The ACLU Talks Too Much
WASHINGTON
It was my old friend and mentor, Luigi Barzini, who asseverated:
“Americans talk too much.” He was sitting in the elegant library of
his home in Rome. The year was 1978, though I cannot recall the
contemporary controversy that aroused him. Luigi’s point was that
we were wrangling again fortissimo con brio, and he thought our
jabbering was again obscuring careful thought. He was a great
friend of America. He had been partly educated here. He wrote in
both Italian and superb English. In fact, at the time he was
finishing one of his many fine books, The Europeans. It contains a
friendly chapter on the USA full of shrewd insights. He believed we
often argued garrulously about things that were not worth arguing
about.
A case has gone before the Supreme Court that fits Luigi’s
diagnosis. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit in 2001
demanding that a sevenfoot cross erected in the California desert
in 1934 commemorating sacrifices endured by our soldiers in World
War I be taken down. At some point after 1934 the land on which the
cross was erected became federally protected, and thus the cross
became a fit issue for the ACLU’s squalling about the separation of
church and state. The creation of this World War I monument was—get
this!—part of a 1930s medical program to help World War I veterans
recover from shell shock. Physicians treating them thought that
their work in the desert heat would be therapeutic. In 2004 the
Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with the ACLU, but veterans’
groups objected—thus the case’s journey to the Supreme Court.
Now it would seem to me that the cross is a historic monument
that need not be subject to contemporary fashions in thought, to
wit, the fashion of hunting down religious symbols and eliminating
them from government property. The cross simply represents the
feelings of soldiers from a bygone era. There are religious symbols
on public display from the past elsewhere. For instance, there are
religious symbols on the Supreme Court building. If I recall, I
have seen a carving in the Court’s chamber of Moses receiving the
Ten Commandments from God. There may even be a picture of God up
there. Viewing the 1934 cross today might give curious Americans a
sense of what our country was like back in those days before the
ACLU was spreading goodwill around the country by harassing people
of faith.
Yet that is not the way the battle-axes at the ACLU see it. One
of its learned lawyers, Peter Eliasberg, told the Washington Times,
“For us to choose the principal symbol of one religion that says
Jesus is the Son of God and He is divine and say that is an
appropriate way to reflect the sacrifice of people who don’t
believe that…is excluding by its very nature.” Well, “we” did not
choose the symbol. Veterans from what was once called the Great War
did, apparently with the consent of their physicians. This is an
interesting historic memorial that the ACLU would deny us.
Veterans’ groups that are opposing the removal of the cross
disagree with Eliasberg. Their members argue that the cross
represents the “Fallen Soldier Battle Cross.” That is a rifle and
crossed bayonet that is driven into the ground to honor a fallen
comrade. Will the ACLU oppose this too? Jim Sims, of the Military
Order of the Purple Heart, told the Times the controversy is “about
thousands of veteran memorials and monuments around the country.
This is about the issue of honoring veterans.” It is trendy in our
noisy public discourse to see “the right” being accused of
injecting religion into politics. Actually, very often “the right,”
or more specifically “the Christian right,” is merely defending
settled manifestations of religion that go back decades in our
history, occasionally centuries. As I see it the ACLU would have us
rewrite American history, eliminating all references to God, the
Bible, and other such artifacts. Of course, for people of faith
these artifacts are reminders of faith. So maybe the ACLU could
begin a campaign to disallow people of faith from lapsing into
prayer in front of such reminders. Possibly the ACLU’s next
campaign will be to eliminate religious symbols from public
buildings, starting with the Supreme Court. As Luigi noticed, some
Americanos are too disputatious.
Chimp Change
WASHINGTON
In May, a 47 million-year-old fossil was put on display at New
York’s American Museum of Natural History. Scientists accorded the
event enormous attention, as did the press. The creature may be
related to us, though it looks like a cat, not a chimpanzee, and
certainly nothing like your mother or father or even one of your
more eccentric aunts or uncles. Evolutionists tell us that of all
the creatures known to science we humans are most closely related
to chimpanzees.
That is not the whole story, of course. According to a very fine
book that I have been reading, Why Evo lution Is True by Jerry A.
Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago,
mankind can be traced back over 3 billion years to our most distant
relatives, self-replicating molecules. The fossil unveiled at the
American Museum of Natural History is a relative newcomer, but she
(the creature was a young female) has cleared up a debate among
scientists.
Anthropologists have been pretty certain that we evolved from
ape-like ancestors, but they have been divided on precisely which
one. There were two, the family Tarsiidae—whose descendants, the
tarsiers, are jungle creatures now living in Asia—and the family
Adapidae, who were precursors of the lemur of Madagascar.
Scientists base their speculations on fossils that are rarely
complete. Some scientists have extrapolated our ancestors from as
little evidence as a tooth. The lucky ones have had a jawbone or a
rib or some other skeletal fragment. The fossil displayed in New
York is a complete skeleton, except for a missing lower leg. From
it evidence mounts that our ancestor hails from the adapidae, the
precursors of the lemur. “Lemur advocates will be delighted,” Tim
White, a California paleontologist, is quoted as saying in the Wall
Street Journal, “but tarsier advocates will be underwhelmed.”
Scientists are given to such disputes, and then there are the
creationists who doubt we have any animal ancestors whatsoever. Let
the debate continue.
What I have found fascinating in Coyne’s book is how very old
the earth is. Some of his evidence comes from fossils and
measurements of the radioactivity in the layers of stone that
harbor the fossils. The radioactivity gives us a good idea of the
stone’s age, and the progression of the fossils gives us an idea of
their steady development.
Scientists, by dating old rocks, have established that the earth
is 4.3 billion years old. The earliest fossils, those being
photosynthetic bacteria, trace life on the planet beginning about
3.5 billion years ago. Around 600 million years ago multicelled
orga nisms appeared, for instance, worms and jellyfish. Then came
terrestrial plants and four-legged animals about 400 million years
ago. Mammals did not show up until 250 million years ago, and birds
can be found in fossil form dating from 50 million years ago. Coyne
writes that “Humans are newcomers on the scene—our lineage branches
off from that of other primates only about 7 million years ago, the
merest sliver of time.” Then just over four decades ago Barack
Obama was born, and just over six decades ago Newt Gingrich.
Coyne and other evolutionary biologists have had their theories
fortified by the ability, starting three decades back, to sequence
the genomes of various species and discover genes shared by related
species, some that still work, some that do not, thus allowing us
to go our merry way from, say, our relative the chimpanzee. The key
to this process, scientists say, is natural selection. There are
good genes that help us survive and not-so-good genes that deny
those who carry them the possibility of survival. Now creationists
find all this highly dubious, but for me the information has come
as a great relief.
The good news is that human beings adapt. We have survived,
according to my reading of Coyne, for about 60,000 years, adapting
to all sorts of challenges, climate changes, dietary changes,
plagues, and other such unwelcome happenstances. The present
hullabaloo over global warming is much ado about nothing. Let the
climate change; the species Homo sapiens has survived 60 millennia.
There is no reason for the Obama administration to tamper with the
auto mobile market. We can survive carbon in the atmosphere and
have since the last weakgened member of Homo erectus wobbled off.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the automobile industry can
survive politicians designing our cars, taxing our gasoline, and
supplying us with tiny vehicles that few Americans want to buy.
