COMMENTARY: America is not a moral crusade

c. 1998 Religion news Service (Tom Ehrich is the author of”On a Journey,”daily meditations available through Journey Publishing Co. If you have feedback or want to suggest a question for a future column, e-mail him at journey(AT)interpath.com) UNDATED _ Let me write this while my outrage is still fresh. It’s 7:15 a.m. Like millions of […]

c. 1998 Religion news Service

(Tom Ehrich is the author of”On a Journey,”daily meditations available through Journey Publishing Co. If you have feedback or want to suggest a question for a future column, e-mail him at journey(AT)interpath.com)

UNDATED _ Let me write this while my outrage is still fresh.


It’s 7:15 a.m. Like millions of Americans, I am driving to work, enjoying the freedoms of a land where I can drive where I will, work at whatever job I can get, talk in privacy with my family, and think and speak whatever I want.

Suddenly, on National Public Radio, I find myself overhearing a 1994 telephone conversation between Webster Hubbell and his wife Susanna.

The former Justice Department official was in prison at the time. He had called his wife long distance.

What misguided patriot was tape-recording Hubbell’s conversations from prison? Have prisoners moved totally beyond the Constitution’s protections?

What misguided patriot subpoenaed that tape in an attempt to pressure Hubbell into testifying against President Clinton? Will Kenneth Starr stop at nothing? I hear the Army’s counsel Joseph Welch asking Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1957:”Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?” What misguided patriot in Congress released a copy of that tape-recorded conversation to the media? Is Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., so eager for a political edge that he will violate the fundamental privacies of American citizens?

This is outrageous!

Such behavior raises the specter of all those ethically challenged people who find profit in violating the privacy of others. They creep about checking our mail, watching our Internet surfing, monitoring our credit card usage, peeping into our lives and eavesdropping on our conversations.

President Clinton may well have an out-of-control libido. But oral sex in the Oval Office is nothing compared to having our rights trampled by out-of-control prosecutors and politicians. The president’s private life has little to do with me. But tape-recorded conversations and their casual dissemination by eager pols threaten me greatly.

This American nation is about freedom.

America isn’t about a moral crusade _ our history is too filled with slavery, greed and chicanery for that.


America isn’t about one political party’s possessing righteousness _ we’ve seen too much of politicians and too little of real nobility among officeholders for that.

America isn’t about victory by any means _ our Constitution assumes that power corrupts and the power-hungry must be restrained.

America isn’t about that smug legalism which says,”The law is on my side, therefore I can take from others”_ we know too much about the shifting sands of legislative agendas and the self-serving nature of lawmakers for that.

If this nation stands for anything, it stands for freedom. We have failed more than once in preserving freedom. The powerful always believe that some group _ African slaves, immigrants, the poor _ aren’t as deserving of freedom as they.

But the Declaration of Independence always calls us back to our fundamental premise: All people are endowed by God with a right to life, a right to liberty, and a right to pursue happiness.

It is chilling to think officials in Washington are so blinded by ambition and hatred that they will violate these freedoms. Being elected or appointed to office isn’t a license to smite one’s opponents by any means. Being admitted to the bar isn’t a license to hunt. Being surrounded by media attention isn’t a license to turn secrets into momentary advantage.


It is chilling to think our government is in the hands of such small people, such uninterested conservators of freedom. Do they really believe that some critical national purpose is being served by their bickering and grandstanding?

My drive to work _ and the private home life that preceded it _ aren’t threatened by the president’s peccadillos. But I felt greatly threatened as I eavesdropped on a prisoner trying to buck up his anguished wife. Hubbell might be greed personified, but he, too, has rights in this land of the free.

DEA END EHRICH

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