From the Easy Chair

Hate Crimes

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 138-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CU180

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CU180, Hate Crimes, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 290, May the third, 1993.

At this time Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and myself will discuss hate crimes.

I think before beginning it is important to analyze the serious problem there is in that term. We have the naïve assumption in our day that love is good and hate is bad. But let’s put that on a more concrete term. Is love good if you love a rapist or is hate bad if you hate a rapist and rape? In other words, the two terms are relative. They are not things in abstraction that can have a meaning apart from a concrete and particular instance.

In the Bible we are commanded to love our enemies. But at the same time we are not to love God’s enemies. And it is presented as a virtue that David said, “Do I not hate them that hate thee? Yea, I hate them with a perfect hatred.” In other words, hate and love are not in and of themselves good or bad. It depends on what it is you love and what it is you hate. So we have a problem here because there is simplistic thinking.

What hate crimes represent or the mentality that is behind them is essentially not only simplistic, but sentimental. The assumption is that if everybody will love everybody and everything, all will be well with our world. And that is a thoroughly untenable opinion. We live in a world where each thing must be assessed and there are some things, indeed, we should love and some things we should hate. So hate crimes are now the crimes that certain people feel that those they dislike are guilty of. If you do not like what they represent, you are guilty of a hate crime. If they hate you in return, it is a virtue on their part because you are evil.

So we have reached a very, very childish level, I believe, when we talk about hate crimes.

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, Thackeray said who we fear more than we love we are not far from hating and government has ... is using hate crimes as a tool to create guilt and it is... it is a divide and conquer methodology. The ... the hate crime thing is fairly... fairly recent as far as actually prosecuting people to my knowledge, but the whole concept of not being able to dislike someone without committing a crime is ... is relatively new. This country was founded on tolerance of divergent views and we have lost that.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Can you force ... can you force all of us to like each other? I mean, would... would a reasonable government undertake such a... an effort.

[ Rushdoony ] I am glad you said reasonable. Do you know one by the way?

[ Scott ] No, I don’t. No, I don’t. But this comes up regarding the homosexuals. When I look at them I am nauseated by thoughts of what they do with each other. They make my stomach {?}. Now what can the government do about that? How am I supposed to like them? And I suspect that what is involved here is not as innocent as it looks on the surface. I think it comes closer to what Rush was talking about. I think hate crimes, we all suspect that hate crimes are enacted—and some of them have been in some states and applied—that some groups will be declared sacred and other groups will be declared guilty on sight.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Under the name of hatred.

[ Rushdoony ] You can be called homophobic...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] But you can’t call them Christaphobic.

[ Scott ] Well, what can we... we have no term for their dislike of straight people. They dislike heterosexual sex or any references to it. They get an expression of disgust on their face. What can you say about that expression? Is it hatred of normal people?

[ Murray ] Heterophobic.

[ Scott ] Heterophobic. That is a good one.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, hate... hate is a part of our nature, part of our fallen nature that we do hate. When somebody steals they... they hate their... their envy is... is the hatred they feel for anyone who has something that they don’t have. And hate is very much a part of human nature so the... to associate hatred with crime is nothing new. But the way to create a new category of crime, to put someone on the defensive, because if you tell someone you shouldn’t hate you are saying that they should love, they should like. And if I... once I start saying I can’t ... I can’t hate, I can’t dislike, those who are accusing me of crimes, you are on a total... you have ... you have... you have lost the battle.

[ Scott ] You have lost freedom. You have lost your inner right not to like strawberries. I mean who is to tell us what to like?

[ M Rushdoony ] Hatred comes from your moral perspective. What do you hate and what do you love?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And if you can’t hate that which you consider evil then you are saying you have to accept it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. What we have today with these people who call certain things hate crimes is their attempt to impose their faith, their religion and their morality on the rest of us. Through the whole concept of hate crimes is an aspect of a religious war aimed at us who are Christians.

[ Scott ] Can I tell again the anecdote about my grandfather and myself?

[ Rushdoony ] [ affirmative response ]

[ Scott ] ...at a family gathering and I was I don’t know how old, not too old. I had a cousin there that I didn’t like and I walloped him a couple of times and his mother went into a fit and dragged me before the supreme court which was my grandfather Philip Scott and I was interrogated with his ... this... this... my aunt standing there with her arms folded. Had... did you hit him? I said, “Yes.”

Why did you hit him?

I said, “I didn’t like him. I don’t like him,” I said.

And he said, “Well you hit him because you don’t like him? Just for that reason?”

And I said, “Yes.”

And he said, “You felt you had a right to hit him because you didn’t like him?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Well, you don’t have that right.”

I said, “You mean I have to like him?”

He said, “Oh, no. You don’t have to like him, but you have to be just.”

And that stuck with me to this day, because it made sense.

[ Rushdoony ] Whatever happened to that cousin?

[ Scott ] I didn’t ever get to like him, but I never hit him again.

[ Rushdoony ] Well I hope he was grateful to your grandfather.

[ Scott ] But this is what the courts are telling us we have to like them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No I have never considered a criminal attacking somebody to be done out of hatred. To me the essence of a criminal is a person who treats other people as objects, who might be in his way for some goal of his own and in that category I put psychologists and educators who have... use it... who make experiments using living students and patients and clients. Anyone who treats other people as objects inferior to themselves, a criminal will hit you over the head or... or shoot you or hurt you because he wants your money or because you are in his way in some form or another. Does not necessarily have any hatred involved at all.

[ Murray ] How can the U S Supreme Court rationalize as simply an expression to burn the American flag and then classify hanging a swastika on a building as a hate crime?

[ Scott ] They are both expressions of thought according to the first definition. The second thought is a hate crime. So it depends on the thought.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have a growing problem in our culture because we have been based, since Hegel to a degree and especially since Darwin on the conflict of interest concept. If you believe that metaphysically basic to the nature of being is an inescapable conflict of everything in the world, if nature is read in tooth and claw, if every animal and ever atom in all creation is at odds with everything else, the you are going to create a culture in which everybody dislikes everybody else.

If you go back more than two centuries, in fact, less in some areas, you find that there was no great antipathy to people of different races.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] They merged readily into the population of Christendom. The only question was one of faith. And whether they were people from Africa, brought by sailing vessels who signed them on or people from the Far East, similarly brought, if they settled in Europe all was well as long as they became Christian. They disappeared in the general population in due time. and it was because you had basically a harmony of interest society. God created everything. Everything has a glorious purpose in and through him. Conflict is not metaphysical. It is moral. And, therefore, it can be resolved.

But now we see everything as metaphysically at war with everything else. So we have a cosmos of continual conflict of all elements with no possible solution. This is simply a form of ancient Manichaeism.

[ Scott ] What astonishes me is the open hatred of liberals to people who do not agree with them. And they express that hatred in abusive language and terms, denigrative terms, insulting terms. They get up and shout when you try to give a lecture. They interfere with you. You even... you see this to a lesser extent on television and radio because television and radio screens the people who appear and they try to get only other liberals who agree with them when they invite people on.

But this venom...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...is absolutely new. When we were younger we remember great arguments...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... with our... with our friends, with our friends and with our good friends and in the family. I mean thanksgiving and Christmas was a time of shouts and table poundings. There was all kinds of raging going on over the political situation and this and that. But it didn’t interfere with our affection for one another or our respect for one another. That affection and that respect is gone.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And now we are being told it is going to be replaced by a mandated love. You either love or we will beat your brains in.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I don’t like to mention names, but I think there is a conspicuous example of someone who will not allow anyone else to express themselves, Michael Tinsley, Kinsley who at the same time that he refuses to give others the right to speak and is consistently impolite, all the same insists that those who talk about P C, political correctness are exaggerating. They are using anecdotes that are suspect. In other words, he denies that there is any reality to political correctness.

So here you have someone who is well known and some people are irritated by it. Others are amused by his arrogant insistence that he alone has the right to speak.

[ Scott ] Well I have always.... I... I am pleased with the fact that the liberals keep him on. He is the worst possible spokesman for their side.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...that they could possibly select. He loses arguments almost all the time and is totally unaware of it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He went to very good schools, by the way, which is a commentary on our private schools. A great favorite of Buckley’s who seems to always pick some favorite idiot so that he can...

[ Murray ] ...tear him apart.

[ Scott ] He can be superior to them. But he is... he is a good specimen of what I was talking about. He absolutely hates anyone who disagrees.

[ Rushdoony ] We have today highly respected men, whether they be Christians or non Christians, scientists or non scientists who, when they appear at our major universities are shouted down and the people who do it accuse them of being hate mongers.

[ Scott ] Intolerance.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Shut you up in the name of tolerance.

[ Rushdoony ] So we are at a critical point in our history, because increasingly it is unwise for any man to agree to appear before an academic community.

[ Scott ] You can appear safely it if is a group within the community, but not if it is the general assembly.

[ Rushdoony ] What is happening now, Otto, is that if there is going to be a meeting in a small classroom it may be only of a group of scholars within that department. You will have groups, minority or majority groups that will break in to the room and insistently break up the meeting.

[ Murray ] That is kind of like the Red Guard.

[ Scott ] Well, it is really the way the Nazis got... and it is German. This is what happened in the Weimar Republic.

[ Murray ] It was Mao Tse Tung which they have a Red Guard they would crash...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...crash meetings.

[ Scott ] Right. It is... it is an... an ... interesting that we are going left, hard left at a time when the left is collapsing everywhere else outside of China, Cuba, North Korea and two or three other fortresses.

[ Murray ] I used to think that people like Kinsley were just cases of arrested emotional development. They just hadn't grown up yet.

[ Scott ] Kinsley is making a very good business out of what he does. He has an awful lot of people who will agree with him. He is ... he is the ... on Cross Fire he is there all the time while Pat Buchanan alternates with the other fellow. He is ... for a while he used to have a... he had a column in the Wall Street Journal, but the editorial page editor got rid of him because of his inconsistencies. He is not ... he is the sort of fellow that Emerson would have liked in a way, because he wasn’t ... he is not bothered by inconsistency. But hatred, we can feel it in the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And you see it in the faces of drivers. Any kind of confrontation that comes up with almost anyone the person goes in to a... a fit of anger.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There is a lot of frustrated anger in this country.

[ Rushdoony ] Before the war, for example, the Indian community had serious problems, as it still does. But it was a relaxed and a friendly community. Their biggest problem was what they did to themselves individually.

[ Scott ] They drank too much.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now they have had a generation or more of people teaching them victimhood and teaching them to hate others.

While I was still on the reservation at... in the late 40s, early 50s I saw the change beginning in that a handful of ne’er do wells were taken away, trained at the expense of some group and came back spouting hatred and victimhood. They were ridiculed by the older Indians of that time. But those Indians are now pretty much in control across country. They have national groups. And they are full of hatred.

[ Murray ] Well, every group is using this as a tool. It was on television news a couple of nights ago that there are some retired Hispanic farm workers down in the valley that were playing cards and drinking in a public park and the... the town got tired of it and the... so they... they took the tables away that they were playing cards on and they would drink themselves into a stupor.

Well ,of course, there were mothers, you know, wanted to bring their kids out there and play and so forth and they didn’t feel that this was a good environment for them. So they complained to the city fathers and the city fathers took the tables out. So their approach was to right away scream and whine that they were being discriminated against because they were Hispanics. You know...

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] One thing about the... the drinking ... the... the public drunkenness.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...which is a crime and gambling for money in public which is a crime.

[ Scott ] Well, the Irish and English today are interesting. Ireland, {?} seminar on this is supposed to be a free country, an independent country, rather. But the fact is that they can go into England without a passport and without a work permit and go to work and they can vote in English elections. So Ireland is not really an independent country. It is an appendage of Great Britain. On the other hand, the IRA insists that Britain get out of Ulster and that the whole island be one island. And in the process they have mounted this terrible campaign in which they have murdered men in front of their families. They have... they have bombed whole areas of London. They have committed an unending stream of atrocities.

Now their rationale, of course, is the mistreatment of the Irish through the centuries by the English. That this a historic truth, but we have to come to a cut off point. We cannot blame living people for dead men’s crimes.

[ Murray ] The sins of the fathers...

[ Scott ] We... if we want to go into ancestral guilt then there is nobody safe. And hatred that is fostered by such groups as the IRA... own what the IRA is doing not the English opinion of the Irish is a great disservice to the other Irish. Most of the Irish couldn’t care less. I am very well acquainted with them as a group and although they can harbor... they can harbor grudges longer than a Sicilian, they don’t make a profession of it. I mean there has to be more to life than that.

The same thing could be said in spades, with no pun intended, regarding the black minority in the United States. The black minority has not experienced slavery. That happened a long time ago. It happened over 100 years ago. They ... their... their fathers had a harder time when they are... than ... they have an easier time than their fathers. If they listen to Tom Sole and others the fact is that when we had black neighborhoods the black people were a lot happier than they are as a result of desegregation and slum clearances and so forth and so on. They have broken up the black community. And we have left its poorest people in a swamp by themselves. Look at the hatred that is coming out.

Now if we don’t as a country do something about the... cooling that, everyone says this, why, we are going to go the way of India. But instead of cooling it, the courts have decided to codify it and to accept it as a valid situation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Our courts have been very, very guilty... much guilty of creating conflict in this country with many of their decisions. And there is no sign on their part of turning around on that. I am glad that Thomas, our black court justice is showing signs of being the best judge for at least a generation.

[ Scott ] He has common sense.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Rooted in experience.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And even when he has agreed with the majority he has written his own decisions in order to indicate that he differs as to the ground of his decision from the others.

[ Murray ] Well, the... once, I think, responsible black leaders realize that this victimization, self victimization that is thrust on them by some of their outspoken leaders, it just... it keeps them in the swamp. They are never going to get out. They are never going to break the cycle.

[ Rushdoony ] it has put them in the swamp. I can remember when blacks were very different from what people see nowadays, where they were God fearing people, hard working, conscientious people, not given to the kind of behavior that has become commonplace in our time.

[ Murray ] Well, it is... it must be damaging to the spirit of black people who are trying very hard to lift themselves to see night after night on television just pounded into the public consciousness black people being arrested for drug crimes, face down in the street, bloody. It has got to bend their soul after a while.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, all these police shows are very bad. I don't think even the Soviets had soap operas glorifying the KGB. And with all due regard to the police, I think they are over played. Their role is overplayed and also the tactics that they are exhibited as using are very dangerous and not good.

What about the ... the children? I don’t suppose... I don’t know in a Christian school, of course, is different than the public school. I know that when my daughter was in school in San Diego that they have black Hispanic girls, black gangs and Hispanic gangs, both male and female, you know, which the white students were in the minority and had no place to ... no court of appeal. If a collision arose the white girl was always wrong. Now I don’t know how it is in the Christian school, because you don’t have disorders. You don’t have the same kind of a thing.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] And ours is a rather homogenous area up here.

[ M Rushdoony ] The problems that I heard of in Christian schools that go along racial lines usually tend to come from outside the school, family members who are gang members. So a... a... say an inner city Christian school that will have quite a racial mix will have perhaps very well behaved, you know, children in the school. The problem often comes when daddy or... or uncle so and so was arrested or... or was shot by the police—and this happens in Christian schools. So the problems are there, but when you are coming from a Christian perspective and you have a... you have been... have a small society in school structured more or less on Christian ethics, you get a lot... rid of a lot of those problems.

[ Scott ] So it really doesn’t exist in the Christian circles.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ M Rushdoony ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, you were with me when we both spoke in Washington, DC about two years ago and I was reminded of it when you spoke about charges of ancestral guilt. Do you recall the young black man who got up and demanded reparations by whites to the blacks? I got up and answered him when I spoke, because I came after him and you were before him. And I knew that young man. I had first met him at Raleigh, oh, about 20 years before. I believe he was in his first year of graduate studies. Very well read. Spoke excellent English, but it was black English he was speaking there. He sounded semi literate only. And he went on and on about reparations to the blacks by the whites of America as justice. And I pointed out to him and I think I could have spoken for millions upon millions, tens and twenties and thirties, maybe a hundred million or two hundred million of Americans.

At first I had nothing to do with it. My parents were immigrants and they had suffered more than any of his people had. And, second, my wife’s family who came from the colonial era had fought to set him free and some of them had given their lives in that war. So what call did he have talking about reparations from the whites. Now he was significantly sulky for the rest of the meeting and found two or three at least who felt that I had been unkind. And all I did was call attention to a very obvious fact when he had been insulting us all the way through his speech.

Now this is the kind of thing we have today. We have spoiled brats who have received too much and he had been very well educated at the state’s expense. He had received grants and the like.

[ Scott ] Well, their argument is with ... with destiny, an argument with God. When Baldwin the black novelist was in Paris at the end of World War II he went to a bar that was frequented by black African men. And he announced that he was a black brother. And one of them looked at him and said, “What tribe?”

No, they first... they first question was: What is your name?

And he said, “James Baldwin.”

And they said, “That is a white man’s name. What tribe?”

He didn’t know. So they threw him out. Now the black nations of Africa are nations. I couldn’t go up in a bar in Paris or New York or anywhere else to a Greek and say, “I am a white brother.” That is racism. And the world is not run by racism. It is run by religion and it is run by nationality and it is run by culture. It is not run by skin color.

[ Rushdoony ] They...

[ Scott ] Only here is the idea of the skin color dominates.

[ Rushdoony ] James Baldwin was determined to hate.

[ Scott ] And he was a product of scholarships, prizes...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...pensions, you name it.

[ Rushdoony ] His father was a black pastor, as I recall it. He had been coddled all the way through his education. One white teacher had noticed his talent and done everything to help him get ahead. And yet all he could do was to whine about all the hatred he had experienced.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting that he began the... at least as far as I was concerned, he began with some outstanding essays in Harper’s either Harper’s or Atlantic when he was living in Switzerland. And it wasn’t until I got three quarters the way through the first of these that I realized that the author was black and ... and they were brilliant.

But the higher he rose and the more successful he became the more money he attained the worse his reaction ... his reaction....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...his resentment rose and recently I have been going over some of the recent post war period. Every step that was undertaken under Lyndon Johnson, especially, to expand the influence and the prestige and position of the black race in the United States was greeted with increased violence, increased hatred, increased resentment, louder indignation. And, of course, this gives you an implicit lesson. If you are dealing with a man who gets worse the better you treat him, what do you suppose will happen at the end of the road?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, Baldwin was perverse, not only in his sexuality, but in all his attitudes. The better off he became, as you said, the better he was treated, the more he was determined to find fault with those who helped him. He did not want to be grateful to anyone.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, at the root of that kind of hatred is envy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I went into this business of gratitude, you and I discussed it once where I had a man whom I did some conspicuous favors to and who become a bitter enemy and I spoke to an older man that... I am running out of older men, but the way. And I miss them. I went to an older man and to ask him why. How could this fellow behave that way when I had done these things for him? He said, “Well, the very fact that you could do them for him humiliated him. Every time he looks at you he thinks of the fact that you were the guy that was able to do that for him. It reminds him of a situation he was in that you pulled him out of and it reminds him of the fact that you were able to pull him out of it and he hates you for that.”

[ Murray ] That is almost oriental, you know? There are some cultures where if you give somebody a gift you immediately create a... a debt on their part and they...

[ Scott ] They resent it.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] They don’t want that.

[ Murray ] That is right.

[ Scott ] Well, there are people who don't want favors. They resent favors. It implies, you know, that you are in a position to do them favors. Well, we are talking about hatred and there is an enormous amount of hatred in the United States at least from my vantage at a time when there is more effort to get along than on an official level than I ever recalled. We didn’t worry about it when I was a boy. I didn’t... we didn't care if the other guy liked us or not. The hell with him.

[ Murray ] Well, Thomas Sole has called attention to the evil done to avoid prejudice and hatred and so on. We have leaned over backwards to help those who were not competent to get into spots where they have no business being. And he feels one of the greatest evils has been helping minority groups get into and stay in medical schools when they don’t meet the qualifications.

[ Scott ] What a crime against the people.

[ Rushdoony ] And sole rightly feels, as himself black, that it is a crime against the blacks. It is saying you are not capable, therefore, we are going to let you in even though you are inferior. There is a horrible condescension there that is devastating.

[ Scott ] Well, the idea that a black child couldn’t learn unless he sat next to a white child is inherently denigrative.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Sole, by the way, is the one who said that the American government will always provide programs to help the blacks as long as they all provide jobs for the white liberals.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is interesting. Some of the academic community are writing about the reorganization of education. Of course what they have in mind are a few superficial changes that will make life easier for the professors.

[ Scott ] I have the impression that...

[ Rushdoony ] And the...

[ Scott ] Oh, pardon me.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And being on the left, they cannot deal with Sole and his comments on education. Sole spoke inside American education the decline, the deception, the dogmas is superb work. They won’t deal with him. And when they deal with Sykes who wrote his book Prof Scam on education, a very fine one, they dismiss him in a paragraph as though this is a popular treatment that has no significance. It is anecdotal. It doesn't deal seriously with education.

So they are unwilling to come to grips with someone like Sole, because they can’t bring themselves to criticize him because he is black.

[ Scott ] The one thing that keeps coming up in my mind is that there is a lot of Christians, it seems to me, that believe that it is Christian... unchristian to criticize anybody else. It is unchristian to discern...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...error and the part of any minority and that the role of a good Christian is to embrace everybody. Satan himself they would love to have for dinner.

[ Murray ] Roll over and play dead.

[ Rushdoony ] I have mentioned this before, but early in the 30s a teacher at a Bible school, seeing that his students were getting infected with the liberal idea of Jesus as loving and mild always had them classify all the sayings of Jesus, those that were angry and condemned somebody and those that were loving and with all the students it came out about the same. Two out of three were condemnations so that the typical picture of Jesus is a false one.

[ Scott ] Well, you can imagine the impression that Jesus made in the world. It didn’t come from uncle Joe.

[ Rushdoony ] No. No. Well, we fail to realize that Jesus came as the Messiah. While he didn’t announce it publicly, he lived that role. Therefore, as King he was passing judgment on the generation of his time, on the religious leaders of his time. At one point he said he had come not to be a judge, but he meant in terms of a civil court. But he was the great judge before whom all men will stand and his remarks passed judgment primarily on those in the religious sphere.

[ Murray ] We need to have a statute of limitations on hate.

[ Scott ] Well, we need to define it. I mean, it stated out with Rush saying that there are things that we should hate. And that observation is something that seems to have become blurred. If ... if you differ in the United States it is considered hostility and if you differ loudly it is considered hate.

[ Murray ] If the word hate imputes hostility...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... and one of the definitions of hate is an emotion of intense aversion, I mean, we all have an intense aversion to ... to sin.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes, we should hate...

[ Scott ] Well....

[ Rushdoony ] ... the sins that are so common place and are taken for granted as though they were nothing to be worried about.

[ Scott ] When I was a boy, the only thing that could really create aversion in other boys was cowardice. We absolutely despised a kid who was too cowardly to fight. We wouldn’t associate with him.

[ Rushdoony ] R E Mc Master in a... in an excellent article last year called attention to the fact that the book of Revelation says that the cowards have place in heaven.

[ Scott ] That would fit.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And it is a fact that is convenient... conveniently forgotten by most people.

[ Scott ] Well, we saw this appear in the opposition of the Vietnam War. How many of the men who were against the war were against the war or were afraid to go?

[ Murray ] No one ever took a tally.

[ Scott ] No one ever took a tally, but we... we certainly heard an awful lot of noble sentiments in favor of the poor people in Vietnam. But when the poor people in Vietnam are overrun by Communists and put into concentration camps and up against the wall for execution, we didn't hear any of that compassion from some of those loud voices. And I don’t know how many that are now calling for us to go war in Bosnia expect to go.

[ Rushdoony ] I am sure President Clinton does not expect to go. He is going to sit safely in the White House.

Well, tonight’s news indicates, perhaps, there will be peace there. But how real that is, I don’t know.

[ Scott ] We are broke.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We are cutting back our military and we are going to engage in military adventures. This is one of the most paradoxical administrations I have ever seen.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] Of course, you know, Bush’s rationale for paying for the Persian Gulf war was he was, well, the stuff we are use we just won’t replace.

[ Scott ] Is that right? So it was a one shot only.

[ Murray ] So it means we haven’t got it to use again. It is gone.

[ Scott ] We have an administration. We have a... a... a governing class that I haven’t... the only historical parallel I can think of is the Ancion regime in France.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...before the revolution. We are in the hands of educated idiots.

They talk about hatred and they are creating more of it ...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... every day.

[ M Rushdoony ] One way all this talk of ... of hatred is continent, it... it... if religion is insignificant and if religion is said to be a creation of man then everything boils to center around man. If you oppose anything then it has to boil down to you are opposed to a person, because your morals don’t really represent anything. They only represent your feelings towards other people.

[ Scott ] Not grounded on any standard.

[ M Rushdoony ] No standard is valid, but your... but your attitude towards others is what you are really revealing.

[ Scott ] My personal feeling is ... ever since my grandfather straightened me out was that how I ... what I think of other people is none of their business as long as I treat people properly and justly. I had a very efficient engineering writer on the magazine who did his job very, very well. I gave him two promotions and to increases of salary. He never knew that I couldn’t stand him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] When it comes right down to it most people want to get along and be civil to one another.

[ Scott ] Exactly.

[ M Rushdoony ] Whenever there is a national... a... a... crisis such as an earthquake or when there was a... a fire and half the county was evacuated, everybody was unanimous that... that... that everybody was wonderful to each other and people were going out of their ways to be kind to people they didn’t even know. What masquerades as hate and racism today is often just suspicion and fear. How man people want to walk up to a minority in a strange city and ask for directions?

[ Scott ] I wouldn’t dream of it.

[ M Rushdoony ] You are afraid of what is going to happen. That is to the same as being a racist. I think part of the reason why black comedians, not the vulgar kind, but the ones who are really funny people in... white people enjoy laughing at them. That is why the... the black shows on television, not all their audience is black. White people would like to believe that they can get pleasure out of black people in a normal setting.

[ Scott ] Laughing with them.

[ M Rushdoony ] Laughing with them.

[ Murray ] Yeah, but we have similar experiences.

[ M Rushdoony ] And I think that was one of the attractions of, for instance, Cosby, not that that really necessarily represented black life, but what he found to be true of children, for instance, was true of all children. And people could identify with... with those attitudes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ M Rushdoony ] Unfortunately, though, what... what... what was then said is that we want to stereotype black people as comical and as buffoons. So we are... we are... if we want to... to... to laugh with them, we are criticized for that as well.

[ Scott ] There is no way out of the... the cul de sac that we have been led into.

[ Rushdoony ] I know one very fine woman who until recent years had lived with, worked with blacks and had many friends among them who could no longer have any association and feels it isn’t worth the trouble, because it leads to too many problems. She regrets it, because all her life she has been at ease among them. But we have created a climate of hatred. We have become almost obsessive in psychoanalyzing any kind of black white relationship and it isn’t worthwhile to some people to try to do anything. There are too many problems attached to such relationships.

[ Murray ] This country is obsessive about almost everything. I mean, in the view of other people in the world, they think we are all nuts. You know, the Japanese can’t understand why we are mad at them for being successful. You know, they don’t understand why we have this difficulty with race relations when... when color doesn’t exist in... in many European countries. I mean in France, you know, inter racial marriage and so forth is considered not a problem.

[ Scott ] No. The blacks have always been popular with the French.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I don’t see any solution to this problem as to others apart from a return to a sound biblical faith. We today are allowing humans to define people, to define hate, to define love, to define mankind. And the result is everything is warped and out of joint, but with a biblical perspective we can overcome this problem and I don’t see any other solution because in the world outside of Christendom there have always been problems. Only Christianity has created a culture where people do not have to be of a same tribe to live together, where they can live harmoniously because they are religiously motivated.

Well, our time is just about up. Would any of you like to add a few words before we conclude?

[ Murray ] No, I would just like to say that when people have tried everything else and it has failed, maybe they should give Christianity a chance.

[ Rushdoony ] They had better if they want to live.

[ Scott ] And I think, really, in the United States we ought to drop the whole word race. It should be neither in your favor nor against you.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is just about up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.