Controversial Essays

by Thomas Sowell

  Particular bad policies are the least of the dangers created by playing fast and loose with the constitution. Lawless power is the far greater danger—and has been for centuries, though its worst horrors seem to have been reserved for the 20th century.

  Yet our judges, politicians and the intelligentsia play with fire as if they had never seen the conflagrations.

  The constitution is only the most visible part of a cultural heritage that has given us freedoms which hundreds of millions of others around the world do not have. But dismantling that heritage is something that is being done every day—whether in anger or in fun—in our schools and colleges across the country, by people who congratulate themselves on being agents of “change.”

  Traditions distilled from the experiences of many generations past are treated as just somebody else's opinion, while we have a right to our own opinion, even when we are not yet a decade old. Children are told to discover their own ways of doing mathematics or of using the English language. They are encouraged to respond emotionally, rather than to analyze logically, on issues ranging from the environment to homelessness. “Public service” assignments give them emotional experiences without either the knowledge or the mental discipline to see below the surface.

  In short, we and our children are being trained to be sheep and to respond automatically to words that strike an emotional chord. We are being set up to be played for suckers by anyone who wants to take up where the totalitarian movements of the 20th century left off.

  The very tactics of those totalitarian movements—intimidation, demonization, and disregard of all rules in favor of politically defined results—have become hallmarks of political correctness today. Some people think political correctness is just silly. But many people thought Hitler was just silly before he took power and demonstrated how tragically mistaken they were.

  Probably most of the people who go along with the destructive and dangerous trends of our time are no worse than the “useful idiots” who made totalitarianism possible. But that is bad enough.

  LAW ON TRIAL

  Law itself is on trial in an Albany courtroom where four New York City policemen are accused of murder in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant. For a shockingly large number of people, the fact that the cops are white and the man who was shot was black is all they need to know in order to take sides.

  And taking sides is the issue for them, not finding the truth or dispensing justice. This approach has already been tried extensively throughout the South during the Jim Crow era. It took decades of struggle and sacrifice—including the sacrifice of lives—to break down that system of double-standard “justice.” Now it has come back into fashion again, with a new color scheme.

  The tragic facts of the Diallo shooting are pretty plain. Even before the police arrived on the scene, Amadou Diallo was—for whatever reason—stationed in a doorway at night and periodically looking both ways up and down the street. Another resident of the area, coming home from work, was struck by what this resident says seemed to him at the time to be “suspicious” behavior. The prosecuting attorney immediately objected to this word and the judge immediately ordered it stricken from the record.

  When a police car with four cops inside rolled by later, after midnight, they too considered Diallo's behavior suspicious. When they stopped the car and got out, Diallo fled back inside the building. There, in a dimly lit hallway, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a black object and held it out toward the cops. One of the policemen yelled “Gun!” By a horrible coincidence, another policeman toppled backwards off the steps onto the sidewalk, as if he had been shot, and his fellow officers opened fire on Diallo.

  The driver of the car rushed toward the fallen officer and asked where he had been hit. But he had not been hit. He had just lost his balance and fallen back off the steps. Nor did Diallo have a gun. He had taken out his wallet and held it out toward the police. It was a tragedy of errors.

  Enter the race hustlers, the politically correct media and politicians in an election year. Al Sharpton, who first gained fame by making wild accusations against policemen in the Tawana Brawley hoax, has of course jumped in with both feet and mobs of supporters. Hillary Clinton has called it “murder”—and she is a lawyer who should know better, especially with a trial going on.

  Even in the courtroom, the atmosphere of intimidation has continued, unchecked by the judge who considered it offensive when a witness said that he found Diallo's actions suspicious.

  Witnesses who have anything to say that might support the policemen's testimony have had wholly unnecessary identifying information publicized and read into the record. The witness who said that his suspicions caused him to pay attention to Diallo as he walked home after parking his truck not only had his address, but his apartment number as well, identified by the prosecutor in open court.

  Supposedly this was to show that he lived in the rear and could not have seen what happened after he got home. But the witness had never claimed to have seen anything from his apartment. What this uncalled-for statement did was put the witness on notice in the courtroom that local neighborhood hotheads now knew where to find him and his family. It was a shot across his bow, a warning not only to him, but to any other witness who might say anything that would support what the policemen had said.

  Do we wonder why witnesses don't come forward?

  A nurse who heard the shots while attending a patient across the street was asked for the name of her patient, even though the patient was not a witness and never claimed to have seen or heard anything. When that was objected to, she was then asked whether the patient was male or female and how old. This was unconscionable in the atmosphere of hostility and lawlessness that has been whipped up over this shooting.

  As someone who taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I was not the least bit surprised by the number of shots fired—or by the fact that most of them missed. Nobody counts his own shots, much less other people's shots, in a life-and-death situation. This is not an arcade game, where lights go off to tell you whether you hit the target. You shoot until it looks safe to stop.

  A lot of lights ought to go off about this trial and the way both witnesses and justice itself are being threatened, inside and outside the courtroom.

  ABORTED KNOWLEDGE

  A certain professor who teaches students who aspire to become speech pathologists begins by showing them the development of the various organs involved in speech. When he shows his class an ultrasound picture of the development of the palate in an unborn baby, it is not uncommon for one or two women in his class to have tears in their eyes, or to say to him afterward that they have had an abortion and were very much affected by seeing what an unborn baby looks like.

  For too long we have been led to believe that an abortion is the removal of some unformed material, something like having an appendix operation. The very expression “unborn baby” has almost disappeared from the language, being replaced by the more bloodless and antiseptic term “fetus.”

  Many vocal advocates who declare themselves “pro-choice” do not want women to have the choice of knowing just what they are choosing before having an abortion. Ferocious opposition has stopped the showing of pictures of an abortion in process—even in schools or colleges that show movies of naked adults performing various sex acts. Still photographs of aborted fetuses have been banned as well.

  The particularly grisly procedure known as “partial-birth abortion” cannot even be referred to in much of the media, where it is called a “late-term abortion”—another bloodless term and one that shifts the focus from what happens to when it happens.

  What happens in a partial-birth abortion is that a baby who has developed too far to die naturally when removed from his mother's body is deliberately killed by having his brains sucked out. When this is done, the baby is not completely out of his mother's body because, if he were, the doctor would be charged with murder. There is no medical reason for this proc
edure, which has been condemned by the American Medical Association. There is only a legal reason—to keep the doctor and the mother out of jail.

  All this is smoothly covered over in the media by calling such actions a “late-term abortion” and refusing to specify what happens. Such patterns of determined evasions and obfuscations show that “pro-choice” in practice often really means pro-abortion. Knowledge is the first thing being aborted.

  Philosophical questions about when life begins may preoccupy some people on both sides of the abortion controversy. But the raw physical facts of what happens in various kinds of abortion have turned many others, including physicians, from being pro-abortion to being anti-abortion. One doctor who had performed many abortions never performed another one after seeing an ultrasound movie of the baby's reactions.

  With most other medical procedures, “informed consent” is the watchword. But, when the issue is abortion, great efforts are made to keep “choice” from becoming too informed.

  Politically and legally, the abortion issue is too complex for any easy resolution. We have gone through a quarter of a century of bitter controversy precisely because the Supreme Court went for an easy resolution back in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision.

  Before then, various states had made differing efforts to wrestle with and balance the weighty concerns on both sides of the abortion issue. But Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun rushed in where angels fear to tread, with a one-size-fits-all decision, washed down with the blatant lie that this was based on the Constitution.

  Far from settling things, Roe v. Wade has led to polarization and escalating strife all across the country, including bombings and assassinations. It has corrupted the media, academia and other sources that are supposed to inform us, but which have instead become partisan organs of political correctness.

  However this highly-charged issue is ultimately resolved—and there is no resolution on the horizon today—surely honesty must be part of that resolution. Political catch-phrases like “a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body” cannot be applied to situations where a baby is killed at the very moment when he ceases to be part of his mother's body.

  One of the few signs of hope for some ultimate resolution is that most people on both sides of this controversy are not happy about abortions. The women who shed tears at the very sight of an unborn baby may not be politically committed to either side of this issue, but their feelings may be part of what is needed to bring opposing sides together.

  MURDER IS MURDER

  Everyone should be outraged by the murder of Matthew Sheppard—not because he was gay, but because he was a human being. We can only hope that the murderers' lawyers don't find a shrink who will say that “homophobia” is a disease and try to use that to get reduced sentences.

  Already there are attempts to politicize this young man's murder by seeking laws against “hate crimes” and other items on the homosexual lobby's political agenda. In an era when so many people are so easily stampeded by words, we need to step back and think about what we are saying when we talk about “hate crimes.” If Matthew Sheppard was not gay and was murdered for his insurance, would that make it any less of a crime?

  People who glibly talk about “hate crimes” ignore both the past and the implications for the future in what they are advocating. It took centuries of struggle and people putting their lives on the line to get rid of the idea that a crime against “A” should be treated differently than the same crime committed against “B.”

  After much sacrifice and bloodshed, the principle finally prevailed that killing a peasant deserved the same punishment as killing a baron. Now the “hate crime” advocates want to undo all that and take us back to the days when punishment did not fit the crime, but varied with who the crime was committed against.

  In the olden days, at least the law could readily apply its standard, even if it was a bad standard, because everyone could tell a peasant from a baron. But, once we make the punishment depend on motivation, we have entered never-never land, where opposing shrinks tell opposing stories to bewildered jurors, taking up lots of time in already overcrowded courts.

  People who automatically respond to any problem by saying, “There ought to be a law” never seem to consider whether they are spreading existing law enforcement resources thinner and thinner. When new laws are passed, there is seldom even a consideration of whether to hire more police and more judges, much less build more courtrooms and more prisons.

  Apparently it is OK just to spread the existing resources thinner. That makes sense only if the purpose of laws is to make people feel that they have “made a statement”—regardless of what the actual consequences may turn out to be.

  Even more disturbing than such irresponsible uses of the law is the notion that there should be “gay rights,” “women's rights” and various ethnic group “rights.” The Fourteenth Amendment provides for equal rights and equal protection of the laws. If you want more than that, then you are no longer talking about rights, but about special privileges.

  Unfortunately, the rhetoric of victimhood has been used repeatedly over the past few decades to claim special privileges—and not just by homosexuals. The time is long overdue for everyone to wake up and not let this game go on forever—or until it has us all at each others' throats.

  Special privileges are poisonous to a whole society. Often those who claim these privileges become victims of the backlash.

  Even when the privileges are not put into the law but consist only of special indulgences for rotten behavior that would not be tolerated by other members of the society, this too is poisonous in itself, as well as breeding inevitable backlashes.

  Many of those who are loudest in their demands for “gay rights” and in breast-beating over their “identity” show the least respect for other people's rights and even go out of their way to insult Catholics or others who do not share their lifestyle. Homosexuals do not need my approval, but neither do they have a right to my approval—or to propagandize a captive audience of children in the public schools to get their approval or to acquire new recruits.

  Homosexuals are not unique in trying to cash in victimhood for privileges, if only the privilege of insulting other people with impunity. But neither they nor anyone else should be allowed to get away with this.

  It is not at all clear that most homosexuals go along with the goals and tactics of those who proclaim themselves their “leaders.” When you consider how many other groups' “leaders” advocate things to which most members of those groups are opposed, there is little basis for taking “gay rights” advocates at their word, much less let what they say be the last word for the whole society.

  McVEIGH AND THE DEATH PENALTY

  The execution of Timothy McVeigh has again raised the issue of capital punishment. Much of the case against capital punishment does not rise above the level of opaque pronouncements that it is “barbaric,” by which those who say this presumably mean that it makes them unhappy to think of killing another human being. It should. But we do many things that we don't like to do because the alternative is to have things that make us even more unhappy.

  As Adam Smith said, two centuries ago, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Those who lost loved ones in the Oklahoma City bombing do not need to spend the rest of their lives having their deep emotional wounds rubbed raw, again and again, by seeing Timothy McVeigh and his lawyers spouting off in the media. McVeigh inflicted more than enough cruelty on them already and they need to begin to heal.

  Sometimes those who oppose capital punishment talk about “the sanctity of human life.” Ironically, many of these same people have no such reluctance to kill innocent unborn babies as they have to execute a mass murderer. But the issue of capital punishment comes up only because the murderer has already violated the sanctity of human life. Are we to say that his life has more sanctity than the life or lives he has taken?

  Shabby logic often tries to equate the m
urderer's act of taking a life with the law's later taking of his life. But physical parallels are not moral parallels. Otherwise, after a bank robber seizes money at gunpoint, the police would be just as wrong to take the money back from him at gunpoint. A woman who used force to fight off a would-be rapist would be just as guilty as he was for using force against her.

  It is a sign of how desperate the opponents of capital punishment are that they have to resort to such “reasoning.” Since these are not all stupid people, by any means, it is very doubtful if these are the real reasons for their opposition to executions. A writer for the liberal New Republic magazine may have been closer to the reason when he painfully spoke on TV about how terrible he felt to watch someone close to him die.

  Nothing is more universal than the pain of having someone dear to you die, whether or not you witness it. Nor should anyone rejoice at inflicting such pain on someone else. But one of the fatal weaknesses of the political left is its unwillingness to weigh one thing against another. Criminals are not executed for the fun of it. They are executed to deter them from repeating their crime, among other reasons.

  Squeamishness is not higher morality, even though the crusade against capital punishment attracts many who cannot resist anything that allows them to feel morally one-up on others.

  It is dogma on the political left that capital punishment does not deter. But it is indisputable that execution deters the murderer who is executed. Nor is this any less significant because it is obvious. There are people who would be alive today if the convicted murderers who killed them had been executed for their previous murders.

  Glib phrases about instead having “life in prison without the possibility of parole” are just talk. Murderers kill again in prison. They escape from prison and kill. They are furloughed and kill while on furlough. And there is no such thing as life in prison without the possibility of a liberal governor coming along to pardon them or commute their sentence. That too has happened.