Only in America could religious conservatives get worked up over the Boy Scouts' decision to admit openly homosexual boys to their ranks.

We all knew this decision was inevitable, if not this week then next year.  What possible difference can it make?  The mere fact that there was a debate should have been enough to persuade even the most dull-witted conservative (a redundant expression) that the Scouts had become evil.  But no, all morning long Southern Baptist leaders have been deploring the corruption of this once great institution, etc. etc.

In the days leading up to the vote, the press was full of useless facts, such as the percentage of the great unwashed that favored the sexual exploitation of younger boys by older boys, the agreement of Romney and Obama on the need for this earth-shattering revolution, the percentage of Boy Scout leaders favoring underage sodomy,. etc. etc.

The issue was always crystal clear without any room for debate, with no opportunity for fine points or clarification.  The Scouts are open to boys from the age of 1o.5 to 18 years.  Some of them, in the course of time, may turn homosexual, but so long as it is forbidden to act on--or rather act out--their unwholesome impulses, the harm they might do is limited.

By contrast,  an openly gay 10 year old has been so hopelessly screwed up by his parents and teachers that short of a religious conversion he can never lead a normal life.  Parents who encourage this nonsense and fight for the right of their little boys to dress as girls and use the little girls restrooms should  be arrested for abuse of children and have their children taken away from them.

A pre-pubescent child cannot be sexually attracted to members of his own sex, much less long to change gender.  These attitudes have been implanted in him by evil adults.  By any non-Freudian understanding of sex, a ten or eleven year old does not define himself by his sexual proclivities.  A really effeminate kid might well, under the right circumstances, grow into a normal lover of women or else find a vocation that requires chastity.  To be openly gay at that age is to advertise a sickness that is worse than bubonic plague.  Just the sort of kids I want my children to share a sleeping bag with!

An older gay adolescent, while perhaps not so completely disturbed,  is in the process of becoming a sexual predator.  Parents and "youth leaders" who would permit such boys to exercise authority over younger and vulnerable tenderfoots are themselves degenerate.  This sort of abuse happened with some regularity in English schools, but when it was discovered, it could be punished and punished severely.  The Scouts, on the other hand, are making a virtue out of a vice.

The hypocrisy of the Scout leaders who voted to approve this measure is transparent.  If gay teens can be admitted and given the opportunity to abuse younger boys , then there cannot possibly be anything wrong in homosexual behavior.  Why, then, forbid adult homosexuals from acting as leaders?  What is the fear?  I think I would far more easily trust an older gay man who has learned some self-control and knows what trouble he might get into over a punk kid (I use the term advisedly) who fears nothing.

But who would trust his sons to the Scouts?  For decades Scouting has been a progressive therapy system run by namby-pambys to create namby-pambys.  Perhaps it was not always so, but already in the 1950's, when I was first a Cub Scout and then a Boy Scout, the organization had drifted far from its original purpose of teaching woodcraft and building manly characters. Most of the Scouts I have run into over the years have been chumps, though there were some who merely loved the outdoors and in Scouting found opportunities to spend time in the woods.

I had no [...]]]> Only in America.

Only in America could religious conservatives get worked up over the Boy Scouts' decision to admit openly homosexual boys to their ranks.

We all knew this decision was inevitable, if not this week then next year.  What possible difference can it make?  The mere fact that there was a debate should have been enough to persuade even the most dull-witted conservative (a redundant expression) that the Scouts had become evil.  But no, all morning long Southern Baptist leaders have been deploring the corruption of this once great institution, etc. etc.

In the days leading up to the vote, the press was full of useless facts, such as the percentage of the great unwashed that favored the sexual exploitation of younger boys by older boys, the agreement of Romney and Obama on the need for this earth-shattering revolution, the percentage of Boy Scout leaders favoring underage sodomy,. etc. etc.

The issue was always crystal clear without any room for debate, with no opportunity for fine points or clarification.  The Scouts are open to boys from the age of 1o.5 to 18 years.  Some of them, in the course of time, may turn homosexual, but so long as it is forbidden to act on--or rather act out--their unwholesome impulses, the harm they might do is limited.

By contrast,  an openly gay 10 year old has been so hopelessly screwed up by his parents and teachers that short of a religious conversion he can never lead a normal life.  Parents who encourage this nonsense and fight for the right of their little boys to dress as girls and use the little girls restrooms should  be arrested for abuse of children and have their children taken away from them.

A pre-pubescent child cannot be sexually attracted to members of his own sex, much less long to change gender.  These attitudes have been implanted in him by evil adults.  By any non-Freudian understanding of sex, a ten or eleven year old does not define himself by his sexual proclivities.  A really effeminate kid might well, under the right circumstances, grow into a normal lover of women or else find a vocation that requires chastity.  To be openly gay at that age is to advertise a sickness that is worse than bubonic plague.  Just the sort of kids I want my children to share a sleeping bag with!

An older gay adolescent, while perhaps not so completely disturbed,  is in the process of becoming a sexual predator.  Parents and "youth leaders" who would permit such boys to exercise authority over younger and vulnerable tenderfoots are themselves degenerate.  This sort of abuse happened with some regularity in English schools, but when it was discovered, it could be punished and punished severely.  The Scouts, on the other hand, are making a virtue out of a vice.

The hypocrisy of the Scout leaders who voted to approve this measure is transparent.  If gay teens can be admitted and given the opportunity to abuse younger boys , then there cannot possibly be anything wrong in homosexual behavior.  Why, then, forbid adult homosexuals from acting as leaders?  What is the fear?  I think I would far more easily trust an older gay man who has learned some self-control and knows what trouble he might get into over a punk kid (I use the term advisedly) who fears nothing.

But who would trust his sons to the Scouts?  For decades Scouting has been a progressive therapy system run by namby-pambys to create namby-pambys.  Perhaps it was not always so, but already in the 1950's, when I was first a Cub Scout and then a Boy Scout, the organization had drifted far from its original purpose of teaching woodcraft and building manly characters. Most of the Scouts I have run into over the years have been chumps, though there were some who merely loved the outdoors and in Scouting found opportunities to spend time in the woods.

I had no problem with the Cub Scouts, because it was a small pack that consisted entirely of the boys I went to school with.  I did not much like the meetings, though, since they were presided over by mothers who must have had too much time on their hands.  It was a chance to eat cookies and drink Kool Aid, but beyond that I don't remember much, apart from the sessions in which we boys taught each other to tie our favorite knots--my limited skills still amaze my wife.

I made the serious mistake of joining a downtown troop.  For business reasons, my father had moved the family temporarily into the center of town.  We had previously lived on the edge of the country, and I had spent my early years camping in the woods and learning a good deal of woodcraft.  It helped that my father was a great outdoorsman--a fine shot and an excellent fisherman.  Imagine my dismay at discovering that my Scout leaders not only had nothing to teach me but were absolutely hopeless in the woods.

I remember one experience well.  We were camped out in a rough cabin with bunk beds.  One of the boys, envying the comfort-loving Scoutmaster's better bed and blankets, sneaked in after the leader had got up to shower.  The kid was unfortunately a bedwetter...

The night before, one of the smart urban kids had sprinkled salt everywhere.  This attracted the porcupines, so I woke up to see the little brutes killing the harmless creatures with knives.  Quite apart from it being a stupid exercise in brutality, it was illegal to kill porcupines.  As every hunter in the great state of Wisconsin knows,  a man starving in the winter woods may have to live off the one animal it is easy to catch--the porupine.  That is why they were protected.  But these inner-city specimens of American youth actually chopped down a young birch in order to finish off two porcupines that had escaped.  I'm surprised they did not burn down the cabin.

Later that day, the downtown kids showed me how to straightwire  the Scoutmaster's car, and off we went on a joyride.  The poor man, who had no knowledge of woodcraft, could not even protect his possessions from the hoodlums he was supposed to be leading.

A year later, a friend of mine and I were in the woods, shooting his pump .bb gun.  We ran into my old assistant scoutmaster with two friends, playing with a .22.  When one of them playfully borrowed the .bb gun and began pinging his friend, the other guy ran around, grabbed the .22 and began firing between his friend's legs.  My friend and I had never witnessed such citified stupidity in our young lives.

A few years after that, in South Carolina, I had a friend whose father was a Scout leader.  This was just before he got sent to jail for writing bad checks.

I do not say all Scouting leaders are of this type, but I will say that I do not much trust grown men who want to spend time with boys.  In some cases, of course, fathers in a community accept such positions as one of their obligations, and if they have woodcraft, they enjoy sharing their skills with their sons and with the sons of their friends.  Otherwise, such people tend to be at best of the social worker/youth pastor type: people who get a kick out of bossing the young and vulnerable.

I understand and agree with the ideals of the early Scouting leaders.  We have to be good barbarians before we can become civilized, and spending time outdoors is a great antidote to the corruption of urban life.  But, whenever possible, these ideals should be communicated by families and by friends of the family, not by do-gooders who give out medals to boys who help their mothers around the house.

The sooner we disabuse ourselves of these socializing illusions and the institutions that perpetuate them--the Scouts, YMCA, youth groups at church--the better off our children will be.  H.L. Mencken was wrong about many things, but his contempt for the YMCA was entirely justified.

Only in America could religious conservatives not see through these illusions and wish to protect their children from the Scouts.  Perhaps the Boy Scouts' decision to encourage the homosexual seduction of children will help.

Congressman Issa:  So, Ms Lerner, how and when exactly did you learn that your department was illegally targeting conservative and pro-life groups.

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  Ms Lerner, your statement is ridiculous. First, you obviously surrendered your right to remain silent when you read a prepared statement.  When you said, and I quote, "I did nothing wrong," were you then saying that what your department did was legal and ethical?

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  Then, just so I'll understand, you actually do think that if you tell this committee the truth you will be incriminating yourself?

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  Do you own a dictionary?

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  Because according to the dictionary, incriminate means: "to charge with a crime."  What is the crime you would be charging yourself with, if you told this committee the truth?

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  You are an employee of the Federal Government.  Do you honestly think that someone who takes the taxpayer's money as a salary is not responsible to those same taxpayers?

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  And do you think it is ethical or even legal for you as a Federal employee to refuse to cooperate with a Congressional committee?

Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I respectfully invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate myself.

Issa:  Ms Lerner, in putting yourself above the law, you have violated both the public's trust and the laws of this land.  I have here a warrant for your arrest, and you will have plenty of time to consult a dictionary in the days, weeks, months, and years to come...

Lerner and Issa don't care about what I think,

I guess I'll just sit here and drink

It is not so much the lying we should find disturbing:  most politicians lie most of the time.  As MacArthur said of FDR, "He never told the truth when a lie would serve."  Substitute the name of almost any member of the Congress or the Executive Branch, and the statement remains true.  No, it is the childishness of the evasive tactics so reminiscent of children who have been caught joyriding in the family car or raiding their mother's purse.  One of my own kids would always say, for example after slamming the stationwagon door on his little sister's hand, "I didn't mean it." By which he means he had not intended to get caught damaging his sister when he only wanted to devil her.

Do not fool yourself.  Most Republicans are just as bad.  John Boehner, while clearly smarter than President O, is almost as evasive, especially when he does not want to admit the degree to which he is collaborating with the administration.  Speaker Boehner, a family-values Republican, recently went to Florida  to give away his tatooed daughter to a dope-smoking dreadlocked Jamaican construction worker.

Yes, I would rather have John Boehner or Mitt Romney or even--and this takes some anti-gagging medications--Mitch McConnell than Barack Obama as President, but the mere fact that such men are leaders of the GOP tells us the party is hopeless.

Alas, it was not to be.  The revelation that the suspects are, in fact, Chechen must be a real blow to Barney Frank, Harry Reid, and all the other enemies of what is left of American liberty.

Some newscasters are still holding out, however.  This morning on NPR Steve Inskeep and David Greene kept on reminding listeners that we don't know anything about the identity or motives of the brothers.  We cannot assume that they are Chechen nationalists or even Muslims, since the region is so ethnically complex. Really?  Find me a Russian Orthodox Chechen.  The small Christian minority in the region has mostly been eliminated during the conflicts, and the cause of Chechen separatism has come to be completely identified with Islamism. Poor Inskeep made the mistake of interviewing Matt Rojansky, a competent expert from the Carnegie Endowment, who very diplomatically made mincemeat out of NPR's attempted whitewash.

Added:

As the day goes on, all the organs of the Anti-American left, from Voice of America to the American Islamist are crying out against any rush to judgment.  Just because the young men are Chechen Muslims does not mean they have a political or religious motivation.

 To gain a little perspective on this, look at the father's statements.  His first response was to declare the boys innocent angels, next he said they were being framed by the US government, he finally added that if the younger son is killed, he will regard it as murder.  In that case, he opined, Americans can expect all hell to break loose.  Another rational Muslim, without any knowledge, is threatening violent death to anyone in America if something happens to his homicidal son.  He cannot even manage a pretense to sanity.

In recent years the Obama administration has given up the attempt to leverage Russian crackdown on Chechnya against the Putin regime, but US diplomats have been playing a dangerous game, condemning terrorism in Chechnya while giving support to the progress of  democracy and to the aspirations of the Chechen people.  In this way, we can always portray the more violent separatists as Islamic terrorists while at the same time deploring the hard line taken by the Russian government.

This instance of Chechen terrorism in the United States falls into a familiar pattern.  Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo Albanians, and now Chechens, far from being grateful for American support for their cause--Bosnia and Kosova would not exist except for US military intervention--see Americans through the single lens of Islam.  We could give each group trillions of American dollars, and they would still hate us.

The mere fact that we let such people into our country is all the proof you need to realize that the rulers of this regime, Republicans as well as Democrats, hate the American people.

Good afternoon, Mr. Putin.  Have a nice day.

A great deal of ink is being spilled on the two Supreme Court cases taking up same-sex marriage, but the effect is rather like the ink released by a cuttlefish to cloud the vision of its enemies.  To anticipate my conclusion, let me go on record as saying that family-values conservatives have done vastly more harm than good.  Their arguments and policies lead only to one end: the nationalization of marriage and the family.  Why does the left always win?  Because the conservatives do their work for them.

Some of them mean well, I suppose, but one might say the same of Pol Pot.  Hell, as the proverb goes, is paved with good intentions, and journalists and activists who do not take the trouble to understand an issue should avoid making public statements or taking part in political controversies.  When the ignorant and corrupt are permitted to lead a movement, whether it involves abortion or global warming, Hell is the only destination.

The problem of ignorance is illustrated by  articles on Roman marriage being sent around in Catholic circles.  I received one today, written  by a "Catholic ethicist" named Benjamin Wilker. A few days ago I got a similar piece by someone named Craig Turner.  Both articles are written in the  breathless tone one associates with people like John Lofton, and both circulate stories of the seamy sex lives of Nero and Elagabalus.  There is no consideration of the sources themselves, and neither writer seems to know anything about Roman law or marriage customs. It might be amusing, if a bit depressing, to find the comon source for these and other such exercises in phony erudition.

It does not require a deep knowledge of the classics to  understand the  utter foolishness of the argument.   One need only consider parallels.  Would we be justified in basing our opinion of 18th century French Catholic marriage on the works of Choderos de Laclos or the Marquis de Sade? Could we use the shenanigans of Lindsay Lohan, Charley Sheen, or John F. Kennedy as representative examples of the sex lives of ordinary Americans? That such people exist, alas, is true, and their numbers are growing, but I only meet such people occasionally.  The Victorian Age had its set of monsters, but it would be ridiculous to imagine that sex orgies were characteristic of the middle-class Victorian family.

If either of these gentlemen were at all interested in knowing anything about Roman marriage, they could turn to contemporary historians such as Richard Saller, Susan Treggiari, and Edward Champlin (among many others), who have thoroughly debunked Hollywood's sensational depiction of sex-crazed Romans.  They might also want to look into the case law presented with admirable clarity by Bruce Frier and Thomas McGinn in their A Casebook on Roman Family Law. In these works they would discover the Roman ideal of marriage as an affectionate bond between man and wife, one that is assumed to last until death.  In the unlikely event they are interested in learning the truth, I should be happy to supply a lengthy bibliography.  Roman husbands and wives often fell short of their ideals, but how is that different from their Christian counterparts?

If American Catholics really cared about preserving Christian marriage, they would quit pointing the finger at imaginary pagans and would, instead, be standing up to the wicked bishops who defend homosexual priests and to the  American Catholic annulment industry, surely a graver threat to marriage than a handful of misguided homosexuals and their advocates in the courts.

The real effect of this anti-Roman propaganda is to keep Christian conservatives ignorant of their traditions and alienate them from the civilization within which the Church took shape.  In this they are more like the crazed Calvinists who attribute all the ills of Christendom to Constantine.  In rejecting Roman traditions, they are rejecting Cicero and Vergil, Roman law and Roman order.  Ironically for Catholics, they are also rejecting the structure [...]]]>  

A great deal of ink is being spilled on the two Supreme Court cases taking up same-sex marriage, but the effect is rather like the ink released by a cuttlefish to cloud the vision of its enemies.  To anticipate my conclusion, let me go on record as saying that family-values conservatives have done vastly more harm than good.  Their arguments and policies lead only to one end: the nationalization of marriage and the family.  Why does the left always win?  Because the conservatives do their work for them.

Some of them mean well, I suppose, but one might say the same of Pol Pot.  Hell, as the proverb goes, is paved with good intentions, and journalists and activists who do not take the trouble to understand an issue should avoid making public statements or taking part in political controversies.  When the ignorant and corrupt are permitted to lead a movement, whether it involves abortion or global warming, Hell is the only destination.

The problem of ignorance is illustrated by  articles on Roman marriage being sent around in Catholic circles.  I received one today, written  by a "Catholic ethicist" named Benjamin Wilker. A few days ago I got a similar piece by someone named Craig Turner.  Both articles are written in the  breathless tone one associates with people like John Lofton, and both circulate stories of the seamy sex lives of Nero and Elagabalus.  There is no consideration of the sources themselves, and neither writer seems to know anything about Roman law or marriage customs. It might be amusing, if a bit depressing, to find the comon source for these and other such exercises in phony erudition.

It does not require a deep knowledge of the classics to  understand the  utter foolishness of the argument.   One need only consider parallels.  Would we be justified in basing our opinion of 18th century French Catholic marriage on the works of Choderos de Laclos or the Marquis de Sade? Could we use the shenanigans of Lindsay Lohan, Charley Sheen, or John F. Kennedy as representative examples of the sex lives of ordinary Americans? That such people exist, alas, is true, and their numbers are growing, but I only meet such people occasionally.  The Victorian Age had its set of monsters, but it would be ridiculous to imagine that sex orgies were characteristic of the middle-class Victorian family.

If either of these gentlemen were at all interested in knowing anything about Roman marriage, they could turn to contemporary historians such as Richard Saller, Susan Treggiari, and Edward Champlin (among many others), who have thoroughly debunked Hollywood's sensational depiction of sex-crazed Romans.  They might also want to look into the case law presented with admirable clarity by Bruce Frier and Thomas McGinn in their A Casebook on Roman Family Law. In these works they would discover the Roman ideal of marriage as an affectionate bond between man and wife, one that is assumed to last until death.  In the unlikely event they are interested in learning the truth, I should be happy to supply a lengthy bibliography.  Roman husbands and wives often fell short of their ideals, but how is that different from their Christian counterparts?

If American Catholics really cared about preserving Christian marriage, they would quit pointing the finger at imaginary pagans and would, instead, be standing up to the wicked bishops who defend homosexual priests and to the  American Catholic annulment industry, surely a graver threat to marriage than a handful of misguided homosexuals and their advocates in the courts.

The real effect of this anti-Roman propaganda is to keep Christian conservatives ignorant of their traditions and alienate them from the civilization within which the Church took shape.  In this they are more like the crazed Calvinists who attribute all the ills of Christendom to Constantine.  In rejecting Roman traditions, they are rejecting Cicero and Vergil, Roman law and Roman order.  Ironically for Catholics, they are also rejecting the structure of the Roman Church.

At the same time as these pernicious screeds have been poisoning the minds of Catholics, political conservatives have been quietly abandoning the battle field.  According to an article in Reuters a few days ago, two dozen pro-family conservatives met in Salt Lake City in December.  Learning that the Mormons were going to pull the plug on their payrolls, they decided to abandon the fight to preserve normal marriage.

It was only a matter of time before conservatives would give up their phony resistance to same-sex marriage.  Right on schedule, Republicans are bailing out on the marriage issue.  When they contrived their foolish and dangerous Defense of Marriage Act (1996), I said at the time (and repeated my argument ad nauseam) that the only long-term effect would be to make marriage a national issue that would enable the Left to redefine marriage.  All the arguments in DOMA itself are being used by leftist advocates to overturn DOMA--and any state restriction on same-sex marriage.

DOMA was the brainchild of Gary Bauer, one of the GOP's culture warriors who almost always gets everything entirely wrong.  Now only seventeen years later, Republican leaders are shifting to the Left, as I always said they would.  They have never and will never stick to their guns, and it is an idle dream to hope that ever will.

Some of the Republicans are so embarrassed that they do not know what to say.  Saxby Chambliss's contradictory and illogical ramblings do the senator credit.  He has the decency to be ashamed.

By contrast, Ohio Senator Rob Portman is pleased as punch by the  immediate respectability he has gained by advocating Gay "marriage."

Senator, have you no shame?  It is bad enough that you are trying to make political capital out of a family misfortune, but even more repellent is the self-serving assumption that underlies your tergiversation.  It is all very well to oppose a legal revolution on moral grounds, you are telling us, until you discover it might affect you personally.  A senator who advocates the death penalty for raping and murdering young children would then be justified in changing his mind if his brother were convicted of such crimes.  No one expects integrity from a US Senator, but we do have a right to demand some decent stab at hypocrisy, and the new breed of Republican is not intelligent enough even to feign hypocrisy.

Conservatives will never win a debate or even make a forceful if unsuccessful defense of their positions until they can clear their heads of the propaganda they have imbibed from the family-values think tanks, which are all too often the defenders of leftist revolutions.  Some conservatives are aghast that David Blankenhornm, the revered founder of the Institute for American Values, has changed sides.  What did they expect?

Blankenhorn used to be a Vista volunteer and community organizer, in other words, a leftist agitator who collaborated with the far-left  Highlander Folk School.  Personally, I like and respect the man, as I still respect the  many  leaders of  Highlander I used to know as honest revolutionaries.  As a conservative, however, David has never been more than a fellow-traveler, completely out of touch with conservative traditions.  To give him his due, he is an intelligent man who always seems ill-at-ease with the pro-family buffoons with whom he is forced to associate in what he imagines to be a good cause.  I only wish he were on our side.

Leftists are nearly always sentimental about people they do not know.  Blankenhorn spent his leftist youth crusading for rights, privileges, and subsidies for black Americans.  To gain the support of such people for a leftist cause, you only have to make the equation:  Gays=blacks=women in Muslim countries=baby seals.  Once a sucker, always a sucker.  It is not an intellectual deficiency but a fault of character.

Blankenhorn’s revolutionary past constitutes some sort of excuse, but scratching beneath the surface of too many conservatives, you are likely to find, at best, the principles of Rousseau and Robespierre and the politics of Franklin Roosevelt.   This is true even of all too many Christians, though they have better grounds to stand on.  In opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Christian conservatives, to take the most honorable example, fall into one of two errors.

The more pardonable error is to rely solely on Scripture and/or the authority of the Church, as if we would even be considering such nonsense as Gay Marriage if a significant minority of Republican politicians were any kind of Christian.  The argument from religious authority only works with members of the same religion.

When the appeal to authority fails them, Christians--especially Catholics--turn to the revolutionary-leftist language of international human rights.  Babies have rights that must be protected, the right to be born and the right to live in a normal family with parents of opposite sexes.  Why not throw in the right to parents with good looks, high incomes, and Ivy League educations?

If babies and children have rights, who is to secure them ?  Since the children cannot sue in court or demand their rights, overpaid government agents must rescue them by stripping parents of their authority.  When the left does this, conservatives call them "child-savers" and denounce the government as a "nanny state," but when conservatives call for exactly the same state intervention, they are defenders of the family.

It is truly a movement of scribblers, pharisees, and actors.  Some years ago I had dinner with a leading family-values Christian conservative, a married man and father who spent the evening trying to pick up the pretty waitress, using lines he clearly had practiced.  You all recall the recent case of Dinesh D'Souza who claimed not to know that Christians were not supposed to spend the night with a future second wife while they were still married to the first.

But even if they were sincere, as few pro-family conservatives are, the conservative mind today is the leftist mind of a generation ago.   Their hearts may well be in the right place, but in their minds they see themselves as crusaders and liberators, defenders of individual rights and downtrodden minorities.  Always fighting for last year's revolutionary cause, they are in no shape to fight against the latest phase of the revolution.

Here we are, then, where all the family-values rhetoric has brought us:  Catholics who make up wild tales about Rome, Mormons who cut the money off from the anti-same-sex-marriage-movement, and left-minded conservatives who cut their losses and go prowling about the world seeking the ruin of widows' bank accounts.

Many Arizona ranchers bought Mexican cattle, no questions asked, but two families seemed to specialize in the business.  Newman “Old Man” Clanton and his sons Isaac, Phineas, and William, and the McLaury brothers, Robert Findley (Frank), and Thomas.  The Clantons were, in general, hard-luck cases.  Like the Earps, they traveled the West looking for easy money.  The Old Man and Ike had both been in and out of the Confederate militias—Ike was a deserter but he reenlisted with the old man, probably to get the enlistment bounty.  Ike was an excitable big-talking loudmouth who rarely had the guts to back his play, once his explosive temper had a chance to cool down, and his brothers Phin and Billy, though less aggressive, never amounted to much.

The McLaurys were by no means so no-account.  They were “plain, good-hearted industrious fellows,” as John Pleasant Gray described them.  Gray was a respectable rancher whose relatives occasionally ran with the cowboys, whose crimes Gray acknowledged while praising them for their courage and for “the strain of honor in their hearts.”   More impartial critics regarded the Cowboys as indispensable warriors in the struggles against Indians and Mexicans.

The McLaurys came from a decent family—their father was a successful attorney in NY State (somewhere in the Catskills), and brother Will would take up the same profession.  Tom and Frank McLaury were hardworking ranchers, known for being well-dressed.  They had a decent reputation, for the most part, in Tombstone.  Both could handle a gun, and Frank was esteemed as a good shot, which is why Wyatt shot him and not Billy Clanton, when Billy drew his gun.

At the hearing, Will McClaury seems to have firmly believed that his brothers were completely honorable men who had been murdered by outlaws who put on badges to shield their criminal activities.  Will was probably misled by his brother’s friends—they were certainly no angels—but neither were they demons.  They were simply young men who had gone West and found a risky and exciting way to make money.  Essentially, they acted as fences for the Cowboys who rustled cattle in Mexico, and Frank and Tom and probably Billy Clanton joined the Cowboys on some of their raids.  As the [...]]]> Arrayed against the Earps in Tombstone was a loose and constantly shifting set of alliances known as “The Cowboys.”  Eastern journalists, looking for sensational material, followed the Cowboys’ enemies and rivals in describing them as an organized gang, but no one could quite figure out who the gang’s leader was—Ike Clanton, Bill Brocius, or John Ringold. 

“The Cowboys” was not a term of respect or even a neutral term for ranch hands, who were known then as herders.  Cowboys were wild men, none too careful—it was alleged—whose horse they rode or whose cattle they sold.  They were certainly dangerous customers, too fond of their liquor and much too prone to shooting off guns in saloons, theaters, and even in church.  They were generally said to be Texans, though some of the Cowboys had never been to Texas and more had only visited the Lone Star State.

These were unsettled times, and it was hard to distinguish between a law-abiding rancher who tried to lead a peaceful life and the rowdier types who may have occasionally bought cattle that had been stolen in Mexico.  After all, the Mexicans were regarded as  "greasers" who had frequently crossed the border to steal Texas beef, a criminal enterprise in which they were not infrequently aided and abetted by Mexican officials and army units.  Cattle then, drugs today—the pattern does not change.  The US Army did little or nothing to protect Texas ranchers, who were after all ex-Confederates.  In 1875 Texas Ranger Captain Leander McNelly with 30 men defied the Union army and crossed the Rio Bravo, demanded and received a herd of stolen cattle, while standing off a Mexican army detachment of several hundred!  Even then McNelly was dying of tuberculosis.

Many Arizona ranchers bought Mexican cattle, no questions asked, but two families seemed to specialize in the business.  Newman “Old Man” Clanton and his sons Isaac, Phineas, and William, and the McLaury brothers, Robert Findley (Frank), and Thomas.  The Clantons were, in general, hard-luck cases.  Like the Earps, they traveled the West looking for easy money.  The Old Man and Ike had both been in and out of the Confederate militias—Ike was a deserter but he reenlisted with the old man, probably to get the enlistment bounty.  Ike was an excitable big-talking loudmouth who rarely had the guts to back his play, once his explosive temper had a chance to cool down, and his brothers Phin and Billy, though less aggressive, never amounted to much.

The McLaurys were by no means so no-account.  They were “plain, good-hearted industrious fellows,” as John Pleasant Gray described them.  Gray was a respectable rancher whose relatives occasionally ran with the cowboys, whose crimes Gray acknowledged while praising them for their courage and for “the strain of honor in their hearts.”   More impartial critics regarded the Cowboys as indispensable warriors in the struggles against Indians and Mexicans.

The McLaurys came from a decent family—their father was a successful attorney in NY State (somewhere in the Catskills), and brother Will would take up the same profession.  Tom and Frank McLaury were hardworking ranchers, known for being well-dressed.  They had a decent reputation, for the most part, in Tombstone.  Both could handle a gun, and Frank was esteemed as a good shot, which is why Wyatt shot him and not Billy Clanton, when Billy drew his gun.

At the hearing, Will McClaury seems to have firmly believed that his brothers were completely honorable men who had been murdered by outlaws who put on badges to shield their criminal activities.  Will was probably misled by his brother’s friends—they were certainly no angels—but neither were they demons.  They were simply young men who had gone West and found a risky and exciting way to make money.  Essentially, they acted as fences for the Cowboys who rustled cattle in Mexico, and Frank and Tom and probably Billy Clanton joined the Cowboys on some of their raids.  As the Mexicans cracked down on the border, some of the Cowboys, it is believed took to raiding Texas ranches and even, so it is said, robbing stage coaches.  It is unlikely, however, that the McLaurys were guilty of anything more serious than receiving stolen merchandise and of sticking by their friends and neighbors, when Wyatt Earp was out for blood.  Frank and Tom had become tough customers, but their legal brother Will was cut from the same cloth, and he probably commissioned the shooting of Morgan and perhaps Virgil Earp.

The McClaurys came from York state by way of Iowa, but the Clantons were men of the Southwest—Missouri, Illinois (Adams Co, West of Springfield,  is very Southern), and Texas.    John Ringold and Curley Bill Brocious were both viewed as Texans.

Ringo was born in Indiana (1850), but the family moved to Missouri and then San Jose, California, where a relative had married Coleman Younger the uncle of the Confederate guerilla  of the same name.  By 1874 Ringo was in Burnet Texas where he was arrested for discharging a pistol. A year later he got involved in one of the great Texas blood feuds, the Mason County War, also known as the Hoodoo War.  He was arrested and held in Austin during a trial and retrial.  It was there he made friends with John Wesley Hardin, the most celebrated killer of the Southwest.  (Hardin's memoirs are well worth reading).  In the end charges were dismissed for lack of evidence:  No one was willing to testify.  By the end of 1878, Ringo was  known to be in Arizona, where he resumed his lifetime shooting spree, shooting a man in a saloon for refusing to drink whiskey (an understandable if not entirely pardonable response to a boor).  In Tombstone, he became known as one of the most dangerous Cowboys, though there is little or no evidence that Johnny Ringo ever engaged in a regular showdown in the street.  There is a curious legend that Ringo was fond of quoting Latin poetry, making him the ancestor of TV’s Palladin.

Curley Bill Brocius (1845-72) was best known for his excellence with a pistol and for a bizarre sense of humor:  On one occasion he once made an entire Mexican party dance naked and on another he made preacher dance in church.  He probably got in trouble with law in Texas and discretely moved to Arizona in 1878.  Bill killed Tombstone town marshal Fred White by accident—Earp was witness and his testimony eventually got Curley bill released.  Nonetheless, Brocius held a grudge against Wyatt, who buffaloed him while taking him into custody.  In 1881 Sheriff Johnny Behan employed Curley Bill among other cowboys as tax collectors.  When Old Man Clanton—along with Dick Gray (brother of John P and son of Mike, one of Tombstone’s founders) and several others--was killed by Mexicans in Guadalupe Canyone Massacre, Bill emerged as one of the dominant figures in the group.

Brocius not always an enemy of the Earps.  In 1881 Brocius joined Behan and the Earps in chasing after the Apaches who threatened Arizona.  Curley Bill is often accused of taking part in the shooting of Virgil Earp, but there is no hard evidence.  He was deputized by Behan to pursue and arrest the Earps during their famous vendetta ride, but  it was Brocius who ended up dead.  There are several versions of the story.  In one, Earp and Holliday,  came across Brocius at his campfire in March 22, 1884.  Wyatt killed him with a shotgun blast—apparently a cold-blooded murder, though Curley Bill was armed and his shot narrowly missed killing Wyatt.  In Earp's story the cowboys had ridden up shooting, and while Holiday and the others fled the scene, Wyatt started shooting, killed Brocius but, though his clothes were torn up by bullets, emerged unscathed.  Believe what you will, but I have no doubt that Wyatt would have murdered anyone, armed or not, whom he believed to have shot one of his brothers.

There is a political dimension to the feud: there often is.  The Earps were Republicans, supporting the reforming editor of the Epitaph, John Clum, who became mayor, while Johnny Behan and the cowboys were Democrats.  Although both groups were Anglo-Celtic whites from mostly poor rural backgrounds, the Earps had gravitated toward the Midwest, while the Cowboys were dominated by Texans.  Two Earps had been Union soldiers, while several of the Cowboys were Confederates or at least sons and brothers of Confederates.  Wyatt had already got a reputation in Dodge City for roughing up good old Texas cowboys on a spree.

It is easy to look at Curley Bill and Johnny Ringo as desperados, and their enemies were always sure to describe them as outlaws, but Curley Bill, in particular, had many admirers among respectable men and women.  He was reckless, too, and sometimes ruthless, but he was a man of courage and honor.  The harsh and criminal Reconstruction regime in Texas had caused something like a civil war between decent southerners and the Carpetbagger/Scalawag coalition that exploited the state and oppressed the ex-Confederates.  Decent men of good families soon found themselves forced to defend their property, their families, and their lives by the gun.  According to Wes Hardin, his string of homicides was provoked by a bullying negro, whose killing even in self-defense was sure to bring Hardin to the scaffold.  On the other hand, it is also true that bad habits harden the character, and many a bold youth ends his days as a robber or even contract killer.   As the beautiful Frances Dee tells Joel McCrae in Four Faces West (based on  Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ fine novella, Paso Por Aqui), a hunted man will eventually steal to live and end up killing someone.  This is not to excuse the cowboys and the McLaurys, but some of the Texans must have been disgusted by the sanctimony of these Yankee gamblers and flesh-peddlers, even if one of them did eat ice cream.

Then, too, while the cowboys were mostly country boys, the Earps were backed by the town folks—merchants, bankers, mine-owners--who did not like the violent irruptions of the cowboys into Tombstone, but the lines were not so clearly drawn between town and country:  The Earps, while they had learned to detest farm work, were nonetheless tough frontiersman who had spent their childhood milking cows, pitching hay, and mending fences.  And, some of the town merchants, while they disliked violence, depended heavily on the free-spending cowboys for their livelihood.

Some events pass into legend because they typify a way of life, a time and a place—Cato’s suicide at Utica, Travis, Crockett, and Bowie’s stand at the Alamo, Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle for the Virgin Queen.  But, the Gunfight at the OK Corral has been mythologized, not because it was a typical event on the frontier but because it was so unusual—unique--for so many men to shoot it out on the street.  Perhaps it was its very uniqueness that made this shootout part of the American myth, but the treatment of the conflict also flattered the American sense of superiority.  Here were bold Northern men, officers of the law, who put down a violent conspiracy of anarchic Southerners who did not appreciate the Glorious Union.  Death be to all such men, whether they are ex-rebels, Irish Catholics, plains Indians, Filipinos, Nazi Krauts, or Ragheads who never lifted a finger against the United States but cannot be made to understand the advantages of US occupation.

The newspapermen, teachers, and professors who turned the Earp brothers into knights in shining armor, defending the American Way of Life from the Cowboys, were liars in a patriotic cause.  Today we can see their mirror image—though it is a distorted funhouse mirror—in the journalists and academics today who vilify anyone who stands up for western civilization, the Christian Church, or the straight white Anglo-Celtic male.  If we have to print the legend, I’ll take the old legend any day.

Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, home of Monmouth College, the  alma mater of our friend and colleague, the late James Stockdale.  Living in Iowa he was repeatedly in trouble, principally for keeping a bawdy house.  He served as deputy marshall in Wichita, Kansas, before joining his brother Jim in Dodge City.  Wyatt, Jim, Virgil, and Morgan Earp landed in Tombstone, where their northern/unionist sympathies brought them into conflict with a group of cowboys nominally headed by the largely no-account Clantons and their respectable allies the McLaury brothers, who had the support of the town sheriff.  The town was divided on the  merits of the two parties, but in the famous gunfight near the OK Corral, Ike Clanton proved to be yellow and the others no match for the Earps and their homicidal dentist friend, Doc Holliday.  The gunfight itself and Wyatt's vendetta against the men who shot his brothers is an old story, told to me many times by my father who as a boy sat on Wyatt Earp's kneee, and it will be retold as long as their are any real Americans left.  As a child I adored Wyatt Earp, but a lifetime of reading has made me sadder and wiser without, however, entirely deadening my admiration for a man who generally avoided violent confrontation and never used a gun unless he had to, though, when he had to, displayed the nerve for which our people have always been justly renowned.  Here are a few pages of a talk I delivered a few years back, some parts of which made it into Chronicles.

It was about 3 PM on October 26, 1881 as the town marshal and his informal deputies walked down the street.  The date is probably not familiar, but you all know what happened that day in Tombstone, when Marshal Virgil Earp—also a deputy US Marshall, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the OK Corral.  After thirty seconds of firing, Morgan Earp lay badly wounded, Holliday and Virgil had sustained less serious wounds, while Billy Clanton and the McLaurys were dead or dying.  Only Wyatt and Ike Clanton—who had fled the scene, unarmed--were unscathed.

Witnesses to the gunfight said that Billy Clinton and Wyatt drew more or less simultaneously—though Wyatt claimed he drew only when he saw Billy reaching for his gun.  Rather than shoot Billy, however, Wyatt went for the best gun in the bunch—Robert—known as Frank--McLawry and shot him in the stomach. The wounded McLawry took aim at Doc Holliday, saying, “I’ve got you now.”  Raising his gun, Doc told him, “Blaze away: You’re a daisy if you do,” but Frank shot Holliday in the hip before being hit again by a wounded Morgan Earp.

The details are a little sketchy and have been debated by the Earps’ defenders and detractors for over a century and a quarter, but most of us who do not have a dog in this famous fight will probably still see the events as a morality play in black and white that has been told and retold in fiction and movies.  The noble Earps—all good Republicans—were on the side of law and order. They were virtuous men who did not drink liquor or indulge in the vices that were on gaudy display in the Old West.  Wyatt even ate ice cream instead of drinking redeye.  The lives of these gallant officers of the law had been repeatedly threatened by a gang of rustlers, stagecoach robbers, and murderers, but when the time came, the fearless Earps, quick on the draw, showed their mettle.

This, or something very like it, was the story I grew up believing.  It was enshrined in one of the classics of [...]]]> Wyatt Earp, saloonkeeper, professional gambler, profligate, and alleged procurer of women, was for all his faults a great American hero.

Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, home of Monmouth College, the  alma mater of our friend and colleague, the late James Stockdale.  Living in Iowa he was repeatedly in trouble, principally for keeping a bawdy house.  He served as deputy marshall in Wichita, Kansas, before joining his brother Jim in Dodge City.  Wyatt, Jim, Virgil, and Morgan Earp landed in Tombstone, where their northern/unionist sympathies brought them into conflict with a group of cowboys nominally headed by the largely no-account Clantons and their respectable allies the McLaury brothers, who had the support of the town sheriff.  The town was divided on the  merits of the two parties, but in the famous gunfight near the OK Corral, Ike Clanton proved to be yellow and the others no match for the Earps and their homicidal dentist friend, Doc Holliday.  The gunfight itself and Wyatt's vendetta against the men who shot his brothers is an old story, told to me many times by my father who as a boy sat on Wyatt Earp's kneee, and it will be retold as long as their are any real Americans left.  As a child I adored Wyatt Earp, but a lifetime of reading has made me sadder and wiser without, however, entirely deadening my admiration for a man who generally avoided violent confrontation and never used a gun unless he had to, though, when he had to, displayed the nerve for which our people have always been justly renowned.  Here are a few pages of a talk I delivered a few years back, some parts of which made it into Chronicles.

It was about 3 PM on October 26, 1881 as the town marshal and his informal deputies walked down the street.  The date is probably not familiar, but you all know what happened that day in Tombstone, when Marshal Virgil Earp—also a deputy US Marshall, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the OK Corral.  After thirty seconds of firing, Morgan Earp lay badly wounded, Holliday and Virgil had sustained less serious wounds, while Billy Clanton and the McLaurys were dead or dying.  Only Wyatt and Ike Clanton—who had fled the scene, unarmed--were unscathed.

Witnesses to the gunfight said that Billy Clinton and Wyatt drew more or less simultaneously—though Wyatt claimed he drew only when he saw Billy reaching for his gun.  Rather than shoot Billy, however, Wyatt went for the best gun in the bunch—Robert—known as Frank--McLawry and shot him in the stomach. The wounded McLawry took aim at Doc Holliday, saying, “I’ve got you now.”  Raising his gun, Doc told him, “Blaze away: You’re a daisy if you do,” but Frank shot Holliday in the hip before being hit again by a wounded Morgan Earp.

The details are a little sketchy and have been debated by the Earps’ defenders and detractors for over a century and a quarter, but most of us who do not have a dog in this famous fight will probably still see the events as a morality play in black and white that has been told and retold in fiction and movies.  The noble Earps—all good Republicans—were on the side of law and order. They were virtuous men who did not drink liquor or indulge in the vices that were on gaudy display in the Old West.  Wyatt even ate ice cream instead of drinking redeye.  The lives of these gallant officers of the law had been repeatedly threatened by a gang of rustlers, stagecoach robbers, and murderers, but when the time came, the fearless Earps, quick on the draw, showed their mettle.

This, or something very like it, was the story I grew up believing.  It was enshrined in one of the classics of frontier literature, Stuart N. Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, republished as the Life and Times of Wyatt Earp, a book I read more than once as a boy.  I do not know how many films have been made, but the more famous ones include: Wyatt Earp (1994), Tombstone and (1993), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), My Darling Clementine (1946), and Stuart N. Lake’s Frontier Marshal (1939) with the best cast imaginable: Randolph Scott (Wyatt), Caesar Romero (Doc), Ward Bond, Lon Chaney, Jr, John Carradine, Binnie Barnes, and, playing the entertainer Eddie Foy who was in Tombstone, is Eddie Foy, Jr.

The most ridiculous of these films is probably Gunfight at the OK Corral with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster—I cannot recall which played Earp and which played Doc Holliday.  Even more dishonest, perhaps is John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, in which the under-muscled Henry Fonda romances Doc Holliday’s former schoolmarm girlfriend—quite a difference from Holliday’s woman known as Big-Nosed Kate.  Although it is not clear, exactly how Kate got her name, whether from the size of her nose or her habit of sticking it into matters that did not concern her, she was certainly no Rhonda Fleming.  Ford kicked out the McLaurys and focused on the evil old man Clanton, played brilliantly by Walter Brennan, though Old Man Clanton must have had real grit to direct operations from the grave he was already lying in.

We all wanted to be cowboys in those days.  We saw all the Western serials in the theaters—not just Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the incomparable Hopalong Cassidy, but the oaters of Bob Steele, the Three Mesquiteers, and Lash Larue and Johnny Mack Brown recycled on TV—when it finally came to the small towns that were still inhabited by real Americans, when there were real Americans.  Some of these cowboy heroes were sure to come to the Tristate Fair that was the highpoint of every year.  Although I was sick in bed the year Hopalong Cassidy came to town, my father got me an autographed from Hoppy and his pal Lucky, who were staying in my father’s hotel, but the biggest thrill was the night my old man brought home Johnny Mack Brown for supper.  This former halfback for Alabama’s Crimson Tide  was a dead man walking.  I had seen, in my short life, more than a few drunks, but I had never seen any man that drunk who could still walk and talk and more or less function, though not well enough to keep this 11 year old boy from skinning him, hand after hand, at poker.

We all knew, of course, that our cowboy heroes were only singers and actors—though even dead drunk Johnny Mack Brown could knock most men’s blocks off.  But Wyatt Earp was no actor: He was the real thing.  My father had told me many times about the time he had sat, as a very small boy, on the great man’s knee.  Earp was in Chicago to do one of his lectures, and after receiving the keys to the city, he was asked if he wanted anything else.  Yes, the former deputy marshal of Tombstone replied, he had read in the newspaper about the kind of real lawman he admired and would like to meet.  That was my father’s uncle Garret Fleming.  An anarchist—today we would call him a terrorist—had taken hostages (a woman and perhaps her daughter) and said he would shoot them if anyone came to arrest him. Great uncle Garret was no slouch—he would later put a slug or two into Frank Nitti—and he crashed through the window, drilled the anarchist, and rescued the hostages unharmed.  Since Garret had no children, he took his brother and his nephew to meet the hero.

That incident, told and retold, explains my love for Stuart N. Lake’s hagiography on which the television show starring Hugh O’Brien was loosely based.  My father never liked the show, and one night, as we were watching Wyatt confront the crooked sheriff Johnny Behan after fortifying his nerve on a wholesome glass of milk, my father observed, “All this comes out of the Tombstone Epitaph.  If you read the other paper, The Nugget, Behan was an upright character and the Earps were villains.”

The remark taught me many things.  I continued to revere Wyatt Earp, but I began to question the facts that were put in newspapers and history books, and I dimly realized that to understand history it was not quite enough simply to take sides.  Life is not always so simple as a Sunset Carson movie; sometimes it is downright complicated—more like Bud Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome film than Roy Rogers in The Gay Ranchero.

Take the Earps.  They were unquestionably brave men and tough.  In Dodge, Wichita, and Tombstone, they proved themselves tough and resourceful.  They inspired respect from many, envy from some, but very little affection.  Perhaps it was the steely glaze of their cold blue eyes, or perhaps it was the fact that they were continually on the make, willing to make money by almost any means that did not involve working with their hands.  At the preliminary hearing held for the killing of the Clantons and McLaurys, Wyatt listed his occupation as saloon-keeper.  This was a piece of social pretension. While it is true he did tend bar from time to time, like his oldest brother Jim, he was a professional gambler and ran the Faro table at the Oriental Saloon.  Early in his career there were charges—and not unsubstantial charges—that in Lamar, Missouri he had falsified a legal document and a defrauded a man of $20.  He had even committed the Western sin against the Holy Ghost by stealing a horse.

Paragons of courage though they undoubtedly were, the Earps did not practice all the virtues.  Jim was something of a lush, and his wife Bessie was both a prostitute and a Madame.  It is not clear when or if Virgil, Morgan, or Wyatt married the women they were living with as man and wife in Tombstone, but one or another of them had worked the streets at one time.  In fact, early in their career, when admirers of the brothers dubbed them the fighting Earps, enemies responded by calling them “the fighting pimps.”  Even Wyatt’s middle-class Jewish wife Sadie had lived openly with Wyatt’s enemy, Sheriff Johnny Behan as his pretend-wife, though previously, when her modest thespian talents were not in demand, she had apparently practiced a more ancient if slightly less honorable profession.

One detail of the legend is true: Wyatt loved ice-cream and in his Tombstone days refused to drink.

The aftermath of the OK Corral fight—which took place on the street not in the corral—was even bloodier than the fight itself.  Ike Clanton, backed by Johnny Behan, filed murder charges against the Earps and Doc Holliday, though only Wyatt and Doc had to undergo a hearing.  The mood in Tombstone and around the country quickly shifted from a celebration of the Earps’ courage to a denunciation of them as murderers.  Ike Clanton’s confused and contradictory testimony, however, undercut the prosecution’s case.  But Ike’s stupidity and prevarication do not necessarily exculpate the Earps.

It is true that Virgil and Wyatt were peace officers who had a right to disarm the Clantons, but anyone with a drop of common sense knew that blood would flow if the two groups met on the street.  Ike Clanton had been in Tombstone, getting drunk and badmouthing and threatening the Earps.  But—and this is how bizarre things were--not long afterwards Virgil, Ike Clanton, Tom McLaury, and Sheriff Johnny Behan had stayed up all night playing poker, in which an altercation broke out between Ike and Virgil who ended up beating Ike with his gun.  Taken into custody, Ike threatened the Earps and Morgan offered to pay his fine, if Ike would face him with a gun—Morgan always had a big mouth. Later, about 1 PM Wyatt ran into Tom McLaury on the street.  By this time, Wyatt was out for blood:

“Are you heeled?” Wyatt snarled at McLaury.  Tom told him politely that he was a friend of Wyatt’s and held no grudge but “If you want to make a fight, I’ll make a fight with you anywhere.”

“All right, make a fight,’ was Wyatt’s answer as his crashed his pistol into Tom McLaury’s skull.  Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, after these events, can any reasonable person defend the Earps’ decision to confront the Clantons and McLaurys?  Can any of you pretend that they went into the street to enforce the law?  It is clear that the usually clear-headed and cool-tempered Wyatt—who had probably never killed a man and preferred to get the drop of a troublemaker by coming up behind him in an alley with a shotgun—had made up his mind.  Ike Clanton had shot off his mouth once too often about killing the Earps and it was time to kill the Clantons and any friends who stood by them before they killed the Earps.

Even after the hearings, the fight was not over.  In late December, Virgil was shot-gunned by three men in the street.  Ike Clanton’s hat was found nearby, and his friend Frank Stillwell was spotted.  Wyatt drew the obvious conclusions—though they would not have amounted to much in a court of law.  By the end of January, though Virgil was still in a serious condition, Morgan Earp was pretty well recovered.  Though warned of trouble, he insisted on having a night on the town, going to the theater and then to the pool hall, where he was shot through the window, as he bent over to make a shot.  People said the shooter was Frank Stillwell, and when Wyatt caught up with him, he and Ike Clanton appeared to be laying for Virgil Earp, who was being sent home to California for his health.  When Wyatt came upon Stillwell, he killed him in cold blood: “I ran straight for Stillwell,” he later recounted, “it was he who killed my brother.  What a coward he was.  He couldn’t shoot when I came near him.  He stood there helpless and trembling for his life.  As I rushed upon him, he put out his hands and clutched at my shotgun.  I let go both barrels, and he tumbled down dead and mangled at my feet.”  Wyatt went after Ike, but the cowardly Clanton once again made his escape.

By the standards of civilized life, both parties were guilty of cold-blooded, premeditated murder in the first degree, but look at it from each of their perspectives.  The Clantons would say with some justice that the Earps had provoked a quarrel with the Clantons and McLaurys and then with their homicidal dentist friend, gunned them down in the street.  By the laws of Vendetta, they deserved to die, not in a fair fight, as in an affair of honor, but executed without mercy or a chance to resist.  The Earps, on the other hand, though they would not have accepted the cowboys’ right to blood, applied the same argument to the men who had assassinated Morgan and tried to do the same to Virgil. By the end of the story, the Earps will have killed two McLaurys, Billy Clanton, Frank Stillwell, Curley Bill Brocius and who knows whom else.

And yet, for all their toughness and homicidal violence, neither the Earps nor the McLaurys were really gunmen, much less outlaws.  They lived according to an ancient code that had withered in London and Boston but sprang back to life on the frontier.  Meaning of the frontier/West: lawless stateless conditions that permitted pre-modern life to revive and burst into flower.  Gun battles and lynch mobs were as much a part of the can-do American mentality as quilting bees and barn raisings.  Even New Englanders had shared some of this spirit, at least in the early days, but it was the Anglo-Celts of MW/South, as they moved West, who defined it.

Like so many Americans of that time, the Earps were footloose vagabonds.  Their father came from Kentucky, but their childhood had been scattered across the West from Monmouth Illinois to California.  Like so many rootless men who went West, Wyatt and his brothers were in eternal pursuit of the American dream: the fast buck.  (I sometimes think that Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Cramden should be the American archetype or, if we prefer a literary character,  either Bret Harte's Col. Starbottle or  Col. Beriah Sellers in The Gilden Age co-authored by Mark Twain).  Wyatt would go on to be a gambler, saloon-keeper, and boxing referee:  In 1896 he refereed the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight for the heavyweight world championship.  Wyatt gave the victory to Sharkey, who had been taking a beating all night, accusing Fitzsimmons of landing an illegal low blow that injured Sharkey.  When Sharkey refused a medical examination, the word went up that Wyatt had fixed the fight, though it is more likely that he was taken in by Sharkey and his manager.  Wyatt’s lowest point was his arrest in Los Angeles (in 1911) for taking part in a gambling con.

But the legend never quite died, and Stuart N. Lake, who interviewed the hero,  made Wyatt a permanent icon of the Old West.  The book has many inaccuracies but how many are due to Wyatt (known for his reticence) and how many to Lake is anyone's guess.  I have made use of a number of books, especially Casey Terfilliger's  fairly recent biography.  It is well-researched and well worth reading, though a good editor could eliminate some of the clumsy writing and tendentious argumentation.

If there is any popular demand, I'll post a sequel that makes a case for the Cowboys.

A number of pop anthropologists (Robert Ardrey, Fox and Tiger, followed by George Gilder) pushed a thesis of human natural violence by comparing us with baboons.  This is simply not legitimate.  Baboons, langurs, macaques are not that closely related to us, and their sometimes tight and violent social structures, dominated by thugs, can be explained as an evolutionary response to environment.  Chimpanzees are more varied in behavior, more inclined toward problem-solving, more fluid in their hierarchies.  Chimpanzee children require more prolonged care, some of the responsibility for which devolves upon aunts and even on male members of the tribe.

Jane Goodall began her work with rather unrealistic assumptions about the nonviolent nature of chimpanzees, but when she had a baby, she realized that her inquisitive charges looked on the baby less as a specimen to observe than meat on the table.   Chimps cannot seem to get enough meat to eat and have to be satisfied, much of the time, with vegetable substitutes.  Nonetheless, they have an all-too human craving for meat and will do almost anything to get it, including snatch human babies from their mothers' arms.

A side-note:  We big-brained apes have a constant craving for meat and salt, both hard to procure in the wild, and both necessary for neurological development. To hunt game, we need bursts of energy, which can be stimulated by sugary foods--fruits and honey.  And since the biggest game we primates play is competitive reproduction, everything is slanted toward having as much sex as we can with females who will raise our offspring.  In this sense, the life of urban welfare dependent males today is natural, if atavistic.  Cramming their bodies with McDonald's junk washed down by high fructose soft drinks, fighting violent turf wars accompanied by chants more savage than we have heard from any ape (rap), and endlessly fornicating with females.  It is the American dream.

To be continued

Liberal and Leftist revolutions, while their ultimate purpose is to eliminate our love for our Creator, are devoted directly to destroying first our understanding of nature and the natural necessities of human existence and then to warping and redesigning our very nature. Marxism, feminism, homosexualism, and environmentalism all have this in common, a hatred of man as he is made both as natural being and in the image of God and a contempt for the objective that stares us in the face and blocks our every attempt to reinvent the human species as something other than what it is.

In this chapter, therefore, I propose both to go over some of my old arguments advanced first in The Politics of Human Nature  and then in The Morality of Everyday Life and to introduce some of my more recent reflections contained in my never-ending work that I am not entitling The Cities of Man.  I shall begin by stealing a few pages from chapter two of the new work, some bits of which may have been put on this website some months or years ago.

Philosophers since Socrates and Plato have been rather too prone to submit all human traditions to skeptical analysis, sometimes in the name of a scientific investigation of nature but more often out of a desire to subject human nature to the categories of a set of rational preconceptions.  Since Descartes, in particular, moral and political philosophers have turned away from ordinary human experience and drawn up moral codes and political schemes that seem more like Aristophanes’ Nephelococcygia (Cuckoos-in-the-Clouds) than any human polity.  Classical liberals wanted to eliminate or attenuate formal social classes, established religion, and irrational bonds of kinship; Marxists would abolish property and economic distinction; more recent radicals want to banish sexual differences and to subject the family to governmental control.  The goal of all these projectors was a rationally designed society controlled by the state and based on principles of perfect justice without regard for personal ties or historical tradition.  This ambitious objective, however, has remained largely unrealized.  Men, good and bad, still pursue wealth and power.  Even incompetent and negligent parents typically love their children, and though fewer and fewer men and women in the West are getting married, the institution is far from extinct.  

The persistence of our primitive passions even in postmodern conditions should come as no surprise.  The human race is old, not, perhaps, when measured either sub specie aeternitatis or by cosmic time or geological ages, but rather old nonetheless.  If we can believe the palaeo-anthropologists, some creature like Homo sapiens has been around for about 120,000 years.  If there are roughly 3 generations per century and something like 3000, per hundred thousand years, then the 15 or so  generations since the Renaissance represent .5% of the generations of the past 120,000 years or, in terms of total years, our culture represents about .4% of human history.

 The experience of Homo sapiens, as long as it is, constitutes only a small part of the story.  Man has been a work in progress for some time: Homo erectus, a species with a brain highly developed enough for speech, emerged about 1.8 million years ago.  As a percentage of 1.8 million, 500 ends up as 0.000 on the primitive calculator I started with, and [...]]]> I have been arguing for decades that any conservative point of view, to be usable or even defensible, has to be grounded in an understanding of human nature derived from observation of man's nature and history.  In an age where a Church may dictate morality, this understanding may be less necessary, though it must be said that Thomas Aquinas' arguments are rooted in Aristotle's methods and observations.  Whatever the justification Christians may once have had for ignoring the material realities of the big-brained apes that we live among and are, the Darwinian revolution consigned all that rubbishy speculations to the dustbin.