Wrapped in the Flag (27 page)

One action Kendall suggested was a change to—or repeal of—the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Granting citizenship and the right of due process to former slaves was just a bridge too far; absolute individual rights were not part of the constitutional bargain.
³⁹

I was no genius about politics, but I could see the obvious: federal civil rights legislation would secure the voting rights of African American citizens, a fact that the white boys who ran the South understood. Despite his elegant prose and complex reasoning, Dr. Kendall was just another disgruntled Confederate fretting over the prospect of black folks actually voting.

“The shock of it,” I joked to friends. “First women get the vote. Now the Negroes. Where will it end?”

“When we’re barefoot and pregnant, and the black folks are pickin’ cotton,” my friend Lee Ann said.

Willmoore Kendall’s views on voting rights spread throughout the right wing. He’d already imprinted his ideas on his former student, Bill Buckley. In an article in
Esquire
in 1961, Buckley described the idea that everyone was qualified to vote as “one of the great self-delusions of democracy.” Buckley continued, “I don’t have any theory worked out on who should vote, but let’s
say, as a hypothesis that fifty per cent of the people are qualified to vote—or seventy-five per cent. I don’t know how you determine it.”
⁴⁰

Not to be outdone, Robert Welch followed the Founding Fathers in calling for “some ‘limitation on suffrage.’”
⁴¹
My parents were “all-in” on this limiting the vote idea. My father pontificated on the benefits of landowners only having the vote, while Mother thought that anyone who got anything from the government should sit out elections.
⁴²

In 1980, Paul Weyrich, a good friend of my parents, explained why he favored limiting the vote: “I don’t want everyone to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
⁴³

Weyrich may not be a household name, but he was the architect of much of the infrastructure of today’s right wing. Think the Heritage Foundation, a huge conservative think tank. Think “the Moral Majority,” the movement that brought the evangelicals into the GOP. Think ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, responsible for many of the voter-suppression bills that recently came to life in state legislatures across the country.
⁴⁴

In 2011, Republican-led legislatures introduced and passed scores of bills limiting access to the polls, a reasonable response, the GOP said, to the huge, ballooning problem of voter fraud. However, the Brennan Center for Justice, which studies voting issues, disputes those GOP conclusions: “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
⁴⁵

No matter, I’m sure that Bill Buckley, Willmoore Kendall, Robert Welch, Paul Weyrich, and my parents would cheer every effort to make it harder to vote. After all, too many of those lily-livered, bleeding-heart, damn-fool people were likely to vote for . . . liberals.

The true fundamentalists in our midst, whether Catholics, Protestants or Jews, are the moral salt of the earth—of an increasingly savorless earth where such salt is like a stream of clear water in a desert
.

—R
OBERT
W
ELCH
, 1958
¹

In 1964, I was still a good Catholic girl. I knew my Baltimore Catechism, confessed my sins, and believed in the Pope as Christ’s representative on earth and the infallible head of the Church. Every Sunday, I went to Mass. I never allowed myself an excuse—Sunday meant Mass and that was that.

Early in my college career, I discovered that many of my friends had a more flexible relationship with the Catholic Church. They were—
gasp
—liberal in their interpretation of rules and guiltless about sins. While I was towing the black-and-white moral line, I noticed that my friends were not only on a different path; they were also having a lot more fun than I was. “Time to learn their secrets,” I told myself.

I was, of course, fighting the rules and wresting back some control over my own decisions, but, mostly, I wanted to be included in the partying, such as it was. When I was offered a choice between playing bridge in the student union and chugging beer at California Crossing, I was going for the beer. Soon I could say “shit” with appropriate inflection and conviction. I choked down whatever liquor concoctions were served, from the infamous “Purple Jesus” to cheap booze right out of a bottle. I smoked like a chimney but drew the line at a sweet weed called “Mary Jane.” I parked with a date but refused to play the “baseball game” he described. I listened to raunchy jokes and tried to laugh at the punch line, even when I didn’t really get it.

As much as possible, I talked smart and pretended to be cool.

No matter what else I tried, however, this good Catholic girl forced herself out of bed every Sunday morning and into the chapel for the ten thirty Mass. Not only were very few of my friends in the pews, but my brother Jay R. was also among the missing. “Do you even go to church?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he answered. “I stay up all night, go to the seven o’clock Mass, and eat breakfast. I’m back in the sack before nine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’s the fastest Mass in history. Twenty minutes—start to finish—sermon included. Everyone goes,” he explained.

“Does it count?” I asked.

“Sure, as long as it has all the essential parts,” Jay R. assured me.

The next weekend, I set my alarm for 6:45 Sunday morning. I brushed my teeth, threw a trench coat over my pajamas, and stumbled into the chapel. The place was packed. The service was just as Jay described. In less than thirty minutes, Father Maher said the complete Mass (in Latin), gave a sermon (a very short one), and led two hymns (one verse of each). At 7:30 a.m., I was in the cafeteria eating scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. By 9 a.m., I was back in my bed for a Sunday nap.

I added the “fast Mass” to my “forget-this-happened-as-far-as-Mother-and-Dad-are-concerned” list, along with Dr. Cowan’s view of John F. Kennedy, Willmoore Kendall’s attack on the Birch Society, and all shenanigans having anything to do with my brother.

Three times a week, Father Thomas Cain entertained my theology class with his version of Australia’s favorite folk tune, “Waltzing Matilda.” Exactly why this kindly Dominican priest, who had been educated in Manila and Rome, whistled this song, I never knew. But it became his signature.
²

Thanks to him, I learned the strange story of the Bush swagman (hobo) who drowned himself in the billabong (deep lake) rather than be arrested by the squatter (landowner) and three troopers (cops). All because of a stolen jumbuck (sheep) and a tucker bag named Matilda.

“Crazy business, those Australian folk songs,” I said.

Thanks to Father Cain, I also figured out that theology as explained by Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican teacher of the thirteenth century, would never be my strong suit.
³
While some of my brainiac friends debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, I laughed. “How many beers does it take to care?” I wondered.

What I did learn from Father Cain, however, went far beyond either Matildas or angels. He was the first teacher I had ever had who used the Bible as a textbook. Anyone who wanted to pass his class had better read it, starting with the Book of Genesis
.

Of course, as a good Catholic girl, I already knew that God had created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. He had also made our first parents, Adam and Eve, and given them the Garden of Eden as their home.
Satan, taking the shape of a serpent, had tempted Eve to disobey God. She fell for the devil’s snares, ate the forbidden apple, and, in turn, offered a bite to Adam, who also ate. The sinners were cast out of Eden, naked. Thus, sin—original sin—came into the world, bringing with it labor, suffering, and death.

“Crazy business, those talking snakes,” I thought.

Before long, under Father Cain’s tutelage, the Creation story took on a whole new meaning. My teacher called that “putting away the things of a child.” In Genesis, Father Cain found two different Creation stories, each written by a different author with a very different style and for a different purpose. One emphasized God’s transcendent power, bringing something out of nothing. The second showed God’s intimate relationship with humans while pondering the questions of sin, free will, and punishment.
⁴

I had been taught that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, taking dictation from God Himself, and now I had to reconsider. Father Cain offered no definitive answer to the questions raised by modern biblical study, but his lectures kept me reading and learning.

As summer approached, I actually looked forward to sharing my new interest in the Bible with my parents. “Mother would love Father Cain,” I thought. “This is one safe dinner subject.”

Shortly after my parents joined the Birch Society, Robert Welch introduced them to Alphonse Matt, the editor of the
Wanderer
, a weekly Catholic newspaper published in St. Paul, Minnesota. Matt, an engaging, persuasive fellow, convinced Mother and Dad that the forces driving the country to the far left were also pushing the Catholic Church in the same direction. In no time, Matt had enlisted my parents in a crusade to save the Church, a crusade they embraced with the same fervor they gave to the Birch Society.

In 1960, Mother became the research director for the Catholic Fact Research Association. I never knew anything about the association or her job, and I had no idea if she was a paid staff member, but every so often one of her articles appeared in the
Wanderer
. One article, written in January of 1964, was typical of Mother’s work. In it, she accused the National Council of Catholic Women—the largest educational organization of laywomen in the country—of promoting the “liberal establishment’s materialistic diagnoses and Socialistic remedies for the social, economic and political problems of Catholic Latin America.”
⁵

When my mother sent me a copy of her article, I skimmed it, stuffed it in
my desk drawer, and forgot all about it. A few months later, my father’s article “The Catholic Church and the John Birch Society” appeared in the spring issue of
Ramparts
magazine.
⁶
I read it and then shoved it in my desk. My parents had embraced a new religious activism, and these articles were my clues. But I did not connect the dots.

I came home from college in late May with a determination to avoid arguments about politics. Instead, I steered my parents to safe topics, like my theology class. One evening, as I described Father Cain, “Waltzing Matilda,” and the biblical exegesis he presented, my parents said nothing. Mother tapped her pencil against the placemat. Dad’s color was high and his lips thin. “Jay, I’ll handle this one,” my mother stated.

My mother, who’d never attended college, never taken a theology class, and never met Father Cain, proceeded to castigate my teacher’s interpretation of Genesis. According to her, the Creation story was historically accurate in every detail. The author of the book, under divine guidance, had recorded the facts, which were handed down to us in the Scriptures and confirmed by the tradition of the Church.

“Your Father Cain must be under the sway of the ‘Modernist’ heresy,” Mother declared.
⁷
“His interpretations are riddled with error. How can such a man be teaching at UD?”

“Mother, he’s not just some teacher,” I said. “He’s a scholar whose opinions are valued by the students and the faculty at school. He even studied in Rome.”

“I don’t care. He is promulgating ideas that have been forbidden. The Pope himself has declared that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and that Genesis is literally true. You are forbidden to take another class from that priest. He’s a liberal, and he’s wrong.”