The JREF doesn’t pick sides in political races, but we do frequently take issue with the journalists who cover them. And as Massachusetts voters drive to the polls to choose the new occupant of the Senate seat once occupied by Ted Kennedy, there is one pundit who must be singled out for attention before somebody — I’m guessing Scott Brown — wins.
That pundit is conservative, creationist, monotonous Ben Stein, of Ferris Bueller fame. Here’s what he had to say, in part, about Brown’s opponent, Martha Coakley:
[She] kept innocent human beings in jail on totally faked charges that made the Salem Witch Trials look innocent […] If our President can endorse a woman who openly debases the judicial process, a woman who actually believes in witchcraft, we are in desperate shape.
In this hysterical article — entitled “Witchcraft’s Candidate” — Stein rightly but disingenuously excoriates Coakley for buying into the sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s, in particular as it related to the Fells Acres Day Care case. Stein is right because the Fells Acres case, as Stein says, “made the Stalinist Show Trials of the 1930s, with prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky, seem sensible and temperate by comparison.” (Stein might be hyperbolic, but his emotionalism is appropriate.) Coakley’s role in hounding an unlucky family, the Amiraults, long after they had paid and overpaid a non-existent debt to society should rightly shame her name so long as she aspires, or pretends, to public service. (That said, I’m not convinced that Scott Brown is any better, though he’s certainly more exciting.)
But why did Stein have to drag witchcraft into it? Fells Acres wasn’t about witchcraft; it was about sexual abuse. Stein seems to be cynically conflating Fells Acres with the McMartin Preschool case in LA, and suggesting that Coakley truly believes that teachers “flew around the school yard on brooms,” as one of the McMartin children claimed.
This is why Stein’s article is more disingenuous than anything. There was no shortage of craziness in the Fells Acres case for Stein to reference, but that special word — “witchcraft” — was distressingly absent. The American Spectator audience is reasonably well-read, and Stein knew that criticizing someone for “actually believing in witchcraft” would get them to chuckle. So he contorted his story to make that special word relevant, and in the process destroyed any bit of credibility his editorial may have otherwise possessed.
But I cannot imagine why Ben Stein, of all people, would have anything against faith in witchcraft, save in the Deuteronomical sense. He, more than Martha Coakley or just about anyone else who springs to mind, has good reason to believe in it himself. This is the man who said “science leads you to killing people,” yet without the scientific method, Stein cannot possibly have sensible standards of evidence by which to discriminate truth from falsehood. Witchcraft is nonsense, he tells us, yet creationism is logical. The Fells Acres suspects couldn’t possibly have committed the crimes of which they were accused, yet men may rise from the dead. How does he know? And how dare he chuckle at someone’s — anyone’s — superstitions, whether they truly possess those superstitions or not?
And in this case, I’m guessing Coakley does not possess the superstition in question. I’ll concede that there may be evidence to suggest that Martha Coakley lives in fear of murderous, child-abusing, broom-riding witchcraft cults, but if such evidence exists, it would be much more remarkable than even Stein lets on. Because Massachusetts politicians are virtually required to love witchcraft. It can’t levitate a teacher, but it sure can levitate the economy.