The Cincinnati Post |
Editorial Page
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Nov. 19, 1998 |
| I've been horrified in the past few weeks to hear about the senseless killings in the United States.
I was shocked by the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming by two anti-gay men he met in a bar. As the father of a 22-year-old son, the same age as Matthew, I cringed to think of him beaten to a pulp and left to die strung up on a split-pole fence. I was even more troubled by the anti-gay comments I heard in some quarters after Matthew was dead. I was equally disturbed by the lethal sniper attack on Barnett Slepian, the physician who performed abortions in Buffalo. I've known people working in such clinics, and feared for their lives whenever bombings on abortion sites occurred. I now find myself even more disconcerted by the sense that they might not be safe even within the sanctity of their own homes. Both killings, it seems to me, are rooted in a kind of vitriolic language that erodes the civility of American society and legitimizes vigilante justice where people take the law into their own hands. I was appalled when Sen. Trent Lott spoke out publicly a few months ago branding homosexuality a sin. As one of our nation's leading Congressional leaders, his comments only spurred on a growing intolerance at a time when the nation claims that it is interested in multiculturalism, and is seeking a measure of harmony among people who may be different - in whatever way - from others in our larger community. I was equally appalled to hear - again and again - the rhetoric of Operation Rescue, branding abortion as murder and in the process suggesting for some pliable people out there that individuals working to uphold the legal right to abortion deserve to die. Some years ago, a number of scholars of American history argued that the shrill anti-Communist rhetoric of the immediate post-World War II period helped legitimize the excesses of the witch-hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy that occurred in the 1950s. By casting issues in black and white terms, by contrasting Godless Communism with the virtues of American Democracy, this rhetoric paved the way for the abuses that followed. According to that argument, even President Harry Truman had a hand in such rhetorical excess. When he wanted to offer assistance to Greece and Turkey in 1947 in what became the Truman Doctrine, |
Republican Sen.
Arthur Vandenburg promised his support if Truman would ''scare hell out of the American people.'' Truman did. In 1948 he
declared of the Soviet Union: ''This threat to our liberty and to our faith must be faced by each one of us.'' Three years later, in
1951, he warned: ''Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in great danger.''
Those images, repeated in even harsher terms by other members of the government, legitimized the abuses by McCarthy and others in the 1950s. Something like that is occurring today. At the very time when we talk about the need for racial reconciliation, and some of our more sensitive leaders plead for harmony in public life, the shrill homophobic, anti-abortion rhetoric is eroding the ties of civility that we need to bind us together in pursuit of common ends. The election just past highlighted the need for civility in our national life. Some of the contests - such as the one between Steve Chabot and Roxanne Qualls - remained clean and focused on the issues. But negative ads and vicious campaigning were more common in most other parts of the country. Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, writing in The Nation, recently deplored the death of civil discourse. In the course of his comments, he noted others making a similar plea for civility, even citing the Pope, who, in his new encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), cited ''ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical inquiry.'' The kind of killing that occurred in the past few weeks cannot continue. It behooves all of us to speak out against the excesses that contribute to these dastardly deeds, to recognize legitimate differences or opinion and orientation, and to try to recommit ourselves to the democratic values that can make our nation strong.
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