From the Easy Chair

Children

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 152-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DA192

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DA192, Children, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 302, November the third, 1993.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott and I shall be discussing the subject of children.

Now it is very interesting to note that over the centuries children have been various defined. The are some scholars who believe that our concept of the child is a very recent and somewhat dubious one. For example, under the influence of Rousseau we regard the child as innocent and Wordsworth had a great deal to do with propagating that notion together with Rousseau. The child comes and in total innocence trailing clouds of glory and the idea that we have from birth a nature that has a predisposition to sin, that we are born with original sin is totally alien to the modern concept. The idea of evil they find, if they are Humanists, incomprehensible.

I listened with amazement to one woman describing the fires in Malibu Canyon express shock that anyone could light a fire. How could anyone do something so destructive and so wrong? That was her opinion. No comprehension of original sin or total depravity. Well, with that lack of comprehension we have no awareness of what the child can do and people allow the child to grow up without any discipline or training and are shocked at what happens as a result.

Somewhat earlier children were regarded as little adults and from their earliest years were treated as adults. One can go on at some length to deal with the subject of the changing concept of the child.

Suffice it to say that unless one has a religious, a theological view of children, there will be trouble. We have to recognize that human nature is not naturally good. And, therefore, the child is not naturally good and is not naturally a little angel. That the child may be very lovable does not change the fact that the child has a potential for a great deal of evil.

So we have a problem with children today. They are out of hand. They are increasingly insolent. Parents are bewildered. They can’t understand why their children have gone wrong when they have done so much for them. Our schools are becoming dangerous places. The streets are becoming dangerous places. Gangs of youth have become a threat in many a major city and they number in the tens of thousands. So children today are a major problem.

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well I think ... I think the idea of... of complete innocence is fading very rapidly if it still exists, because we witnessed in very recent days, as a matter of fact, in recent years that young children down to the age of seven, eight and nine can be stone cold killers. People in England apparently have a more realistic attitude than we do as far as their criminal justice system. They recently last few days reported the killing of a young child by two essentially children, young boys and they will be tried as adults and they will spend the rest of their lives in prison. Now that probably wouldn’t happen, or at least it is we are not ready for that yet, although we are approaching it. We have recently had some murders, brutal murders by children, young teenagers and preteens and I think a pair of them are going to be tried as adults and sentenced as adults. So the... the idea is rapidly wearing off as people realize that children give the right cultural conditioning can be stone cold killers and are a menace to society.

[ Scott ] Well, I think you have to look at the background of the child. The idea of the innocent child was really a Victorian idea and they made great efforts to keep... to set children apart from an adult society and they weren’t supposed to be exposed to adult literature or concepts. They were protected, so to speak. But, of course, that only applied to the middle and upper class. The... it didn’t apply to kids in the slums and my own observation was that kids in the slums and they have... what we used to call slums, now they call them the ghetto which is a bad term, inappropriate. Poverty levels and not even necessarily poverty levels because they used to be a lot of honest poor who were quite moral and kept very clean house and so forth. But kids who were exposed to what we used to call the facts of life and in the slums, facts of life and death for that matter developed a very hard eye very early.

Now all the kids have hard eyes, because they are exposed to what the slum kid used to learn in life. They are given in lessons. They have sex courses which are so basic and so graphic that they cannot be repeated in newspapers or magazines or any adult literature. And this is from kindergarten on. So it is impossible not to believe that at a very young age the child learns to look at adults with disgust because he is... they are taught these things at a pre puberty at a time when children are not asexual, but certainly far less sexual than what is encouraged.

So we have here the creation of amoral children. Now when society declines as, for instance, during the Civil War and the collapse of civilization in Russia as a result of the Civil War after World War I, you had gangs of boys who were very dangerous. They were like young wolves. They committed murders and robberies and everything else that they could commit and they were hunted down and killed.

[ Murray ] I would say... isn’t that happening in Brazil?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is happening in Brazil and not only Brazil. It is happening throughout much of Latin America. These are ... are... are children who are actually thrown out of their homes or who run away from their homes who sleep in a street, who operate in bands and who are very dangerous and so forth.

We have them I Central Park. We had them in Central Park 30, 40 years ago and nobody who had any sense would even venture into that territory.

Now we have an article recently in the Sunday edition of the New York Times which somebody sent me about the children of the very wealthy who are absolute nightmares, absolute nightmares. We also have women who go to work not because they need the money, but to get away from their own kids, because they don’t like them.

So what we are talking about is the result of it is a social breakdown.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] We really can’t separate children from the rest of society as a different species. They are the ... of all the human beings in the country or in the society, the children are the most vulnerable whether they are good or bad. Most subject to be ... to the influences of adults and of the treatment by adults. Now as Otto can tell you, I remember... I used to... when I lived in San Francisco way out in the sunset district when we first moved there and I was quite poor at the time, no car. I took a bus to work. I took a bus out. And I would cut across a couple of streets in order to reach our house. There was a girl, I don’t know how old, nine, 10, something like that, eight or nine or 10, who waved at me and I would wave at as I went by. One day I... one evening or late afternoon I went by and I waved and her mother ran out and you never saw such an expression and grabbed that child and carried her into the house as quick as she could. And I... I... I never again went down that street. And today I don’t look at kids. It doesn’t do any good to smile and say hello. In... in many instances they don't answer. They don’t smile. They are not jolly. Their whole life has been soured by their education unless they are in a private school or a Christian school. The public schools are absolutely degrading them.

[ Murray ] Well, they are teaching them step by step that their parents are irrelevant, that adults in general are at least, you know, the ones that are close tot hem are irrelevant. And they become entities unto the powers unto themselves.

[ Scott ] Well, they teach them what their parents do in the bedroom. They have them filling out questionnaires. And, of course, the lessons that they have to teach, that the television teaches is that this is a society where the men ordinarily brutalize women. I mean, we don’t have to talk about innate depravity here. What we are talking about is a depraved society.

[ Rushdoony ] We have the doctrine of select depravity. The male sex and certain races have a monopoly on depravity according to our modern leaders.

[ Scott ] Well, white males.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] White Christian males.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You mentioned something very important, Otto. The Victorian idea of the innocent child. The Victorian idea of the innocent child has a very interesting history. Rousseau had a major part in it as did Wordsworth whose poetry was almost like another Bible to many people so that from both you had a stream of semi deification of the child. Together with this you had the classical idea, very definitely non Christian and education was to a great extent de Christianized and classical culture became the Bible of education in the English speaking world and also in the Germanic world even earlier.

Well, this was carried so far that if you look at the 18th century, late... or late 19th century Victorian art, what you see is the concept of innocence applied to two groups, children, especially to little girls and animals. All the children are portrayed as the epitome of total innocence.

My first year of college I stayed in a home that had a really marvelous collection of paintings, originals by important English painters of the last half century up to World War I, in fact, but mostly before 1900.

I recall vividly a Lancier painting. Lancier is in for a revival now, of two dogs and the kind of thing that Lancier did. Any animal he portrayed a deer or a stag, there was a look in the eyes that made you feel that he was almost more human than human beings.

[ Scott ] Yeah, they were idealized animals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Magnificent painter. Remarkable talent and skill. But there was...

[ Scott ] They were all Bambis, various varieties.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, at the same time you had a concern with the protection of innocence in the child. In this country it expressed itself in what was called a legal reform. You probably recall Judge Ben Lindsey of Denver.

[ Scott ] How could you... how could you forget him? He stained your mind.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Ineradicable stain.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, his books were very impassionate statements defending the juvenile delinquent and Lindsey was a very intense man. He wrote compelling books, persuaded the entire country that to treat the juvenile delinquent as you would any criminal was a criminal act. You had to have criminal detention homes and juvenile facilities and so on. Well, of course, what happened was that they protected them from other prisoners, but they made them available and without doing so legally to important legal persons to molest the boy or girl, something I encountered some years ago as a young pastor, that anyone who went to a juvenile home was fair game.

But the point is they warped the whole of the American legal system so we cannot deal properly with a particularly vicious young hoodlums that now are killing, stealing, dealing in drugs and so on.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true. The Victorians, of course, had several levels. There is a book at home I have called Boys Together which whenever I describe it makes the person who hears it very indignant, but I thought it was a terrific book about the preparatory schools in Britain, Winchester, Eaton, Harrell and so forth. And the author said they were the last areas of 18th century society. The boys ran the school. The school... the... the masters ran only the classroom. And, of course, the boys went in at the age of nine and left at the age of 18, roughly. And the senior class ran the school and the senior class varied in character from year to year. Some years they were athletes. Some years they were drunks and some years they were whore masters and some years they were faggots and so forth, scholars. And they traced ... the author traced the names of the students and he had in foot notes what they did in later life.

Now now ... none of these groups were ... permeated the entire school. Some of them influenced their class, but never the whole school. The homosexuality existed, but it was not universal, because it doesn't fit with boys. As a general rule as a very unusual boy who goes there.

At any rate in about the 1850s they began to get a different type of headmaster. They got the Victorian middle class headmaster and they came in and they said, “We are going to stop this immorality. The boys are not going to have a girl in town anymore. They are not going to drink. They are not going to gamble. They are not going not have these bloody fights and so forth.” And one of the things that changed the tone of the schools was the fact that the headmasters made a... they suspected faggotry whenever they saw two boys who were friendly. And they would call them in and question them. And this absolutely changed and altered the entire tone of the school. It made friendship much more difficult because they suspected the worst when they saw friends.

We have reached that stage as a society. Men are not supposed to have close friends anymore any more than women because ugly and dirty rumors and charges immediately arise. I remember talking to the Kentucky author Jesse Stewart who wrote a lot of books, or a lot of stories that were printed in Esquire magazine years ago. And he had one of his short stories was about a friendship between two boys in the Kentucky hills. It was reprinted in the 50 year anniversary of the publication as touching description of homosexual relationship. And I thought Jesse would go to New York personally murder the editor.

But at any rate, this was the element that the Victorian school master brought into these schools. And amongst other things total control from dawn to whatever, around the clock of the boys. And that was just about the end of the book. The only thing the author did not say, which, of course, comes to mind immediately was that they stopped producing men.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And now we are... we have stopped producing men in a similar way. It isn’t that we have the same scurrilous effort here. We don't suspect all the boys and all the girls of being wrong, but we are teaching them that there is no such thing as perversion, that abnormal behavior is normal. And we are teaching them, incidentally, that ethics do not count. What counts is to go along and to get along and to join the crowd. So we are producing children that are not likeable. We are producing little hypocrites more effectively than the ... than the Victorians who did the same in their style in their time. And I think that it is leading to a considerable difficulty between the modern adult and the modern child.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. If you do not have a Christian training in the life of the child from the home and the school, the child is very susceptible at that age in particular to influences.

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Rushdoony ] And the influences are all going to be from the media, then, from entertainment. One of our readers wrote to me about a week ago a startling thing namely that a 10th grade student in a public high school, a girl had told him that it was better to have AIDS than to become pregnant because motherhood was yucky, but AIDS made you a martyr in the eyes of the world.

Now when you watch television and read the papers you can see how such an attitude is taught. It is picked up from the culture around us. And that is a very deadly thing. Then there is another aspect. We have so surrounded the family with all kinds of restrictions, with all kinds of Dr. Spock books and that sort of thing that there is no spontaneity anymore and a lot of the young parents who are brought up in this kind of thing, they are told that these are the authorities you are going to follow, nothing about learning from your own family background or from the church. So they have a perfectionism with regard to caring for their children. As a result, everything drives them up the wall because they are not getting perfect results from their children and they really fall apart over it.

[ Scott ] Well, they are not allowed to spank.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] They are... I read where one man was taken to court for forcing his daughter to go to church. There is no spontaneity. You are right about that, because they are trying to do the right thing. And I understand that right now children will challenge their parents and say, “If you put a hand on me, I will have you arrested.”

The courts have entertained the idea that children can divorce their parents. We have fractured families where the members of the family are scattered around the world. And there is an absence of the uncles and the aunts and the cousins who can intervene or who would intervene if they could. And then we have grief counselors who go into the schools when something happens on the playground, when a kid is shot, when somebody else is brutal raped. The schools ... there is savage behavior in the schools. There is savage behavior in the prisons, savage behavior everywhere across the country and it is all as though it doesn’t exist.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, they have kids planning their own funerals now as part of a class ...’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Project. They specify, you know, where they want to be buried and if they want a memorial service or not and this is in the primary grades.

[ Scott ] Well, you know the language of the primary grades. I mean, we had bad language when I was a boy, but now the bad language is across the board, unspeakable language.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They... they think they are being... being given a criminal education.

[ Rushdoony ] A good term for it, Otto.

Well, we do have a major problem today with the schooling because the children are not given an opportunity to learn the right things. And God knows they have a predisposition already to that which is wrong so that when that is what we are giving them, is it any wonder that they turn out so badly?

[ Scott ] What is wrong?

[ Rushdoony ] They are not taught that.

[ Scott ] It is a word you never hear.

[ Rushdoony ] No. Or sin.

[ Scott ] There is no sin.

[ Rushdoony ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And there is no wrong. There is error.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, they will abolish error before long, too.

[ Scott ] Well, it is an interesting... interesting to watch, but I get the impression—and this is, of course, at a distance—that children today are no longer happy. Now we used to be happy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I remember. We used to sing. We walked... in the winter we walked two miles to the Saturday night movie or a Saturday afternoon movie and sang on the way home. I don’t think I have ever heard children singing for years.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] For decades.

[ Rushdoony ] Children and adults alike used to sing. And that has dropped out of American life.

Back in the late 1950s a very interesting book was published. The author was Saverstein, I believe a psychiatrist, a thoroughly common sense work. And the book was titled The Paradoxes of Everyday Life. He had a chapter in which he spoke in favor of the screaming mother. And he said mothers are afraid now to scream at their children, but he said that the old fashioned screaming mother communicated to the child that there was a right and a wrong. The child quickly learned from the mother’s anger and screams at him that he had transgressed, that there were certain lines he better not cross again. So he said that we were, in effect, in trouble because the screaming mother was beginning to go out of fashion. So he saw no good future in the tight lipped controlled mother who was afraid to tell Johnny that he was a little stinker and she was going to wail the tar out of him.

[ Scott ] Well, that was my... at the point I was waiting to say. We have failed the children.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we also failed the women.

[ Rushdoony ] [ affirmative response ]

[ Scott ] Women are being brutalized not just in the television set, but across the country. The men of the United States have failed both the women and the children. And this nonsense that is going on now, this evil nonsense would not go on if we had men.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I remember when I was a boy that the nun ... I had to make my first communion. And the nun told us that we had to make a complete confession before we went to communion and she told a horror story of some child who put his tongue out for the wafer and because he hadn't made a complete confession couldn’t pull his tongue back. And I repeated this to my father and he immediately got his hat and said, “Come with me.” And we went down to the rectory and he saw the nun and he asked her if she had told that story and she said she had. And it was a chilling moment. I don’t remember what he said or how he said it, but I am sure she never told that story again and that she never made the mistake of trying to introduce a child to God through a lie. And he was... he was a man. And they are in short supply. I suppose we could say that their own fathers have failed them, because it is not easy to grow to manhood unless you have a man who will not break your spirit, but at the same time teach you what right and wrong is. And we cannot, I think, as men, blame anything. We cannot blame the government and we can’t blame the church or the clergy or anything else for our failure as Americans to maintain the rules and the standards of civilization.

These public schools, this government is unworthy of its predecessors.

[ Rushdoony ] One of my vivid memories from my high school days was a movie that came out which I did not see, but heard about immediately the day after it opened about 15 miles away in a nearby small town. There was no theater in our small town. It was a Cagney movie, James Cagney and I don’t recall what he did, but he used physical force against ...

[ Scott ] You are talking about the grapefruit incident.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, the grapefruit...

[ Scott ] He pushed a grapefruit into the actress’ face.

[ Rushdoony ] Was it Mae Clark?

[ Scott ] I don’t recall.

[ Rushdoony ] At any rate, as soon as the parents of some of the students heard about it they laid down the law. They were not going to go to see that picture or any Cagney film. And I never felt the same about Cagney after that. I always disliked him, because the men of the community who were truly men thought that was contemptible that it should be shown or that anyone would even think that that was something that should be film fare for adults or children.

Now, of course, everything goes.

[ Scott ] Well, the women are in bad condition. They... it is not safe for them to go out in a metropolitan or even many suburban areas. Nothing is done either to the police who don’t do their work or to the judges who don’t do their work. You know, none of those jobs are... are life time permanent jobs. The citizens can remove the police chief. They can remove a judge. You can be dismissed in private industry for being stupid and there is no reason why an elected official should be safe from the same judgment so that when we get into the whole question of children, we are not in charge, I would say, of how the children behave when they are not under our control, because everybody is born into the world with a unique set of personalities. And we all know that children have misbehaved from very good homes and behaved well from very bad homes, that circumstances or poverty or wealth or anything in between is not usually the determinant.

But if you steep children in the kind of filth that they are now being given under the name of sex education and in the immoral atmosphere of the present day ambient, it is hard for me to see how they turn out well. They have to be extraordinary.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now there are exceptions. The are Christian schools that do a good job and that at least if the kid does something he shouldn’t do, they know that they shouldn’t be doing it. And it is an interesting thing. I remember once a physician asked me if I took dope. And I said... I was astonished at the question. I said, “Of course, I don’t take dope. Why do you ask?”

He said, “Well, maybe you are a psychopath.”

I said, “Well, that is... that is possible. What is a psychopath?”

He said, “Well, I don’t really know, but,” he said, he said, “your reflexes are abnormally quick.” That was the reason for his questions. And I said, “Well, lets get back to the psychopath. What does a psychopath do? What... what defines a psychopath?”

He said, “Well, somebody that has no... no mercy, who will do anything that seems convenient to him no matter what.”

And I said, “Well, that is youth. You are talking about youth now.” I said, “Are there any old psychopaths?”

He said, “Not very many.”

I said, “Well, maybe they don’t live long enough, who knows?”

But I thought about it later and I thought, well, the reason the reason there aren’t any old psychopaths, or not very many at any rate is we learn as we get older and kids learn from the adult world in which they are raised. And there is no way that we can escape that responsibility. And I think in the United States and perhaps in Brazil and other places, people are absolutely giving up under the pressure of the specialists who have convinced everyone that you can’t do it unless you have gone to a special school to learn how to do it.

[ Rushdoony ] A good Christian school has a very loyal body of men ready to help it, because they appreciate what it is doing for their children. We have had so many things done for us. The playing field being leveled, the outside play area for the young children, all the equipment built there, the venetian blinds on the upper {?} story windows, things like that. It is amazing how helpful the men are because they appreciate what the school is doing for their children and the difference between their children and others in the community.

[ Murray ] Well, you can see it in kids’ faces.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] I mean the contrast is... is stark. You take a look at, you know, kids playing around the Christian school and you go into a public school and, I mean, it is totally different. The kids in the public school even the... I... you know, because I deliver radio equipment and do repair radio equipment for some of the public schools in the area and the kids are ... are just morose. I mean they are sitting there in class. I see when the doors open and, you know, they are staring down at the floor with not a bored look on their face, but, I mean, they are angry at having to be there.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Murray ] There is no joy in their ... their countenance whatsoever.

[ Scott ] Well they had... destroying the natural affections which used to sustain us. My family is on either side was never demonstrative. And I look at these movies where there ... Johnny is going to the store and his mother says, “Go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. I love you.” I mean, this... this nonsense was never part of my culture. We didn’t clutch each other. But nevertheless it was a... a great deal of affection and a sense of security that we were taken care of and that we were protected. I think that is... that is an essential obligation.

But now I am beginning to get the idea, especially from that article in the New Yorker about these obnoxious rich kids and obnoxious in a way that even obnoxious rich kids didn’t used to be, because they generally had some manners and now these are obnoxious rich kids that have no manners to their parents. And I have heard great many stories about rebellious children in the last 20 years, let’s say, 20, 25 years, of kids who curse their mothers and are... are literally uncontrollable.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the problems with rich children is that they are sometimes reared by the servants rather than by the parents. I knew of a case I southern California where this boy from a very wealthy couple, their only child, started to kindergarten and the teacher sent a note home stating that their son was quite fluent in Spanish, but knew almost no English. And it was because they had a Spanish maid who was in charge of the child and the child’s contact mainly was to come in in the evening before bedtime and say good night, mother, good night, father. But most of his conversation was with the Spanish maid.

[ Scott ] That is very interesting. We knew a very briefly in sort of a tangential way an Irish cook who had worked for Jacquelyn Onassis and I said, “What was she like?” And the cook said, “Get that brat out of here.”

[ Rushdoony ] Incidentally, when this was called to the attention of the parents by the kindergarten teacher they were very angry with the maid.

[ Scott ] I can imagine. Of course.

[ Rushdoony ] They did not blame themselves.

[ Scott ] Of course not. Of course not. Have you... how many people have... do you run into who blame themselves? How many people do you run into these days who have ever committed a mistake?

[ Rushdoony ] That is true. Well, there is no confession in Catholic or Protestant circles, no confession in private prayer, so how many people are ready to admit sins?

[ Scott ] Well, to have unhappy children across the landscape and to have difficult relations with your children and I don't know how many people the I know who have had those difficult relations is ... is to really make life very uncomfortable. If we don't get rid of our social sciences, if we don’t get rid of our social scientists they will destroy us all.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, they are well on their way...

[ Scott ] Yes, they are...

[ Rushdoony ] ...to having that goal accomplished. Well, children we are told in the Bible are a heritage from the Lord. That is, an inheritance. And for some one to lay waste their inheritance is a fearful thing, especially when it is a human inheritance. We can call it our main inheritance, because it is our way of having an impact on the future. Our children are the future of the world and therefore we have an opportunity to alter the character of the world through our children.

[ Scott ] Do you remember Helen Hayes, the actress?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] She got pregnant and was unable to fulfill her contract to appear in a play in Broadway and they sued her for violation of contract and the court ruled that the baby was a gift of God and therefore she was not responsible for their particular loss.

[ Rushdoony ] I can’t imagine a court doing that today.

[ Scott ] I can’t. I was trying to recall the year. I believe it was in the early 30s...’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But I am not sure.

[ Rushdoony ] I am... I think so, too.

[ Scott ] No, I can’t recall an American court making such a ruling today, but that was the ruling then.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, of course, it is the truth. It is your continuity. And ... and there is a chain of continuity. I recall one time when I was staying wit my dad at his home in Caracas I decided to paint the place. And I was on a step ladder and he sat in a chair sipping scotch and watching me. And we were talking and I turned around and ... and started to answer him and put my finger up like that and he said, “Oh, my {?}, my father is back.”

The continuity through... through the time and to break that continuity is really tragic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You saw recently with that football player didn't appear for the important football game.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...because he wanted to be...

[ Scott ] He wanted to be present at his child’s birth.

[ Murray ] ...present at the birth of his first child and that really has thrown the social scientists for a loop. They say this is heralding a ... the entry of a new era.

[ Scott ] A new ear.

[ Murray ] You know, some guy steps up and takes responsibility and they don’t know how to handle it.

[ Scott ] I was working for a reporting service when my wife was pregnant and I took the day off and she was delivering and I remember I was working for a very difficult fellow. They said, “What can you do?”

I said, “Look, it is possible that she might die. And I want... I am going to be there.”

[ Murray ] Yeah. It is not a sure thing by any means.

[ Scott ] You know it is not a sure thing.

[ Rushdoony ] That is a... an attitude that is gone. I hadn't heard anyone say that for I don’t know how many years, but that was not an unusual statement by men.

[ Scott ] No, it was always possible.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There could be complications.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But we don’t think of complications. We expect perfection from the doctors down. And on the rare occasions now when a doctor makes a mistake it is as though he had conspired to do evil the reaction is so hostile.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Everyone is supposed to bat 1000 now.

[ Scott ] It was an English boy I read about that was an exchange student in high school with his counterpart in the United States about 25 years or so ago. And he said he was asked about his experience here. He said, well, when he discovered they didn’t cane you he thought it was marvelous. It was heaven. And then he... and he said everybody was very pleasant when he first arrived. Then he said he did something wrong and everything turned cold. And he said if he had stayed in England and had done this he would have been caned and then everything would have been fine. But he said he was not punished and he was not forgiven and everything stayed cold for the rest of the time he was here and he said he never wanted to go back to the United States even on a visit thereafter. And that was an interesting point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Without punishment there is no forgiveness.

[ Rushdoony ] No cleansing. Yes. Well, that is why the old requirement of a confession of sins to a priest, to pastor or mainly in a the protestant tradition to God and to the person whom you offended was so healthy. There was a cleansing.

[ Scott ] It was a good feeling. Something that I ... I miss. My last confession as a Catholic was when I was 19 and the priest was silent for while. I had lots to tell. And he finally said, “Give more to the poor.”

[ Rushdoony ] Are you still giving?

[ Scott ] Yes, of course.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, it sets a pattern.

[ Scott ] Yes. And when I was a seaman we had a ... an understanding. We leant each other money. And if we saw the fellow again and he happened to have money he might pay us back, but it wasn’t an issue one way or the other. That was, of course, during the war.

[ Murray ] Well, we have got some amazing statistics about absentee fathers among divorced parents, something like 80 percent of the fathers either don’t pay child support or are not around. And the ... the government has structured the welfare system that doesn’t encourage them to stay around and then when the government finds out that it is going to cost them money then they pass laws and hunt them down.

[ Scott ] The aid for dependent children is only delivered to the woman and child if there is no man. So, of course, if they are ... if the man disappears then the woman and... and the child is supported by the government. It used to be a black problem more than a white problem and the statistic, I wouldn’t ... I don’t know enough about it to challenge, but one of the trouble with these statistics is although they pretend to be about human beings they don’t break down who. They don’t break down what kind of men. We don't get racial statistics. We don’t get ethnic statistics. We don’t really know who is doing what. It is all lumped as though everybody is the same and everybody behaves the same and everybody doesn’t.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, currently Colonel Doner with Monty Wilson and Joseph Mc Auliffe is holding a series of seminars for men across country. The last one he had before he visited was attended by 300 men. And what he finds is that these men are so harried on all sides by attacks on their masculinity by the general idea that men never do anything right that they feel incapable of acting so that they welcome the opportunity to be instructed in how to exercise authority and... as a man, how to be the head of the household, how to control the children and so on. So Colonel is doing a great work here in this respect.

[ Scott ] That is very good. That subject came up in an indirect way once with Liz and I reminded her that I had never struck her. And she said, “No, you never did,” but she said, “There was always an air of menace in the air.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is nearly over. Do you have a last word to say on this subject, Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, I hope that as many people as can have the opportunity with children send them to Christian schools because I think they would be more than pleased with the result, particularly when they take a look at the product that is being turned out by the public school system. And I think the... the... the voucher initiative, although there is a lot of, you know, pro and con about what it was going to accomplish and who was behind it and so forth, at least indicates that there is an unease, a growing unease in our society about what the public school system is doing with children. And at least it is causing people to evaluate and think about it...

[ Scott ] I think we should...

[ Murray ] ... a lot more.

[ Scott ] ...perhaps try to spread the idea that educational tenure should be abolished. If Johnny can’t read that might be a good idea to change the teachers.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, very good. 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.