200 Years Ago Today

[Guest guest]

First let me say thanks to Ben, Joe et.al for your encouragement on this

thing. The day that I read about the Supreme Court's decision not to hear

the Warner case, a very empty feeling came over me that lasted all day.

They could have made the entire country 12-step-free but chose not to.

Surely they must know that there are and will be more complaints coming up

the pipe--burdening the tax payers with expensive litigation. Surely they

must know that only a fool could believe that AA is not religious. Surely

they must know that freeing the souls of only three states is a

contradiction to the lofty maxim which adorns their building.

But the battle goes on. Ideally I would like to see a case such as Rita's

be the final knock-out punch. Rita has been a courageous and winning

warrior all along, winning in court, and keeping her career and retirement.

And surely she suffered in a way that I probably understand more than most,

although no one can ever accurately measure the suffering of another.

During the short period of time that I was in U.S. Navy " treatment " I

thought that I had somehow had the misfortune to fall into the hands of a

rare and bizarrely sadistic ring of people, who together were getting their

kicks by tormenting those whose future careers were at the mercy of a

thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote. As I looked into the matter further I

realized that yes, they were bizarrely sadistic, but no, they were not rare.

It is the nature of the beast; truly these people are " governed by bad

passions. " What other assessment can one make when reading words like these

from Rita:

" In fact, I was told point-blank by my treatment counselor (a proud

stepper " in recovery " ) that if the God I believed in was insufficient

as a " higher power " with which to work the steps, that I *must* find

some OTHER " Power " to believe in! "

When I read these words I was probably more heart-wrung than most, but less

shocked than most, if that makes sense.

Yes, it is the nature of the beast; in France Blaise Pascal wrote:

" Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from

religious conviction. "

In England C.S. wrote:

" ...but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end

for they do so with the approval of their own conscience...To be 'cured'

against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is

to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason

or those who never will. "

And during the American Revolution--only about five years after, at age 33,

he had drafted that famous letter to King III--Jefferson wrote:

" The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are

injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there

are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my

leg...... Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors?

Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public

reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is

uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature...... What

has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the

other half hypocrites ......The shackles, therefore, which shall not be

knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be

made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a

convulsion. "

I drove to Virginia Beach Saturday to photo copy a fresh,

suitable-for-scanning copy of v. Liard. Regent University has the

closest law library to where I live. I had not been in the place in years,

and it brought back memories of all the time I had spent there during the

early part of this decade.

When I returned home I went into my wheelbarrow size paper files and

eventually found what I was looking for to clear my foggy memory on Traynor

v. Turnage. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision and the release

of Herbert Fingarette's " Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a

Disease " , the wacko-stepper magazine, " Alcoholism & Addiction " , published in

its July-August 1988 issue an article called " The Fingarette Fallacies " ,

which included a box article called " Defending the Disease. " To see just

how jittery Fingarette made this nasty flock of soul buzzards, consider the

following quotes:

" In trying to skirt the disease question, Justice White, in rendering the

majority opinion of the Court, created an uproar by stating, 'It is not our

role to resolve this medical issue on which the authorities are sharply

divided.' Sharply divided? We have yet to see a medical authority step

forward and present evidence to suggest that alcoholism is not a disease. "

" In these times of supposed enlightenment on addictions, it's hard to

believe that anyone would take Professor Fingarette seriously. His

theories, however, were embraced by members of the Supreme Court, and were

the basis for Justice White's remarks about authorities being sharply

divided. "

" Fingarette is a dangerous man. His writing is extremely convincing to

semi-literate readers--to people that know very little about social

sciences, science in general, mental disease, or alcoholism. Through one

small article in the Harvard Law Review, he has managed to influence the

Supreme Court of the United States, and his popularity is apparently

increasing. "

" If people believe his arguments, Fingarette may cause the number of

injuries, deaths, and suffering in general that can result from alcoholism

to increase. "

The box article is headlined as follows:

Once and For All

Defending the Disease

How America's Authorities View the Disease of Alcoholism

It includes photographs of, and short comments by, the following ten people:

1. E. , MD, President-Elect AMA

2. Reagan, then First Lady

3. Jimmy

4. Q. Ford, President NAATP

5. Margaret Bean-Bayog, MD, President AMSAODD

6. G. Talbott,MD, Ridgeview Institute

7. Pastor Schuller, Crystal Cathedral

8. Senator Arlen Spector

9. Betty Ford, On a lofty perch looking down on people as sickos.

10.Otis R. Bowen,MD, Secretary HHS

Well, we all know who Talbott is, right? Talbott is Atlanta's heavyweight

soul raper who recently got his zealot butt kicked in court to the tune of

big bucks. Here is Talbott's comment:

" Chemical dependency has been classified as a disease since the time of the

American Revolution. So classified by Dr. Rush, a physician, who

was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. We have learned

more about these illnesses in the past five years than in the past five

hundred years and it is now evident that alcoholism and other drug

addictions are truly psycho-social biogenetic diseases, established,

verified, no longer a concept but now a precept. "

Well gee, if Rush said so then it must be true, right? Lets take a

look at Rush, the grand daddy of all Therapeutic State shrinks. As Ken Ragge

points out in " The Real AA, " Rush was indeed the first to " define "

alcoholism as a disease. Ken references chapter nine of Szasz's " The

Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the

Mental Health Movement. " Szasz devotes an entire chapter to Rush and makes

it clear that Rush discovered nothing, he only defined. That has not

changed to this day, no discoveries, only definitions--and corruption, " a

mere contrivance to filch wealth and power. "

One of Jefferson's most famous quotations is engraved in stone at the

Jefferson Memorial in Washington and comes from one of his letters written

to Rush:

" I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of

tyranny over the mind of man. "

http://www.nps.gov/thje/jwrite.htm

The letter itself is available through the Cliff links of AA

Deprogramming:

http://www.aracnet.com/~atheism/hist/jeff1080.htm

Jefferson, because of his role in securing religious liberty, was despised

by the establishment inclined clergy of his day, and he took no prisoners in

his counter-attacks, referring to them as cannibals, mountebanks, false

shepherds, charlatans, pious and whining hypocrites, mystery mongers,

soothsayers, and more. He once referred to the area surrounding his

hometown of Charlottesville as " a Sodom and Gomorrah of parsons. "

The Revolution ended, both Jefferson and Rush continued to write

prolifically, sometimes to each other, and an interesting series of events

would unfold on the other side of the Atlantic. The allegedly " mad " King

III was " treated " by the " Rev. " Francis Willis, a rural clergyman who

" from motives of principle and charity towards his fellow creatures " had

interested himself in the insane. In writing about this " treatment "

relationship, Dr. Ida Macalpine and Dr. Hunter stated in their 1967

book, " III and the Mad Business " , " So began the new system of

Government of the King by intimidation, coercion, and restraint. No account

of the illness from this point on can disregard the King's treatment, and to

what extent the turbulence he displayed was provoked by the repressive and

punitive methods by which he was ruled. "

Of Dr. Rush, the " great " Revolutionary War doctor and signer of the

Declaration of Independence, P.M. Ashburn wrote in his " History of the

Medical Department of the U.S. Army " , " By virtue of his social and

professional prominence, his position as teacher and his facile pen,

Rush had more influence upon American medicine and was more potent

in the propagation and long perpetuation of medical errors than any man of

his day. To him more than to any man in America, was due the great vogue of

vomits, purging, and especially of bleeding, salivation and blistering,

which blackened the record of medicine and afflicted the sick almost to the

time of the Civil War. "

On the cold, windy afternoon of December 14, 1799, a horse ridden by 37 year

old Dr. Elisha Cullen Dick galloped up the snow covered driveway of Mt.

Vernon. He was of a " newer " school of medical thought than the two older

doctors who were tending General Washington, and he had been summoned for a

more collective opinion. When Dr. Dick arrived the General had already been

bled three times. " He needs all of his strength--bleeding will diminish

it. " was the iconoclastic young doctor's opinion. His advice was not taken

by the two veteran bleeders, Dr. Craik and Dr. Brown. Washington was bled

for the fourth time. He died that evening. Craik later wrote Brown that

they should have listened to Dick. Had they " taken no more blood from him,

our good friend might have been alive now. But we were governed by the best

light we had; we thought we were right, and so we are justified. "

" It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand

by itself. "

Jefferson

Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)

http://www.aracnet.com/~atheism/hist/jeff0283.htm

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