Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Secret Treaties (1974).

To the Editor:

Re “Planned Parenthood Changes Fetal Tissue Policy” (front page, Oct. 14):

It’s time to start asking those who oppose the use of fetal tissue in scientific research some tough questions. Will they get behind their beliefs and renounce their own personal use of any medical advances, vaccines or medicines that have been developed using fetal cells?

If the use of fetal tissue in scientific research is so morally repugnant to these people, reaping the health benefits derived from it cannot be defended.

Let them answer this question: Are you ready to open your medical histories and disclose the ways in which you and your loved ones may have benefited, and will continue to benefit, from fetal cell research?

ELISABETH STRAUS

New York

Eldorado (1974).

I like this. I can't wait to treat progressivism, militant atheism, feminism, Marxism, utilitarianism, postmodernism, and homosexuality. Imagine the possibilities.

This afternoon, at a Shell station in Arlington, Texas, I paid $2.099 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. With my Kroger card, it came to $1.999. What're y'all payin' in your neck o' the woods?

This is a view (looking south to southwest) of the inside of Fort Michilimackinac, from the rampart. Click to enlarge. It was windy day. Dust and dirt were being blown about.

Here.

Here.

To the Editor:

I find David Brooks’s column disturbing. While its focus is how the Republican Party is slowly being taken over by right-wing extremists, he doesn’t acknowledge that the Republican Party is already there. Its knee-jerk fealty to “conservatism” sounds as if it is controlled by a dogma, even a religion, rather than being a broad-based political party.

Remember, there are only two relevant political parties in this country. Elected officials must represent all of their constituents.

Mr. Brooks ends with “it took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.” It took a thousand more for the Republican Party to change from a relatively inclusive political party to one that demands obedience to the religion of conservatism.

DAVID M. STOUT

Pittstown, N.J.

Note from KBJ: The letter writer has it exactly backward. It's progressivism, rather than conservatism, that has become a religion in this country. Moreover, the Democrat Party has has long since been "taken over by left-wing extremists." The Republican Party is simply trying to figure out how to counter these extremists. Think of it this way: David Stout and his ilk are driving a bulldozer through American society, destroying everything in the bulldozer's path preparatory to rebuilding society according to a progressive blueprint. Republicans are trying to figure out how to stop the bulldozer before it destroys everything. Here and there, they throw up an obstruction that impedes the bulldozer's movement. David Stout is so convinced of his rectitude that he views these protesters as extremists. "Why would anyone want to stop us? Don't they know that we are in the right? Don't they realize that we are trying to make the world a better place for all concerned?" The dogmatism of progressives is shocking and dangerous.

Harris has no sense of history, and no understanding of the traditional role of religious argumentation in promoting liberalized versions of faith. Harris buries his rasping, potentially valuable critique of genuinely obscurantist ideas beneath undiscerning attacks on people he calls “religious moderates.” Both The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation reject the liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, liberal Muslims, and so on, who could be Harris’s strategic allies. Reviewer after reviewer has treated Harris’s books as not worth systematic refutation because the author can’t tell the difference between Jerry Falwell and Peter Gomes, and can’t distinguish between the Muslim fanatics who attacked the World Trade Center and the liberal Muslims written about in Jytte Klausen’s The Islamic Challenge. Harris accuses religious moderates of serving as covers for more outrageously irrational versions of the faith. Yet these religious moderates are, like him, inheritors of the best features of the Enlightenment, and are thus his natural allies. Harris reveals no understanding of the historical circumstances that have led many highly intelligent and well-educated people to espouse religious faith, or of the range of ideas that have passed as religious. The popular novel by Marilynne Robinson Gilead explores a liberal religious culture with strong roots in the United States, yet Harris is altogether oblivious to the character of this culture. Harris’s logic is similar to that of the communist international’s theory of social fascism as advanced in the early 1930s, when social democrats in Germany, the United States, and other nations were said to be functionally indistinguishable from fascists simply because they had not renounced bourgeois reform in order to side with the communists.

(David A. Hollinger, "Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?," Representations 101 [winter 2008]: 144-54, at 151 [endnotes omitted])