Just A Taste

One of the small joys of subscribing to the Wall Street Journal is the Taste page in the Friday edition of the paper. The three articles featured there each week on culture, education, and religion are just about guaranteed to entertain and enlighten. This week's batch is no exception.

Dimitri Cavalli recalls a time when liberals cheered as the Catholic Church cracked down on those who went against its teachings (free for all!):

Rummel and Archbishop Joseph Ritter of St. Louis had previously used the threat of excommunication to suppress lay Catholic opposition to civil rights. In 1956, Rummel warned Catholic lawmakers in the state legislature that they would face excommunication if they voted to mandate the segregation of all private schools, including Catholic ones. In the same year, he forced the Association of Catholic Laymen, which was established to oppose his initial desegregation efforts, to disband by threatening its members with excommunication. In 1947, when "separate but equal" was still the law of the land, Ritter threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who took legal action to block his plan to desegregate Catholic schools in St. Louis.

How did liberals react to Rummel's actions? "We salute the Catholic Archbishop," the New York Times editorialized. "He has set an example founded on religious principle and response to the social conscience of our times." An editorial in the Nation applauded Rummel's initial excommunication threat and cited Ritter's action in 1947 as a precedent. Certainly, it seems, liberals don't really mind mixing religion with politics as long as it's their political agenda being promoted.

Rep. DeLauro, Mr. Giuliani and other Catholic politicians may choose to see ecclesiastical punishments as blunt political weapons used to club them into submission on a controversial issue. For the bishops, however, such punishments are imposed as a last effort to be taken against those who, in their judgment, are publicly flouting the laws of the church.

And Collin Levy notes that many environmentalists are really not happy to see energy companies playing ball on alternative energy:

All of this is particularly amusing in light of the hype in California last year over a ballot initiative called Proposition 87, also known as the "Clean Alternative Energy Act." Under the act, oil companies, having failed to invest enough in research on alternative fuels, would face a tax on each barrel of oil taken out of California. The money would be used in part to start a research fund for alternative energy technology.

Many of the state's environmental glitterati rallied to support the initiative, including honorary resident Al Gore, Julia Roberts and Hollywood gadabout and heir Steve Bing, who pledged more than $40 million of his inherited wealth to the cause. The proposition failed, but the big oil companies launched new alternative fuel research institutes on California campuses shortly thereafter. Instead of gloating, Mr. Bing lashed out at Stanford for participating, publicly taking back $2.5 million of a gift to the school in protest.

The outrage of Mr. Bing and others is hard to fathom, but their chief concern seems to be that, between them, the universities and the energy companies have cut the political activists out of control of the investment dollars. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a liberal watchdog group, has set up its own "Project for Integrity in Science" to "scrutinize conflicts of interest" at those schools and other nonprofit associations that receive corporate funding. The basic principle is fine: Transparency in philanthropy is generally a good thing.

But the agenda of Mr. Bing and his environmentalist friends seems confused. Are they against capitalism or against pollution? Have they figured out that the two are not (always) the same?

Far too many greens are at heart against capitalism. Concern over the state of the environment has just been a useful tool to advance their ultimate goal.