February, 2001

Ashcroft Nomination

The longer one lives the more one appreciates the old Greek's statement that "there is nothing new under the sun."
     During the confirmation hearings of Senator Ashcroft for Attorney General the Salt Lake Tribune carried an article about the Senator with the headline: "Democrats Zero In on Ashcroft Speech Referring to Jesus as King of the U.S."
     This is a typical example which demonstrates how public opinion is manipulated, because a fair number of readers just glance at headlines and then go on to the sports pages unless they have already read those first. Politics is not their bag and that is why they don't bother to vote. The article, authored by Libby Quaid, and carried by the Associated Press, deals with Ashcroft's "six paragraph address" before the students and faculty of Bob Jones University which is a Fundamentalist Christian institution. The article quoted Ashcroft as saying "Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus." The article did admit that Ashcroft had said earlier that the "American colonists routinely told emissaries from the king of England, 'We have no king but Jesus' when they were asked to pay taxes." The fact that the audience was profoundly Christian does put the comment into a different context which tends to be missed when one only reads the headline.
     For Christians Jesus is indeed their king and this got Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna in October of 1938 into deep trouble when he had the audacity to tell this to Catholic university students who had gathered for the annual mass at the beginning of the school year. From the pulpit of St. Stephen's cathedral he told his audience:" we will especially at this time [5 months after the Nazis had taken over Austria] assert strongly and resolutely our faith; to testify for Jesus our Fuehrer and master, our king and his church." Predictably the Nazis did not take kindly to this affront because there was only one Fuehrer of Greater Germany and his name was Adolf Hitler. What the Nazis did, thereafter, can be found in War and Mayhem.
     Have some of our Democrats now stepped into the shoes of the Nazis? Are they also determined to stamp out this "mischievous superstition" as Tacitus had called Christianity?
 
 
 
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