Correspondence
GRAHAM, REV. WILLIAM C. & MANISCALCO, MSGR. FRANCIS J. & FARENELL, MIKE & SAYDAH, CHARLES & DALPIAZ, GINO & McBRIEN, REV. RICHARD P. & SHINNERS, JOHN & Talbot, William
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors I was wrong, so thanks As a nonpracticing Duluthian currently alive in East Harlem, I was delighted to read Ann O'Brien Treacy's "Time Stops" [The Last Word, April...
...But for a presidential veto, a bill with strong bipartisan support banning partial birth abortions would now be the law of the land...
...Indeed, the recognition of the worldwide impact of the papacy's moral leadership has been a positive sign of the times...
...Carlin is right to dismiss the value of early polls that forecast a Clinton victory in November 1996...
...I'm not sure that's what Americans want...
...What would our society be like today if, in the face of either of these decisions, those with a higher moral vision had declared, "Face it, we've lost...
...All politics is regional David Carlin's arguments in his essay on President Clinton's bid for re-election ignore the central premise of presidential election politics: It is essentially regional in character...
...Can Carlin imagine any presidential candidate today running successfully on a platform of hostility to Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam) and of approval for abortion on demand, physician-assisted suicide, same-sex marriages, and the interests of the entertainment industry as it is...
...In science, facts speak for themselves...
...The Doctrine Committee is not a bridge club or a sewing circle...
...True, Arkansas and Tennessee weren't much, but they were a start...
...If a fetus is only potentially human, what is it actually...
...REV...
...Add the economic strains in Louisiana and the demographic shifts that actually caused population losses in Montana and Wyoming, and the GOP faced a new line-up in the Electoral College...
...You're not funny I resented the smug and flippant tone of the editorial ["Catholicism," May 3] cheerfully defending your old buddy, the Rev...
...But I would suggest that their power has been waning because "right-to-work" laws, striker-replacement laws, and court decisions that have weakened or negated collective bargaining agreements have deprived unions of the one thing they could offer their members-job security...
...5. It is impossible to imagine any party taking power in the United States with the kind of specifically an-tireligious and anticlerical programs espoused by parties that took office in several European states during the last century and the first three decades of this one...
...john shinners Notre Dame, Ind...
...But this is no laughing matter, and I would expect Commonweal to take it seriously...
...Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) Finally, I question Carlin's thesis that the 1994 midterm election represented a significant change in electoral patterns...
...rather, it recognized the inordinate strength presidential elections give to smaller states, and the simple fact that there are many more smaller states than larger states...
...Perhaps to strengthen his overall thesis, your columnist ignores all this...
...4. In recent years, quiet but audible doubts have been expressed about the practice of easy divorce in this country...
...FRANCIS J. MANISCALCO Washington, B.C...
...Again, religiously motivated people are not on the sidelines but in the midst of this debate...
...It's true that the Democrats have paid a price for their attempt at the politics of inclusion: The "have-nots" have definitely alienated the "haves...
...What the Republicans are showing us so far is that their definition of small government entails passing the buck of re-ponsibility downward...
...polls clearly demonstrate that same-sex marriage is not something most Americans, including most citizens of Hawaii, favor...
...MSGR...
...Richard McBrien...
...Consider these points: 1. Twenty-three years after Roe v. Wade, the surprise is that abortion on demand is not simply accepted overwhelmingly by a populace influenced by a media world that has been at pains to present the choice of abortion-even for the most trivial of reasons-as a fundamental human right...
...I'm happy that my brother priest was right, I was wrong, and Treacy was articulate and sensitive in telling the tale of silent hours, attention to God, and the many advantages of prayerfulness...
...The use of the words "essentially sympathetic" in the preface was intended as a way of returning the compliment to the committee, whose chairman, Archbishop John Quinn, had described the process followed in (Continued on page 30) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) the examination of earlier editions as "a model of cooperative ecclesial concern" and had taken pains to insist that the committee's 1985 statement could not be used "to call into question [my] authentic Catholic faith or orthodoxy...
...It wasn't simply a "Southern strategy...
...Though the Republicans also needed Alaska, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Maine to cobble out their victories, the main strength was literally through the heart of the nation...
...Finally, Carlin seems overly impressed with the havoc that can be wreaked by courts in our society...
...In 1988, the Democrats dutifully obliged, settling on Michael Dukakis as their nominee...
...As great as that can be at times-and as great as the benefits of court decisions in other instances-the courts do not ultimately determine the morals of society...
...The Dred Scott decision did not deter those who knew slavery was wrong, nor did the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson stop those who knew that "separate but equal" was a cover for repression...
...Thanks, plus a demurral Thank you very much for your editorial of May 3 on my recent trouble with the bishops...
...But in 1992, Clinton and Gore fractured the bloc...
...You blithely dismiss the bill of particulars drawn up by the Doctrine Committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops against this man's book, Catholicism...
...I don't know whether we want "big" government or "small" government, but I firmly believe we want government to work...
...All is not lost David R. Carlin, Jr/s, counsel of despair, "Face It, We've Lost" [column, May 17], ignores many signs in our culture that point in the direction opposite to his conclusions...
...We have not prevailed, but, in contrast to Carlin's defeatist view, we are not simply out of the loop, consigned to the margins...
...propositions in its favor were defeated in Washington and California and barely squeaked through in Oregon...
...WILLIAM TALBOT New York, N.Y...
...Bruno P. Schlesinger, inspired by Dawson's insight, founded the Humanistic Studies Program (formerly called Christian Culture) forty years ago, and it has been going strong ever since...
...By 1988 the GOP had a coalition big enough to win a presidential election without having to campaign in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and California...
...They were both Southerners, and this enabled them to break up the Republican coalition first envisioned in Barry Gold water's candidacy in 1964, then used successfully in 1968 by Richard Nixon...
...3. On same-sex marriage: Various state legislatures are already taking action to void the effects in their states of a law legitimating such unions in the state of Hawaii...
...But this is partly the result of a Republican strategy to portray the progress made by blacks and women as "undeserved" and made "at the expense" of some other group...
...Stone Park, III...
...WILLIAM C. GRAHAM New York, N.Y...
...MIKE FARENELL Glens Falls, N.Y...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors I was wrong, so thanks As a nonpracticing Duluthian currently alive in East Harlem, I was delighted to read Ann O'Brien Treacy's "Time Stops" [The Last Word, April 19...
...The preface makes no such suggestion...
...2. Physician-assisted suicide is also clearly an issue on which the public is sharply divided...
...Carlin misreads politics David R. Carlin, Jr.'s April 19 column ["Why Clinton Will Lose"] errs in its reading of political trends...
...These initiatives reflect the state of public opinion...
...he seems ready to proclaim defeat before the first skirmish is over...
...Putting it all together, the strategy capitalized on how rules of presidential elections can magnify even small population losses in the large Northern states into sizable Electoral College pluralities from the smaller states...
...I think the results of that election reflected the widespread perception among voters that government just wasn't working and the Congress was the captive of big money...
...Again, Carlin is correct that unions can no longer deliver votes...
...GINO DALPIAZ, C.S...
...The Republicans have made the mistake of thinking that the electorate endorsed the Contract with America lock, stock, and barrel...
...This was the strength of Carter's successful run in 1976 and Clinton's in 1992...
...Address the issue...
...George Bush dressed him in suitably stereotypical images, and the voting public responded accordingly...
...Dawson lives Commonweal readers may be interested to know that the legacy of Catholic historian Christopher Dawson's innovative ideas about the need to study Western culture through an interdisciplinary focus on its Christian roots [April 5] still bears fruit in at least one American college...
...Religiously motivated people are again at the forefront of this struggle, and-Carlin to the contrary notwithstanding-the fight is far from over...
...Her report of keeping company with the eucharistic Christ in Father Patrick McDowell's oasis of prayer was evidence that I, too, was incorrect to suspect that initial interest in such a prayerful undertaking would eventually wane...
...Here at Saint Mary's, Prof...
...So they decided to give the Republicans a chance...
...But it is good to have some support as well...
...You are right: I am perfectly capable of speaking for myself...
...And there ain't no mister-in-between...
...The only thing as bad as a big government that doesn't work is a small government that doesn't work...
...RICHARD P. MCBRIEN Notre Dame, Ind...
...I appreciate Commonweal's...
...The writer is chair of the Saint Mary's program he describes...
...REV...
...Although there were also adversarial and unsatisfactory aspects to that process, the atmosphere by the end was, for the most part, mutually re-specful and even friendly...
...For the most part, it has been religiously motivated people who have kept up the pressure, even at the expense of a great deal of mockery or indifference, and Catholics are hardly alone in taking a prolife stand...
...I especially like your last two sentences...
...it could literally concede those large states to the Democrats (never set foot in them, spend no money on campaign advertising) and still win the White House-always provided that the Democrats did nothing to try to break up this plurality of primarily small (or previously small) states from the Intermountain West, the High Plains, and the Old Confederacy...
...Our two-year major takes students through a close interdisciplinary study of Western history, literature, art, theology, and philosophy, and strives for the kind of cultural synthesis that can correct Dawson's perception of the average undergraduate curriculum as a "sprawling collection of unrelated units...
...I can only hope that Carlin is using a form of Swiftian satire, rather than actually contending that Christianity is a spent force in our culture...
...Don't get into the game of name-calling, making fun, or searching for motives on the part of those mysterious dark forces of obscurantism out there somewhere...
...If I have any complaint about the editorial, it is with its assertion that the preface to the new edition of Catholicism suggests that the bishops and I are "now of one mind...
...discussion of the value of the intact family-mother, father, and children-is even more in evidence...
...it was a clear example of the old boys' network in operation...
...But he's not entirely right to call him an underdog...
...CHARLES SAYDAH Monsey, N.Y...
...Between potency & act Heather King's "One Woman's Journey" [May 31 is an excellently expressed, painstaking confession about abortion, but it does repeat the mistake of most defenders of abortion when it describes the act as the destruction of a "potential human life...
...6. The reception given to Pope John Paul II and his message in this country last October argues in favor of an openness on the part of Americans to the highest ideals, even if not always an acceptance and practice of those ideals...
...I could not, of course, describe the recent non-process in that fashion...
...In the current climate, just about any candidate is an underdog...
...Zoologically, biologically, genetically, taxonomically/ the fetus from its inception is human...
...Such is life in contemporary Catholicism," you sigh...
...Of course, you were cowardly enough to drag in the Vatican and the conservatives ("No doubt, Rome threatened, American conservatives complained...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 11
