Ben Stein's Confession

My confession:

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened.. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are, Christmas trees.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu .. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him? I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.

In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

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Then becoming a yearly license at a higher price. Now here is what it is in my own words.

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I want them to know that there will always be hope for freedom if they follow in these
people’s footsteps; if they cherish the concept of “free will”; if they believe that human
beings are special, not animals, and that they have intellects, souls, and consciences. I
want them to know that if the government schools are allowed to teach children K–12 using
Pavlovian/Skinnerian animal training methods—which provide tangible rewards only for
correct answers—there can be no freedom.

Why? People “trained”—not educated—by such educational techniques will be fearful of
taking principled, sometimes controversial, stands when called for because these people will
have been programmed to speak up only if a positive reward or response is forthcoming. The
price of freedom has often been paid with pain and loneliness.

In 1971 when I returned to the United States after living abroad for 18 years, I was
shocked to find public education had become a warm, fuzzy, soft, mushy, touchy-feely
experience, with its purpose being socialization, not learning. From that time on, from the
vantage point of having two young sons in the public schools, I became involved—as a
member of a philosophy committee for a school, as an elected school board member, as
co-founder of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM), and finally as a senior policy
advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S.
Department of Education during President Ronald Reagan’s first term of office. OERI was,
and is, the office from which all the controversial national and international educational
restructuring has emanated.

Those ten years (1971–1981) changed my life. As an American who had spent many
years working abroad, I had experienced traveling in and living in socialist countries.
When I returned to the United States I realized that America’s transition from a sovereign
constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare
(bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the “system” in
all areas of government—federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the
“system’s” control would take place in the school—through indoctrination and the use of
behavior modification, which comes under so many labels: the most recent labels being
Outcome-Based Education, Skinnerian Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction.4 In the 1970s
this writer and many others waged the war against values clarification, which was later
renamed “critical thinking,” which regardless of the label—and there are bound to be
many more labels on the horizon—is nothing but pure, unadulterated destruction of
absolute values of right and wrong upon which stable and free societies depend and upon
which our nation was founded.

In 1973 I started the long journey into becoming a “resister,” placing the first
incriminating piece of paper in my “education” files. That first piece of paper was a purple
ditto sheet entitled “All About Me,” next to which was a smiley face. It was an open-ended
questionnaire beginning with: “My name is _____.” My son brought it home from public
school in fourth grade. The questions were highly personal; so much so that they encouraged
my son to lie, since he didn’t want to “spill the beans” about his mother, father and brother.
The purpose of such a questionnaire was to find out the student’s state of mind, how he felt,
what he liked and disliked, and what his values were. With this knowledge it would be easier
for the government school to modify his values and behavior at will—without, of course, the
student’s knowledge or parents’ consent.

That was just the beginning. There was more to come: the new social studies textbook
World of Mankind. Published by Follett, this book instructed the teacher how to instill
humanistic (no right/no wrong) values in the K–3 students. At the text’s suggestion the
teacher was encouraged to take little tots for walks in town during which he would point
out big and small houses, asking the little tots who they thought lived in the houses: Poor
or Rich? “What do you think they eat in the big house? ...in the little house?” When I
complained about this non-educational activity at a school board meeting I was dismissed
as a censor and the press did its usual hatchet job on me as a misguided parent. A friend of
mine—a very bright gal who had also lived abroad for years—told me that she had overheard
discussion of me at the local co-op. The word was out in town that I was a “kook.” That was
not a “positive response/reward” for my taking

Sometimes there is just nothing else to say: The ACLU's not-so-holy trinity

Dr. Paul Kengor - Guest Columnist - 12/16/2010 9:30:00 AM

The ACLU seems unusually active right now. Maybe it's the Christmas season, which seems to make the ACLU more miserable than usual.

I tried to ignore the latest round of ACLU legal challenges, but they became too much. The surge has been remarkably ecumenical, not singling out Protestant or Catholic interests, whether challenging a public school in Florida or trying to compel a Catholic hospital to do abortions. At least the ACLU finds a way to unite Protestants and Catholics.

In the interest of faith and charity, I'd like to add my own ecumenical offering -- a history lesson. It concerns some fascinating material I recently discovered on the ACLU's early founders, especially three core figures: Roger Baldwin, Harry Ward, and Corliss Lamont. I can only provide a snapshot here, but you'll get the picture.

First, Roger Baldwin: Baldwin was the founder of the ACLU, so far to the left that he was hounded by the Justice Department of the progressive's progressive, Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps it was a faith thing. Wilson was a progressive, but he was also a devout Christian, and Roger Baldwin was anything but that.

Baldwin was an atheist. He was also a pro-Soviet communist, though smart enough not to join Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Other early officials of the ACLU, which was founded almost exactly the same time as the American Communist Party, included major party members like William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Communists used the ACLU to deflect questions from the U.S. government over whether they were loyal to the USSR, were serving Joe Stalin in some capacity, and were committed to the overthrow of the American system.

That "overthrow-the-government" thing is something our universities insist is a bunch of anti-communist, McCarthyite tripe. In fact, it took me mere minutes of digging into the Comintern Archives on CPUSA to find fliers and formal proclamations from the American Communist Party publicly advocating precisely that objective. (Click here to view some of the documents.) I also found the ACLU rife throughout those archives.

So bad had been the ACLU in aiding and abetting American communists that various legislative committees, federal and state, considered whether it was a communist front. The 1943 California Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities reported that the ACLU "may be definitely classed as a communist front." The committee added that "at least 90 percent of its [the ACLU's] efforts are expended on behalf of communists who come into conflict with the law." That 90-percent figure was consistent with a major report produced by Congress a decade earlier, January 17, 1931.

In my research, I also found constant approving references to the ACLU in CPUSA's flagship publication, the Daily Worker. The Daily Worker loved the ACLU. Moreover, I was struck by how early the ACLU had been challenging not just Christians but their most joyous holiday, with the Daily Worker's eager approval.

To cite just one example, Christmas 1946, the ACLU sought to stop the singing of Christmas carols in California public schools. For that, the communists were most grateful to Baldwin and the boys.

Aside from Roger Baldwin, there were two other especially influential figures comprising this not-so-holy ACLU trinity: Corliss Lamont and the Rev. Harry Ward. Covering these two adequately here is impossible. I've devoted probably about 10,000 words to Lamont alone in my book, Dupes -- both men were precisely that: dupes. For here, suffice to say that the ways in which Lamont and Ward were rolled by communists is astounding.

Alas, Christian charity compels me to concede a key fact, particularly at Christmas time. Among this not-so-holy trinity, there was a measure of redemption for Baldwin at least. Baldwin eventually -- after the Red Terror, after the Great Purge, after the Ukrainian famine, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, after millions of rotting corpses, after the gulag, after the communists had violated every imaginable civil liberty -- awakened to the stench of the Soviet system. He finally saw communism, and communists, as a genuine concern.

By the 1950s, Baldwin insisted that ACLU officers take a non-communist oath. Call Baldwin crazy, but he figured that any ACLU member who held allegiance to "totalitarian dictatorship" was not truly serious about civil liberties. Perhaps they were publicly exploiting American civil liberties to privately support a nation (the USSR) that had no civil liberties? Good thought.

So, yes, Roger Baldwin's ACLU backed away from its communist leanings.

Sadly, however, Baldwin's ACLU never seems to have shirked from its atheist leanings, which haunt us still today.

Could it be that the ACLU's alleged onetime commitment to defending communism has shifted to an apparent commitment to defending atheism? It certainly seems like it, especially this time of year. And if the ACLU doesn't like that perception, it should change it.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His books include "God and Ronald Reagan," "God and George W. Bush," and "God and Hillary Clinton." This column is printed with permission. A longer version of this article first appeared in "American Spectator."

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