A section in Part Two focuses on how idealists can be dangerous, and one chapter in particular was very good, "When Religion Makes People Cruel." Here he speaks to cruelty found in each of the major religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and summarizes by quoting the 18th century rabbi Elija ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer (the Gaon of Vilna), who said, "Religion is like rain: it brings forth both beautiful flowers and poisonous weeds."The last section of the book is devoted in its entirety to the case of Baby Richard, the young boy who was adopted at birth by a loving family, but was later returned to his birth father at age four and a half when the Illinois Supreme Court, by a vote of 5 to 1 (the majority all men, the dissenter, a woman), overturned lower court decisions and decided that the adoption was illegal.
The story is a tragedy on many levels, the most poignant being that the court did not order that the child be permitted to have continued interaction with his adoptive family. Prager is particularly incensed about the issue of blood (i.e., genetics) taking precedence over family bonds, the societal trend towards the rights of the birth father ("the inseminator") over the rights of the child. He reserves his strongest vitriol for the five judges whom he refers to as evil men, justifying the use of the word "evil" by recalling Hannah Arendt's use of phrase, "the banality of evil," the sub-title of her book about Adolf Eichmann. As Prager sees it, the evil perpetrated by the Illinois justices was not a deliberate, malicious evil but rather a "combination of mediocrity, willful ignorance of the consequences of one's actions, and an overriding...belief, " in this case, the belief in the inviolability of blood.
Baby Richard, whose real name is Danny Warburton (Warburton is the name of his adoptive family), is now presumably in his early 20's. This would be another good reason to update Prager's book. At the time of writing, the story was big news, and though there was some attempt by the media to report that Danny was doing very well, was adjusting to his new family, was happy, etc., it's obvious (to me) that there's no way this could have been determined so soon. Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune was the journalist who covered the story at the time, and I don't know if he's done a follow-up story on the case. I see here that he's had some personal and professional issues in the last decade.
I guess my next non-fiction book will be the text I've adopted for my fall English 50 class, The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition, by Thomas Cooley. If Prager would update Think a Second Time, I'd seriously consider adopting that as a text. Thinking a second time could do these millennials a bit of good.
No comments:
Post a Comment