The Left Vindicates A Pro-Life Scholar

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“Remember Stanford scholar Steven Mosher?” asks Monica Showalter in American Thinker. Her question is prompted by a new documentary on Communist China’s savage forced-abortion policy, begun in 1980 and slightly modified in 2015. The film, One Child Nation, which opened in theaters earlier this month, won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The Left loved it.
But that hasn’t always been the case. Just ask Steven Mosher. “Way back in the 1980s,” Showalter writes, “the man was reviled in scholarly circles for exposing these brutal realities about China. Instead of being praised for adding to the scholarly body of knowledge, he was abused, slandered, accused of process crimes, and eventually kicked out of his Ph.D. program because he reported the truth about what was happening.”
All too true. After reading about Stanford’s ouster of Mosher, this writer arranged hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that confirmed the pioneer scholar’s findings. The hearings were classified as “secret” not because they revealed classified information — they didn’t. Rather, those testifying, using publicly available data, were afraid that, if they were found out, they’d get the Mosher treatment too.
Why? Because 35 years ago, not only at Stanford but in Washington, the left was gung-ho about China. Over time, however, after Mosher testified in Washington and met with Reagan Administration figures, his revelations had a valuable and permanent impact on U.S. Foreign Policy. (President Reagan’s Mexico City Policy, recently expanded by President Trump, is only one example.)
Once the cards were turned face-up on the table, the facts about China’s gruesome program were in plain sight. “For anyone who was paying attention,” Mosher writes today, “there was never any doubt about what was happening in China.”
Stanford’s defenestration of Mosher “was at the urging of the Chinese government,” Showalter writes. She is correct. Stanford was proud of its premier position in China’s “opening to the West.” If the Communist leadership wanted to keep the lid on its slaughter, that was fine with Stanford. As Showalter writes, this was all part of “the lies-violence cycle that Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as so necessary to all totalitarian tyrannies. Yet,” she continues, “the only thing Mosher was really guilty of was the highest responsibility of a scholar, which was to tell the truth.”
Today, in the light of the success of “One Child Nation,” Showalter now regards Mosher as vindicated, even though that truth-telling took far too long.
This past June, this writer, along with a thousand other parents of graduates, briefly greeted Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne at his home. In the spirit of academic excellence and professional comity, I have asked Dr. Tessier-Lavigne to review the facts behind the Mosher case (the “report” on the basis of which he was expelled was never released, I am told).
Perhaps it’s time to go back to Stanford for another graduation, this one long overdue.

A Leadership That’s Sinking Fast

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), founded in 1956, boasts of a somewhat mystifying charism. While the group comprises leaders of congregations of Catholic women who represent some eighty percent of U.S. women religious, its notion of “religious” is distressingly distant from the goals of the foundresses of many of its member communities.
The conference assembly’s draft “Resolution for 2019-2022” is entitled, “Creating Communion at the Intersection of Racism, Migration & Climate Crisis.” Its goal is to “examine root causes of injustice,” and the text encourages contemplation, social analysis, and conversation to study “racism, migration, and climate crisis and to examine its effects, explore the underlying causes, formulate a common response, and report on strategic initiatives taken in pursuit of justice.”
While mentioning “prayer” once, the resolution does not mention God, Jesus, or the sacraments. Neither does its August 14 letter to Donald Trump, which was affirmed by 663 LCWR members gathered in assembly in Scottsdale, Ariz.
“Mr. President, we beseech you to end all divisive and polarizing rhetoric,” the letter reads.
Here a brief historical reminder is in order.
In a parish bulletin this week, a Virginia pastor observes that “when originalist jurist Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, the Senate voted to reject the nomination after Sen. Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) — Chappaquiddick Bridge survivor and brother of President Kennedy — objected. Within 45 minutes of the announcement of Bork’s nomination to the court, Sen. Kennedy took to the Senate floor with a strong condemnation of Bork in a nationally televised speech. There he declared that, ‘Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens’.”
At the time, neither the USCCB nor the LCWR condemned that prominent Catholic senator for his “divisive and polarizing rhetoric.” Apparently, in the language of the D.C. Beltway, the sensitivities and sensibilities of the LCRW have “grown” during the ensuing years.

Real Sisters Need Not Apply

A different kind of woman religious was in the news during the same week. New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray announced the winning nominees that would be represented by statues honoring “New York’s seven most important women.” The monuments will be erected with some $5 million in taxpayer funding.
But someone was missing.
Mother Francesca Xavier Cabrini “was America’s first saint, a tireless advocate who founded an upstate orphanage, a school for girls in Washington Heights and 67 organizations for the needy in the late 1880s,” writes the New York Post. “But she wasn’t good enough to be named one of New York’s seven most important women.”
While Mother Cabrini came in a landslide first in a vote taken by New Yorkers, “a group controlled by McCray tossed out the revered Catholic sister in favor of more women of color and a drag queen-turned-LGBTQ activist,” the Post reports.
Bill de Blasio, McCray’s husband, is a curious fellow. He once told Cardinal Dolan that “he had been baptized and raised a Catholic and he was very proud of the fact that he had an uncle, a priest.” But he doesn’t appear to have intervened in the group’s decision.
Mayor de Blasio, who is running for the presidential nomination of the Democrats to run against President Trump, describes himself as a “spiritual” person, he is “not affiliated with any particular church,” he once told the New York Observer. He went on the say that, as a young man, he was deeply influenced by “liberation theology.” That would put de Blasio firmly in the same ideological camp as the women of LCWR, although the “spirituality” of the group’s members might differ somewhat. Nonetheless, we await word of the organization’s collective outrage at New York’s rejection of St. Francesca Xavier Cabrini, although we won’t be holding our breath.

Curious And Curiouser

An Alaskan Women’s Shelter Is Sued for Turning Away a “Man in a Nightgown.”
At the Iowa State Fair, a young woman asks former Vice President Joe Biden, Catholic, “How many genders are there?”
After a pause, Biden answers, “at least three.” After grabbing the student’s arm he adds, “By the way, first one to come out for marriage was me,” he said.
The young lady was upset. After all, she undoubtedly expected him to say, “masculine, feminine, and neuter.” But the press of crowd apparently prevented that part of his answer.