"I've decided to devote myself full-time to the Church and pro-life
causes,"
said former pizza mogul Tom Monahan during a visit to
NR's Washington
office
this week.
Conservatives have wondered for years why the founder of Domino's was not
more of a political presence, even in his home state of Michigan. He was
well
known for his pro-life views — NOW tried to boycott his stores after he
donated money to help pass a state ban on Medicaid-funded abortions in
1988 — and he spent millions to build Catholic churches and schools in
Central
America.
Earlier this year, Monahan launched a political-action committee that will
fund pro-life candidates at the state and federal level next year. He
figures
on spending $1 million in Michigan, and perhaps half that amount
elsewhere.
"Sen. Spencer Abraham is one of our priorities," he said.
Why did he wait so long? Monahan said he was upset by the NOW boycott —
not
because of what the group could do to him personally, but because he
didn't
want his politics to hurt his individual franchise owners. So he decided
to
put the company up for sale. It took years, but last December a deal was
finally concluded.
"I'm going to die broke," he says.
It's impossible to take the odious James Carville seriously. But his
forthcoming book,
Stickin': The Case for Loyalty, may mark a new low for
the
man. This slight volume, fated to descend upon an unsuspecting public next
month, intends to explain why it's good to stick with your friends and
stick
it to your enemies, even when your pals are pathological liars and your
foes
are simply searching for the truth.
Carville, doing his best hick-as-writer impression, promises no
"highfalutin
philosophizing" — a pledge on which he delivers admirably. "When we talk
about
loyalty to God, I am not about to tell you dear reader which version of
God
is the right one — whether it's the Judaic God or the Christian God or
the
Islamic God or the God of Righteousness," explains Carville in a chapter
on
religion. "For me, in the end, I like the God of Mother Robert of St.
Joseph's parochial school that I was acquainted with growing up. That God
never told me to hate anybody or anything."
Except evangelicals, apparently. Four pages after his declaration of
religious tolerance, Carville proclaims: "The fundamentalists are loyal to
the Bible to the point of being asinine. If they think God is going to
give
them any credit for their narrow-mindedness and stupidity, they're crazy."
Let's review: This is a book in defense of loyalty criticizing
evangelicals
for their loyalty to scripture. Hmmm. And it accuses them, specifically,
of
narrow-mindedness and stupidity for this loyalty. Double hmmm.
Hatred is a great motivator not only for Carville personally, but liberals
generally. At least that's what Carville says. In his discussion of why
Clinton wasn't removed from office, Carville says hate conquered all: "One
of
the major problems for [Democrats] who felt something other than loyalty
to
Bill Clinton was the Republican party. By going public against the
president,
they would in essence be helping people that they disliked on the other
side.
They would also be helping to advance the Republican agenda. These were
the
people we had worked against and argued with and fought for years. ... I
think this reluctance made a huge contribution to our cause. What kept
people
from crossing over was that they did not want to be on the other side.
They
were kept back by the opposition and who the opposition was and how they
conducted themselves. I can't sit here and tell you what everybody was
thinking but I know that it was a factor in a lot of people's minds. No
matter what their doubts, the glue was stronger than the forces working
against it. We stuck together behind the president."
That's the best argument yet for hate-crimes legislation.
