There is a famous story about a scientist who removes all of the legs from a frog and asks it to jump. When the frog, inevitably, does not jump, the scientist writes in his notebook, "With no legs, frog is deaf."
A similar phenomenon has been occurring among Republicans lately. In the wake of the Littleton shootings the one point of agreement between the left and the right has been the lack of easy explanations, which hasn't stopped the Republicans from suggesting one.
Newt Gingrich stated it bluntly in a recent speech to the Republican Women Leaders Forum. "We have had," he said, "a 35-year experiment in a unionized, bureaucratic, credentialed, secular assault on the core values of this country. We should not be surprised that eventually they yield bad fruit, because they are bad seeds." In Gingrich-ese, words like unionized, bureaucratic, credentialed and secular are all just synonyms for liberal. He goes on to say, "When Al Gore talks about God and faith, is he for voluntary school prayer or isn't he? Does he want to bring God back in or does he want to give us a psychobabble?"
Writing in The Los Angeles Times, author Tom Clancy was similarly blunt: "So maybe, just maybe, we can allow public schools to tell kids that some things are just plain wrong? The problem with that is that our ideas of right and wrong ultimately come from a source higher than the government. And to say such a thing would offend atheists." Guess what atheist is a synonym for? Clancy, in the same article, cautions us to beware of people who would use the Littleton tragedy to further their own political ends.
Conservative gurus Cal Thomas and Paul Weyrich have been similarly downbeat, lamenting that it might already be too late to bring this country back to God. Thomas recently opined that kids need to be taught that there is an absolute right and an absolute wrong, and that these absolutes come from God. Pat Robertson has offered that the Littleton tragedy is nothing short of a warning from God to change our ways before it is too late. Of course, I could just as plausibly argue that Littleton proves God's nonexistence.
Absent from all of this Republican invective is even the slightest shred of evidence that any of the recent school shootings are connected to the absence of religious instruction in public schools. And without such evidence, the Republicans are in danger of looking as foolish as our frog scientist.
It is a tautology to say the Littleton murderers have no values. The problem comes in linking values to God. Indeed, the shooters in the recent Arkansas and Kentucky incidents both came from families that attended church regularly. They were no strangers to God and his message. Early reports out of Littleton indicated that one of the two shooters had attended a seder in the weeks leading up to the massacre (but in the minds of many moral majoritarians, Judaism doesn't count). Also unmentioned is the virtual lack of violent crime in many European countries. These are countries whose secular culture differs from ours primarily in the strictness of their gun laws, and in their taboos against violence.
Equally irritating is Republican vagueness about what, exactly, they want. Gingrich wants "to bring God back in", but what does that mean? Does he want a special class devoted to religious training? And whose God? He calls for "voluntary school prayer," but that is precisely what we have now. Any student can pray whenever he or she feels like it. Does Gingrich want teachers to lead students in prayer? Does it matter to him what religion the teacher practices? Perhaps he only wants a nebulous moment of silence, but surely he doesn't think that would be sufficient to guard against all future shootings? Gingrich and his ilk really want Christianity to be taught in the schools, but they know this idea would be unpalatable to most people. So they couch their rhetoric in terms like "values" and "prayer" that generally garner a more favorable reaction.
Even here I might be inclined to take Gingrich seriously, if his hypocrisy were not so blazingly evident. Elsewhere in his speech he says, "And [Bill Bradley and Al Gore] can set a standard and say that we are only going to do fundraisers with producers and stars that do decent films." It doesn't seem to bother him that Republicans take money from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone, perpetrators of some of the most violent movies ever made. Tom Clancy's ultra-violent novels (which he can defend on the grounds that young children don't read them) are routinely made into ultra-violent movies. Of course, these movies usually show a macho American super-patriot delivering a rousing, red-white-and-blue butt-kicking to some ill-mannered foreigners. By Republican standards, this is a good moral message to be teaching our kids. Gingrich, incidentally, goes on to say, "And I am not using that just to make a partisan point."
If teaching values means instructing our kids about racial equality, the perils of crime and drugs, the importance of hard work and discipline, and respect for the people around you then I'm all for it. These are good, sound values regardless of whether there's a spirit in the sky watching over us or not. But the answer to Littleton does not lie in Republican simple-mindedness. Using God as some sort of three-letter bogeyman for scaring kids into line is an idea that should be offensive to all genuinely religious people. Our "core American values" include things like freedom of religion and tolerance of others. It would be foolish to allow the latest crop of Republican theocrats to sully these values in the name of righteousness or morality or God.
