YOUR CHILDREN: GOD'S FUTURE DESIGN? oR ANIMALS IN HEAT?

Consider a few of the public comments made by President Bill Clinton's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders.

On the pro-life movement: "They (pro-lifers) really should get over their love affair with the fetus."

On teenage girls: "I tell every girl that when she goes out on a date, she should carry a condom in her purse."

Equating sex education with driver's ed: "We taught 'em what to do in the front seat. Now it's time to teach them what to do in the back seat."

Asked in 1987 whether she planned condom distribution in Arkansas schools: "Well, we're not going to put them on their lunch trays, but yes."

On her view of the Catholic Church: "The first 400 years, black people had their freedom aborted and the Catholic Church said nothing. The way of life for the Native American was aborted; the Church was silent. ... Look at who's fighting the pro-choice movement: a celibate, male-dominated church."

On her conservative, mostly fundamentalist Protestant critics: "... non-Christians with a slave-master mentality."

Of course, if a presidential nominee had thus ranted on, displaying such naked bigotry toward Jews, homosexuals, blacks, Hispanics, women, or short people, he or she would be ruined in a frenzy of pious denunciation. But if it's the Catholic Church, or fundamentalist Christians whom you delight in offending even slandering why then, modern liberals will smile and call it `outspokenness'.

Think of Dr. Elders as the Culture War, invading your living room and your family life, courtesy of your tax dollars.

Candidate Bill Clinton sold himself as a New Democrat. By this he meant to signal that he had learned from the left-wing mistakes of McGovern and Carter, Mondale and Dukakis mistakes that had threatened to render the Democratic Party permanently irrelevant at the presidential level. Clinton, we were told in 1992, would be a tough-minded centrist.

Campaign rhetoric aside, today's governing reality is that Bill Clinton is easily our most liberal president ever. He is a man of the left, even, sometimes, the hard left.

Today it is OK, apparently, for presidential appointees to have declared war on the Boy Scouts of America for the offense of discriminating against sodomites, and for affirming the God of Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob and Jesus of Nazareth.

Is it progress? Think how far we have come in barely two generations. As recently as the late '50s, women students were discouraged from wearing anything but dresses on our local campus; television never showed even married couples together in bed; Hollywood turned out what everyone understood to be wholesome movies, policed by censors with agreed-upon standards of decency.

Too restrictive, we were told. Too "uptight." That's the last thing we want to be. Came the '60s, and the New Left generation that included a young Bill Clinton and his future bride, Hillary Rodham. The World War II generation, whose watchword had been "Duty, Honor, Country" gave way to a generation that said, "Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. Don't be `uptight'. `Do your own thing'. Anything goes."

What of our culture? Entertainers with the ineffable charm, style and class of Audrey Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, Nat King Cole and Grace Kelly, have given way to Madonna, prancing around in her underwear, simulating masturbation, and to a cretin called Ice-T, urging the murder of policemen.

Fittingly, then, today we have, on the verge of confirmation, Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Ten, 15 certainly 20 years ago, that a President would nominate such a patently offensive nominee would have been political suicide, and Senate confirmation, unthinkable. This week, it's about to happen. Progress?

Judged by her own standards, her term at Arkansas' health department has been a miserable failure. The purpose of condom distribution, remember, was to curb the incidence of teen pregnancy. The facts are, though, that teen pregnancy was actually declining in Arkansas between 1980 and '85, before her tenure. Dr. Elders took office in 1987, formed school-based clinics to dispense condoms and other contraceptives, and teen pregnancy in Arkansas began to rise. "More to the point," writes Blant Hurt, a columnist for Arkansas Business, "the teen pregnancy rate has risen in 10 of the 11 Arkansas counties that have the school-based clinics Dr. Elders established. Overall the teen pregnancy rate in these counties has risen 12 percent 1987-'90."

Many years ago, the late, great critic and author Malcolm Muggeridge clearly foresaw the Joycelyn Elderses, with all their terrible works. Borrowing from the poet Blake a concept he called "fearful symmetry," Muggeridge wrote:

Illiteracy increases along with expenditure on public education, the demand for sedatives with increased leisure or affluence, and crimes of violence with libertarian schemes to prevent them and rehabilitate their perpetrators. The more pacifists and internationalists in the world, the more belligerency; the more free speech, the less truth spoken; the more maternal and child care, the more fetuses aborted and thrown away with the hospital waste. Oh, the terrible inhumanity of the humane!

Former Reagan-Bush administration official William Bennett recently posed the issue with characteristic bluntness. "Our children," Bennett declared to thunderous applause, "are not rutting animals in heat. They are thinking creatures of God, moral creatures in the making."

With the in-your-face savagery that is her signature, Dr. Elders has staked her claim. On the other side of this Culture War's barricades, we followers of Bill Bennett look into the abyss toward which our society is hurtling, and pray that it isn't already too late.

MDBR