Poor Ole Murphy Brown

Code Speak

When Vice President Dan Quayle castigated the networks and Hollywood for the "sad" condition of Murphy Brown, the TV sitcom character who is having a child as a single parent, he was not just speaking to the citizenry-at-large. Vice President Quayle had a more specialized audience to whom he was also speaking. The surface comment could be interpreted as castigating all mothers who choose to have their children out of wedlock as being immoral and being the mainstream of American moral life. In this view, single parents simply do not represent the epitome of the American family. Since our present-day American family represents a great admixture of ethnic, religious, personal, and feminist values, with some social pathology, it's hard to see just what the American family really is.

Considering that about 1/3 of the families in the United States are single parent families with most of the single parents women, Vice President Quayle's remarks could be taken as anti-feminist. Since a large number of the single parent households are single black women, his remarks can be taken as racist. Since many of these single mothers are on welfare, Vice President Quayle could be interpreted as being anti-welfare. Even while the American family is changing rapidly, the Vice President's idea of American family values relate only to those families that are white, middle class, undivorced, subordinate mother-at-home, dominant father-bread winner families. At no time in American history has this family type been the only family type, and at all times in American history a variety of family types could be found contemporaneously.

It is interesting that Vice President Quayle selected a fictitious character for his target—a nice, clean, harmless target, not a flesh-and-blood person. The target was ideal because it was readily recognizable for what it was, an unwed mother having a child out of wedlock (illegitimate) and, as Murphy Brown is a very popular character in a very popular sit com, there could be no mistaking the subject matter. Nice propaganda metaphor.

Never mind that we have had the sexual revolution. Never mind that we have had the ERA and feminism, and the women's movement, and the women's national political caucus. Never mind that women are people, individuals; equals, with unalienable rights of their own—citizens sovereign. Never mind that it is the closing years of the 20th Century and we should be empowering women, minorities, the economically disadvantaged, the lost, forgotten, and forlorn of the citizens sovereign.

What the Vice President had to say was directed at the small minority of Americans on the religious right, who are fanatically opposed to abortion, contraception, and any life style except the father/mother/children lifestyle with the father the bread winner and the mother home with the kids. What he was telling them was that the White House still loves them and that they should get out and bust their buns on the President's re-election campaign, because the next guy is not going to be sympathetic to their cause. You can hear these sentiments clearly expressed on the American Family Radio Network. This network specializes in American Family Values. A program I recently heard had a speaker excoriating the abortion doctors, and he stated flatly that the anti-abortion people should take down the names of the doctors who perform abortions so that when Roe v Wade is overturned these individuals can be prosecuted for murdering babies.

Healing words from the White House? Words to give us hope for a better tomorrow? Indications that the American dream is not dead? No! The White House is still dividing us. Of all the issues Nixon, Reagan, and Bush have used to divide the American people, race and abortion have been the most successful. Reagan, manfully, tried to divide us on the issue of school prayer. Bush wanted to destroy the 1st Amendment with an anti-flag burning amendment. None of those issues, including gun control, had the staying power of race and abortion. It is a sorry day when the Vice President of the United States is the cheerleader for this destructively divisive activity.

...Ted Sudia...

The United States Supreme Court

Our Wayward Court

The United States Supreme Court, by steadfastly ignoring the needs of the vast majority of the citizens sovereign, is heaping opprobrium upon itself, for it is engaged in three dangerous and debilitating exercises. It is (1) pandering to the executive that appointed it, (2) undermining our Federals system by referring problems to the States for a remedy when equal protection of the law and due process would indicate a Federal solution, and (3) is blatantly disregarding the time honored process of stare decisis, the convention whereby the Court acknowledges the contributions of former Courts by upholding their decisions.

In two recent decisions the Court has held that whatever the Presidents wants to do is legal regardless of underlying statute. One case involved the now famous gag rule where Federal clinics or clinics funded with Federal money were forbidden by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to give advice on abortion when, in fact, abortion is legal and is the law of the land. The Supreme Court deferred to the President instead of the law on the lame excuse that if Federal money was involved the President could insist, etc. The fact is that every dime the President or his aides spends is first appropriated by the Congress and the Congress did not stipulate this requirement.

In a second decision, and on the request of the Justice Department, the Supreme Court held that it was okay to kidnap a Mexican national in Mexico and bring him to the United States for Justice since (1) our laws do not apply outside the United States, and (2) our extradition treaty does not specifically prohibit abduction as a means of forcing a Mexican national to stand trial in the United States. What the Supreme Court falls short of is common decency and the knowledge that foreign relations are reciprocal. This Court seems willing to go to almost any extreme to sees that justice—rather, its brand of justice—is meted out swiftly and surely. No niceties like an extradition treaty is to stand in the way of justice. The Court recently allowed a man, who might be innocent, to be executed because it was tired of hearing appeals. Appeals is what the Court gets paid to hear.

If we view the Supreme Court's action through our own history, the Supreme Court placed us in the position of Great Britain at the time of the colonies when the British law provided for the transport of Americans to Great Britain for trial, when the crime was presumed to have been committed in the colonies. We had a legal relationship with Great Britain that went beyond the relations of sovereign nations, and those actions infuriated the colonists, so much that they put the practice in the Declaration of Independence as an important grievance "for transporting us beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offenses." The idea that you just couldn't carry people off to be tried some place other than their homeland later found its way into the Constitution. Article III Section 2 says in part... "The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and the Trial of all Crimes shall be held in the State where the Crime was committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress by Law may direct." As if that were not enough, the question of transporting persons for trial is also covered in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, to wit; "In all criminal prosecution, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...."

If one argues that the abducted Mexican was not an American citizen and, therefore, not entitled to the protection of our Declaration of Independence or our Constitution, then the least that can be said is that the Court does not believe in the Golden Rule and the most that can be said is that the Court condones what must be regarded as acts of aggression against foreign nations by abducting their nationals. It's evidently okay commit a crime to bring an alleged criminal to justice.

The current Supreme Court is systematically undermining Federal authority and power by deferring to the States for the solutions of many problems that cry for equal protection or due process. One hundred years or more after the Civil War was supposed to have settled the question, the Court is moving in a States' Rights direction. The most recent abortion case, Webster v Reproductive Services, allowed the States to define the circumstances under which abortion would be conducted in those States. While not overturning Roe v Wade, the Court has sufficiently undermined it as to make it ineffective in many States and to hamper the access to abortion in many other States. Some of the litigation that arose from Webster will come before the Court in cases that may be used to overturn Roe v Wade. The decision involving Pennsylvania further undermines Roe v Wade by again deferring to the States to propose limits to the right to privacy.

In the areas of civil rights and labor law the Court has reversed itself on precedents that go back to the Civil War, giving States the authority of key civil rights that were heretofore in the Federal domain. The President has repeatedly vetoed legislation passed by the Congress to redress the wrongs of the Court calling the legislation "quota bills." The President vetoed legislation that said it was contrary to the terms of the law to consider it a quota bill, but he did anyway. Together the Court and the President are fanning the flames of racism by the actions they are taking in reversing civil rights and deferring to the States on matters considered Federal since the Civil War. The States are obliging by demonstrating that they are not the protectors of individual liberties, and the civil rights picture is quite muddied, thanks to the Supreme Court. Federalism is in question as the Anti-federalists on the Court undermine the authority of the general Government, moving us in the direction of a Confederacy instead of a Federal government, a loose collection of balkan republics instead of maintaining cur Federal republic.

The Court has shown scant concern for precedent, especially when it does not fit the action plan of reversing a hundred years of civil rights gains. The Court has reversed civil rights laws that were passed in the wake of the Civil War. It has re-interpreted law that was grounded in Federal law and has determined that the States can now look after them—all of which seems to be aimed at reducing the effectiveness of the Federal Government in favor of the States.

The Court is moving in the direction where the Federal government may not be the repository of our most fundamental rights. The United States Supreme Court has been captured with the advice and consent of the United States Senate by people whose agenda does not include the citizens sovereign a Court which has a very limited view of human rights, and which seems to have no view of the unalienable rights. The right to privacy is not a legal gimmick: It is an unalienable right.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility