|  | >    I think that was before anyone knew what Hitler and Stalin were up to
>    or were really like in character.
Not so.  The article in 1938 about Hitler is rather clear that they don't
think much of him at all.  Here it is:
   January 2, 1939
   
   
     _________________________________________________________________
   
                                MAN OF THE YEAR
                                       
                                 ADOLF HITLER
                                       
   
   Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when
   four statesmen met at the Fuhrerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of
   Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were
   Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard
   Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all
   odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf
   Hitler.
   
   
   Fuhrer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army,
   Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on
   that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless
   foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn
   the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the
   teeth--or as close to the tooth as he was able. He had stolen Austria
   before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.
   
   
   All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated Germany
   on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so terrified the
   world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during
   late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over
   Czechoslovakia. When without loss of blood he reduced Czechoslovakia
   to a German puppet state, forced a drastic revision of Europe's
   defensive alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe
   by getting a "hands-off" promise from powerful Britain (and later
   France), Adolf Hitler without doubt became 1938's Man of the Year.
   
   
   Most other world figures of 1938 faded in importance as the year drew
   to a close. Prime Minister Chamberlain's "peace with honor" seemed
   more than ever to have achieved neither. An increasing number of
   Britons ridiculed his appease-the-dictators policy, believed that
   nothing save abject surrender could satisfy the dictators' ambitions.
   
   
   Among many Frenchmen there rose a feeling that Premier Daladier, by a
   few strokes of the pen at Munich, had turned France into a second-rate
   power. Aping Mussolini in his gestures and copying triumphant Hitler's
   shouting complex, the once liberal Daladier at year's end was reduced
   to using parliamentary tricks to keep his job.
   
   
   During 1938 Dictator Mussolini was only a decidedly junior partner in
   the firm of Hitler & Mussolini, Inc. His noisy agitation to get
   Corsica and Tunis from France was rated as a weak bluff whose
   immediate objectives were no more than cheaper tolls for Italian ships
   in the Suez Canal and control of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railroad.
   
   
   Gone from the international scene was Eduard Benes, for 20 years
   Europe's "Smartest Little Statesman." Last President of free
   Czechoslovakia, he was now a sick exile from the country he helped
   found. Pious Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Man of 1937, was
   forced to retreat to a "New" West China, where he faced the
   possibility of becoming only a respectable figurehead in an enveloping
   Communist movement. If Francisco Franco had won the Spanish Civil War
   after his great spring drive, he might well have been Man-of-the-Year
   timber. But victory still eluded the Generalissimo and war weariness
   and disaffection on the Rightist side made his future precarious.
   
   
   On the American scene, 1938 was no one man's year. Certainly it was
   not Franklin Roosevelt's; his Purge was beaten and his party lost much
   of its bulge in the Congress. Secretary Hull will remember Good
   Neighborly 1938 as the year he crowned his trade treaty efforts with
   the British agreement, but history will not specially identify Mr.
   Hull with 1938. At year's end in Lima, his plan of Continental
   Solidarity for the two Americas had a few of its teeth pulled.
   
   
   But the figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe with all
   the swagger of a conqueror. Not the mere fact that the Fuhrer brought
   10,500,000 more people (7,000,000 Austrians, 3,500,000 Sudetens) under
   his absolute rule made him the Man of 1938. Japan during the same time
   added tens of millions of Chinese to her empire. More significant was
   the fact Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the
   democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.
   
   
   His shadow fell far beyond Germany's frontier. Small, neighboring
   States (Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, The Balkans,
   Luxembourg, The Netherlands) feared to offend him. In France Nazi
   pressure was in part responsible for some of the post-Munich
   anti-democratic decrees. Fascism had intervened openly in Spain, had
   fostered a revolt in Brazil, was covertly aiding revolutionary
   movements in Rumania, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania. In Finland a foreign
   minister had to resign under Nazi pressure. Throughout eastern Europe
   after Munich the trend was toward less freedom, more dictatorship. In
   the U.S. alone did democracy feel itself strong enough at year's end
   to give Hitler his come-uppance.
   
   
   The Fascintern, with Hitler in the driver's seat, with Mussolini,
   Franco and the Japanese military cabal riding behind, emerged in 1938
   as an international, revolutionary movement. Rant as he might against
   the machinations of international Communism and international Jewry,
   or rave as he would that he was just a Pan-German trying to get all
   the Germans back in one nation, Fuhrer Hitler had himself become the
   world's No. 1 International Revolutionist--so much so that if the
   oft-predicted struggle between Fascism and Communism now takes place
   it will be only because two revolutionist dictators, Hitler and
   Stalin, are too big to let each other live in the same world.
   
   
   But Fuhrer Hitler does not regard himself as a revolutionary; he has
   become so only by force of circumstances. Fascism has discovered that
   freedom--of press, speech, assembly--is a potential danger to its own
   security. In Fascist phraseology democracy is often coupled with
   Communism. The Fascist battle against freedom is often carried forward
   under the false slogan of "Down with Communism!" One of the chief
   German complaints against democratic Czechoslovakia last summer was
   that it was an "outpost of Communism."
   
   
   A generation ago western civilization had apparently outgrown the
   major evils of barbarism except for war between nations. The Russian
   Communist Revolution promoted the evil of class war. Hitler topped it
   by another, race war. Fascism and Communism both resurrected religious
   war. These multiple forms of barbarism gave shape in 1938 to an issue
   over which men may again, perhaps soon, shed blood: the issue of
   civilized liberty v. barbaric authoritarianism.
   
   
   Lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the Fuhrer.
   Undoubted Crook of the Year was the late Frank Donald Coster (ne
   Musica), with Richard Whitney, now in Sing Sing Prison, as runner-up.
   Sportsman of the Year was Tennist Donald Budge, champion of the U.S.,
   England, France, Australia. Aviator of the Year was 33-year-old Howard
   Robard Hughes, diffident millionaire, who flew a sober, precise,
   foolproof course 14,716 miles round the top of the world in three
   days, 19 hours, eight minutes.
   
   
   Radio's Man of the Year was youthful Orson Welles who, in his famous
   The War of the Worlds broadcast, scared fewer people than Hitler, but
   more than had ever been frightened by radio before, demonstrating that
   radio can be a tremendous force in whipping up mass emotion.
   Playwright of the Year was Thornton Wilder, previously a precious
   litterateur, whose first play on Broadway, Our Town, was not only
   ingenious and moving, but a big hit. To Gabriel Pascal, producer of
   Pygmalion, first full-length picture based on the wordy dramas of
   George Bernard Shaw, went the title of Cineman of the Year for having
   discovered a rich mine of dramatic material when other famed producers
   had given up all hope of ever tapping it. Men of the Year, outstanding
   in comprehensive science were three medical researchers who discovered
   that nicotinic acid was a cure for human pellagra: Drs. Tom Douglas
   Spies of Cincinnati General Hospital, Marion Arthur Blankenhorn of the
   University of Cincinnati, Clark Niel Cooper of Waterloo, Iowa.
   
   
   In religion, the two outstanding figures of 1938 were in sharp
   contrast save for their opposition to Adolf Hitler. One of them, Pope
   Pius XI, 81, spoke with "bitter sadness" of Italy's anti-Semitic laws,
   the harrying of Italian Catholic Action groups, the reception
   Mussolini gave Hitler last May, declared sadly: "We have offered our
   now old life for the peace and prosperity of peoples. We offer it
   anew." By spending most of the year in a concentration camp,
   Protestant Pastor Martin Niemoller gave courageous witness to his
   faith.
   
   
   It was noteworthy that few of these other men of the year would have
   been free to achieve their accomplishments in Nazi Germany. The genius
   of free wills has been so stifled by the oppression of dictatorship
   that Germany's output of poetry, prose, music, philosophy,art has been
   meagre indeed.
   
   
   The man most responsible for this world tragedy is a moody, brooding,
   unprepossessing, 49-year-old Austrian-born ascetic with a Charlie
   Chaplin mustache. The son of an Austrian petty customs official, Adolf
   Hitler was raised as a spoiled child by a doting mother. Consistently
   failing to pass even the most elementary studies, he grew up a
   half-educated young man, untrained for any trade or profession,
   seemingly doomed to failure. Brilliant, charming, cosmopolitan Vienna
   he learned to loathe for what he called its Semitism; more to his
   liking was homogeneous Munich, his real home after 1912. To this man
   of no trade and few interests the Great War was a welcome event which
   gave him some purpose in life. Hitler took part in 48 engagements, won
   the German Iron Cross (first class), was wounded once and gassed once,
   was in a hospital when the Armistice of November 11, 1918 was
   declared.
   
   
   His political career began in 1919 when he became Member No. 7 of the
   midget German Labor Party. Discovering his powers of oratory, Hitler
   soon became the party's leader, changed its name to the National
   Socialist German Labor Party, wrote is anti- Semitic, anti-democratic,
   authoritarian program. The party's first mass meeting took place in
   Munich in February 1920. The leader intended to participate in a
   monarchist attempt to seize power a month later; but for this abortive
   Putsch Fuhrer Hitler arrived too late. An even less successful
   National Socialist attempt--the famed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of
   1923--provided the party with dead martyrs, landed Herr Hitler in
   jail. His incarceration at Landsberg Fortress gave him time to write
   the first volume of Mein Kampf, now a "must" on every German
   bookshelf. (Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess helped write it. Imprisonment
   also gave Hitler time to perfect his tactics. Even before that time he
   got from his Communist opponents the idea of gangster-like party storm
   troopers; after this the principle of the small cell groups of devoted
   party workers.)
   
   
   Outlawed in many German districts, the National Socialist Party
   nevertheless climbed steadily in membership. Time-honored Tammany Hall
   methods of handing out many small favors were combined with rowdy
   terrorism and lurid, patriotic propaganda. The picture of a mystic,
   abstemious, charismatic Fuhrer was assiduously cultivated.
   
   
   Not until 1929 did National Socialism win its first absolute majority
   in a city election (at Coburg) and make its first significant showing
   in a provincial election (in Thuringia). But from 1928 on the party
   almost continually gained in electoral strength. In the Reichstag
   elections of 1928 it polled 809,000 votes. Two years later 6,401,016
   Germans voted for National Socialist deputies while in 1932 the vote
   was 13,732,779. While still short of a majority, the vote was
   nevertheless impressive proof of the power of the man and his
   movement.
   
   
   The situation which gave rise to this demagogic, ignorant, desperate
   movement was inherent in the German Republic's birth and in the
   craving of large sections of the politically immature German people
   for strong, masterful leadership. Democracy in Germany was conceived
   in the womb of military defeat. It was the Republic which put its
   signature (unwillingly) to the humiliating Versailles Treaty, a brand
   of shame which it never lived down in German minds.
   
   
   That the German people love uniforms, parades, military formations,
   and submit easily to authority is no secret. Fuhrer Hitler's own hero
   is Frederick the Great. That admiration stems undoubtedly from
   Frederick's military prowess and autocratic rule rather than from
   Frederick's love of French culture and his hatred of Prussian
   boorishness. But unlike the polished Frederick, Fuhrer Hitler, whose
   reading has always been very limited, invites few great minds to visit
   him, nor would Fuhrer Hitler agree with Frederick's contention that he
   was "tired of ruling over slaves." (Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor,
   also complained of the submissiveness of German character.)
   
   
   In bad straits even in fair weather, the German Republic collapsed
   under the weight of the 1929-34 depression in which German
   unemployment soared to 7,000,000 above a nationwide wind drift of
   bankruptcies and failures. Called to power as Chancellor of the Third
   Reich on January 30, 1933 by aged, senile President Paul von
   Hindenburg, Chancellor Hitler began to turn the Reich inside out.
   Unemployment was solved by: 1) a far-reaching program of public works;
   2) an intense re-armament program, including a huge standing army; 3)
   enforced labor in the service of the State (the German Labor Corps);
   4) putting political enemies and Jewish, Communist and Socialist
   jobholders in concentration camps.
   
   
   What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to Germany in less than six years was
   applauded wildly and ecstatically by most Germans. He lifted the
   nation from post-War defeatism. Under the swastika Germany was
   unified. His was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great
   energy and magnificent planning. The "socialist" part of National
   Socialism might be scoffed at by hard-&-fast Marxists, but the Nazi
   movement nevertheless had a mass basis. The 1,500 miles of magnificent
   highways built, schemes for cheap cars and simple workers' benefits,
   grandiose plans for rebuilding German cities made Germans burst with
   pride. Germans might eat many substitute foods or wear ersatz clothes
   but they did eat.
   
   
   What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to the German people in that time left
   civilized men and women aghast. Civil rights and liberties have
   disappeared. Opposition to the Nazi regime has become tantamount to
   suicide or worse. Free speech and free assembly are anachronisms. The
   reputations of the once-vaunted German centres of learning have
   vanished. Education has been reduced to a National Socialist
   catechism.
   
   
   Pace Quickened. Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically,
   robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living,
   chased off the streets. Now they are being held for "ransom," a
   gangster trick through the ages. But not only Jews have suffered. Out
   of Germany has come a steady, ever- swelling stream of refugees, Jews
   and Gentiles, liberals and conservatives, Catholics as well as
   Protestants, who could stand Naziism no longer. TIME's cover, showing
   Organist Adolf Hitler playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated
   cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine's wheel and the Nazi
   hierarchy looks on, was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a
   Catholic who found Germany intolerable.
   
   
   Meanwhile, Germany has become a nation of uniforms, goose- stepping to
   Hitler's tune, where boys of ten are taught to throw hand grenades,
   where women are regarded as breeding machines. Most cruel joke of all,
   however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists
   and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of
   saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The
   Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to
   business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other
   what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been
   strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control
   and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80%
   of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated
   last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well
   as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many
   instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar
   to Russian Communism.
   
   
   When Germany took over Austria she took upon herself the care and
   feeding of 7,000,000 poor relations. When 3,500,000 Sudetens were
   absorbed, there were that many more mouths to feed. As 1938 drew to a
   close many were the signs that the Nazi economy of exchange control,
   barter trade, lowered standard of living, "self-sufficiency," was
   cracking. Nor were signs lacking that many Germans disliked the
   cruelties of their Government, but were afraid to protest them. Having
   a hard time to provide enough bread to go round, Fuhrer Hitler was
   being driven to give the German people another diverting circus. The
   Nazi controlled press, jumping the rope at the count of Propaganda
   Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, shrieked insults at real and imagined
   enemies. And the pace of the German dictatorship quickened as more &
   more guns rolled from factories and little more butter was produced.
   
   
   In five years under the Man of 1938, regimented Germany had made
   itself one of the great military powers of the world today. The
   British Navy remains supreme on the seas. Most military men regard the
   French Army as incomparable. Biggest question mark is air strength,
   which changes from day to day, but most observers believe Germany
   superior in warplanes. Despite a shortage of trained officers and a
   lack of materials, the German Army has become a formidable machine
   which could probably be beaten only by a combination of opposing
   armies. As testimony to his nation's puissance, Fuhrer Hitler could
   look back over the year and remember that besides receiving countless
   large-bore statesmen (Mr. Chamberlain three times, for instance), he
   paid his personal respects to three kings (Sweden's Gustaf, Denmark's
   Christian, Italy's Vittorio Emanuele) and was visited by two
   (Bulgaria's Boris, Rumania's Carol--not counting Hungary's Regent,
   Horthy).
   
   
   Meanwhile an estimated 1,133 streets and squares, notably Rathaus
   Platz in Vienna, acquired the name of Adolf Hitler. He delivered 96
   public speeches, attended eleven opera performances (way below par),
   vanquished two rivals (Benes and Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austria's last
   Chancellor), sold 900,000 new copies of Mein Kampf in Germany besides
   selling it widely in Italy and Insurgent Spain. His only loss was in
   eyesight: he had to begin wearing spectacles for work. Last week Herr
   Hitler entertained at a Christmas party 7,000 workmen now building
   Berlin's new mammoth Chancellery, told them: "The next decade will
   show those countries with their patent democracy where true culture is
   to be found."
   
   
   But other nations have emphatically joined the armaments race and
   among military men the poser is: "Will Hitler fight when it becomes
   definitely certain that he is losing that race?" The dynamics of
   dictatorship are such that few who have studied Fascism and its
   leaders can envision sexless, restless, instinctive Adolf Hitler
   rounding out a mellow middle age in his mountain chalet at
   Berchtesgaden while a satisfied German people drink beer and sing folk
   songs. There is no guarantee that the have-not nations will go to
   sleep when they have taken what they now want from the haves. To those
   who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than
   probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.
 | 
|  |     There Is No Right to Do Wrong
    Alan Keyes
    This is another in The Chronicle's series by Republican candidates
    discussing their campaigns for the presidency. Alan Keyes is a
    conservative radio commentator and former diplomat.
    THE CRISIS Americans sense in our country today arises from one moral
    challenge manifested in many areas. That challenge involves corruption
    of our understanding of freedom, due mainly to abandoning the respect
    for law and individual responsibility that ought to undergird it.
    Our freedom depends on certain moral ideas. In my personal conscience
    and belief, Christianity most perfectly embodies those ideas. But
    Americans come from many religious and moral backgrounds, so in dealing
    with public policy we must derive ideas from sources open to support
    from people of all religious backgrounds.
    Nothing meets this purpose more completely than the principles and
    logic of our Declaration of Independence. The Declaration states
    principles of justice defining our moral identity as Americans,
    presenting a certain concept of our human nature and drawing out its
    political consequences. It says all human beings are created equal,
    needing no qualification beyond their simple humanity to command
    respect for their intrinsic dignity, their ``inalienable rights.'' The
    purpose of government is to secure these rights. A government
    systematically violating them is neither just nor legitimate.
    But our Declaration does more than assert rights. It also makes a clear
    statement that God, the Creator and author of the laws of nature, is
    the ultimate source of authority commanding respect for those rights.
    If God did not exist, or if worldly powers were not obliged to respect
    God's authority, there is no reason to recognize or respect rights with
    which He has endowed all human beings. Thus the effective prerequisite
    for human rights, and the idea of government based on consent (through
    representation, elections, due process of law, etc.), is respect for
    God's authority and eternal laws.
    If we accept the logic of our Declaration, reverence for God is not
    just a matter of religious faith; it's the foundation of our republic's
    justice and citizenship. Freedom, therefore, cannot be confused with
    licentiousness. We do not have the right, by choice or action, to
    destroy or surrender our inalienable rights. Indeed, if we judge that
    they are being systematically violated, we have a duty to resist and
    overthrow the power responsible.
    This duty involves the judgment and moral and material capacity to
    resist tyranny. These constitute our character as a free people.
    Our Republican Party was born of a commitment to principle by those who
    had the courage to stand before the American people in the face of
    great division, and insist that we respect the principles that make
    America great, strong and free.
    The decline of marriage and the moral dissolution of families come from
    putting self first; from deciding that no obligations need be
    respected. Our Founders knew better. They offered us a true vision of
    America that is not licentious or foolishly indulgent -- but rather one
    of freedom based on fear of God and respect for law.
    We must restore to public discourse the simple truths affirmed by our
    Founders from Washington through Jefferson, and restated by Lincoln and
    every president until we arrived at our own cowardly times.
    We must start by seeking to end government programs (like
    family-destroy ing welfare efforts, and sex-education courses that
    encourage promiscuity) that actually hasten the moral breakdown of our
    nation. Our first priority must be restoring moral and material support
    for the marriage-based, two-parent family. The disintegration of
    families is the major contributing factor in poverty, crime, violence,
    the decline in education performance and a host of other expensive
    social problems.
    The assertion of a right to abortion epitomizes the corrupt concept of
    freedom that has tragically -- and, we may hope, temporarily --
    achieved ascendancy in our times. We will not remain a free people if
    we insist on being corrupt and licentious, or if we arrogate to
    ourselves, individually or collectively through government, the right
    to destroy the rights of others.
    It's empty to praise the courage of those who died to preserve
    America's freedom and principles, and then not stand up for those
    principles.
    America is not a quest for material progress, prosperity, great cities,
    and mountains of money. We are grateful for our prosperity though it
    came at much expense to some of our forebears -- those who toiled in
    slavery -- but the real American dream is of self-government which
    respects the fact that freedom is not just a choice or an opportunity.
    Rather, freedom can be a burden, a sacrifice, and an obligation to
    respect the truth of our moral identity. So long as we have the courage
    to stand up for it, that moral identity can unite us across every line
    of race, creed and color. If Republicans abandon that line of
    principle, there are Americans who will fight to make it prevail -- few
    or many, or alone if they must.
    Historically when Americans choose between right and wrong, we choose
    what is right, and we'll do it again. We know real heroes are those
    who, in families and daily lives, respect the truth that we must meet
    the obligations and sacrifices of freedom before we can claim its
    privileges and benefits.
    We must stand where our Founders stood -- believing that we cannot have
    the right to do what is wrong. And as we adhere to principles of
    justice, we will hold up a beacon of hope for all humankind.
    5/16/95 , San Francisco Chronicle, All Rights Reserved
 | 
|  |     (c) 1995 Copyright the News & Observer Publishing Co.
    (c) 1995 N.Y. Times News Service
    WASHINGTON (May 23, 1995 - 00:30) -- Saying that America is caught in a
    spiritual crisis worsened by overly politicized churches, members of a
    broadly ecumenical group of Christian leaders are releasing a statement
    calling for a verbal "cease-fire" and a search for common ground
    untainted by partisan ideology.
    "Christian faith must not become another casualty of the culture wars,"
    says the statement, which has been signed by more than 80 prominent
    mainline Protestant, evangelical, Orthodox and Roman Catholic leaders,
    including six Catholic bishops. "Inflamed rhetoric and name calling is
    no substitute for real and prayerful dialogue between different
    constituencies with legitimate concerns and a gospel of love, which can
    bring people together."
    The 1,800-word statement, titled "The Cry for Renewal: Let Other Voices
    Be Heard," will be released here on Tuesday, a week after the
    conservative religious organization, the Christian Coalition, unveiled
    its Contract With the American Family.
    The statement, in the works for several months, does not respond to the
    coalition's 10-point document, which recommended that Congress restrict
    late-term abortions and pass a proposed Religious Equality Amendment
    that would permit some forms of school prayer, among other measures.
    But it contains pointed criticism aimed at religious conservatives.
    "The almost total identification of the religious right with the new
    Republican majority in Washington is a dangerous liaison with political
    power," the statement says.
    It also faults religious liberals for so closely identifying with the
    Democratic Party as to forsake their "moral imagination" and contribute
    to the nation's political polarization.
    The statement's primary authors, the Rev. Jim Wallis, the editor of
    Sojourners, a bimonthly independent religious magazine, and Tony
    Campolo, a sociology professor at Eastern College in St. David's, Pa.,
    and founder of an educational organization for inner-city children,
    described themselves as "progressive evangelicals."
    Wallis said the document's signers were "not looking for a
    confrontation" with the Christian Coalition.
    "Civility has to be part of the approach, and compassion," Wallis
    added.
    He said that some of the signers had arranged meetings Tuesday with
    President Clinton, Speaker Newt Gingrich and the House Minority Leader,
    Richard A. Gephardt. Wallis said the group had also asked to meet with
    the Christian Coalition's executive director, Ralph Reed.
    Reed said he would be out of town Tuesday and so unavailable for a
    meeting then. Saying he wanted to read the statement first, he added,
    "I don't rule out talking with them."
    "We welcome a broader dialogue," Reed said. "We can disagree without
    being disagreeable." He also said, "I have never suggested that
    political involvement was the sine qua non of our faith or our
    witness."
    Despite the statement's criticism of religious liberals, several
    leaders usually identified with liberal positions signed on, including
    the Rev. Paul Sherry, president of the United Church of Christ, and the
    Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of
    Churches.
    The signatories included moderates and even a few theological
    conservatives whose names are not often seen on such documents. Among
    them were Steven Hayner, president of Inter-Varsity Christian
    Fellowship, an evangelical youth organization; Millard Fuller,
    president of Habitat for Humanity, and J.I. Packer, a theology
    professor at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. and a senior editor at
    the magazine Christianity Today.
    Also among the signers were such prominent African-American clergy as
    Bishop John Hurst Adams, senior bishop of the African Methodist
    Episcopal Church; the Rev. Calvin O. Butts 3rd, pastor of Abyssinian
    Baptist Church in New York, and the Rev. James H. Costen, president of
    Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta.
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