Enforcing the law
Gaffney, Edward McGlynn Jr.
tempt and deprives you of the respect and opportunities that compound with guns blazing against their fellow Texans. Until others hold as birthrights'? ...
...it gives me big- which transplanted over 600,0(X) Catholics from North Vietnam time willies about the Second Amendment (relating the need to the new regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South...
...For EDWARD McGLYNN GAFFNEY...
...It was over $100 million of taxpayers' money into the ATF raid and first reported in an academic book I wrote in 1989 (The Catholic the FBI siege...
...The religious freedom That hardly justifies the intense, aggressive behavior of the All' matter is subtle...
...spices from the Sermon on the Mount...
...looked...
...I do not suggest that there is or ought to be an and FBI...
...Com- have been to leave these folks alone, but that "less restrictive monweal's May 7 editorial ("Agents of Apocalypse") took a alternative" does not seem to have been a serious option...
...That doesn't require another gun control in determining his future relationships with American personlaw, even the sensible "Brady Bill," just somebody at the nel in Laos, where he went as a private citizen in 1956 to esTreasury and Justice Departments with different priorities...
...Carmel ]," they wrote, "is like Ever renowned for its delicacy in the face of human sticking a finger in a dynamo...
...Whether it explodes or implodes, tragedy...
...Yet Dooley's career remains shrouded It will be hard to move past the simplistic fixation of blame in mystery, and Shilts dramatically purports to expose the se(on the president, the attorney general, the federal agents, cret campaign that wrecked his life...
...The outsiders were truly innocent of the close parlated into illegal conduct, the government may...
...They were "nutty...
...1 sought out more critical treatments of his career that suffering from AIDS only adds to the poignant urgency sur- would help establish his significance beyond the confines of 6: 21 May 1993 Commonweal...
...784 pp...
...In relying upon a single journalist's questionable work and a couple of interviews...
...Carmel ligious community believes it has a duty to kill others and is were familiar with apocalyptic literature--indeed, they were likely to carry out that goal imminently...
...One commentator noted, I hope investigation of Dooley's sexuality while Dooley was on the facetiously, that the Davidians had not violated any law of Texas American lecture circuit in early 1956, promoting Deliver Us of which he was aware...
...lage clinics were no sham...
...in December 1991 which was riddled with factual errors...
...These questions will have to he not merit the end that came to them...
...I would have preferred that the scarce resources Counterculture in America, 1933-1962...
...Press, 527.95...
...Shilts has made a remarkable number of errors in his brief but central discussion of the Tone Dooley case...
...and for its superb command of the wide the result will he tragic for all...
...So REACTION TO WACO why bother in Waco, where the stakes-from the government's perspective --seemed so high...
...the struggles f'or the rights of women, Jews, blacks, and Government officials-and too many members of society-have Catholics...
...That settles that...
...Koresh et al...
...But, as a utopian who once taught history, I know hostile treatment...
...military only to find themselves harassed, reviled, of "the fire next time...
...Actually, the ONI report is readily TOM DOOLEY'S MANY LIVES available to scholars who will simply pay a visit to the Naval NOBODY'S PLASTER SAINT Operational Archives in Washington and request the documents...
...Fearing a for a militia to the right of the people to keep and hear arms...
...tablish village clinics...
...The Waco episode does not just give from Evil, the best-selling, highly embellished account of his me pause about the least restrictive alternative standard that used role in the Navy's 1954 "Operation Passage to Freedom," to govern the First Amendment religion clause...
...Presumably because the govern- and folk hero to millions of American Catholics in the late 1950s...
...The views of the Branch Davidians about in American religious groups, the Wall Street the end of the world may seem odd, not only to the Wall Street Journal told us last month all that they think we Journal but to the vast majority of us, but beliefs alone do not need to know about the death of David Koresh and his followers justify a government raid...
...is no ordinary hook...
...It Lesbians in the U.S...
...The most amazing news out of rounding his message, that gays have served proudly and well Waco is that none of the government agents apparently thought in the U.S...
...The government poured Dooley's homosexuality has been no secret for years...
...Assume, moreover, that the Wall Street Journal correctly diThe First Amendment protects us from governmental inter- agnosed Koresh and his followers as a bunch of nutty paranoids...
...Martin's actually occurred a thousand miles away in Saint Louis...
...from calling Cardinal Francis Spellman "John" to elaborately Randy Shilts's Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and setting Dooley's funeral Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral...
...One could argue that this is precisely what this outcome will take a while, and isn't guaranteed...
...Shilts describes the U.S...
...At the time I felt it allocated to law enforcement on firearms be spent on regular sufficient to describe the circumstances of Dooley's ouster from interdiction of the massive violations of federal laws at the gun the Navy and indicate the role this forced resignation played shows each weekend...
...ernment must sit idly by if there is credible evidence that a re- The difference, it seems, is that the folks inside Mt...
...scandal that would diminish its own prestige, the Navy houndThe real problem is that Koresh is but the tiniest flake of pow- ed Dooley into confessing his homosexuality following a eainder (I mean snow, not gunpowder) at the tip of the iceberg of paign of surveillance and perhaps entrapment by Office of Naval automatic weapons in this country...
...that is demonstrated, it seems plausible that the same standards My besetting ideological temptation, I suspect, is not so much that protect the Communist party and the Klan ought minimally liberalism as utopianism-flavored, I hope, with not-so bland to have governed in the case of the Branch Davidians...
...When ideas get trans- surrounded...
...Sober religious leaders like Dean Kelley, the counselor on ENFORCING THE LAW religious liberty of the National Council of Churches of Christ, CONSIDER THE BILL OF RIGHTS and James Dunn, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, wrote to President Bill Clinton more than a month before the final denouement in Waco, urging him to "demilitarize the confrontation in Waco...
...dreds of locations throughout the country...
...ment's interest in law enforcement was-to use the First While Dooley's ordeal comprises but a small part of Shilts's Amendment buzzword-truly "compelling...
...But I hope that this Shilts's first mistake in Conduct Unbecoming is an overretragic case serves not as a precedent for more paramilitary op- liance on the work of Diana Shaw, whom he misidentifies as erations against the strongholds of the religious and secular cra- a "biographer...
...are likely to respond to such acceptance by their own restrictive alternative to limitation exists...
...Why did leaving the Davidians alone not seem Unbecoming is Thomas A. Dooley, the jungle doctor of Laos to be a real option for them...
...obsessed with it--whereas the government agents were outThat point has been made repeatedly in cases involving the side-in more ways than one-the faith community they had Conllllunist party and the Ku Klux Klan...
...JR example, she dismissed Dooley's "Vientiane clinic project" as Edward McGlvnn Gaf(nev, Jr., is the dean of the Valparaiso a "sham": while it is true he never worked in Vientiane, his vilUniversity School 0/ Law...
...Our government, after all, sorted out carefully by disinterested fact-finders before re- has no duty to protect us from nutty ideas, whether secular or sponsibility for this tragedy can be assessed more clearly...
...of course, take allel between the imagery in the Book of Revelation and their prompt and appropriate action both to prevent and to stop the own astonishing sound effects, light deprivation, and military conduct...
...It is sad that no one paid much array of theological convictions that stir the soul heed to these voices...
...In Smith the Court acceptance of social norms that are worthy and workable, in- relegated the less restrictive alternative standard to cases where cluding the God-given ideal of permanent, sacrificial, enfam- the government intentionally singles out a religious group for ilied love...
...The better part of prudence would in Waco, Texas...
...Until others hold as birthrights...
...It leads me to believe Until the Native American peyote case in 1990, Smith v. that some day society (including the church) may come to re- Employment Division, the courts allowed religious freedom to gard homosexuality (including homosexual unions) as a Sig- he limited only where the state had borne a heavy burden of nificant differencebutnotasacurse oracrime orof itself sinful...
...ference with free exercise of religion...
...to amass an arsenal as they await the end of the world...
...IIOYr grown out of the habit of thinking seriously about less restrictive alternatives to the way they enforce the law in general...
...Pity Attorney General Janet Reno and the FBI and the ATF The best-known victim of military homophobia in Conduct for a moment...
...Like the First and the Second Amendment...
...David Koresh, his followers, the media...
...Shaw, a researcher for the film industry, pubzies, but as the basis for tougher federal restriction on access lished an article on Dooley in the Los Angeles Times Magazine to automatic weapons at the wholesale end...
...more subtle approach, raising disturbing questions that cannot Maybe the Davidians were nuts, but their kind of nuttiness did so lightly he brushed aside...
...When I first began researching Tom Dooley's life and works Rushed into print to influence the raging de- I was often annoyed by the embarrassingly saccharine habate over the status of gays in the military, its giographies that pervaded the Catholic press during his lifedust jacket proclaims, "Once in a generation comes a book that time and even in the years since his death from melanoma in can change the world...
...On any given Saturday, il- Intelligence (ONI) operatives who bugged Dooley's phone and legal transactions are openly carried on at gun shows at hun- eavesdropped on his hotel room conversations...
...had vast expose, the book is framed by Dooley's story for maxiviolated federal laws regulating access to automatic weapons...
...on Dooley: "from the first time Diana Shaw attempted to retrieve Dooley's official Navy records, it was clear that the service had something to hide...
...RORERTG...
...It only lends credence to the worst fears and suspiexemption f'ronl gun control laws grounded in the Free Exercise cions of the paranoids, and proves from their perspectiveClause or that religious adherents Should have special license that the world really is out to get them, but good...
...witness occurred in Waco, but my point is a more general one...
...Shilts describes Shaw's heroic pursuit of the secret Navy file CONDUCT UNBECOMING...
...The recent announcement that Shilts is 1961...
...and persecuted simply for being themselves...
...To invade a center of energy I like Mt...
...But no one has yet adduced credible evidence that behavior that culminated in the consuming holocaust...
...Military (St...
...mum dramatic effect...
...Navy's frenzied Which brings me to gun control...
...and that no less beings...
...To anyKoresh and his followers were likely to have come out of their one inside the faith of the Davidians, who would not suspect Commonweal 21 May 1993: 5 that the end was indeed nigh...
...proof that the limitation was justified not by any ordinary puband that many or most gays, nd lesbians, because they are human lic interest, but by a supreme public necessity...
...There's nothing wrong with the government taking the meantime, there are two other points that the WSJ over- a wait-and-see attitude about the end of the world...
...In religious...
...Nor And it does not explain why the FBI complied so closely would any Serious First Amendment scholar argue that the gov- with the script that Koresh and his followers were following...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 10
