Miscellaneous

The Crisis of Accountability - What is to Be Done - Crime and Crisis in our Legal System

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-1

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: The Crisis of Accountability - What is to Be Done - Crime and Crisis in our Legal System

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Audience Leader] I thought about the best way to introduce our principle speaker this evening, Dr. R.J. Rushdoony, and there are many things I could say about Rush, I could talk about the more than 20 books he’s written- I guess it’s more than twenty- I could talk about the thousands of volumes in his library which he has read; there is much that I could say. But let me just say that in my opinion if the history of this era is written a hundred years from now or beyond then, the name that will be remembered will not be the Ronald Reagans and the Franklin Roosevelt’s and the Jimmie Carters, so much as R.J. Rushdoony. R.J. Rushdoony is truly one of the great teachers in the history of mankind, and so the great principles which he teaches are the principles of the sovereignty of God, and the principle that the Judeo Christian heritage of Western Civilization is the basis for our law system, and that when law departs from God’s word, it ceases to be legitimate. But I will let him give you more on that in the context of his perspective on the problem of crime in American society.

Let me introduce his remarks by quoting to you from a very interesting column by Patrick Buchanan, which I think frames what R.J. Rushdoony will be saying very well; bear with me as I read this, please excuse my flu tinged voice.

“Several weeks ago in the fishing community of New Bedford Massachusetts, an incident occurred which in the (?) cliché, shocked the nation. A twenty one year old woman who had entered a seedy bar called Big Dan’s, was set upon, tossed up on a pool table, and repeatedly raped. While she cried for help the patrons cheered the lads on, until an hour or so later she escaped, screaming, into the street.

In the American way of protest, a candlelight demonstration was held outside city hall. Participants carried signs such as: “Rape is not a spectator sport.” Disgraceful and disgusting though the episode was, the boys night at Big Dan’s is the predictable and predicted climax to half a century of what modern man yet chooses to call progress. What really did we expect? Fifty years ago, had some patron laid a hand on that woman in any bar in America he would have been beaten senseless. America was a country where women were respected, women were safe. Rape was not only a hanging offense, it was not infrequently a lynching offense. When Caryl Chessman went to the gas chamber for a sex attack on a little girl, after a dozen years on death row, most Americans felt he got exactly what he deserved. In the last two decades however, Americas Progressives, horrified at Chessman’s execution, won their long war against the death penalty. Executions for rape were outlawed by the Supreme Court as cruel and unusual punishment. Rape became more and more common, an American crime.

As the external protections of women, the scaffold and the law collapsed, the internal ones were likewise crumbling. Years ago, sex was a matter of utmost gravity in a Christian country. Two of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, drilled into every child in school and home and church, dealt directly with the religious proscriptions. With the official disparagement of religious teaching, those Ten Commandments were regarded as hoary old taboos. Indeed, they cannot now even be posted in Public Schools. As religion was driven out, sex education came in- a new form of sex education, divorced of the old morality, the old time religion. ‘Sex is good, sex is healthy, sex is fun.’ If a 15 year old girl wants to become, quote: “sexually active” all she need to do is go down to Planned Parenthood and get fitted by the end of the afternoon.

Nobody but the moral majority would argue that her parents ought to be told. What the educational system taught, the popular culture seconded: sex is no big deal. Contradicting the experience of ten thousand vice officers, President Johnsons Commission on Obscenity and Pornography discovered no harmful effects in the latter. Perhaps some beneficial ones. Hardcore pornography was not only legalized, it was hastily commercialized. For a few bucks on your hotel bill in New York City, you can see enacted on your TV a scene not dissimilar to the one the patrons were cheering up at Big Dan’s.

“What’s the big deal?” the rapists must be wondering in their jail cells in New Bedford. “We were only having fun.” What the feminists and those good folks holding candles outside that city hall want is something they will never find, a secular and demystified substitute for the moral sanction against animalistic behavior, historically provided by religion. Cut the Christian roots to Western Civilization, and be not surprised that the traditions, customs and laws fed by those roots have withered away. If our Progressives insist on teaching children they are descended from monkeys, they ought not to be excessively judgmental when some of the kids grow up and behave like ‘fun loving’ apes.”

With that as preface, let me give you R.J. Rushdoony. Rush? (applause)

[Rushdoony] About a decade ago, a police detective told me something which in substance was confirmed by a number of other men in police work. He said the situation with regard to crime was out of control. He said that when approximately 2% of the population (?), misdemeanors are no longer dealt with. Certain felonies are dropped out of police consideration, and there is a slow and steady retreat. At the same time, he said, what the criminals represent is as it were the fever sore on the body politic. And the population at large represents a softened attitude with regard to moral standards, so that the legal system itself begins to falter.

A friend who retired from the Pentagon just a few years ago told me that a neighbor whom he had previously respected was on the jury involving a very ugly case, in which the offender was a young hoodlum. The hoodlum was acquitted. And when this man jumped his friend and neighbor, the man said: “I couldn’t sentence him, the next time it could be my son.” Now that attitude is increasingly prevalent.

When crime reaches a certain portion of the population as a way of life, the situation is out of hand. Yesterday on the plane I picked up before boarding a copy of the April 11th Time Magazine. The cover article is Fighting Cocaine’s Grip, Millions of Users, Billions of Dollars. Let me read one small portion of that article. I quote: “Experience drug police are inclined to believe that their efforts against Cocaine will amount in the end to a token fight. “All we can hope to do,” said Sergeant (?) of San Francisco’s drug squad: “Is prevent someone from setting up a cocaine stand in Union square.” One Federal official who has been with the DEA since it began in 1973 has no heroic notions of putting an end to cocaine runs. “We feel like we are part of a spectator sport,” he says. “We are not the answer. The answers are going to be found in your wallets and your conscience.”

This is why demands for law and order which are in and of themselves based on a sound premise, are still ineffectual. I am a strong believer in law and order, but you cannot have law and order in a moral chaos, in a moral vacuum. It is interesting to note that soon after the Enlightenment began its sorry course in Western History, James, or rather George the 1st of the house of Hanover came to the throne in England. At the same time they were facing a very serious problem of crime. They went for stiff law and order, and increased the number of hanging penalties. At the same time, they also passed the first Riot Act. The criminals were becoming so commonplace in London and throughout England that they were often rioting and taking over entire communities. But the Riot Acts did not help. Hangings became so routine that even stealing a loaf of bread could lead you to the gallows- but it made no difference. There was no difference until the Evangelical reawakening changed people, and therefore changed society.

Let me say just parenthetically here, and I am going to deal with this subject in one of our Chalcedon position papers by early summer: ultimately the law and order problem represents the failure of the churches. Let me add one thing more: the second largest importer of world socialism today is the Christian missionary operation, which in the form of liberation theology is propagating socialism the world over. It is being done by Catholics and Protestants, by Modernists and Fundamentalists, by Arminian’s and Calvinists, and it is creating as much evil abroad as the dereliction of the churches is creating here in this country.

We are seeing one area of law enforcement after another show a receding enforcement. There are great areas in the West where pot is grown in National Forests. In one area I know of, and newspapers in the west coast carried a series of articles for about ten days about the situation, university students fought in the 60’s that a vast area of timberland be set aside as a wilderness area; it was done. Then they moved in and began to grow pot, which they are doing now in connection with the mafia. The sheriffs men do not dare go in there; in fact, one helicopter which flew at as high an altitude as possible over the area spotted two dead bodies of people who were still under the illusion that it was a wilderness area.

The attitude of law enforcement people that a place like that requires almost a full scale warfare, and a loss of some men to go in and do something about it. So they have their hands full, and they do nothing.

The problem of crime is a problem of government. Now that seems to contradict what I have been saying. Let me repeat: The problem of crime is a problem of government; but when we say that we have to ask then: “What is government?” and it is at this point that our thinking has gone so sadly astray. When we talk about government today, we mean the state, and this is seriously in error. If we go back to the Colonial period, and the early constitutional period, no one in speaking of government would mean thereby the state. They meant first of all the self government of the covenant man, his responsible rule of his own life and of everything that was under his domain, so that self government was seen as the basic government, not the state. Equally important in their consideration as the key realm of government was the family, because the family is a government which unfortunately too seldom governs these days- but a very basic area of government.

So thus we have first of all the self government of every man, second we have the family, third we have the church, which again has lost its grip on government. It neither teaches people how to govern themselves, nor does it govern them; and it tolerates within its ranks every kind of garbage. Then fourth, we have the school which historically has been a very important area of government- which again is failing to govern, and again has become a major source of lawlessness, rather than government. Then a fifth area of government which still has some integrity is your vocation. Your vocation at least governs you in that it commands a certain amount of your time, and imposes certain restrictions on your time, and requires a certain performance of you- less and less I am afraid- in order to hold your position.

Then 6th, society is a form of government, which historically has been very important. People have been governed by what their neighbors believed and required of them, in fact there is a long tradition which is worth investigating, although almost nothing has been written on the subject in our time- customary law. Customary law. Laws whereby it was assumed that the community could intervene at any time, and in terms of long established principles, deal with an offender. These still existed when I was a boy. If a man were guilty of abusing his wife physically, the neighbors called on him, the neighboring men, and they made it clear what their displeasure was, and said he would either conform or they would deal with him. Not too long ago I met, not much before his death, an old Pennsylvanian whose wife was a distant relative of my wife; and I asked him if he knew anything about customary laws, and he laughed, and he said: “Oh yes, they were very effective.” He said: “We didn’t have the trouble with abuse of children and abuse of wives by men.” And I said: “What did you do in your part of the country?” and he said: “Well,” and he named a specific instance, and he said: “We did what we always did, the man was being abusive towards his wife, so we called on him, just a friendly, neighborly call, and we took off his clothes and dragged him ass-backwards through a field of nettles, and we told him that if he repeated his performance we would become really offended.”

Now, I cite this to give you an idea of how extensive government once was. Civil government, the seventh kind of government, once was a limited area of government. In fact, when De Tocqueville came to this country he said that the real government of the United States was its private associations, which is still something else that I have not yet described. What were these private associations? We would call them ‘tithe agencies.’ Let me give you an example. I did a little bit of studying of Salem Massachusetts some few years ago. In 1795, Salem had 2,500 people, a village. 50 years later in 1845 it had 45,000 people, so it had doubled and re-doubled, time and again. But it was still a quiet, Puritan community in 1845. Why? It had had masses of migrants landing there, not only those who stayed, but those who moved westward into other parts of Massachusetts and other states. Every ship that landed at the docks was met by an array of people: first there was housing for the seamen on those ships, and a chaplain. That kind of thing you can find in Melville’s Moby Dick, where Father Marple is the chaplain in this institution. Now, there were groups that met the immigrant families, and dealt with finding housing for them; others that had schools where they taught them English; others of these associations would have job core training for the men, all funded with the tithes of Christians. Others would teach the women home making, the foods that were commonly used in this country. Others provided Christian schools for the children.

This is what made this country, because as De Tocqueville said in a famous footnote which is too often left out in abridged editions- it is a footnote that took up most of the page- he warned, writing about 1830, that if the United States did not immediately develop a large, standing army, it would be faced with revolution in a few years. He said that there were no slums in Europe to compare with those in the United States, that he questioned whether even in places like Calcutta there would be like conditions. Why? Well, we had no immigration laws in those days, and the minute we became a free country what Britain and France and Germany and other countries did was to give any condemned criminal, whether condemned to death or to a term in prison, a choice: “We will give you a ticket to the United States.” And naturally, they took it. They landed here and in every city where such an army of lawless people, that in the five points area of New York City, the police only dared to go in by platoons. What happened? Well, tithe agencies went in, and in not too many years they turned those areas into law abiding ones, and made this country what it is.

But what we have now is that the state equates itself with government, and when we talk about government we are talking about the state; and we are moving to that situation where, as in the Soviet Union, society and the state are identical. All ability of anyone to govern themselves is suppressed. If all of us here were living in a Soviet housing project, and I became ill and could not work and therefore was hungry, if you decided to take up an offering and help me, you would be in danger with the Soviet Authorities! You would be indulging a counter revolutionary activity, because you would be creating a government outside the Soviet state. Society and the state are one and the same in the Soviet Union, or better, society is not allowed to exist. This means that the only possibility in the Soviet Union is the state or revolution. Now we have not yet reached that point, but we are on that road, and unless we begin to restore government in all the spheres in which it exists outside the state, we are in trouble.

Let me add parenthetically, this is something that our foundation hopes as we are able to grow and get the funding, to do, to get training programs to teach people government- but not statist government; government that restores itself in society.

One of the basic, in fact the first commandment given to man in scripture, is to exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. The dominion mandate is too often forgotten in our time. Now, the dominion mandate was not given to Caesar, it was not given to the Federal government or the Soviet government, or to any Civil government, but to man as an individual, and as a family, and we had better work for the restoration of that, the kind of government that made us into a great people.

Now let us turn to our legal system and crime. One of the disasters we have today, and which we take for granted as though it were a fact of life from the beginning of time, is the prison system. As a matter of fact, the prison system is a modern innovation. It goes back to Quaker Liberals. These Quaker Liberals, believing as the Quakers do that every man has in himself a spark of divinity, the inner light, which if given an opportunity will take over and make him naturally good, said that if we create by acts of state monastic agencies where every offender has his own cell, there in that solitude the inner light can take over their lives. That is how we get the word ‘cell’ for our prisons, they were created to be monasteries where these men were going to save themselves, as they meditated in their cells. This is a long and an interesting history, which has bred one disaster after another.

But, when we go back to the Bible, to the law as it is given in Moses, we find that prisons only existed to hold a person pending trial. He was then sentenced, either to execution or to restitution, and restitution was twofold to fivefold, depending on the nature of the offense. In other words, if a man stole a hundred dollars, he had to restore a hundred dollars plus another hundred; in certain types of offensives the restitution had to be fourfold or fivefold, because the particular kind of offense had implications and consequences that were far reaching.

Now, restitution thus had as its focal point the offended party. He was the one to whom restitution had to be made. But in the modern era we have said that the offended party is the state; the state of California vs John Doe. Well, it may have been you or myself who were robbed, but no, the state says: “The crime was against us.” So what happens to us doesn’t matter. One man I know who was stuck with a bad check by a real bad check artist who turned out to be a professional, was very indignant when the man was given a suspended sentence in order to get him out of California as fast as possible, with a little incentive from the police. And he said: “But what about my money?” And the judge rebuked him for being a vengeful person.

Now, if the man were a habitual criminal, then he was sentenced to death; and for some offenses on the first offense, to death. As a matter of fact the last law requiring the death penalty for habitual criminals was only struck down in the early 70’s, was it not? It was once commonplace in this country, and I can remember as a boy, when no matter whether the offense was small or great, a habitual criminal was on the third or fourth offense executed; and the premise was that, which as Moses said: “So shall you put iniquity out of the land.” You didn’t allow a professional criminal class to develop, if a man were a professional criminal, then he was eliminated.

Now, I think it is interesting to note that the restitution system is beginning to come back. Let me add, by the way, it never went out entirely in one area: if you stole from the Federal government, you had to make restitution to the Federal government, and a taxpayer cannot, with bankruptcy or anything, escape what he owes to the IRS. The Federal government at this one point has had a strand of Biblical premise to its thinking- unfortunately almost the only area.

But, restitution is beginning to make a comeback, in some instances unfortunately it is not in its Biblical form. The state makes the restitution, which means the taxpayer pays again- he pays for the mans keep in prison, and he pays for the restitution that is made to himself via taxes. But some states are beginning to give judges the option of sentencing a man to restitution. A friend of mine, Judge Paul Mitchell Wright in North Carolina was instrumental in getting the first law of that sort onto the statute books, and while some judges are hesitant about making use of it, those who are, are finding that it is very helpful.

As a matter of fact, sometimes restitution is being required when the state law doesn’t actually call for it; to cite an example, and I could give you other examples of this, a very wonderful friend (Anstropini?) of Sacramento California, was on her vacation and with her husband who was going to see some relatives, and they stopped in Reno and went to a shopping mall, and someone tried to snatch her purse. (Ann?) would not surrender it. She only had $14 in it, but being a good Conservative and an activist, as she told her husband afterwards- Elmer was quite indignant about what she went through for $14, and she said: “It wasn’t the money, it was the principal of the thing!” Well, Ann is a little strip of a woman, and she wrapped her arm around that bag, and the man picked her up and threw her to the ground and did everything to shake her loose from it; meanwhile some of the shopkeepers in the mall saw what was happening and called the police, and they came and got the man.

When Anne left the hospital, the police asked her to come in and sign the complaint. The young man was a university drop out from somewhere who was into drugs, and Anne said: “I’d rather not sign this, I don’t believe in prison, I don’t think it is going to do him any good. I believe in restitution.” She explained it to the police sergeant, and he said: “Well, lady, we will work that out.” He said: “You sign this, and we have got enough eye witnesses that we can get a confession out of him, and we will tell him that if he signs a confession which we can use if he goes astray, we will put him in a halfway house- while you have been in the hospital we’ve been drying him out- then he can go out and work during the day, stay at the house at night, and make restitution to you.” And she said: “Fine. I am not going to hold him to more than double restitution, and here are the hospital bills.”

Well, the story worked out beautifully; the young man is now, this is about three years after he completed his restitution, working in a drug rehabilitation center with other young people, and Anne had a visit from his parents, who are most grateful. But restitution does offer us something that is important- it deals effectually with the problem of crime, it makes restoration, which the law now does not do. The principle of restitution- and some kinds of restitution require, you see, the death penalty- eliminates the offender where he must be eliminated.

Moreover, in terms of the Biblical standard, there is a moral liability on the part of the bystander. The bystander as in the case in New England, that horrible case of rape, is always equally guilty. Thus in terms of this, the liability of the bystander, we also involve everyone in the responsibility for law enforcement. As a matter of fact, we have a term that still survives, but not in the law, ‘hue and cry,’ hue and cry. This was a legal term when the pursuit of a criminal was begun, let us say a man fleeing the scene of a crime. Every citizen was required, every male citizen, to engage in the hue and cry, and to work to overtake the offender; and every citizen had the police power, which is a power we all still have, one power we delegate without surrendering.

Moreover, when we look at crime from the perspective of Biblical law, we find that as we look at theft for example, you have simple theft first of all where a man takes something lawlessly; complex theft where one does it as a member of a group; then indirect or legalized theft, when men by law, framing iniquity or mischief by law, the Bible says, enact evil, enact a crime; and of course most of the laws enacted in the past half century have been framing iniquity by law. They have enacted envy, they have enacted class warfare, the rich against the poor; they have penalized people for being more successful.

We have a tax structure which is envy enacted, and wherever we turn, we find today this kind of theft common to most people. You remember, when I began I said that when two percent of a population are criminal, law and order becomes a retreating fact; because at the same time there has been a decay in the population at large, and it is that decay I am talking about now. Envy. Envy today is the foundation of a great deal of our legislation, a great deal of our entertainment, because television incorporates the premise of envy, and the conflict of interests. If we believe in God, we believe in an ultimate harmony of interest, and this is why we can believe in the free market, because there is ultimate harmony of all interests. But when you eliminate God from economic and political thinking, you must posit the conflict of interest, and then envy takes over and becomes a virtue; and today our educational system promotes envy as a virtue. Should we be surprised at the products?

I think the most remarkable fact of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s is that the educational system, being as bad as it is and turning envy and other vices into virtues, has not destroyed the country totally. That is the most remarkable fact- it indicates something of the resiliency of our background, and the lingering elements of what the opposition calls ‘the Puritan work ethic.’

But crime has been turned today, theft, envy, all the seven deadly sins virtually, are now regarded as social virtues, and the foundations of society have been undermined. This is why, to deal with the crisis in our legal system, we have to stand back and deal with the moral crisis in ourselves, in our families, our churches, our communities; and we have to restore every aspect of self government, and government, the family, the church, the school, vocations, society, and tithe agencies, to their rightful place. De Tocqueville said, remember, that the thousands upon thousands of private associations were the real government of the United States; and they were. Most of the governmental functions were exercised outside the state. I have a little story I like to use again and again, and if some of you have heard it please bear with me.

A friend of mine, a California rancher, was going to Virginia City Nevada, and before he left, Ted Mussio told me his elderly neighbor, a rancher who was over 90, came over and he said: “Ted, I wish I could go to Virginia City, I was born there.” And he said: “I want you to do me a favor. When you go there, go to the Catholic church and see if my grandfather’s grave is being taken care of, and I’ll give you some money to give to the priest to see that it is properly taken care of.” then he said: “I want you to go to the house we owned, the house in which I was born. It was a great big old Victorian house, two stories, with a lot of gingerbread. Let me know if it is still standing there, and what it looks like.” Well, Ted went there and he went to the church, took care of that, located the house very easily, it was everything that his neighbor had described it as being, it had a new roof on it and someone was living in it. So he went to the county hall of records and he tracked down that piece of property, and he found that of course they had not been able to sell it because the silver mines were shutting at that time in the early 90’s, and there were vacant houses all over Virginia City, and it sat vacant until 1940, when together with other properties it was advertised in the weekly paper and sold for back taxes for over 45 years, plus costs. There was only one bidder, and he refused to pay a penny more than back taxes plus costs; which came to $6.46. (laughter)

Now, that was when we had real government, not statism; that was when the community governed itself. But we have had a revolution, a social revolution, and behind it a religious revolution which since the 30’s has transformed this country, and identified government with the state; with the unhappy consequences we see all around us.

But there is a counter-revolution, a quiet, peaceful revolution underway. I cited what had happened once in Salem- evidences of that same kind of thing are again with us. Our Journal of Christian Reconstruction which our foundation publishes under the editorship of Dr. Douglas Kelly, in its current issue which just came off the presses and went into the mail, I believe Thursday, deals with what is being done in this area of practical reconstruction, all over the country; we gave 460 pages to the subject and barely scratched the surface.

Consider what Lester Roloff did in Texas. He started a home for delinquent children, and before he died he had plans underway to house 15,000 delinquents from all over the country. His record of success with those delinquents is between 90-95%, and for that the state of Texas had that man in the courts for nine years, and the case isn’t over yet although he is now dead. I know that case, I was a witness twice in connection with it. But there are now about a hundred like Christian agencies to deal with delinquents, and more being developed all the time. There are similar agencies to deal with ex-convicts who are beginning to stray, or are in trouble. One of our men has an involvement with one such group. Some remarkable things are being done by Evie Hill in Watts Los Angeles, amazing things; and I believe Howard, you are a party to one of the organizations which is out to transform the ghettos of this country, to make a new people out of the inhabitants, and provide economic opportunities, and I believe they are going to do it.

Melvin Hodges in Baton Rouge Louisiana has started a foundation for black Christian education, and a great many others are doing the same; I am working with a church in Oxnard with two black pastors, its membership is about equally Latin, Black, and White, doing a remarkable work of reconstruction, and of dealing with the problems of the people in their community, and at the same time facing a mounting hostility on the part of the city, precisely because they are effectual. Last week Friday, I visited a rescue mission in Santa Anna California, and our current Chalcedon Report has an article about it by Rob Martin. An ex-Marine, a Black, Louis Whitehead came out of the service, went to Santa Anna and noticed that there were people sleeping under the bridges. He was a black man and they were white, but he said: “Nobody should live like that.” And he felt as a Christian he should have a ministry to them. He is doing remarkable things.

These were people who were loosely described as bums, not better than they had to be, involved in very petty crimes all the time. The city has been trying to put him out of business, as Richmond Virginia is by the way, to Mrs. Johnson who is carrying on her husbands work; he died not too long ago. When the city council met, over three hundred men who were working men and business men in the community came in there to fight the attempt to close down that rescue mission, stating: “We were alcoholics and on the streets when Louis Whitehead made the difference.” That only stopped them temporarily, they are back at it again.

But the battle is being fought, and we are winning more and more victories. What has Louis Whitehead done? He has taken government back from state and Federal government. His mission is just across the street from the welfare department, and the city has no objection to the welfare department; and there is a difference between the people who come out of Louis Whiteheads place, and those who come out of the welfare offices.

Louis Whitehead is dealing with the problem of crime, and with the problem of government, and others like him. This is our responsibility. We have to push back statism on the Federal and the State level. We need an increasing amount of activities such as this meeting represents, because we have a tremendous battle here; but we have to remember we have to fight this war on all fronts. At the same time that we push back statism in civil government, we have to take back government in all the other areas of life. Self government, the family, the church, the school, and the Christian school movement now has one out of four children in this country by the way. (applause)

You don’t get honest statistics about it, but every day there are more than six new schools started; every day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. And let me add on this subject, in almost every state now they are moving against home schools, parents teaching their own children, it seems to be orchestrated from Washington- we don’t know for sure, but it seems to be. And I am delighted with this attack, because the irony with this is that the home schools are not all Christian, we have give or take a few thousand, a hundred thousand home schools in California. Many of those home schools are conducted by Liberal and radical parents who have had it with the public schools. So now they are in the battle, and they are very welcome.

We have to take back the school from the state. Control over our vocations, and control over society at large, and restore civil government to its proper and Biblical place, as a ministry of justice. Thank you. (applause)

[Audience Leader] Well, I’m sure that everyone agrees that just to hear that speech was worth the trip here. I didn’t give the address at the beginning, let me give it now, and again my apologies for my voice. Dr. Rushdoony’s Institute is called Chalcedon Institute, Chalcedon, its address is P.O. 158 Vallecito California, 95251. That’s Vallecito. There is a book stand outside in which a number of Dr. Rushdoony’s books are available for sale, and I believe he would be delighted to add your name to his mailing list if you would give it to him.

We will have an opportunity for questions and discussion with Dr. Rushdoony. [tape ends]