14

Terminological Right of Way

APRIL 7, 1988

 

When the civil rights bills were passed in the mid-sixties, their principal sponsor, Senator Hubert Humphrey, promised in one melodramatic session that he would “physically eat” the bill he was promoting if ever anyone attempted to use his bill in order to prefer a member of one race at the expense of a member of another race. Senator Humphrey died from other causes than the food poisoning to which he’d have been subjected after the Supreme Court OK’d affirmative action.

A fortnight ago we had the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which now extends to the federal government the right to inquire into the racial or sexual composition of a school’s basketball team if its medical school is receiving federal subsidies. And last week, Georgetown University, the oldest Jesuit college in America, capitulated on the lawsuit demanding that it make room within Georgetown for gay and lesbian student federations.

One supposes that Georgetown’s administrators would at this point interpose that they did not completely lose the fight. True, Georgetown has not been required by the courts to “recognize” the student homosexual groups. But it is required to give the groups facilities. And, it is conceded, the groups will draw their rations from student funds. So far as one can discern, Georgetown’s victory is limited to the asterisk it is permitted to use in its catalogue of student activities after Lesbian Liberation Front: ^*“not officially recognized by the university.” To such farthings are the defendants today reduced, if the juggernaut running over them is labeled “civil rights.”

In 1952 the Commission on Financing Higher Education of the Association of American Universities issued a warning against the dangers of accepting federal funds. “Under federal control, our hundreds of universities and colleges would follow the order of one central institution, and the freedom of higher education would be lost.” Among the signers of that document were the presidents of Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Brown. Those learned gentlemen would take from the situation today whatever satisfaction is desired by prophets of doom. But even so, it is hard to imagine that they’d have foreseen a day in which a federal court instructs a religious institution that it is required to countenance, let alone provide quarters for, groups engaged in promoting activity deemed not only wrong but sinful by the moral architects of that institution.

Those who stress (and re-stress) the separation of church and state are certainly narrowing the area within which the freedom of religious exercise is tolerated. Perhaps in the storm cellar. Here is a scenario: A son sues his father for denying him facilities in the home in which to practice homosexuality with a neighbor’s son. The ACLU defends the son’s freedom on the grounds that the father’s house is a beneficiary of a federally backed mortgage, and therefore the civil rights of all its occupants need to be observed.

Lunatic reasoning? Who, ten years ago, would not have thought it lunatic reasoning that a religious institution dedicated to teaching, among other things, the moral law should be obliged to extend its hospitality to those who seek to flout such laws?

I observed with fascination, only a week or so ago, the plausibility with which Senator George McGovern, as ever on the cutting edge of liberal reasoning, defended the recent civil rights extension. It sounds so reasonable to say that “the taxpayers” do not wish their money to be spent on “any institution” that permits the practice of discrimination. Discrimination against race, ethnic background, sex, and now sexual inclination.

One wonders—I brought this unsuccessfully to the attention of Mr. McGovern—what has happened to the concept of privacy. Just as the idea of civil rights has expanded, one would have expected that the concept of private rights would expand, in an age when the clearest threat is that posed by omnipotent government. But the only private right anybody ever got exercised about in recent times is the right to use birth-control devices. Private clubs are gradually disappearing, under the sanction of civil rights. If I were in Congress I would be tempted, I said to Senator McGovern, even if only on April Fools’ Day, to introduce a “Civil Rights Bill for Preemptive War Against the Soviet Union.” My only purpose would be to permit me in the campaign ahead to point to all those Democrats who voted against the “Civil Rights Bill of 1988” and thereby stifle a hundred political careers.

Somebody, somewhere, somehow, has got to stop the civil rights thing. It is making a joke out of one after another provision of our Bill of Rights.