BENNETT VS. ELDERS: AMERICA, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

It wasn't exactly Gay and Lesbian Student Awareness Week on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University when Bill Bennett showed up to address a wildly enthusiastic, capacity crowd. One of America's great leaders and most formidable battlers in today's cultural wars, Bennett drew two standing ovations as he delighted his audience, both in initial presentation and in response to audience questions.

Asked to respond to some of the latest outrages from Clinton administration Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, Bennett was characterisitically blunt. "I have stated on national television, and will restate it here," Bennett declared, "Rather than being appointed, I believe Dr. Elders should be arrested." He was referring to the distribution to Arkansas school children by Elders of condoms she knew in advance to be defective. Bennett made no mention of Elders' vicious, in-your-face hostility to the Catholic Church and to any preference for traditional values.

Another Bennett zinger: "The Clinton administration's approach can be summed up in a three-prong approach to today's problems: `Tax it; regulate it; put a condom on it.'"

Week before last, an interview Dr. Elders gave to the (ital.) Advocate (unital.) was published. As I have never seen a copy of that publication, I am indebted to a national conservative newsletter for a summary:

"It's Friday so it must be time for our weekly outrage from the Surgeon General. She didn't disappoint us. In an interview out today (3/18/94), in the (ital.) Advocate (unital.), America's largest homosexual publication, Elders calls for gay adoptions, strikes out at the Boy Scouts for banning homosexual counselors, and attacks the religious right for not liking sex enough. ..."

We are indeed in what the Germans call a (ital.) kulturkampf (unital.), or a "war over the meaning and purpose of our culture." Dr. Elders is a national embarrassment and a disgrace, a crank and a charlatan. As Bill Bennett points out, the problem is, our children are listening. She is a forceful spokesman for an increasingly exhausted and intellectually bankrupt liberalism. Her bizarre pronouncements can perhaps best be understood as the twitching death throes of that spent liberal vision.

I will go further: Any administration that would proudly harbor her is unworthy of the American people, and it may fairly be said that such an administration deserves the day of electoral reckoning that is surely coming. The American people did not understand themselves to be voting for this sort of radicalism in November, 1992, and they will have their revenge at the polls.

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I want to call your attention to a remarkable viewing opportunity that is available to cable TV households tomorrow evening. Monday, March 28 at 7:00 p.m., Public Access Cable TV (Channel 5 in Cape and Jackson) will broadcast a highly informative and persuasive presentation entitled "America's Godly Heritage". I have seen this program and recommend it highly to all who are concerned with issues of how to get our beloved country back on track. If you can't watch it tomorrow evening, tape it and watch it later. It is certainly worth your time.

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And what should we make of Hillary Rodham Clinton, patron to the likes of Joycelyn Elders? Hillary had been First Lady only four months when a fawning profile appeared in the august pinnacle of American journalism, the Sunday magazine of (ital.) The New York Times (unital.). So help me the writer wrote with a straight face and with apparent total sincerity the piece was entitled "St. Hillary". Some excerpts:

"... The politics of Hillary Rodham Clinton are indeed largely liberal (although, the post-election evidence largely indicates, no more so than those of her husband), but they are of a liberalism derived from religiosity. They combine a generally `progressive' social agenda with a strong dose of moralism, the admixture of the two driven by an abundant faith in the capacity of human intellect and the redeeming power of love.

Sound overheated? There's more. (Remember, for writer Michael Kelly, the operative assumption seems to be, "There's nobody here but us Hillary lovers."): More from Kelly:

"... They [Hillary's politics] are ... the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history from Harriett Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carrie Nation to Dorothy Day; from the social gospel of the late 19th century to the temperance-minded Methodism of the early 20th century to the liberation theology of the 1960s and '70s to the pacifistic and multiculturally correct religious left of today."

Whew. Read that, and read Pat Buchanan's wickedly funny column today, and have yourself a belly laugh, courtesy of the breathtaking arrogance and the ludicrous pretensions of Hillary Rodham Clinton.