The Quaker Shaker And Gay Marriage

My Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt put this video on YouTube with the headline "God Weighs In On The Same Sex Marriage Debate?" I thank God for the question mark.

Hewitt was at the Nixon library Wednesday night moderating a debate between conservative John Eastman, former dean of Chapman University's law school, and liberal UC Irvine law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Hewitt regularly hosts the legal eagles on his syndicated radio show.

With cameras rolling (providentially? There's that question mark again), a 4.0 earthquake struck Yorba Linda while Eastman was speculating about how associate justice Anthony Kennedy might rule on Prop. 8 and DOMA. After the shaker, which occurs at 3:45 in the video, Eastman said, "See what happens when you mess with traditional marriage?" and basked in a thundering ovation. Offered the opportunity to interpret the event himself, Chemerinsky paused for a long moment and said, "My field's constitutional law, not geology."

Note he didn't say "theology." Hewitt and Eastman get kudos for handling a scary moment with elan. But I'm glad they didn't test the ineffable grace of heaven any more than they did. The God who would send an earthquake to a double-domes' debate must've been a lot angrier at the tens of thousands he killed by dropping buildings on them in Japan and China. My God, that one is not. Chemerinsky may have been tempted to say that the incident could just as well have been a rebuke as an affirmation of Eastman's rhetoric. He was wise to leave God's intentionality out of the earthquake as we -- experts, voters, and judges -- continue to do our our best to behave honorably and justly toward all his people on earth.

Ex Cathedra

The gag goes that when a fire alarm goes off in church, Presbyterians form a committee while Episcopalians laboriously don complex vestments before lining up for a stately procession and heading for the exit. This afternoon at Chapman University in Orange, California, we of many faiths processed for gracious scholar and Presbyterian pastor the Rev. Dr. Gail J. Stearns in celebration of her installation as dean of the Wallace All Faiths Chapel -- a moving ceremony in which Chapman's undergraduate Christians, Jews, Muslims, Baha'i, Hindi, Sikhs, and Wiccans played ceremonial roles. The University Singers, under the direction of Stephen Coker, ringed the vaunting Wallace chapel and lifted our hearts with two anthems. The keynoter, USC Dean of Religious Life Varun Soni, gave a spirited talk about the anti-institutional, post-denominational Millennials whom all us liturgically-disposed mainliners would give our stoles and souls to get into our pews with prayer books and hymnals in their laps.

Before offering a pacific benediction, Dr. Stearns (who preached at St. John's during Advent and is shown meeting with our members) listed three goals of her deanship: Nurturing students' spiritual lives in all their diversity, promoting dialogue among campus theologians and other disciplines, and deepening relationships with local religious leaders.

As he prepared to intone the words of installation, Chapman's dynamic chancellor, Daniele Struppa (rocking the biretta, above), a St. John's member along with his colleague Lisa Sparks and their children, mentioned his and Chapman president Jim Doti's bidding war with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange for the bankrupt Crystal Cathedral, in which Bishop Todd Brown and the diocese prevailed. "To provide a larger venue for today's ceremony, President Doti wanted to buy us a new church," Daniele said. "But Bishop Brown felt it would be better to have it here in the All Faiths Chapel." Daniele told me afterward that the bishop (shown chatting with Rabbi Heidi M. Cohen of Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana) smiled beatifically.

St. John's On The Town

That's Lisa Sparks and her Chapman University colleague, Chancellor Daniele Struppa, both of St. John's Church, at a recent celebration of Chapman's 150th anniversary. The photo appeared in the April edition of Orange Coast.

War Powers And The Problem With Presidents

Tom Campbell, who served five terms in Congress from a district in northern California, has been dean of the Chapman University law school since February 2011. "It's a pleasure to have another moderate Republican in Orange County," I told him last night at the Pacific Club in Newport Beach, where Kathy and I were guests of our St. John's friends Bob (serving again as a peerless MC) and Ann Mosier. "On behalf of the other four, welcome."

"Richard Nixon?" he said with a bemused look. Dead these 17 years, I replied, as he knew. "Of course," he said with a smile. "Chuck Percy? George Romney?" Alas, also gone are the great Illinois senator and Michigan governor, beacons of the great American center. Campbell was suggesting that pragmatic conservatism had died along with its lions. Then he perked up and said, "Olympia Snowe! Ah, but then she's retiring."

We agreed that Nixon -- promoting detente with communists, the EPA, and near-universal health insurance, not to mention wage and price controls -- wouldn't be welcome in today's GOP. Indeed in most portraits of the modern conservative movement, Nixon's corner of the Etch A Sketch screen has been rendered inoperative. And yet a prominent local jurist standing nearby said that he too would join a party for the socially tolerant and fiscally prudent. One does meet such people in Orange County, even while clinking glasses in its premier social and business club. Perhaps Mitt Romney, if nominated, will be able to erase the hard-right positions he took to get onto the ticket, having spent years trying to do so with his centrist positions as Massachusetts governor. If not, in November we may learn that the lions' passing presaged a diminishment of the GOP's ability to contend for the White House.

During his lecture on war powers and the U.S. Constitution, Campbell demonstrated the capacity for nuance that makes pragmatists so infuriating. Bolstering his analysis with quotations from the Founders, he argued that only Congress may conduct an aggressive war, though the commander-in-chief has broad authority to act defensively. That being said, the War Powers Act (which Congress passed over Nixon's veto in 1973) lets a president wage war without permission from Congress for up to 90 days, meaning that any president can start World War III by himself so long as he sends Congress a memo within 48 hours of firing the first shot and then wins (or loses) inside of three months.

From Nixon on, presidents have resented this limitation on what some construe as their sovereign right to protect and defend the country. During a congressional hearing after Bill Clinton went to war in Yugoslavia in 1999, Campbell pressed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to explain the difference between war or hostilities, which would have triggered the War Powers Act, and her description of the massive bombing campaign, armed conflict. She responded, "You're the law professor. You figure it out."

That's the war-making executive's usual high-handedness toward Congress for you. Then there's the judiciary's timidity. When Campbell and 15 Republican and Democratic colleagues sued Clinton for violating the War Powers Act, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that Congress, though it had refused to declare war, had tacitly authorized it by appropriating funds to pay for it. "But the [current] appropriation isn't for the cruise missiles that are being used in the war," Campbell said. "They've already been paid for. The appropriation is to rebuild the stock that will be needed for the next war." By Campbell's lights, the judge was saying that Congress could only stop an illegal war by reducing the nation's overall preparedness.

Campbell advised judges who may fear being ignored by a willful president to remember July 1974's Nixon vs. United States, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-0 vote, ordered the president to turn over tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon complied and then resigned on Aug. 9 in the firestorm over one transcript's contents.

Since Campbell had mentioned Kathy's and my ex-boss, I asked during the Q&A about Nixon's own constitutional scholarship. Campbell had already argued that that Congress had authorized the Vietnam war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Fast forward to the 1977 Nixon-Frost interviews, when the ex-president was asked about an operative's scheme to expand the president's power to monitor and harass anti-war activists, 1970's Huston Plan. It was never implemented. But when David Frost wondered why he'd even considered such an appalling abuse of power, Nixon replied that if the president does it, it's "not illegal."

My question last night: Since the U.S. was at war, was Nixon's formulation (widely misunderstood as an excuse for Watergate crimes) actually a defensible assertion of a president's sovereign right to protect the country? Campbell replied that Nixon would have been better off saying that Congress, by authorizing the war, had already permitted security measures at home. It was an overreach for Nixon to arrogate the power to the executive, which, as it turns out, seems to be a persistent problem with presidents.

Historic Cruising Vessel

This is almost certainly the last photo taken of Richard Nixon. On Saturday, April 16, 1994, he was headed home from the Westchester (New York) Country Club after attending the wedding of a family friend. He's shown with his chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor (rocking that perm), and the bride's father, Bob Abplanalp, inventor of the aerosol valve and third musketeer to Nixon and Bebe Rebozo. Note as well the Chrysler limo.

On the Monday after the wedding, Nixon suffered a devastating stroke as he sat on the deck of his Upper Saddle River, New Jersey home, savoring an evening in spring and awaiting dinner. He died on Friday, April 22. The following week Kathy and his family returned his body to California, where Noah McMahon, about 2,000 other helpers, and I (then director of the Nixon library, where he would be buried next to Mrs. Nixon) were waiting. A Chapman University undergraduate, Noah volunteered to help with parking. He now runs two companies he founded, Anonymous LLC and the Giving Back Fund, and serves on the school committee at St. John's. Note as well the Chrysler limo.

Noah acquired the historic wheels several years ago from Bob Stanley of Bronxville, New York, who had bought it from Nixon's estate (of which I was co-executor). Noah had it painstakingly restored. This week, he picked up the attention-commanding license plates. He plans to lend Nixon's Chrysler to organizations for their fundraisers and silent auctions. If those whitewalls could talk!

The Continuing War Against John Dean

Nixon White House staffer Geoff Shepard (left) says his ex-colleagues "did some horrible things." The colleague the Nixon-Bob Haldeman operatives now controlling Nixon's foundation consider maximus horribilis is John Dean (below), who helped send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes. In 2009, they went to war against former Nixon library director Tim Naftali after he invited Dean to give a talk. Among the schemes disclosed so far was getting another former Nixon aide, Sen. Lamar Alexander, to pressure Naftali or worse by putting a secret hold on President Obama's nomination of a new archivist of the U.S. Shepard also tried to keep the public from seeing Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony.

Beginning tomorrow, the Chapman University law school in Orange, California is convening a 40th anniversary Watergate symposium that features Dean. We learn today that Shepard's been trying to get onto the bill so he can call the former White House counsel a nutcase and fool to his own bad face. But the professor convening the confab said no thanks:

"Look, I don't want to hurt people's feelings," [he] says of Shepard's draft, but there wasn't much intellectual content and it was marked with innuendoes.

The politics still swirling around Nixon in the county of his birth is, to borrow the columnist's word, complicated. Who can say what will happen next as the struggle over his legacy continues? The irony is that while there's a good case to be made in defense of some of Nixon's actions during Watergate, attacking Dean doesn't help him anymore. It just helps his men.

Sioux Falls Tea Party

Robert Slayton teaches history at Chapman University in Orange County, where he holds the Henry Salvatori chair, named for a famous conservative activist and philanthropist. Yet Slayton is still carrying a torch for George McGovern's true believer's campaign against Richard Nixon in 1972 -- and warning tea partiers against make the same mistakes:

The senator from South Dakota may have been true to the values I and others shared, but he was out of step with what the majority of Americans believed, and what they wanted the future to look like. Not just our faction, but fifty-one percent or more. He extolled our principles powerfully, but did not match up with those held by the bulk of American voters. McGovern could win primaries where a minority held sway, but not a general election.

The Tea Party segment of the Republican Party may be heading in the same direction, to a similar result of short-term victory and larger defeat.

Atheism's Useful Idiots

In their opposition to the lower Manhattan mosque, atheists and the movement once known, ironically enough, as the religious right are combining their efforts, no doubt without meaning to, to weaken the First Amendment's command that government leave religion alone.

As I wrote yesterday, it endangers everyone's freedom when powerful politicians try to hold religious leaders publicly accountable for their beliefs, whether it's Muslims' conception of the state, the weird stuff in the Book of Mormon, Roman Catholics' opposition to abortion, or for that matter the Episcopal Church's prevailing support for gay marriage.

Notwithstanding that danger, the unlikeliest of anti-religion coalitions has taken shape in opposition to the mosque. We all know about Baptist-turned-Roman Catholic Newt Gingrich comparing Muslims to Nazis. Religionists from Gary Bauer to Hindu Human Rights Watch are on board as well. But you don't have to be faithful to ride their train to glory. Atheist Charles Krauthammer is one of the mosque's most strident critics. Atheist Christopher Hitchens doesn't oppose it per se, but he thinks Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf should be called to account for his favorable view of Iran's theocratic regime.

I don't question the motives of everyone in the atheist party. Krauthammer's position is consistent with his years of hawkish commentary about Islamic fundamentalism. Hitchens has been harder on Imam Rauf's GOP critics than on the imam himself. To paraphrase Sen. Mitch McConnell, both say they're supporters of the U.S. Constitution's religion protections, and I take them at their word.

But it's also true that a dominant theme of the post-Sept. 11 neoatheist movement is that religion does more harm than good. In the U.S., it does its nasty business under the mighty wing of the Constitution. As leading atheist voice Sam Harris wrote in 2006:

Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs.

Well, not anymore, at least if you're a moderate imam following in a 1300-year-0ld Abrahamic tradition who has Jewish and Christian admirers and a wife who lobbies for women's rights within Islam. If that's you, and you want to build a community center in lower Manhattan that includes a tiny worship space, now you have to answer Christopher Hitchens' questions about your views on Iran. You also have to "give good evidence and valid arguments" to the Republican Party and maybe even, if the pressure keeps up, to the agencies of the City of New York that will decide your project's fate.

Krauthammer says he's not calling on government to stop the mosque. Sarah Palin summed up that argument in her Facebook challenge to President Obama: "We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?” Palin should use her bully pulpit for a civics lesson in tolerance and freedom of religion. Instead she, fellow ex-governor George Pataki, a former speaker of the House, and other current and former officeholders are creating a hostile environment for a perfectly legitimate faith community.

As the debate becomes more and more noxious, can government action, perhaps in the form of the kind of dodge recently suggested by Chapman University constitutional law professor Hugh Hewitt, be far behind? Of course thanks to all the political and rhetorical firepower and the public's susceptibility to anti-Muslim tendencies, the anti-religion coalition might be able to drive Imam Rauf's establishment out of town without even bothering to enable a constitutionally inconvenient regulation or law such as Hewitt suggests respecting the establishment of a religion.

But just you wait. Whether they succeed in their efforts or not, the atheists and rightists will soon part company. Someday, the political winds will shift. The case of the inconvenient mosque would be a useful precedent for harassing others with unpopular or controversial views such as Roman Catholics, orthodox Jews, Mormons, and even Rick Warren and his fellow Southern Baptists. Should that moment come, religion's enemies would smile as they remembered the day when Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin became their useful idiots.

LLPOF

At age 50, Frank Mickadeit of the Orange County Register, one of the last of the big-city reporting columnists, reports on his first week at Chapman University's law school:

[W]e got a bracing talk from Assistant Dean Jayne Kacer, who illustrated with an anecdote just how small the seemingly vast O.C. legal community really is, and how knowledge is nothing without reputation. One O.C. judge she knows was taking over the case load of another judge and came upon an unfamiliar acronym in the notes the outgoing judge had made in one file – “LLPOF.” Ah, the old judge said, it was there to remind him about the character of the attorney who was trying that case. It stood for, “liar, liar, pants on fire.”

Powell At Intermission

In Orange County last Saturday evening to accept an award from Chapman University, Colin Powell was at his most energized while talking not about war and peace but education. He recounted a prior visit to Orange County to meet with students and teachers at Glenn L. Martin Elementary School in Santa Ana, where his sister, legendary teacher Marilyn Berns, who died in 2005, was working. Though Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, it turned out that not arriving by motorcade made all the difference. "The kids didn't know who I was or what I did," Powell told an audience of 600 at Chapman's gala banquet, "but they loved that helicopter." He also talked about America's daunting educational challenges, reminding us that a third of our young people (and half of all our minority students) still don't finish high school.

Though he served four years as George W. Bush's secretary of state, Powell didn't mention him. When he did address global issues, they had to do not with the war on terror, in which he played a central role, but the end of the Cold War, where he was a supporting player under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Accordingly I was honored to have on my arm my wife and successor at the Nixon Foundation, former Nixon chief of staff Kathy O'Connor, who once accompanied 37 when he called on Powell at the Pentagon.

Thanks to the presence of former Ambassador to Spain and former Nixon Foundation chairman George Argyros (one of the architects of a supercharged Chapman along with its visionary, marathoner president, economist Jim Doti), Powell reenacted the comic opera of Perejil Island, a uninhabited pile of rocks in the Strait of Gilbraltar claimed by both Spain and Morocco. One Saturday morning in July 2002, on the way to spend the day with his grandchildren, Secretary Powell kept the two countries from a full-scale confrontation by typing out and signing a peace agreement, faxing it from his home in northern Virginia, and pressuring the king of Morocco to accept the deal and remove his forces.

It was a wonderful story. I also would've liked to hear what it had been like on Sept. 11, how he feels about his controversial speech to the UN in the runup to the Iraq war, and what he thinks the U.S. should do to win in Afghanistan. My friend Don Will, professor of peace studies at Chapman, told me that some of these questions came up when Powell met with three undergraduates before dinner and that Powell had answered directly and graciously. This Orange County Register report has details about that conversation.

As charming and uplifting as his dinner talk was, I felt he was holding the larger audience somewhat at bay, as though he was still sifting through strong and perhaps conflicted feelings about the Bush administration. Whether or not he finishes that process, I'll bet there's a final act of public service to come, either appointive or elective. On Palm Sunday, the Episcopalian Powell will turn 72. Fit and ramrod straight, he looks and acts 60. On Saturday night, he made a lot of cracks about being comfortably retired, but I left the event thinking about a thoroughbred straining in the gate, unsure whether its next race would be six furlongs or a mile, on turf or grass, but almost beside itself with the power to run.