Document 27.9 A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Moral Majority Threatens Freedom, 1981

Document 27.9

A. Bartlett Giamatti | The Moral Majority Threatens Freedom, 1981

One of the Moral Majority’s sharpest critics was A. Bartlett Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar, president of Yale University (1978–1986), and subsequently commissioner of Major League Baseball. In an excerpt from the speech he originally gave to Yale’s incoming freshman class in 1981, Giamatti attacked the Religious Right for its dogmatism and threat to personal freedom.

A self-proclaimed “Moral Majority,” and its satellite or client groups, cunning in the use of a native blend of old intimidation and new technology, threatens the values [of freedom]. Angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality, its members threaten through political pressure or public denunciation whoever dares to disagree with their authoritarian positions. . . .

From the maw of this “morality” come those who presume to know what justice for all is; come those who presume to know what books are fit to read; which television programs are fit to watch; which textbooks will serve for all the young; come spilling those who presume to know what only God knows, which is when human life begins. . . . There is no debate, no discussion, no dissent. They know. There is only one set of overarching political and spiritual and social beliefs; whatever view does not conform to these views is by definition relativistic, negative, secular, immoral, against the family, anti-free enterprise, un-American. What nonsense.

. . . For what [these groups] claim they espouse—love of country, a regard for the sanctity of life and the importance of the family, a belief in high standards of personal conduct, a conviction that we derive our values from a transcendent being, a desire to assert that free enterprise is better than state ownership and state control—are not evil or pernicious beliefs. Quite the contrary. They are the kernels of beliefs held dear, in various ways, by me and by millions of other Americans. You should not scorn these ideas simply because some extremists claim, whether sincerely or hypocritically, to have captured these beliefs for themselves. The point is, the rest of us hold to ideas of family, country, belief in God, in different ways. The right to differ, and to see things differently, is our concern.

Source: A. Bartlett Giamatti, “A Liberal Education and the New Coercion,” A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 110–17.