A Model Of Liberal Democracy?
In March, four Balliol law students, including myself, crossed the Atlantic to participate in an international ‘moot’ (fake court hearing) against Patrick Henry College, Virginia. The judges supposedly decide the winner not on the merits of the case but by assessing the performance and arguments of each side. PHC is a small Protestant evangelical college founded by Dr Michael Farris in 2000 to rival Ivy League institutions, but with a strict Christian ethos.
Its motto is ‘For Christ and for Liberty’. Most PHC students have been homeschooled by their parents, believing that their children, after a religious home life, are defiled by exposure to mainstream, morally bankrupt American culture at school by being taught a secular curriculum and mixing with other young people from a variety of backgrounds. They are already proving successful: Farris was one of five Christian leaders selected by G.W.
Bush to discuss with him the details of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act before the signing ceremony; and in 2004, out of the hundred interns at the White House, seven of them were PHC students. According to PHC’s code of conduct, students must: believe in God; be practising Protestants; not drink alcohol, smoke or take drugs; not swear; not look at porn; and must obtain parental permission before pursuing a (sex-free and heterosexual) “romantic relationship."
Creationism is taught, “as biblically true and as the best fit to observed data.” in biology classes. Interestingly, we were told by a PHC student that these rules were not always strictly observed: he knew people who had had sex, had looked at porn on campus, were gay (but not practising), were Democrat (equated with being gay by Farris, according to our PHC informer), had sworn once, had drunk a beer on campus and so on.
Our friend was also an ‘intellectual dissident’, having occasionally made his insurgent views on academic matters known to the administration, who, though not silencing him, made it clear that his views were not to be heard out loud. The moot topic given was the same in all rounds �" the prospective imposition of the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child (CRC), which is not strictly binding on the USA.
The question was whether the CRC could also bind the USA under the doctrine of customary international law, and if so, whether it could then bind individual US states. That every country in the world bar two has signed and ratified this treaty would suggest that its provisions were international ‘customs’ (norms to which the international community subscribe), and thus may be binding on those countries which have not ratified.
For the final, the Balliol team had been given the side of arguing for the imposition of the CRC on the US federal government and the state government of a fictional state. Unfortunately, we lost, defending the imposition of the CRC, to the well honed skills of our PHC counterparts before the Virginia Supreme Court justices and an audience including key benefactors to PHC. After this we were whisked off to a dinner for all these donors, apparently the annual fundraising jamboree for PHC.
At dinner, nothing too contentious was said �" so I thought: no discussion on gay marriage or abortion. However I realised afterwards I made a few faux pas: explaining the secularisation of such institutions as Harvard (which was set up as a seminary) by putting it in a historical context, saying that when Harvard was founded, most educational institutions were church governed, so its religious origins should not have any bearing on its modern character.
Apparently this is a very contentious issue, with the Farrisian view being that such institutions with religious origins are wrong to secularise, and no historical contextualising is permitted. After the meal the preaching began. Michael Farris, during an epic speech, invited the four Balliolites up to the lectern, in front of all these donors, and handed us each a bag, containing a copy of his masterpiece, The Joshua Generation, not published in the UK.
We had our photos taken with Farris, all grins and handshakes. We began to feel awkward; I am not one for being paraded, especially not in front of a whole lot of rich people. Farris then proceeded to rip into the issues within the moot. We realised that he had used the moot problem against us to preach.
Conveniently, it seemed the Balliol mooters got the “morally wrong” side of the problem: Farris condemned the evils of the “judicial tyranny” that is American judges under liberal Western Europe’s influence. According to him, the liberty of the American people to protect their right to defend themselves against “evil” conventions such as the CRC is being eroded by American judges looking to the other countries to decide American issues in American courts.
UN treaties are also apparently shaped by godless liberal European values (such as the prevention of the death penalty being used on minors and the prohibition of child soldiers). In any event, Farris’ law is wrong: even when it comes to customary international law, Congress is still free to legislate as it wishes.
After Farris had warned his donors of what would happen if these judges were allowed to continue bringing the USA in line with what is accepted internationally, Farris asked for $30 million from them for PHC. We felt furious. We remembered the day of the qualifying moots: Farris had told us after the preliminary rounds that he had already flipped a coin, and we were arguing for the imposition of the treaty.
We did not think anything of it at the time, but the coin is usually tossed in the presence of both sides. But it wouldn’t have done for the upstanding PHC students to fight for the imposition of the laws of godless liberals, especially in front of the donors. Our nationality as Europeans had been used against us ideologically, and our status as Oxford students had been used to earn PHC a lot of money from donors.
Although we all had ideological objections to PHC, we were more aggrieved by this abuse, and would have felt the same way had it been a Maoist university in China, a madrassa in Pakistan or a Vatican seminary.
2nd Jun 2005