Immigrating Terror

Barney Frank and the Law of Unintended Consequences: How the Frank Amendment Helped Terrorists get Legal Visas by Chuck Morse Kindle Price: $3.99 Auto-delivered wirelessly

Immigrating TerrorBy: Rocco DiPippo FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, April 03, 2006
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In the years since the Twin Towers were destroyed, Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, has come under fire fromseveral writers who claim that immigration laws he wrote made it easier for foreign subversives to enter America, set up terror cells, and raise funds for extremists. One writer, Chuck Morse, who ran against Frank as an Independent in 2000, asserts Frank bears responsibility for loosening restrictions on student and temporary visas, which eased the way for the 9/11 hijackers to enter the U.S. to plan and carry out their attacks.

Frank denies that any of his legislative activity contributed to these things. He implies that “the Republicans” approved of his immigration legislation. He says that his immigration laws were good ones. He says poor enforcement of them was the problem. He says that the 9/11 Commission cleared him of any culpability in the weakening of America’s ability to keep out extremists and foreign terrorists. He calls those who say his immigration policies contributed to 9/11 “right-wing extremists.”

There is evidence – presented later in this article – that approximately 19 months before 9/11, Barney Frank had been given specific information indicating that at least some of his immigration legislation was causing a massive infiltration of America by radical Muslims and radical Muslim clerics. He did nothing in response to that information but continued writing and pushing legislation that further relaxed immigration requirements and granted additional rights to non-U.S. citizens, even to those who had been deported from the U.S. for committing felonies.

All legislation must be discussed within the historical context in which it was written. Frank began writing immigration legislation while the domestic surveillance abilities of the FBI and the foreign surveillance abilities of the CIA were being devastated by attacks by the Democratic Party, the radical Left, and “civil liberties” groups including the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Alien Border Control Committee (ABCC), formed by President Reagan in 1986 to coordinate the FBI and CIA in rooting out and deporting Islamists and alien immigrant supporters of Muslim terror, was effectively forced to dismantle by the coordinated efforts of the aforementioned parties. And Congressman Frank contributed to the ABCC’s demise by writing legislation that stripped its authority to deport alien extremists based on their political beliefs.

From 1981 onward, while terror attacks around the world by Muslim radicals were rising dramatically and America’s intelligence agencies were being neutered by the Left, Congressman Barney Frank legislated to loosen America’s immigration controls. At the same time, he consistently voted to slash funding for the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. military.

Frank’s most far-reaching work on immigration law occurred in the context of a major overhaul of the McCarran-Walter act of 1952. That act contains the body of U.S. immigration law. Its overhaul during the 1980s culminated in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1990. To expedite the work, the project was divided into two parts: an overhaul of legal immigration laws and a separate overhaul of illegal immigration laws. Congressman Frank wanted to reform the exclusion provisions of legal immigration laws, laws that codified the things a prospective legal immigrant to the U.S. could be denied entry for.

“The exclusions were part of the legal immigration provisions, and as a member of the Democratic majority on the immigration subcommittee, I asked for and was accorded by my colleagues the right to take the lead in rewriting the exclusion provisions,” says Frank. [1]

Frank concentrated on removing the ideological exclusions. Those exclusions were used to prevent people with totalitarian views from immigrating to the U.S. and causing unrest. They were also used to deport legal aliens who had caused unrest or engaged in subversive activities in America. Frank categorized the exclusions as “relics of the McCarthy era.” His associating the ideological exclusions with “McCarthyism” is disingenuous for many reasons, not least because Senator Joseph McCarthy concentrated his anti-Communist efforts on U.S. citizens, not aliens or visitors.

In fact, ideological exclusions were not “relics of the McCarthy era.” They originated from the Alien Registration Act of 1940, signed into law by President Roosevelt as a national security measure on the eve of World War II. The bill made it a federal crime for anyone to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.”

Frank was passionate about removing ideological exclusions. “I was in an ideal situation because while I was in favor of the overall bill, I cared most of all about the exclusions, and I was prepared to try to defeat the bill if I was not successful in reforming what I considered to be the most outrageous aspect of American immigration law, the antigay, anti-free-speech McCarthyite hangover,” said Frank.

To Frank, the ideological exclusions were inconsistent with the notion of free speech. But the question was: Should the full First Amendment right to free speech be extended to non-U.S. citizens while they were in America? Frank said yes. He then flipped the issue on its head by arguing that denying entry to foreigners with subversive or “dangerous” views and radical ideologies was a de facto violation ofAmerican citizens' First Amendment rights to hear those views.

“Beginning around the turn of the century,” said Frank, “American law contained a large number of exclusions to protect what legislators apparently thought was a fragile citizenry from all manner of dangerous foreign influences. Anarchists, people who believed in polygamy, Communists, people who knew people who were related to Communists, people who thought and said unpleasant things about America – the list of those kept out of America was egregious and in total violation of the spirit of free expression.”

It is typical for left-wing politicians to waltz past the bones of Communism’s 150 million victims on their way to trivializing the dangers that radical ideologues present. Frank is no exception, since he considers foreigners who hold totalitarian views to be of no concern to national security, a view he has held since at least 1981, the year he officially began working to eliminate ideological exclusions. The Soviet Union, America’s long-time communist enemy, did not collapse until 1990. Though Frank’s final exclusion amendment included language making deportable “any alien who participated in Nazi persecution,” there was no clause barring any alien who participated in Communistpersecution.

When Frank’s exclusion amendment became law, it said aliens could not be excluded or deported “because of any past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations which, if engaged in by a United States citizen in the United States, would be protected under the Constitution of the United States.”

Frank used the elimination of ideological exclusions to facilitate the removal of another long-standing exclusion statute, one truly unjust. It is important to mention this since it raises questions concerning his motives for legislating against ideological exclusion in the first place.

Frank tailored his attack on ideological exclusions to expedite the removal of the sexual preference exclusion, an exclusion that denied homosexual immigrants entry to the U.S. Given the cultural climate of the 1980s, a stand-alone effort to have the sexual preference exclusion removed would not have been supported by many Congressmen, regardless of their private views on homosexuality. So in a brilliant legislative sleight-of-hand, Frank crafted the comprehensive immigration exclusion amendment to define the only reasons that entry to America could be denied – and he left the sexual preference exclusion out.

That strategy of omission put anyone wanting to continue the ban on admitting homosexual immigrants in the unsavory position of having to sponsor a separate amendment seeking to continue that ban. In his essay “A Case Study in the Effective Use of the Political Process,” Frank explains his strategy:

My intention was to take the legitimate bases for excluding people from this country – namely, that they would in some real way be dangerous to our well-being – and embody them in a new section that would replace the existing obnoxious [ideological exclusion] sections. I would deal with the anti-gay exclusion simply by leaving it out of the re-draft. Thus, no separate vote would be taken on whether or not to repeal this provision, because its abolition would be accomplished by omission. And since I was part of the majority that would be presenting the new bill, the burden in Congress would thus be shifted to those who sought to preserve this homophobic aspect.

In other words, Frank took an issue concerning national security and parlayed it into a significant victory for gay rights.

In spite of security concerns, the ideological exclusion is removed

In 1987, over the objections of the State Department because of security concerns, Frank’s exclusion amendment was made temporary law. Though President Reagan also objected to Frank’s ideological exclusions amendment, he accepted it in compromise to get broader aspects of the McCarran-Walters revamp passed into law. For the first time in American history, the full First Amendment right to free speech and free association, once exclusively enjoyed by full U.S. citizens, had been granted to non-citizens and visitors to the United States. The moment Barney Frank’s exclusions amendment was made law, it became unlawful, on the basis of their beliefs alone, to deny entry to immigrants or other foreign nationals with radical ideologies. It also made it nearly impossible to deport them once they were here.

Three years later, the overhaul of McCarran-Walter was finished, and it became law as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990. Frank’s ideological exclusions amendment remained intact, except for a single word. The final amendment said that an alien could not be excluded from entry into the U.S. nor deported once there ''because of any past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations which, if engaged in by a United States citizen in the United States, would be protected under the Constitution.” Frank had also wanted to prevent the U.S. from denying entry to immigrants based on past “activities,” but under pressure from the Bush State Department, Frank was forced to drop “activities” from the amendment’s final wording.

The New York Times, which vigorously supported Frank and his fellow Democrats’ drive to remove ideological exclusions, reported its permanent removal on Oct. 26, 1990: “Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who was the chief House negotiator in the conference committee, said the new provisions worked out Wednesday night and today 'made rational the reasons a person can be excluded,' and added, ‘We are saying you can't exclude someone because of their speech, their beliefs, or their associations.’” [Emphasis added]

Some changes were made to the 1990 exclusion amendment in 1996, but Frank’s ideological exclusions amendment remained untouched and in force until after the 9/11 attacks. The 1996 exclusion list allowed immigration officials to bar aliens from entry or deport them for the following terrorism-related reasons:

(1) has engaged in a terrorist activity,

(2) a consular officer or the Attorney General knows, or has reasonable ground to believe, is engaged in or is likely to engage after entry in any terrorist activity .

(3) has, under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily harm, incited terrorist activity,

(4) is a representative of a foreign terrorist organization, as designated by the Secretary under section 219, or

(5) is a member of a foreign terrorist organization, as designated by the Secretary under section 219, which the alien knows or should have known is a terrorist organization is inadmissible.

But U.S. immigration officials could not deny entry to or deport aliens solely on the basis of their political or ideological beliefs or the associations they engaged in while in America. And the remaining exclusions, as they related to terrorism, were filled with ambiguities that monkey-wrenched the process of deporting suspect aliens expeditiously. The Center for Constitutional Rights, National Lawyers Guild, and other left-wing groups lined up to exploit those ambiguities. They filed endless litigation in defense of aliens arrested for suspicion of involvement in crime, terrorism or terrorist-related activity.

James R. Edwards of the Hudson Institute sums up the overall effect of Barney Frank’s elimination of ideological exclusion:

History teaches that foreign ideologues have long sought to promote their beliefs and advance their causes on American soil. Alien subversives have spied, spread propaganda and stolen state and industrial secrets. Foreign anarchists, communists and other radicals have sought to make converts, raise funds, organize followers and otherwise exploit American freedoms...In short, the 1990 Immigration Act’s revision of exclusion grounds preserved the spirit of the McGovern and Moynihan [Frank] Amendments. Indeed, this law made it much easier for aliens who hold radical, dangerous, anti-American or subversive political beliefs to enter and remain in the United States. This perversion of the First Amendment means the guy who preaches hatred, pollutes hearts and minds, steeps persuadable people in reasons to harm Americans and wage war from within against America…gets a free pass.

 A Graphic Warning Ignored

On January 26, 2000, at 11 a.m., in Room 2237 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Avalon Project at Yale Law School for the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims held a hearing. During that presentation, testimony was given by experts on terrorism and immigration regarding the vast influx of Islamist ideologues and other extremists into the U.S. and Canada. One of those experts, Steven Emerson, described, in great and shocking detail the large number of foreign Islamic radicals and radical clerics entering the U.S. each year. Emerson said, “U.S. officials say they are virtually powerless to stop the influx of known militants into the United States for reasons ranging from lack of adequate intelligence to easy circumvention of the watch list to legal restrictions in stopping self-described religious clerics from entering the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

Those “legal restrictions” were a clear reference to Barney Frank’s ideological exclusions amendment, which forbade denying entry to or deporting aliens based solely on their beliefs, ideologies, or associations. Rep. Frank was a member of that House Subcommittee on Immigration Claims that the Avalon Project had addressed. And Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-TX, who works closely with Frank on immigration matters, had physically attended the Avalon hearing.

Five hundred and ninety-four days after that hearing, 19 months later, Muslim radicals, acting out their radical beliefs, murdered 3,000 Americans under a clear, blue sky.

How many of the hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslim radicals and their Islamic clerics, who legally entered America under Barney Frank’s amendment, aided the 9/11 murderers? How many of them had attended to some operational detail of the 9/11 plot? How many cheered and supported it, or excused it in front of their mosques? How many alien Muslim radicals remain in the U.S., awaiting a signal to murder? How many of them have become full U.S. citizens?

Most importantly, how many American hearts and minds did these ideologues poison with their hatred? What will the result of that be?

After 9/11, the Patriot Act became law and Congressman Frank’s ideological exclusion amendment was effectively suspended. Visa laws were significantly tightened up and the enforcement of immigration laws increased. Frank does not like what he sees.

 “When 3,000 Americans were murdered by illegal immigrant terrorists on September 11,” says Frank, “that was the end of rational immigration policy in the United States.”

Or rather, it was the beginning.

Rocco DiPippo is a freelance political writer and publisher of The Autonomist blog

ENDNOTES:

 [1] Barney Frank, A Case Study in the Effective Use of the Political Process, an essay published in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy and Civil Rights by John D'Emilio, William B. Turner and Urvashi Vaid (Stonewall Inn Editions 2002)

Note: While Rep. Frank’s categorizing of the 9/11 killers as “illegal immigrant terrorists” is, in the strictest sense, technically true, it is a misleading categorization. When applying for their visas, none of the hijackers-to-be admitted to being members in the terrorist al-Qaeda organization, an admission that would have made them ineligible for a visa. Hence, technically speaking, since they did not disclose this (assuming they were even asked about it), the visas that all of them held were obtainedillegally making them technically, but not practically, null and void. In addition, some of the killers had removed pages containing visas from countries on a U.S. terror watch list, where they had obtained training. Again, this made their visas technically illegal. The most important fact is that all of the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. with non-counterfeit, functionally legal temporary visas. And the ones who traveled to and from America while planning the attacks, did so with ease. Collectively, the hijackers entered the U.S. 33 times in 21 months. Between them, they had a total of 68 contacts with immigration and consular officials. Who can forget this?
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Yesterday's Jihadists

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Yesterday's JihadistsBy: Chuck Morse FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, September 07, 2005
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"I’m a minority. I’m an Arab, I’m Palestinian. I’m a Muslim. That’s not a popular thing to be these days. Do I have rights, or don't I have rights?” – Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, on his arrest on charges of being a terrorist.
"Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party." - Jane Addams, 1919.

Many have noted the Left's affinity for violent anti-American terrorists and equal affinity for regarding themselves as the victims of an American fascism that no one else can quite detect. This is hardly a new pattern in left-wing behavior; it is more like a paradigm of the Progressive outlook, and in fact a refined version of the Lizzie Borden defense. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks; and when she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one… Then she pleaded to the court she was an orphan. And was acquitted.

No period exemplifies as vibrantly the progressive manipulation of history in support of this paradigm as what is universally referred to as the “Red Scare” of the 1920s. Modern historians portray the era as an exercise in government repression, a precursor of McCarthyism (which actually has a similar moral and cast). An out-of-control Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, is alleged to have rounded up an enemies list and deported them, by the thousands, because they were immigrants and had unpopular anarchist ideas.

The reality, then as now, is that an ideology-based wave of terrorism carried out by resident aliens forced the government to take stern but necessary (and Constitutional) measures to protect its citizens and to preserve the normal flow of American life. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 which led to the measures known as the Patriot Act which the left regards not as protection for citizens against Islamist terrorists but as an assault on civil liberties and “critics” of government policy like itself has historical precedents in the “Palmer Raids” which were an effort to meet a parallel threat. Following the 1917 revolution in Russia, American anarchists launched a campaign of bombing and assassination against American officials, judges, and prominent citizens.

It was on August 20, 1918, almost 75 years before Osama bin Laden launched his jihad against the Western democracies, that Bolshevik leader Vladimir I. Lenin issued his version of a fatwa against the same “Great Satan,” the United States of America. In his “Letter to American Workers,” Lenin called on his acolytes to “play an exceptionally important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism” by joining the “civil war against the bourgeoisie.” Most Americans ignored the rant, but within immigrant anarchist communities it resonated with significant force.

April 28, 1919, saw the first fruits of the Bolshevik incitement, when a bomb was dismantled at the home of Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson. The next day, a Bolshevik bomb ripped the hands off of an employee of Georgia Senator Thomas Hardwick as he opened the deadly package; it also severely burned the senator’s wife. A few days later, on May Day, 34 bombs were intercepted before reaching their intended targets which included such leading figures as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, North Carolina Senator Lee S. Overman, Utah Senator William H. King, Postmaster General Albert Berlson, and John D. Rockefeller. On the same May Day, coordinated, violent, seditious riots were launched in several cities, most notably in Boston, and a bomb wrecked a municipal building in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on May 2.

On June 2, 1919, at virtually the same time of the day, eight American cities were bombed by anarchists who had already softened up the country a month earlier with a series of violent and coordinated riots unleashed on May Day, 1919.

One month later, June 2, 1919, bombs were simultaneously set to blow up in eight American cities. On that day, bombs exploded at the homes of Boston Judge A. F. Hayden and at the Newton,Massachusetts, home of State Representative Leland Powers. A bomb was intercepted and defused at the office of Cleveland Mayor Harry L. Davis and two bombs exploded in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, one next to the home of Federal Judge J. Thomson and the other next to the home of immigration official W.W. Sibray. In New York City, the home of Judge Charles C. Nott was bombed. Night patrolman William Goshner was killed by what the New York Times referred to as an “infernal killing machine”; so, too, was an unidentified man trying to defuse the bomb intended for Judge Nott.

In Philadelphia, the Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church and the Frankfort Arsenal were bombed. Bombs also exploded at the homes of prominent citizens in Patterson and East Orange, New Jersey.

Most significantly, from a political standpoint, a huge bomb ripped off the front of the Georgetownhome of President Woodrow Wilson’s Quaker pacifist U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The terrorist planting the bomb at Palmer’s door was killed when he tripped trying to flee the scene. Palmer and his young family were not hurt in the assassination attempt. The massive explosion caused windows to shatter at the neighboring home of Palmer’s close friend and political associate, Under Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Palmer acted swiftly by establishing a special unit of the FBI to investigate the terrorists putting 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover in charge. The FBI proceeded to round up more than 10,000 suspected alien terrorists over the next seven months. By January 1920, 247 alien terrorists had been deported. Those who could not be deported, partially due to insufficient evidence, were freed.

Nine months later, September 1920, anarchists detonated a bomb on Wall Street. This act of terror occured in the neighborhood of the future World Trade Center. The Wall Street bomb killed 40 innocent commuters and injured more than 400. The street was littered with dismembered corpses and puddles of blood. The jihadists were secular radicals, most of whom had recently emigrated fromEurope, who were trying to destabilize America with a new kind of warfare. They called their terrorist acts the “propaganda of the deed,” and the garden of Allah, which was their goal, “socialism” or “anarchy.”

The administration of Woodrow Wilson eventually was able to break the back of the terrorist infrastructure. In doing it secured a large measure of peace for several generations. Contrary to the propaganda of the terrorists themselves -- inscribed in the historical record by their academic sympathizers -- this was accomplished with an impressive degree of restraint. Terrorists were deported, the threat was suppressed, and civil liberties were preserved.

The Wilson administration response to the emergency went a long way toward sparing this country from the type of chaos and violence that was plaguing Europe at the time. President Wilson articulated his counterterrorism policy in his December 1919 message to Congress: “Let us be frank about this solemn matter, the evidences of the world-wide unrest which manifest themselves in violence throughout the world bid us pause and consider the means to be found to stop the spread of this contagious thing before it saps the very vitality of the nation itself.”

There are other ways to sap the vitality of a nation: for example, by rewriting history to erase the distinctions between aggressor and victim, and thus between right and wrong. In regards to the terrorist threats against this nation, this effort is well-advanced. Now we remember the terrorists of the 1920s as victims of American injustice, and the heroes who defended America as the enemies of freedom. And this is the way the Left wants us to think of the terrorists who threaten us and the heroes of America’s homeland security like John Ashcroft who is, in a way, Mitchell Palmer’s heir.

It is both striking and illuminating that the same “liberals” who were apologists for the 1919-1920 assassins and defenders of murderers like the famed anarchist pair -- Sacco and Vanzetti -- are venting same anti-American froth today. They accuse our government of trampling on the Constitution and engaging in a witch-hunt, but they fall over themselves in extending compassion to  our terrorist enemies and giving captured Islamist operatives the benefit of the doubt.

Lenin aptly called the terrorist sympathizers of his day “useful idiots.” The irony is that had the Bolsheviks been successful in their program to undermine America -- had the views of the Progressives prevailed -- all rights and civil liberties would ultimately have been abolished.

No doubt there were examples of governmental over-reach in the 1919-1920 crackdown, as the FBI labored to protect our nation from suspected alien terrorists. The same could be said of the FBI’s crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan and organized crime. But no one would conclude from this that the effort to deal with the Klan should be called “The Klan Scare” or the tracking of the Mafia “The Crime Scare.” That is because the academics who keep the historical record, and the intellectuals who write about the history of Klansmen and criminals, have no sympathy for those segments of society or their causes. But apparently they do for anti-American radicals with a violent agenda.

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Chuck Morse is a radio talk show host at WROL in Boston.

Interview on the Jim Bohannan Show

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Jim Bohannan Interview: http://www.jimbotalk.net/programhighlights;jsessionid=4B48CCABA8ADDA5E49E1C26A08E57FD5

The Whigs are Back

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As a political party, the Whig’s were torn apart in the decade leading up to the Civil War due to internal conflicts emanating from disagreement over how to hold the American Republic together. Pre Civil War Whig’s included Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln who first ran for Congress as a member of the Whig Party. While Lincoln was the first Republican President, his philosophy was essentially Whig.

What was the Whig philosophy of Abraham Lincoln and what does it teach us today? Lincoln believed in individual rights and this would lead him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation which led to the abolition of the barbarous institution of chattel slavery. Lincoln understood that no person has a right to own another person. Lincoln accepted the biblical principle, as enunciated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. This notion, inspired by the Bible, is absolutely relevant today as the Modern Whig seeks to re-awaken within the bosom of his fellow citizen, the idea that he has a God given right to his individual sovereignty and to determine his own destiny. Over a half a million men died in the Civil War to establish the principle that both men and women were each created in the image of God and that, as such, rights come from the creator and not from the State.

While fighting to defend the principle of individual rights by abolishing chattel slavery, Lincoln also championed the cause of a strong and sovereign American Republic as he supported such national programs as the building of the transcontinental railroad. In this regard, Lincoln was acting in the tradition of his Whig mentors who had supported national projects and internal improvements. In 1825, John Quincy Adams, for example, envisioned a time when America would launch a space program. The Modern Whigs support infrastructure improvements that would make America energy independent.

Lincoln protected American industry and labor with the passage of the Morril Tariffs. These measures taxed imports which raised revenue for the national treasury while protecting and strengthening American industry. Today’s Whigs support fair trade tariffs on imports, taxes on American corporations and individuals doing business overseas, and laws that encourage domestic capital formation, accumulation, and investment. Whigs are economic nationalists who encourage free enterprise at home with low taxes while raising revenue through taxing imports, overseas transactions, and through high royalties on the profits derived from domestic natural resources such as oil, gas, and coal.

Lincoln raised money to finance the Civil War by issuing debt-free treasury notes instead of borrowing funds from banks at interest. Known as “greenbacks” these treasury issued dollars were backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Today’s Whigs propose that Congress issue greenbacks to pay the national debt and, over time, eliminate fractional reserve banking. Constitutional currency would lead to economic stability as the amount of currency issued by the government would be no more or less than the economy would require. This would be a great means to reduce poverty and enhance private savings.

The Whigs developed their political philosophy before the advent of “left” and “right.” Whig’s are not left in that the Whig is not a hyper-nationalist. The left advocates virtual worship of secular state power as the left seeks to implement the nanny state that intervenes in all aspects of the life of the citizen. The Whig is a nationalist in that he loves his country and advocates policies that enhance national sovereignty and economic prosperity but only to the degree that it fosters individual freedom and free enterprise. The right advocates a strict libertarian approach which is also rejected by the Whigs.

Whigs believe in the concept of subsidiarity which calls for the strongest government to be local and the weakest government to be national.  Whigs advocate local control of education policy and state control of health policy, welfare, and social questions such as the regulation of abortion and marriage. This concept is based upon a concept that has become increasingly rare since the demise of the Whig party and that is that the citizen is capable of self-government and that this capability is best expressed by the smaller unit of government. Yet the Whigs support a vigorous and united national government that is charged with conducting a trade policy that is pro-American business and a foreign and military policy that is engaged in the world in support of allies and in opposition to foes.

Whigs believe that national interest should reflect self-interest and that this idea finds its best expression in the US Constitution. Whigs believe that adherence to the Constitution would restore limited government through a separation of powers. Whigs seek to reduce illogical regulations which would result in more individual freedom and which would save trillions of dollars in wasteful spending.  The end of bad regulations would put an end to the informal national virtual monopolies that have formed around education, finance, energy, and healthcare. 

The Modern Whig Party is the fastest growing third party in America today. This is due to the fact that the Whigs represent a move that goes beyond the calcified and polarized ideologies of both the left and the right. Whigs support ideas that are more self evidently natural to human progress, ideas that develop a stronger and more soverign individual as reflected in a stronger and more soverign nation.

Morality versus Outcomes

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My co-host Patrick O'Heffernan stated on our program “Fairness Radio” that conservatives are concerned with morality while liberals care about “outcomes” and he is absolutely right. In his new book “Ameritopia” conservative radio talk show host Marc Levin makes this vary point when he observes that conservatives focus on “process” while liberals focus on “outcome.” Levin accurately views conservatism as libertarian and liberalism as utopian.

Obviously there is no “outcome” except death, and for us believers, an afterlife. Indeed life is a process and civilization is and will remain an unfinished endeavor that is advanced by individual initiative operating in a context of maximum freedom. The utopian belief in outcome flies in the face of reality and human nature which is imperfect. The work of imposing an “outcome” is the essence of the authoritarian nature of the left and their totalitarian socialist experiments, both national and international socialism.

I responded to Patrick’s assertion with the opinion that morality leads to a positive outcome for the individual and this leads to progress, in its true meaning, for society. He answered me by citing an example of how morality does not lead to a positive result. His example was a claim that abstinence education taught in conservative schools has led to an increase in teenage pregnancy. To buttress this strange argument he cited statistics that would indicate, accurately, that there are more teenage girls having babies in school districts that offer abstinence education than there are in those that offer what he referred to as sexuality education.

It should be obvious that this is because conservative girls in conservative communities are less likely to abort their babies. It is also probably true, in my opinion, that there are less pregnancies in those conservative communities than their otherwise might be in our over sexualized society due to abstinence education. The more revealing statistic would be how many abortions are performed on teenage girls in the districts that offer sexuality education. Have studies been done regarding this? Have statistics been gathered that chronicle the physical and psychological conditions of post-abortion teenagers? I think not.

Sex education, which holds moral neutrality as its ultimate virtue, was launched by SIECUS in 1965. What has been the “outcome” since then? What to the statistics show us in terms of whether there has been an increase in teen pregnancy, out of wedlock births, STD’s, suicides, drug use, promiscuity, depression, and other maladies, since that time. Have our psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists analyzed any possible connection between these trends and sex-education to pre-adolescents?

I would argue that morality, which for a conservative means in this case protecting the morals and the innocence of children and young people, is the better way to go both for its own sake and as a matter of public policy. I shudder to contemplate the “outcome” that morally neutral sex education has had in terms of how it has affected the individual lives of those who have lived through it, particularly those who would be most vulnerable to its suggestions.

Catholic Hospitals to offer contraception?

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Obama-care apparently includes a “contraceptive mandate” that will require all insurance companies in the US to cover sterilization, abortifacients, and contraception. Under this law, all Catholic hospitals will be forced to offer “contraception” to their employees. Perhaps this is what Nancy Pelosi meant, when speaking on Obama-care, when she said “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” There has not been a discernible clamor on the part of Catholic hospital employees for their employers to offer free “contraception.”

This is an example of a manufactured issue, one that is motivated by a much more sinister agenda than merely an assault on religious freedom which it certainly is. This law is part of an ongoing effort that goes back to the turn of the last century, an effort that would seek to replace the moral authority of private religion with the perceived interests of the State. More precisely, this law is part of an ongoing and relentless effort to replace the moral authority of the family with that of the State.

There are countless examples of so-called progressives in history who have advocated for the replacement of faith and family with centralized collective control going back as far as French Revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf and communist founder Karl Marx. The limited space of a column constrict the focus to just two examples of  American “progressive” thinkers who have influenced the present atmosphere that now permits the government to force Catholic institutions to pay for abortions and birth control without much public opposition. The two examples offered here are John Dewey, the patron saint of progressive education, and sociologist Phillip Reiff, who influenced the establishment of sex education.

In a December 5, 1928 article in The New Republic, Dewey, having recently returned from a pilgrimage to Stalin’s Soviet Union, described “The marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practices under the fostering care of the Bolshevist government.”  He described “the great task of the school to counteract and transform those domestic and neighborhood tendencies such as the influence of home and Church.” Dewey’s idea of such a “transformation” involved indoctrinating America’s children against “home and Church” while he cautiously called for the “institution of the family (to be) sapped indirectly rather than by frontal attack.” 

Gushing over the Soviet utopia, Dewey observed the “whole network of agencies by means of which the Soviet government is showing its special care for the laboring class...and to give a working object-lesson in the value of a communistic scheme.” Indeed, Dewey planned for the time in which young and impressionable American public school students would grow up to influence a “network of agencies” after his “change agents” had disabused the younger generation of such false consciousness as moral standards, faith, and the centrality of the independent sovereign family.

In that same vein, sociologist Phillip Rieff wrote in his 1964 progressive classic “The Triumph of the Therapeutic-Uses of Faith after Freud” (p.159) “Sex education becomes the main weapon in an ideological war against the family; its aim was to divest the parents of their moral authority.” Reiff referred to the family, as opposed to the socialist oriented state, as “the chief institutional instrument of repressive authority.” Rieff was a consultant to the National Council of Churches.

American liberals need to wake up and join conservatives who smell the danger of allowing the government to implement repressive laws against Catholic institutions. Liberals might indulge in a degree of smug solace over the “contraceptive mandate” by assuring themselves that, after all, they support contraception and abortion so why should they care. Indeed some Liberals might even rejoice over the spectacle of the government cracking down on those pesky and intransigent Catholics. Before they get too comfortable, liberals might reflect upon the famous poem written by Lutheran anti-Nazi theologian Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.