OPEN LETTER TO UCLA

February 14, 2015

Dean Brad Sears

The Williams Institute

UCLA School of Law

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1476

Dear Dean Sears:

I received an email today describing the work being done by the Williams Institute at UCLA. As a result, I visited your very impressive and comprehensive web site.

It appears that through the generosity of Mr. Williams, the University has been able to recruit a formidable staff of scholars, researchers, writers and speakers which has been diligently and effectively training 3,000 judges throughout the United States.

In reviewing your web site, I was impressed with both the similarity and the contrast between the work of the Institute and the famous Brandeis Brief filed in the 1908 case of Muller v Oregon on behalf of the defendant State of Oregon by Louis Brandeis, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court.

The Brandeis Brief, you will recall, was a ground breaking effort to persuade the court, not so much with historical precedents as with scientific knowledge and other evidence not introduced in the lower courts, such as testimony by medics, social scientists and male workers who argued that long working hours had a negative effect on the health, safety, morals and general welfare of women.

It became a model for many other presentations before the Supreme Court of the United States, a practice which has encouraged the Court to eschew the historic function of adjudication in favor of an activist role as arbiter of the national welfare and culture.

It would appear that the work of the Williams Institute constitutes a massive and exhaustive Brandeis Brief in favor of the LGBT cultural agenda. In the interest of fairness, would it not be desirable to inform the public and all potential litigants of the names of those 3,000 judges who had the benefit of your intensive instruction and attitude training?

I should think that litigants currently before the court debating the marriage issue should be informed which, if any, of the current Supreme Court Justices are among those 3,000 judicial graduates of the Williams Institute.

Sincerely, 

Thomas E. Brennan

Former Chief Justice of Michigan

Founder of Thomas Cooley Law School

SUNDAY MORNING

It’s Sunday morning and I am dressed for Church. I’ll write my check; make it payable to the Saint Leo Abbey where a dozen good men live a peaceful, prayerful life, and a few hundred of the locals will gather to join them in worship at 10:00 o’clock.

I’m thinking of what it means to be a Christian; a follower of Jesus Christ. What does it mean in 2015, a time when Christians are beheaded and crucified in the part of the planet where Christ was born and preached.

He was a good man, a man of peace. “Peace be to you” was his mantra.

He died on a cross, put there at the behest of a theologically misguided mob on the orders of a spineless public official whose only law book was a wet finger held to the wind in search of the “emerging public consensus.”

We’ll pray for peace this morning. We’ll also pray for wisdom, for guidance to make sense of the world we live in. We’ll ask for guidance about how we should feel about Muslims.

Winston Churchill was a member of the House of Commons and a leader of the liberal party during and after the first World War. With counsel from his close friend T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) Churchill was a major participant in the decisions dividing up the Ottoman Empire in the 1920’s.

Like Lawrence, Churchill admired much about the tribal Bedouin culture. The modern map of the Middle East, with its plethora of Arab nations, reflects a decidedly Churchillian influence.

Warren Dockter, a history research fellow at Cambridge University, recently came upon a hand written letter to Winston Churchill from his future sister in law, Lady Gwendoline Bertie in 1907. In it, she exhorts Churchill not to convert to Islam.

In 1940, as Prime Minister, Churchill allocated 100,000 pounds to build a Mosque in central London. It was celebrated in the Arab world, which was precisely what Churchill intended. He wanted Arab support against the Nazis. He didn’t get it.

Dockter doubts that Churchill ever seriously considered converting to Islam. While he admired the fierce, death defying, bravado of Arab warriors, he was keenly aware of the backwardness of Islamic social teachings.

Churchill’s counsel is valuable, especially since he, like Lawrence, was regarded as somewhat of an Arabophile. Here is what he said:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!

Besides the fanatical frenzy,
which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. 
The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, 
the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities; thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome."   

The “strong arms of science” are no longer the exclusive property of Christendom. ISIS has all the field weapons available in the West. Even nuclear weapons are already available to the 200 million Pakistanis, 95% of whom are Muslim.

I came home from church praying for peace, but wondering how prepared we Americans are to defend ourselves against a militant and proselytizing faith.