank (D-Mass...

...The remarkable victory of Solidarity candidates in the June 4 Polish elections will expose the stresses and strains within its ranks...

...This "climate of suspicion so harmful to the church," the archbishop went on, "is fed by casual remarks about the fidelity of others, by ungrounded accusations, and by warnings whose urgency is sometimes, perhaps often, in inverse proportion to their authors' command of hard facts...

...In both cases it is unfortunate-unless of course, as sometimes happens, the "qualifications" are inflated beyond the real skills required to perform a particular job...

...The bill, said to have been written by lawyers for the Polish Bishops' Conference, was supported by some seventy members of the pre-election parliament who identify themselves as part of Solidarity's conservative wing...

...Unfortunately, however, Speaker Foley's remarks stopped before they should have...

...Merit has never been the main thing in this department...

...Foley's defense but failed to produce on Mr...

...The society also expresses its respect for the many theologians and other scholars who continue their work in the School of Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America in this difficult period...

...The memo and the response it produced in Mr...

...That cynical, but credible, reading of Birmingham's fire department, and for that matter, other city bureaucracies around the country, applies as well to significant numbers of public utilities, private companies, and corporations...

...The argumentxoncludes: better that blacks, women, and others who have suffered discrimination compete in the meritocratic market like everyone else...

...But there are other religious and cultural divisions that will take their toll of a coalition long held together by a common enemy-the government...

...We hope they will be emulated on both sides of the House aisle...

...Last year in the U.S...

...Foley was defended, as in truth he should have been...

...Its 650-member fire department now has 160 black firefighters, 2 of whom have reached the rank of chief...

...The question of qualifications, on which so many white male workers rest both their grievance at being passed over for newly hired or promoted minorities and their appeal to fairness, fails to acknowledge that their present dominance in many kinds of jobs rests upon past discrimination...

...Frank's behalf, demonstrate how acceptable homosexual bashing remains in this country...