From the Easy Chair

Crime

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 155-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DC195

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DC195, Crime, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 305, January 17, 1994.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss in this first hour the subject of crime. We will try to stay away from the subject of the federal government in Washington, DC in our discussion.

Now the subject of crime is an interesting one because the very word is of interest. Theologians and Christians will speak of sin, an offense against God. At one time crime in civil law was also an offense against God. Then it became an offense against the state. Subsequently, then, the state made its own law and crime became an offense against what the state decreed.

Under biblical law it could be said in this country and in other countries that ignorance of the law is no excuse and it was no excuse because everyone from early years on was exposed to biblical law. But today it is impossible not to be ignorant of the law, because you have a room full of federal statutes plus administrative laws that are enough to fill a library when you consider administrative laws on the urban, county, state and federal levels.

Crime is being separated from morality to become an offense against the state. As a result, because the state controls it and the state has destroyed Christian teaching in society, that is, in the schools, public occasions and meetings and so on, it is becoming a kind of esoteric thing. We are rearing a generation of barbarians. I can recall how in the mid to late 40s one could begin to find and in the 50s it became more common place, people who were getting married in church and coming out and kids gawking and wondering what it was all about. What are they doing? Getting married. What is that?

They had no comprehension of the basic order of society enough to recognize what marriage means.

Some of the implications of this were brought home to me by something that Dr. Ellsworth Mc Intire of Naples, Florida called to Dorothy’s attention and mine recently. His son in going by the school in the evening saw smoke arising in the back. He went there hurriedly to see what was burning and found that the fence by the school was burning. A neighbor who had already called the fire department had his hose and was putting it out. When the firemen arrived they were almost certain who it was and the caught the arsonists, six of them, ages six through 12, in the process of setting a fire to a house with people in it. They had performed a number of cases of arson in a very short period of time. And the law being what it is there was not much apparently that the authorities could do.

We have a great explosion of crime because we have had a total loss of sound moral teaching a and the situation is not going to get any better until there is a return to godly instruction at all levels of life.

Douglas, what would you like to add to that or any...

[ Murray ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] ...comments, critical or otherwise.

[ Murray ] Just some general observations, I think, that ... I think all of us aware that there are so many new laws, for instance, in the state of California, over 3000 of what they call laws are put on the books ever year and multiply that by all of the federal regulations and laws put... rulings by courts which have the force of law, people are no longer sure whether their actions are criminal or not, just in their normal course of their daily living. And, in fact, many people have simply adopted the attitude of—cynical or not—that they assume that all of their actions are now criminals and so they no longer make any distinction between normal human activity and ... and criminal action. They don’t take it seriously anymore. And I think that is the root of why there are so many scofflaws.

And we have so many laws on the books which are not enforced or, at least, not enforced adequately so that they have any lasting effect on the law breaker. And you don't hear about any mandatory sunset clauses that limit the length of time that a law is in effect to cure a temporary problem. They just keep writing laws and there is layer upon layer upon layer ad nauseum, so that... that... the... the distinction between what people used to regard as ... as a crime such as taking someone’s life or committing robbery or any of the other crimes what we call felonies are considered series crimes, have become diminished by the fact that there are... you break a law every time you walk out the door of your house. You can make acts... you can accidentally break a federal law simply by saying the wrong words to describe an ethnic or a racial group. You can no longer have a conversation any longer without breaking a law.

So people aren’t... aren’t taking the law very seriously because the... the... the people who write laws have written so many layers and so many laws that people just don't care anymore whether they follow the law. That is just my general observation in talking to people. They just don't care anymore.

[ Scott ] Well I think we have two... two situations that expand the subject beyond what it used to be. There has always been crimes against the people, you might say, basic crimes and regulations which are treated as crimes by the court and the government, but in my opinion we now have another... and two additional elements that make it more difficult. The first is that there is an underground war underway, mainly on the part of the blacks against the whites. And neither the government nor the press nor the people are willing to openly admit its existence. And that expands the number of crimes that are committed and the nature of the crimes that are committed. The other element is that the government indirectly recognizes this war by encouraging and following the universities and the social scientists in attempting to halt this underground war by controlling speech. And the courts have complicated the matter even further by confusing speech and action.

Now at one time you could only be convicted in court for an action, but now the difference between speech and action is blurred. You can burn the flag, for instance, and that is considered an action that you have a right to take. On the other hand... and you can attack the principle of patriotism or other traditional values and that is accepted as speech that you have more or less a right to take. But speech that infringes upon racial differences is forbidden.

Now we have a political situation in the country where we have multi races, we have multi religions, we have no law protecting these religions openly against offenses committed by someone of another religion. For instance, Christianity is fair game. But other religions are protected. Certain of our ethnic minorities are put in a practically sacred position against criticism and others can be criticized at will by anybody. So you have the whole difference between speech and action has entered an area of confusion. We have the politically correct vocabulary and it is a vocabulary and publishing houses are putting it out and the churches are altering the Scriptures to fit the new vocabulary. Bible translations are coming out that are politically correct. And we have hate crimes.

Now hate is not an action. Hate is a sentiment, a position, you might say, in which very few people can say that they are innocent of it, because as offered prejudice expressed against every group in the world in the United States depending upon whose ox has been gored in the past.

So the whole question of crime has now been expanded to the point, as you ... as you said, that it isn’t a question of leaving the house and committing a crime, it is a question of committing a crime by being whoever you are. Unless you are certain members... a certain members of a certain group. So when we talk about criminality now, we are really in an ocean of interpretations in which almost any of us could be snatched out of our houses and brought to trial and convicted, whereas other groups can express the most horrible obscenities, racially specific obscenities with absolute freedom. So we have the basic element of justice destroyed which was always based upon the idea that all men should be treated equally in terms of law.

Originally, of course, the English had a different way and I think they still have. You had to be tried by a jury of your peers which meant the house of Lords if you were an aristocrat. We... we haven’t covered the... entered into the matter of who is your peer today, although we should, because racial compositions of juries are not subject of actions and discussion. But that is going beyond the point. The point really is that we are now in a state of total confusion, legislatively, judicially and individually as to what is right, what is wrong, what is a crime, what is not.

[ M Rushdoony ] Yeah, well, the whole.... there are whole... a number of areas where we are basically ... our state is becoming... has become a... a... dictatorial. And to oppose public policy is to be an... an... an outlaw as far as the state is concerns another whole area is the use of environmental law, so-called environmental law.

There is a large subdivision that has been approved but the construction has... cannot begin because even after they approve it every various state agencies, even our school had to go through this. They give you a list of all these different agencies and groups that have to check off of a particular project, various Indian groups. There is possibility of having Indian remains or Indian settlements. Indian groups have to check off that you are not going to disturb their ... their sites. And you go down to different highway departments and they can all basic cost you your entire project or delay it for a year or two, just one of these agencies. But to give you an example of how the federal environmental law can cause a snafu, there is a large subdivision planned for {?} camp that has been approved, but the federal government has been delaying for months because there is apparently some kind of a pond on this property they want to develop. It has a leak in it. It is a man made pond. It has a leak in it. It has never held water year round. But some bureaucrat in their infinite wisdom declared it to be federal wet lands. It is on private property but because it has had water in it for a number of years thy declared it to be federal wet lands and they are delaying,... the whole project is delayed,.

You delay a project like that you can lose your funding. And just about anybody can come under federal law and they can’t enforce these laws on everyone so it ends up being selective. If you want to do something to your property or if you do do something and somebody wants to go after you and be nasty, they can report you to the proper... appropriate federal agencies. If you have a dam or a pond in your property that has got full of algae and if it is a stinking mess, but if ducks visit it, or even if they don’t visit it, if the government decides it is wet lands, they can tell you whether you have to maintain that and prevent you from, you know, improving it or removing it.

[ Murray ] Or in other words it has become a new control mechanism by the state over private property.

[ M Rushdoony ] And that is one aspect, I am sure. If we... if we went into business law we could find all other kinds of ways which the government can control, the government can dictate. If you want to sell insurance in this state you have to follow all the rules and if you do sell insurance they tell you you can’t stop selling insurance in this state if you don’t like their regulations. So we are all... seem to be employees and property of the state.

[ Scott ] Well, fundamentally yes. Fundamentally we own no property. Everything we have has been granted to us under the guise of a privilege. It is a privilege to buy a house. It is a privilege to live in it and you have to pay taxes on it every month or else you will lose the house. So you really cannot say that you own the house. You have to pay grant, in effect, to the government. And you have to have a license to perform any activity. Every activity outside the house is governed by the licensure so that government gives you, in effect, a permit in the form of a license. That this a permit. Without the permit you can not do this. You cannot cut somebody’s hair. You can’t have a business transaction without the government being a third party and paying the proper tax over the transaction and so forth.

But, as you say, it is selective because the government cannot follow every activity. Your bank account, for instance, is microfilmed. Now the microfilm isn’t sent to Washington and Washington doesn’t monitor your... your bank account or my bank account in most cases unless you attract the attention of some authority in the government and then they subpoena your... your bank account records from the bank and the bank has them and has to turn them over. So in that sense all your activities can become subject to special investigation and you would be, I think, even President Clinton is discovering to his dismay that we all leave a very, very voluminous record of our activities just by being alive in the country.

[ Murray ] Would you say that the root cause of a lot of this confusion is caused by judicial activism where they have passed laws ostensibly to cure a temporary problem? In effect, the court is legislating to... and they ... they will always make the comment, “Well, we will review this again in the future.”

[ Scott ] Well, I think if we go back to the beginning of the latest phase to the bussing, bussing was first proposed as a means of desegregating the schools and, of course, the neighborhoods and so forth in an attempt to overcome the gap between black citizens and white or black and others on the basis of a sociological study made by a sociologist, a black sociologist. That was what impelled Congress to enact forced bussing legislation and that went to the Supreme Court which then ruled that schools should be desegregated and that bussing was a valuable tool or mechanism for this.

Now the people of the United States objected to the bussing but they did it on hypocritical grounds. They kept saying they weren’t against integration. They were just against having the kid driven into the slums. But, of course, they were against integration. I mean they proved... they vote with their feet for segregation all the time. And the inability to stand up and be honest about their objection meant that they lost their case from the beginning. I am not saying that the case was a good case. I am simply saying that was the silent case.

Now the Supreme Court ruled on the sociological study. In other words, they ruled on social scientific grounds and almost all of the modern legislation that is coming in is based on social science. It is not based on the traditional idea of justice. It is based on social science which is inherently dedicated to managing the way we live, think and act, based upon Freudian type analyses of our motives.

[ Murray ] How much science, really, is there to sociology?

[ Scott ] There is no science to it at... at... at all.

[multiple voices]

[ Murray ] So do we simply call it a science?

[ Scott ] They... they call it... they called it a science because when Freud emerged out of the psychiatric school of his day the word science made everything sound really good. It was...

[ Murray ] It was a sales pitch.

[ Scott ] It was a sales pitch. I remember that a very good historian excepting for that little foible called himself a scientific historian. People used to call themselves a scientific this and scientific that. Nobody can define it.

[ Rushdoony ] I think in order to understand what has happened one of the key figures in determining the nature of sociology, well, two. Very early the work of Comte was that there were three stages to human thinking. The first was mythological or religious. The second was philosophical. And the third was sociological. And in terms of sociology we are not seeking for the meaning of things, but their use.

Then another sociologist of very great importance has had a powerful impact upon this century, Emil Durkheim. Durkheim was a far more appealing figure than Comte and. a better writer, I would say, but Emil Durkheim in particular his, I believe the correct title is the rules of sociological method, laid down some premises which have profoundly influenced modern thought and modern education.

I know that in a major university in the South some few years ago I asked the students how many of them had had to read at least a chapter, if not more, of Durkheim and almost everyone in an audience of maybe 600,800 raised their hand.

Durkheim pointed out in his Rules of Sociological Method was this. Now his presupposition, of course, being there is no God nor truth. He held that criminals are evolutionary pioneers, that they are exploring the next step in evolution so that when they commit murder or rape or theft or arson or whatever the case may be, they represent not what the Christian thinks of as sin, but a human push forward trying to expand the boundaries of the human potential so that every criminal is potentially an evolutionary pioneer because he is experimenting with the boundaries of society’s toleration and potentiality.

Durkheim’s thinking has led in this century to a progressive toleration for the crime, a defense of the criminal so that you have, as we do today in Washington, DC, Janet Reno, an attorney general of the United States who believes that she is there to protect the guilty.

Well, the guilty from the standpoint of an antiquated Christian culture as these people see it are people who are potentially pioneers. They are the ones who are ready to push the boundaries out a bit further. And there have been in the past year especially a number of homosexual men and women who have described themselves as pioneers in history because they pushed against the boundaries of biblical law. And they are the martyrs of Humanism so that they can be very, very eloquent in calling attention to these martyrs of the cause.

Certainly in the march on Washington last year, April, 1993, the many speakers on that occasion upheld such a point of view. So we have a moral deconstruction under way. This is what P C, political correctness is about. It is in favor of this moral deconstruction which obliterates all meaning as we have traditionally known it so that you have a Yale professor declaring that it isn’t what Shakespeare or Milton said that is important, but what they claim reinterpreting everything in terms of their feeling what Shakespeare and Milton really meant so that they wind up with something totally alien. Just as these people can go to the texts in the Bible which speak of God calling homosexuals dogs and ordering their death and wind up saying that the Bible is a pro gay book. I think the classical example of turning meaning upside down or destroying it totally is one that Dinesh D’Asuza called attention to in Illiberal Education a statement by the poetess who took part in the inauguration of Clinton. She said, “I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.” Of this she was absolutely certain. And in terms of this existential deconstructist thinking, of course, she was very much in line.

Another major current of thought in the modern world has been Existentialism. A great figure in this century was John Paul Sartre. And Existentialism says that meaning is not to be derived from anything in the past, from the Church, from God or from the state even. So Existentialism and its part in the new left was, essentially, anarchistic. Only the moment and your feeling in the moment determines meaning. So it is a totally personal determination. Again, this is very much I line with or at least congenial to the thinking of Comte. It also ties in with what I just cited about Maya Angelou—not her real name, of course. She knew that Shakespeare had to be a woman, a black woman.

Well, if the only valid criterion is the impulse of your biological being then, of course, Shakespeare can be a black woman and the law of gravity can be abolished at any time you choose.

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, it seems to me that the liberals continue to artfully construct a succession of rationalizations for criminal behavior. They start out with the devil made me do it and then the Twinkie defense. I was temporarily insane. And now I am simply an evolutionary hero.

[ M Rushdoony ] The latest one is a victim.

[ Murray ] You know, that is...

[ M Rushdoony ] That is... that is...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is the big one now. I am a victim, therefore I can rape and murder.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] ...and whatever.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, someone wrote recently that everybody is using victimhood, all the minority groups, all of the racial groups, all the poorer groups. So now the in thing increasingly with the white majority is victimhood also. I was sexually molested by my parents or something like that so that victimhood has become a universal copout.

[ Scott ] Well, what we are really talking about is the flight from reality.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The idea of denying reality by means of various and sundry explanations. Candor, that little publication from Great Britain which you and I both get, I believe, in its latest issue had a news item about a woman who was mugged in London or somewhere in England, dragged along, by the way, while the mugger wrestled her purse away from her. Nobody interfered with him. But she reported it to the police and she gave all the details excepting that when it came to identity although she had been mugged by a black man she said she had been mugged by a white man, because she couldn’t admit that mugging is a black specialty. And neither can most people. But I think that denial of reality marks what we are talking about.

Now Sartre, as an unspeakable fellow, and... and none of the others that you have mentioned, Durkheim and the rest who are what anyone would up as honorable people. But here we get into the business of the word and the deed again. The word is placed above the deed. The essence of the activities are constantly being denied in a flood of words. The fact of the matter is we are, I think, as a nation, heading towards a bloody collision between the races. And nothing is going to stop it because nobody will admit it. It is not supposed to happen. The schools are supposed to be producing educated and very liberal and tolerant people and it is producing the most prejudiced generation yet, much more prejudiced than my generation, because we can sense that the modern liberal uses it we were not prejudiced.

I have never heard any race or group of people criticized in my parents’ home. And I myself sailed and worked with black people. I have worked with every ethnic group in New York that you can think of. And racial and ethnic hatred which appears in print and in TV and in the movies in the most obnoxious terms in the movies constantly we hear racial epithets in the movies as well as obscenities which we never used in private conversation even in this country.

So here we have a rising tide of racial animosity while today Martin Luther King Day we hear sanctimonious speeches from all our elite on how much further progress we have to make and the progress is taking us straight into the rocks.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I can’t argue with that. I think that the media has a heavy burden of guilt. They have covered up so much and reduced all offenses that people commit to victimhood. That ties in with environmentalism because victimhood says the environment of people or of things made me do it. I am a product of environment. That goes back, of course, to the Garden of Eden where Adam did not say, “I sinned. I did that which was evil in thy sight,” but, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me she did give me and I did eat. It is the woman’s fault and even more, God, it is your fault. You gave her to me. I was a fine, upright man until that woman came along. So I was booby trapped. And you had a hand in it.”

And on that day sociology was born. So ...

[ Murray ] It hasn’t... it hasn’t stopped.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Murray ] The... the idea of blaming somebody else, I mean, this is ... it crosses our whole society.

[ Scott ] Well, the inability to confront reality is deadly. If you cannot confront the fact that you are imperfect and if you cannot admit the fact that you make mistakes, you cannot possibly improve. And that is the condition in which the country has talked itself into. We have made tremendous mistakes in the United States both in terms of our handling of the rest of the world, our treatment of other people and our treatment of our own people. We helped to destroy the colonial world that Britain and the rest of Europe, western... western Europe took 500 years to create. And we had nothing to replace it with excepting a bunch of words about democracy and votes.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the interesting anthropological analyses at the beginning of the century or the last years of the last had to do with guilt versus face culture, the fact that in many cultures the world over face is what counts, maintaining your façade. And it is not a concern with wrong doing or sin, but with appearance. The western world, as a result of Christianity, has had a guilt culture. It has recognized that the problem is that you do wrong, others do wrong and you have got to face up to the fact of your sin and guilt in order to remedy matters, but we have—and John Dewey has had a major role in this—a conversion of western culture from guilt to a face emphasis so that today increasingly a façade is what matters to more and more people in the western world.

[ Scott ] Well, we have gotten into the position where opinion is placed higher than behavior. You have to express the right opinion. There is a trap in this in which the church falls more often than not. If the fellow sitting in the second pew says the right thing about the service, well, then, he is a good Christian. As long as he is in the church, as long as he is sitting in that particular building. But when he goes out, what... how does he behave. And this very often deep contradiction is very seldom brought to his attention or to anyone else’s. And I remember very clearly years ago when I was much more socialistic than I am today to understate the matter, I really felt that if I said the right thing that I was being a good guy. And I didn't have to follow through in terms of behavior, because I had already said the right thing. All men are brothers and so forth. I had the right party position.

The whole country is now operating on that basis. As long as you say the right thing you are ok. In the meantime ordinary behavior is on a steep decline.

[ Rushdoony ] And the right thing is not right in terms of God, but right in terms ...

[ Scott ] ... of the prevailing fashion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. People look not to God for their model, but to what others are doing.

One of the most amusing episodes over the years as a pastor that I encountered was when this young man, very much a drinker and a brawler and when I say a brawler when he was angry and had a few drinks he would tackle not one, but several and usually laid them out pretty well, which was painful because usually the arresting officer was a relative in that particular community.

Well, at any rate, he got converted. And just as he put everything into a fight he put everything into his faith and beginning with day one when he came to church he asked before he came he said, “You take up a collection, don’t you?” Yes. “Well, what am I supposed to put into it?” Well God requires a tithe and a gift is only above and over a tithe. “Ok.”

So he came there with a wad of bills and just put it right in the plate sitting in the front row. And the man who was taking the collection was upset and he growled after the service, “What is he trying to do, show us all up?” All he could do was look at this fellow not at God, not at what he should do. This fellow was setting a wrong standard as far as he was concerned. And we have that in very serious as well as amusing ways all around us.

[ Scott ] Well we go into this matter of speech. It is an interesting matter. I have a book on pornography and the law which goes through the progression of how the courts have progressively ruled that pornographic expression is protected by the Constitution. Now Justice Bork took issue with that. He said free speech in the mind of the Constitutional writers meant free political speech. It didn’t mean blasphemy and it didn’t mean pornography. It mean the right to criticize the government. Now that has been totally reversed. You can have free pornographic speech, but you cannot have free political speech.

[ Rushdoony ] There is a professor in Canada who has waged war against all who try to condemn pornography because he insists that the basic value, the one value in society is that a man has a right to fulfill his needs. Now he puts no strings on that. He, of course means that emphatically where pornography is concerned, but what about rape and murder, theft, every kind of crime? If your value is just to fulfill your needs, then you have no law in society. And, of course...

[ Scott ] He doesn’t really mean that, because if you applied it to him he would be the first to take you to court.

[ Rushdoony ] True, but he is a professor who is teaching this. And is it any wonder that our society is where it is? The wonder is that it is not any worse.

[ Scott ] Well let’s take blasphemy. There is no right legally speaking to do anything about blasphemy. I remember when if you said the wrong thing to a fellow he would knock you down, but today that would get you a lawsuit that would last 25 years, because you are not supposed to be able to be insulted, unless you belong to one or another minority group which is officially labeled as insultable, you might say. But I think the distinction between the pornographic speech which he is using his tenure to say he has a right to do that and political speech is the most salient distinction we have.

[ Murray ] I couldn’t help think this morning after the news of that earthquake in Los Angeles came out, you know, Los Angeles is regarded as the pornography capital of the world and the freeways keep getting knocked down by huge earthquakes so people who are in the pornography business can’t get to work. I just wonder if there is any correlation there.

[ Scott ] It is not even a city. It is an... it is a conglomeration of buildings and people. It has no character. It has no soul. It has no ethos. It doesn’t even have a nationality.

[ Murray ] It is too big to work.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is not one of the biggest cities in the world by any means.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] You have to realize the big cities are in places like Mexico, the Far East, Latin America...

[ Scott ] That is true. And San Paolo, Brazil...

[ Rushdoony ] Africa.

[ Scott ] ... is, I think, something like 16 or 18 million. Very few people here ever heard of it. Don’t even know where it is on a map. Cairo. I talked to a barber from Cairo whose wife is in Cairo and making an awful lot of money with a small shop and I said, “Selling what?” He said, “What does it matter? If you have a piece of land in the city of Cairo, there are so many people there that you ... you have to make money.”

[ Murray ] Well, Los Angeles is too diverse to work. Most culturalism is ...

[ Scott ] Well our cities used to be neighborhood cities. There was a German Town in New York, Mott Street an Esther Street were Jewish. There was an Irish section and a Polish and so forth. And there was a great deal of mutual toleration. I don't recall any neighborhoods every fighting another neighborhood in New York.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, at least until 18 years ago Los Angeles had that character. It was like a collection of villages.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, crime is increasingly a concern and it is interesting that a biblical idea is getting a slight revival in that there is a measure that may get on the ballot in the next election here, three strikes and you are out.

Now the idea is really a revival of something that used to be the law in this state and across the country. Only it is rather three strikes and you are dead. Three convictions and as a habitual criminal you were put to death.

Now it is...

[ Scott ] When... when... when was that?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, it was the law in California before World War II. It was last on the books in 1972 when on appeal from a southern state it was overturned by the U S Supreme Court.

[ Scott ] Convictions of ... of... of any sort?

[ Rushdoony ] Any sort on the third or fourth conviction you were a habitual criminal and you were executed and I recall a case that attracted some notice where the man on the third conviction had been guilty of only a 20 dollar theft.

[ Scott ] That was in Texas, I think.

[ Rushdoony ] But the point that was made at the time he had no record of being gainfully employed so apart from these convictions he had been getting by with crime over the years.

[ Scott ] Well, I have several thoughts about criminal law in the United States. Of course today it is a travesty. We have, I understand, about two million black criminals who have committed many more than three crimes and in some cases serial murders. And I have read that if those two million were put away the rest of the black community would present no problem at all. They would be the rest of the 30 million or whatever it is are good citizens. And I think it is probably a lot of credibility to that. I think that professional criminals always compromise a very small element excepting now when you could be convicted of almost anything. So if we had three convictions today a great many people might go away.

[ Rushdoony ] These are criminal convictions.

[ Scott ] Yeah. Even there. Even there.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] They have been... I mean, we will take, for instance, Mr. Keating and the savings and loan. Keating was convicted of more than three crimes so he could be executed on the spot. And yet I have grave doubts about what Keating did wrong.

[ Rushdoony ] I agree with you there, but that is not the type of crime that was dealt with when we had the three or four strikes and you are out.

[ Scott ] You are thinking of violent physical crimes?

[ Rushdoony ] That... yes. They were theft, murder, rape, arson.

[ Scott ] Keating...

[ Rushdoony ] Those types of crimes.

[ Scott ] Keating was convicted of theft.

[ Rushdoony ] But it did eliminate a professional class of criminals except for a small element that could get by. And it did give us a much, much better country. Now, having abolished that, we are being forced back to it step by step so that you have not only here in California, but across country a demand for such a law.

[ Scott ] Well, we have failed signally in treating criminals. In most of the countries of eastern Europe, I don’t know about western Europe, a criminal... a man convicted or a person convicted of a crime was given a double sentence, so much in terms of imprisonment and punishment and the loss of civil liberties or civil rights, I should say, for a limited period of time. At the end of the punishment his civil rights were restored so that he had the chance to go back and make a decent occupation or career for himself. We do not do this. The United States never forgives. Forgiveness does not enter into the American consciousness and yet this is a very Christian country.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] The loss of civil rights here is permanent for any felon.

[ Rushdoony ] Not quite, Otto. It used to be common place and I know of specific cases, at least in the western states I have familiarity with and specifically in California. If after your conviction and your release you could demonstrate to a court on petition that you had been a law abiding, working member of society for a given time, which varied from state to state, your citizenship was restored.

[ Scott ] Well, I am glad to hear that. I didn’t know that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I have never read that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That was routine, at least in the western half of the United States.

In this particular matter of the initiative here, three strikes and you are out, one of the arguments used against it by politicians is that we will never be able to build enough jails to house all those that then would be permanently in prison.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] But the answer to that is they will just move on to other states after two convictions rather than taking a chance here.

[ Scott ] Well, there is another thing, that is the silent strike by the judges against the application of the death penalty.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In ... in Texas there are over 300 prisoners on death row, 317, I think. I have just read about it. They have over 300 under sentence of death, some of them for as long as 15 or 20 yeas and similar numbers piling up in all the other states that have the death penalty. The judges simply do not want to apply it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, that is very, very true.

Well, our time is almost up. Is there a last sentence or statement anyone would like to make?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I think one of the reasons people don’t want to forgive is because they don’t think justice is being done. They don’t think people are being punished. Yet California’s attorney general recently has proposed that child molesters, their names be published until they have... if hey move into a neighborhood people have to be aware they are in the neighborhood. And people are all in favor of that because they think they shouldn’t be out in the first place. They think that justice was never done and if justice was done they shouldn’t have a problem these people being in their neighborhoods.

[ Scott ] Well, there is a lot to that, although I will say that the accusations of molestation have reached horrendous proportions and cannot really be trusted.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is true, too.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, will you like to say something?

[ Murray ] No. I think that they should graft a giant wart on the end of their nose so that they would be {?} identifiable.

[ Scott ] Maybe a tattoo.

[ Murray ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Well....

[ Murray ] The American Civil Liberties Union would never allow it.

[ Rushdoony ] Our time is 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.