Copyright (c) 2002 First Things 121 March 2002): 2-8.
Avery Cardinal Dulles claims that on the question of religious freedom the difference between the nineteenth–century popes and the Second Vatican Council concerns means only (“Religious Freedom: Innovation and Development,” December 2001). The popes wanted a Catholic State whereas the Second Vatican Council merely sought State permission to “carry on [the Church’s] mission unimpeded.” A few paragraphs later Cardinal Dulles laments that “the greatest threat to religion, in my estimation, is the kind of secularism that would exclude religion from the public forum and that treats churches as purely private institutions that have no rightful influence on legislation, public policy, and other dimensions of public life.”
But by following the strategy of the Second Vatican Council this outcome is unavoidable. Pluralist society is implacably secular because its very reason for being is to achieve social peace by suppressing any serious discussion of foundational questions. Religion represents such absolutes and is seen by pluralists as particularly dangerous. Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, and Pius XI all knew that democratic pluralism is incompatible with Catholicism.
As Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre clearly understood, Vatican II represented the surrender of the Catholic Church to modernism. At its heart modernism represents the desire to be well thought of by the movers and shakers of the world. This is a temptation from which Princes of the Church are not immune.
Pluralists, of course, find the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on religious freedom just fine, because then the Church no longer threatens the hegemony of secularism. Public life in America is now lived as if atheism were true. In suppressing the ideal of a Catholic state, Vatican II has betrayed Catholic teaching and has made the most cruel mockery of thousands of martyrs who died for the faith. Those martyrs did not die for the right to practice their religion in a pluralist setting, but for the truth and exclusivity of the Catholic faith.
Robert L. Phillips
Professor of Philosophy
University of Connecticut
Storrs, Connecticut
Avery Cardinal Dulles argues that the right recognized by Vatican IIto act according to religious convictions may not disturb “just public order,” and that Bishop Emile De Smedt denied that Dignitatis Humanae affirmed any right to error. The State must avoid coercion, but not necessarily if religious freedom is being misused to disturb public peace or undermine public morality.
Now Dignitatis Humanae in its prologue refers to the moral duty of all people to enter the Church. Therefore, in a country where the great majority are Catholic and the State has officially recognized the true religion, as Pope Leo XIII said must be done, is not the Catholic faith part of public morality? Therefore, might not the State legitimately prevent the public propagation of non–Catholic religion as an offense against public morality? This was the law according to article six of the Fuero de los Espanoles, specifically mentioned by the Concordat between the Holy See and Spain in 1953. Article six declared Catholicism the religion of Spain, tolerated the private practice of other religions, and prohibited the public propagation of non–Catholic religion. Would Cardinal Dulles consider this law compatible with Dignitatis Humanae’s restriction of religious freedom by public morality?
Brother Ansgar Santogrossi, OSB
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Mt. Angel Seminary
St. Benedict, Oregon
Professor Phillips, like Marcel Lefebvre and others, interprets Vatican II as if it had endorsed religious pluralism and secularism. On the contrary, the Council taught that the “one true religion subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church” and denied that people were morally free to propagate any doctrine contrary to that faith (even though the State might not have the authority to prevent them from doing so). Prof. Phillips also misreads me as saying that the Church must seek permission from the State to carry on her mission. That is a God–given right that no one can take from the Church.
Brother Santogrossi is probing the limits of what Vatican II meant by public morality. While arguing that the State has the right and duty to prevent the propagation of any religion that undermines “just public order,” the Council did not specify exactly what public order involves. Could one argue, as Br. Santogrossi does, that the Catholic faith itself may be part of public morality, so that the State could prevent the propagation of any other religion as an offense against public order? That view would, I think, effectively negate what Vatican II lays down as the right of non–Catholic religious bodies “not to be hindered in their public teaching and witness to their faith” unless they abuse that right in certain specific ways. The Council insisted that even where some one religion is established by law, “the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom must at the same time be recognized and upheld.” It would be difficult to reconcile these statements with the Spanish Concordat described by Br. Santogrossi.
J. Bottom’s essay “What Violence Is For” (December 2001) accurately portrays some of the basic theses of René Girard’s “anthropology of the Cross,” but it misses other crucial ones and thus misapplies Girard’s work in interpreting recent events. The primary theses that Mr. Bottum has missed involve the role of secularity in shaping the history of the “Christian” West. Mr. Bottum thus portrays too radical a distinction between the West and its Islamic cultural counterparts in a way that suggests the superiority of the former over the latter.
When Girard first argued for the superior revelatory power of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Part 2 of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, he immediately followed it with an analysis that did not in a like manner argue for the superiority of “Christian” culture. The third chapter in that second part of Things Hidden is entitled “The Sacrificial Reading [of the Gospel] and Historical Christianity,” in which Girard traces some of the ways in which historical Christianity has been just as violent as alternative worldviews, if not more so, because it has lapsed into sacrificial readings of the gospel. Because we have secularized our forms of violence under the auspices of human institutions and ideologies—i.e., we have omitted the theological justifications for recourse to violence and resorted to secularized forms of transcendence, such as rule of law, democratic freedom, scientific methodology, et al.—we tend toward seeing other people’s sacred violence as primitive.
Girard’s primary example of such hypocrisy was the mythological (according to his elaboration of myth as the perpetrator’s justifications for violence) notion of Mutual Assured Destruction of the Cold War arms race that was contemporary with the writing of his book in the late 1970s. He says,
A truly wonderful sense of the appropriate has guided the inventors of the most terrifying weapons to choose names that evoke ultimate violence in the most effective way: names taken from the direst divinities in Greek mythology, like Titan, Poseidon, and Saturn, the god who devoured his own children. We who sacrifice fabulous resources to fatten the most inhuman form of violence so that it will continue to protect us, and who pass our time in transmitting futile messages from a planet that is risking destruction to planets that are already dead—how can we have the extraordinary hypo crisy to pretend that we do not understand all those people who did such things long before us: those, for example, who made it their practice to throw a single child, or two at the most, into the furnace of a certain Moloch in order to ensure the safety of the others?
The last comment points to the irony that ancient religions might even be considered superior to Western Christianity in their use of violence to the extent that they were able in general to be much more economical with it. Isn’t the periodic sacrifice of one or two people preferable to the threat of a mutually assured destruction of the entire planet? In more ancient religions, the gods are generally able to effectively justify the right small dose of sacred violence to keep at bay the profane violence (i.e., more random violence of individuals against one another). Since the revelation of the Cross, those cultures and religions in closest proximity to it gradually lose the effectiveness of divine justifications. The gospel works like an anti–sacred–violence virus. Those cultures in prolonged, intimate contact with it gradually lose the effectiveness of their sacred violence to act as an immunity to profane violence. The doses of sacred violence required to contain the profane violence grow larger and larger, reaching the level of nation against nation, genocide, massive pollution, and many other excesses of violence common in our time.
There is one important difference in the West, however, due to its being the closest in proximity to the gospel for the longest time—a difference, that is, related more to historical accident than to innate superiority. Since Girard’s thesis is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has inexorably through the ages taken rationales for violence away from us by revealing the gods who demand violence as idols, the West has finally reached the point of secularity, the point at which the divine justifications drop away altogether. We continue to claim transcendent justifications for our violence through such instruments as the Constitution or the global market. But these are not seen as gods, so we have difficulty understanding cultures that rebel against secularity and continue to maintain religious justification for their violence.
Is this a significant difference in terms of tending to curb violence? As Girard says, it is a far from simple matter. Has the West shown signs of killing less, or even being less ready to be killed for its “just” causes? I think that the record shows us still to be quite ready and willing on both counts. What has become different is our reasons, secular ones substituted for sacred ones.
In summary, the significance of Girard’s work has not been to manifest the superiority of “Christian” culture over other cultures. Rather, it has been to point to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the decisive revelation of human violence as the generating event behind all human culture, including those human cultures that consider themselves “Christian.” The only true alternative is the culture of God, which, coming to us through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ, is the only nonviolent culture.
I do agree, at least in part, with Mr. Bottum’s distinction between “soft” and “hard” pacifism. Soft pacifism does not take seriously enough our human fallenness into cultures of sanctioned violence, whether sacred or secular. On the other hand, perhaps Mr. Bottum’s essay is guilty of soft justification of violence, i.e., not taking seriously enough the violence justified in one’s own culture in contrast to another. (Mr. Bottum distinguishes between “force” and “violence” so that he can justify our American use of “force” to stop their “violence.”) Such softness on one’s own violence is generally a good manifestation of why hard pacifism is so hard to come by.
(The Rev.) Paul Nuechterlein
Racine, Wisconsin
I am grateful to J. Bottum for his fascinating essay. His observations on quasi–Christian “soft pacifism” in the wake of September 11 are both just and important. But I disagree with his inclusion of Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky in this type of thinking, judging only by the short passages Mr. Bottum cites in his essay. Both passages are concerned neither with appropriating victim status nor with naive and “gooey” calls for tolerance training, but rather with facing squarely the appalling realities that result from America’s own brand of violence.
The note sounded by both Chomsky and Roy is admittedly rather shrill, but we must consider that their dissent comes at a time when much of the world seems content with President Bush’s view that this attack was simply an attempt by “evildoers” to snuff out “the beacon light of freedom” in the world. Their dissent is important as a balance to such simplifications. I think that Mr. Bottum hears their tone and misses their point because he assumes that the United States represents the “Christian alternative to the sacrificial logic by which mythic cultures are founded.”
But is our culture really founded on this alternative? Chomsky brings up the annihilation of the American indigenous population—are we to call what was done to them, in service of the foundational myth known as Manifest Destiny, something radically different from the logic of sacrificial violence? What grounds do we have for labeling that annihilation “force” instead of “violence”? If we put aside Roy’s “doppelgänger” ideas, we find that her passage is even more directly relevant in that it is concerned with the ways in which the American version of sacrificial logic is currently devastating natural and cultural goodness throughout the world.
Is this to say that because of the injustices we have committed it was right that some violence came our way? Emphatically no. But it is to acknowledge that the situation is more complex than one pitting envious evildoers against beacons of light. It is to acknowledge what many Americans felt when, with the smoke and dust still darkening the Manhattan sky, our leaders told us to quit our mourning and start buying things we did not need. It is not soft pacifism to ask what it is we are defending with war machines that we knew from the outset would take the lives of many innocents.
Neither is it soft pacifism to believe that a commitment to justice in the way we live and affect the world is part of the consideration of whether or not our military operations are to be judged “force” or “violence.” Of course it may not even work out to be pacifism at all; we may end up feeling as Chesterton did as he contemplated the coming of World War II: “We now have to defend something nearly indefensible, only because the remedy is even worse than the disease.”
Christopher Killheffer
Yale University Library
New Haven, Connecticut
J. Bottum’s essay on the meaning of violence comes tantalizingly close to making a clear point, but in my view never quite succeeds. I am with him at the start when he says “we are very bad at symbols these days,” and I agree with his conclusion that for non–pacifists, opposing violence with force is the right option. But I’m still not sure how he got from A to B.
Is he trying to say that Islam is, or at least gives rise to, “a mythic culture” that “needs violence for its foundation”? I can see why he might hesitate to say this in so many words, but tiptoeing around the idea and dropping hints about the elephant in the living room is not the way to deal with it. The fact is that millions of mainstream Muslims from a range of classes still practice bloody animal sacrifices annually at the ’Eid–ul–Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice. Slaughtering animals (the more the better) and distributing the meat to your family, friends, and those in need is one of the obligations of a faithful Muslim. While human sacrifice per se forms no part of the Islamic religion, it is abundantly clear that most faithful Muslims are familiar with the symbolism of real blood in a way that has died out among most of us in the Christian West.
I got my hopes up when it looked like Mr. Bottum was going to tell us “what violence was originally . . . designed to do.” But then he went off into attacks on Chomsky, Hitchens, and Roy, none of whom have a clue about it either, and never got around to the point of violent sacrifice in a mythic culture. I think there are two useful ways to look at the question: 1) from the point of view of those making the sacrifices, and 2) from the point of view of a Christian who believes the sacrifice of Christ has broken “the cycle of violence, sacrifice, and mimetic desire.”
From the viewpoint of those who make violent sacrifices, the point is to appease the gods for whom the sacrifices are made. I think Mr. Bottum needlessly confuses the practices of animal sacrifice and human sacrifice. He mentions scapegoats and means thereby humans, but of course the word originally referred to a live goat that was released to bear the sins of the Jewish people into the wilderness. There is a strong element of vengeance in the attacks of September 11 that is absent in animal sacrifice. Nevertheless, Mr. Bottum is right about the symbolic power of sacrifice, whether human or animal, to sustain a culture. I suspect that is one reason why ’Eid–ul–Adha is retained in Islamic practice even today.
From the viewpoint of Christianity, all idol worship, including animal sacrifice, is really devoted to nothing. But demonic spirits can take advantage of those who worship idols and lead them into deeper sin. The only spiritual beings who were really appeased by the deaths on September 11 were the devil and his demons, who continue to inspire those who contemplate similar acts today. The problem that Mr. Bottum correctly identifies is that those such as Chomsky who do not believe in nonmaterial beings literally cannot make sense of the kinds of things done by those who still speak and act in powerful mythic symbols. We all need a crash course in symbolism from Westerners who are still sensitive to the symbolic and the mythical.
One such was Lewis Mumford, the late critic of technology. A few days after the September 11 attacks, I bought an old copy of his The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power at a used book sale. Mumford, writing in 1967, assailed the symbolism of gigantism and indifference to the human scale that he saw in a number of contemporary works of architecture. In particular, he held three examples up as special recipients of his ire, and even included photographs. One was some forgettable office building shaped like a spaceship, but the other two were more familiar: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center twin towers. I don’t think Osama bin Laden is a fan of Mumford’s, but both know their symbols. And the rest of us had better start learning fast.
Karl D. Stephan
San Marcos, Texas
Regarding Michael Linton’s review of my Passion (“Passion Stomp,” December 2001): I will not dignify his anti–Semitic comments (“Golijov diminishes Jewish culpability in Jesus’ death”) with an answer. For that you may refer to Pope John XXIII. Nor will I respond to his Taliban–like comments (“By having sopranos and altos sing Jesus’ words, Golijov makes the Son of God weirdly androgynous”). I just want to correct an untrue statement by Professor Linton: the Boston Symphony players brought earplugs only to the first rehearsal. They took them out for the remaining ones, as well as the performances. Furthermore, contrary to Prof. Linton’s statement, I believe that every one of the BSO players came to tell me how moved they were and how much they loved playing this piece.
Osvaldo Golijov
Worcester, Massachusetts
Mr. Golijov’s accusation of bigotry is serious and deserves a serious answer.
Although now recognized as sophisticated and subtle, the Gospel of Mark is unambiguous in at least one aspect. Jesus stands in stark—and ironic—contrast to the temple priesthood. This theme is introduced in Mark 1:22b and continues through the book, reaching its climax in 14:63ff. where the high priest rends his robes and the whole Sanhedrin beats Jesus, demanding his death. Within this large design, the violence of the crucifixion and the temple priesthood’s highly active part in it are highlighted by smaller touches characterized by ironic reversals: the loyal Peter cowardly denies Jesus, and Joseph of Arimathea—the Sanhedrin member—bravely claims him; the Jewish high priest pronounces Jesus blasphemous and worthy of death, while the Roman centurion supervises the execution and proclaims Jesus the “Son of God.”
Most Christian scholars would agree that the Gospels are midrashes upon the historic events of Jesus’ life, midrashes that clarify Jesus’ position as promised Messiah and eschatological Lord. A musical setting of a Gospel story is a midrash upon a midrash. Passion settings such as Bach’s and Penderecki’s are sophisticated commentaries on and clarifications of the Gospel stories, their positions in the Christian canon, and their roles within the lives of continuing worshiping communities.
Instead of illuminating Mark’s story, Golijov’s midrash distorts it. The Passion According to St. Mark disappears under the Passion According to Golijov. My objection here is no more anti–Semitic than was my objection to a similarly troublesome attitude to the text in the Crystal Cathedral’s passion play (FT, June/July 1997). Whereas the text of that 1997 Garden Grove passion sought to dilute the theological notion of sin (and edited it out of the Lord’s Prayer), Golijov diffuses the high irony of the story by excising the single–minded meanness of the temple cabal. In one way Mr. Golijov is exactly right. It is his passion. That’s one of its problems.
For Christians it’s Jesus’ Passion. Or as it’s called in the liturgy, “The Passion of Our Lord according to St. Mark.” Particularly for evangelical Protestants—but for many other Christians too—the Scriptures are not something that we interpret and adjust, conforming the documents with whatever passes for present realities or suits particular sensitivities, either individual or cultural. We seek to conform our lives to the Scriptures, not the Scriptures to our lives. And the Scriptures have that authority because through them we know Jesus who is our Lord. Mr. Golijov can hardly be surprised if people for whom this text—in all its details—is so important find his understanding shallow and his editing problematic.
My guess is that Mr. Golijov views the text as anti–Semitic and thus purged it of what he thought was objectionable content. If he thinks so, he misreads it. The conflict in the text is between Jews, not against Jews. My full passage which Mr. Golijov characterizes as anti–Semitic is “Golijov diminishes Jewish culpability in Jesus’ death by editing out of Mark’s text most passages that present Jewish officialdom in a less than benign light.” It came in the context of addressing the apparent oddity of a Jew composing a setting of the Passion—something that was widely noted in the press and about which Mr. Golijov had commented. Perhaps I should have put “officialdom” earlier in my sentence. But writing “ . . . diminishes Jewish officialdom’s culpability” seemed unnecessarily lumpy, and blame for the miscarriage of justice described in the text could hardly be placed against all the Jews or the Jews alone. The women in the story—all Jewish—were not only powerless to stop the process but apparently faithful supporters of Jesus throughout it. It was a Roman who pronounced sentence and other Gentiles who did the dirty work. I thought all that was clear.
But of course it isn’t. Christians themselves have misused the accounts, and in the wake of the Holocaust the almost visceral reaction of some Jews to the New Testament stories is certainly understandable. I regret that Mr. Golijov took my comments as he did. But Mr. Golijov should both understand the importance of the unadorned Scriptures for evangelicals and remember evangelicals’ historic philo–Semitism. Not only do we worship a Jew as God, but evangelicals are sometimes even stronger supporters of Israel than are some Israelis themselves. The anti–Semitic label is unwarranted.
Instead of name calling, I wish that Mr. Golijov had taken the opportunity to explain matters such as his editing decisions, why he chose to present Jesus as a symbol instead of a person, and perhaps what he expected the reactions of Christians to be to his work.
On the comparatively trivial matter of who wore earplugs when, I stand by my sources.
In George McKenna’s review of While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (December 2001), he neglects to lay the least bit of blame for the Civil War on the heightened sense of self–righteousness instilled in both the North and the South by their respective churches. My own researches into the war have led me to conclude that the churches promoted secession vigorously, and that the war’s origin, intensity, and duration could have been avoided or reduced had the churches not added their infernal heat to the flames. (For references concerning my assertion please consult “The Civil War, Slavery, and the Bible,” located at the following website: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_babinski/ experience.html#humanity.)
Edward T. Babinski
Greenville, South Carolina
Churches—infernal heat? Mr. Babinski seem to have an ax to grind. I can only pray that it does not corrupt his research. In any case, it is hard to see how the churches could have been expected to remain silent about the issue that produced the war. In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln called slavery the most serious moral issue of his time. Douglas, in trying to declare it off–limits for political debate, called it a “religious” issue. They were both right. Whenever moral and religious issues are debated, churches must get involved. It goes with the territory.
The item on abortion and reproductive health care in While We’re At It (December 2001) is factually incorrect and misrepresents the position of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP).
The piece, quoting Brigham Young law professor Richard Wilkins, maligns CRLP by charging that “the strategy demonstrates ‘CRLP’s contempt for the American political system.’” As a legal organization, CRLP’s mission is to establish and protect the rule of law by advancing women’s reproductive rights in the U.S. and around the world, whether at the UN, with governments, or in the courts.
More troubling is the rest of the quote by Prof. Wilkins. His statement is riddled with errors. Asserting that CRLP’s “contempt” extends to “a disregard for more general notions of national sovereignty and democratic self–determination” is just plain wrong. Groups across the political spectrum are working to create customary international law through the UN’s processes. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized since the early nineteenth century that customary international law is a legitimate part of American law. Moreover, it is generally accepted that Congress can set aside customary international law by statute and thereby make it unenforceable in U.S. courts—thus, there is a powerful democratic “check” on the UN process. But Congress has never enacted such a law.
Far from imposing one viewpoint on abortion, or “bypassing political accountabililty,” all UN documents recognize that abortion is included in the definition of reproductive health, but only to the extent that it is legal in individual nations. In contrast, the “Mexico City policy,” which the piece explains as “forbid[ding] the use of U.S. funds for overseas groups that promote or perform abortions,” in fact prohibits the use of these groups’ own funds, and imposes the viewpoint of a minority of the population of the U.S. on other sovereign nations, regardless of their own established laws on the issue.
These contortions distort the way the UN addresses reproductive health services and the efforts of the reproductive rights community, and have resulted in a column that is a disservice to the readers of First Things.
Janet Benshoof
President, Center for Reproductive Law and Policy
New York, New York
Ms. Benshoof asserts that my comments in the December 2001 issue of First Things are “riddled with errors.” Ms. Benshoof should be quite careful before making such a claim.
Anika Rahman, Director of the International Program for CRLP, claimed, in a letter to the Washington Times (August 31, 2001), that “our lawsuit does not assert that the right to abortion is a principle of international customary law.” In her letter, Ms. Benshoof admits what her colleague denied. See paragraph 89 of the Center’s lawsuit, which alleges that “CRLP advocates” for “interpretations of existing treaties and other international human rights agreements that favor protection of reproductive rights, including abortion, as internationally recognized human rights.” It takes exceptional legal training, to say the least, to explain any distinction between a “customary international law” and an “internationally recognized human right.”
Ms. Benshoof claims that the CRLP’s attempts to enforce “customary international law” are consistent with the American legal system and that, in any event, UN–created norms respect the abortion policy of individual states. These claims warrant a three–point reply.
First, as Ms. Benshoof notes, the Supreme Court has decreed that customary international law is enforceable in U.S. Courts. That is precisely why abortion advocates, like the CRLP, are moving into the international law arena to set aside political and legal decisions (like the Mexico City policy) adopted within the United States. Viewed in this context, Ms. Benshoof’s invocation of international law indeed shows contempt for the American legal process. Otherwise, why file a lawsuit (invoking purported international law) to set aside a presidential decision?
Second, Ms. Benshoof’s assertion that Congress can “set aside” a principle of customary international law is creative but merely hypothetical, and certainly questionable at best—as Ms. Benshoof concedes, this has never actually happened. The real issue, of course, is why Congress should have to “reverse” or “set aside” a principle of law that Congress or the United States Constitution did not create in the first place. That is precisely how the use of international law by Ms. Benshoof and her associates shows such contempt for democracy and sovereignty.
Third, abortion advocates, without any doubt, are attempting to further their agenda by using international meetings that have little if any political oversight by, or democratic accountability to, the electorates of the nations attending those meetings. Such meetings are used, or misused, by the abortion lobbyists to create new “norms” of customary international law—norms that would never be adopted through the democratic processes of most of the attending countries.
Nations such as those in South America whose constitutions specifically protect unborn children are urged at international meetings to endorse broad language calling for “reproductive rights.” Of course, during the course of the international meetings, abortion activists deny that “reproductive rights” language includes abortion. (But see the Canadian admission to the contrary—the event that prompted the item in question.) Then, once the “reproductive rights” language is adopted, CRLP and others take that language back to the legal systems of the participating nations and claim (as the CRLP did in its own lawsuit) that such “agreements . . . favor protection of reproductive rights, including abortion, as internationally recognized human rights.” This is precisely why abortion advocates expend such vast efforts at international meetings pushing for abortion policies that do in fact seek to subvert the democratic process by foisting an a priori abortion agenda on nations around the world.
The incredible irony is that all of the above takes place, according to Ms. Benshoof, in the name of seeking “to establish and protect the rule of law.”
By filing a lawsuit to set aside the Mexico City policy on the basis of “international law” created outside the American political system, the CRLP has demonstrated that it firmly believes that “international law” (which has little if anything to do with the will of the American people or the representatives they elect to govern them) is nevertheless enforceable against the American people and, ultimately, the people of the world. Groups and individuals who indeed wish to “protect the rule of law” should take notice.