What should Catholics think of Sen. Joseph McCarthy?

[angel12]

All that quote you provided does is prove that the concern was not with homosexuals or even homosexuality but the belief or impression that homosexuals were simply subversives .

Which was never proven, of course.

 

[SeraficLeo]

McCarthy linked homosexuality and communism together as “threats to the ‘American way of life’” and Senator Kenneth Wherry (1892-1951), the Republican minority leader, said in an interview with Max Lerner, “You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives…we’re both Americans, aren’t we? I say, let’s get these fellows [closeted gay men in government positions] out of the government.”"

Mattachine Society[edit]

Main article: Mattachine Society

The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was one of the earliest homophile/homosexual organizations in the United States, probably second only to Chicago’s Society for Human Rights (1924).[10] Harry Hay and a group of Los Angeles male friends formed the group to protect and improve the rights of homosexuals. Because of concerns for secrecy and the founders’ leftist ideology, they adopted the cell organization being used by the Communist Party of the United States.

So it’s a total shocker that American Senators and Congressmen might have associated homosexuals with Communism.

 

[SeraficLeo]

Which was never proven, of course.

That’s irrelevant. The claim was made that the big bad U.S government was persecuting homosexuals because they were homosexuals. However, all the evidence presented here in this thread demonstrates that this is a slander: they were concerned about Communists and Communism, particularly the danger they might try to overthrow the U.S government by unconstitutional means or betray national secrets to the Soviet Union.

 

[Londoner]

A) state imposed atheism
B) the need to destroy all existing institutions
C) the denial of the dignity of an individual
D) the denial of the right to property
E) the lack of subsidiarity
F) the destruction of the family
G) the collectivization of agriculture

Why would you suggest that? Clearly none of the features of communism listed above are policies of the US Democratic Party.

 

[Londoner]

Communists don’t deserve to be able to walk freely in a decent society and spread their poison.

In a decent society everybody deserves to walk freely unless sentenced to deprivation of liberty by a court of law. That includes communists and any other people with whom you may happen to disagree. Voltaire did not in fact say, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’, but it is as good a summary as any of the principle of the right to freedom of speech. It is, as you well know, a right protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. You will not have forgotten that the first duty of every member of the US armed forces is to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’.

I’m not tied to a monarchy, but historically I do think it’s the best we’ve seen as long as it was also subjugated to the church

Again, this directly contradicts the First Amendment. It also contradicts US Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 8.

 

[Usagi]

That’s the thing, though — yes, there were actual Communist spies and infiltrators. But thanks to Joe McCarthy, the very idea became laughable if not offensive. He went after the wrong people, lied about his lists and evidence, and basically made the whole thing about his own self-aggrandizement. And when he (rightly) was finally taken down, the whole idea of Communist infiltration was discredited along with him. When I was in school, before the Venona Papers came out, the whole thing was treated as a pointless witch hunt, and actual spies of the era (not all of them McCarthy’s own targets) were regarded as tragically innocent victims of a witch hunt.

It’s proper to want the historical record corrected. But don’t make Joe McCarthy out to be a hero. He’s the guy who took it too far, screwed everything up, and damaged the whole notion of Communist infiltration as a real danger for decades. And again, based on what I’ve read about the guy and the way he acted, I think he cared a lot more about using anti-Communism to make his own name than about actually uncovering true threats.

 

[Usagi]

Which is super interesting given what McCarthy’s staffers Roy Cohn and David Schine were allegedly getting up to at the time…

 

[Cruciferi]

But don’t make Joe McCarthy out to be a hero.

He wasn’t the Hero we wanted, but the one we deserved.

He’s the guy who took it too far, screwed everything up

Actually, I don’t think that he took it far enough. Digging deeper would have revealed the truth.

Nevertheless, He sounded the alarm and that’s good enough.

 

[Usagi]

Palestinian is a more modern term. Is it from the area’s time under the Ottoman Empire … or is it what the English called it between the end of World War I … and when they left? I don’t know if “Palestine” has ever been an actual nation (versus an area).

Palestine is an ancient term; forms of it occur in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and Hebrew. It first seems to have been used for the region by some Ancient Greek writers before Jesus’ time. So while it’s not a nationality, Jesus was Palestinian in terms of being born and living most of his life in that region.

Now, it seems that the Roman province of Syria Palaestina didn’t come into existence until about a hundred years after Jesus Ascended (AD 135); before that, it was divided into Judaea and Galilee, as we see in the Gospels. So by that measure, Jesus’ legal status was more properly “Galilean,” since he lived before the reorganization of the local government. But as noted above, the term “Palestine” was still around for the region, just as people lived in (North and South) America, and might thus have called themselves “Americans,” before the legal entity of the United States of America was created.

The modern use of “Palestinian” to distinguish Arabs living in the region from Israelis is recent, but that comes from the name of the region that was around in Jesus’ time and before.

 

[Usagi]

Nevertheless, He sounded the alarm and that’s good enough.

It really wasn’t. You don’t get credit for “sounding the alarm” if your behavior ends up turning the whole notion that there even is a threat into a joke.

 

[Cruciferi]

It really wasn’t.

Your Personal Opinion

You don’t get credit for “sounding the alarm” if your behavior ends up turning the whole notion that there even is a threat into a joke.

Then who gets the credit? Who do you approve of?

It seems like YOU would’ve preferred it if everyone had been left in the dark.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Not a total shocker, as you suggest. The “other” has always been mistreated by being a target of bias, and it has always been assumed that if a particular group tends toward a certain ideology (in this case, the Mattachine Society), that must mean that most, if not all, people of the same characteristics (in this case, sexual orientation) are members of the group or at least agree and sympathize with their ideology. This is worse even than guilt by association because there is no real association except by a twisted kind of non-rational logic. I would wager that the majority of gay people of the era never even heard of the Mattachine Society.

 

[edwest211]

That is completely false. At the time, Communists and Communist sympathizers said this to discredit him. Factual historical information shows that the US Government was protecting itself. Senator McCarthy was doing what he thought best and the FBI agreed with him. But not even the FBI knew what the NSA knew. The head of the NSA discouraged prosecution because it would involve revealing Top Secret information. The NSA was decrypting Soviet military communications which was vital in determining Soviet intentions. If any messages were found that ordered the redeployment of aircraft, for example, that would set off an alarm. That “witch hunt” was a necessary, purposeful series of events. Hollywood was closely watched. Some writers and directors were enamored with Communism and could knowingly or unintentionally add Communist propaganda to their writing and movies. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government intelligence agencies were keenly aware of the threat. I’ll add one more note. At the time, foreign persons who had settled in the United States but who were not citizens, had to fill out an Alien Address Form every year. The Government wanted to know where you were, especially if you were from a Soviet satellite country.

No, not every Communist was a spy, but members of the Communist Party in the United States believed in it and promoted it.

 

[edwest211]

I agree but prosecution was prevented, including in cases where evidence existed that a government employee was a Communist and worked in a position where their inside knowledge could be passed on to the Soviet Union. The Russians could never know that the US was decrypting their high-level military communications.

 

[CoffeeFanatic]

Well, love him or hate him, he wasn’t actually wrong about there being communists in the US.

 

[niceatheist]

Being a Communist was and is not illegal in the United States.

 

[CoffeeFanatic]

No, but the Cold War was certainly not a good time to be one here in the US. People were rather understandably leery of it. Communists in the rest of the world gave them good reason to be.

 

[edwest211]

And a Communist bookstore in your neighborhood gave people the reality that Communist ideas were being spread.

 

[SeraficLeo]

As idealistic as your argument is, in reality, everyone makes those categorizations, if only out of necessity for organizing information. Frankly I am pretty sure it was a generally safe assumption that people living the homosexual lifestyle in the early and mid-20th century were by-and-large leftist or radical in their political or social ideologies and I make this claim on the basis of early testimony by homosexuals trying to organize with other homosexuals for recognition and protection by the state.

The earliest known American attempt to found a gay-activist or gay-rights organization (the Chicago based Society for Human Rights) met with failure largely because of homosexual opposition to the group’s own stated aims or goals, which were very conservative:

Contemplating this failure in 1962, Gerber stated,

The first difficulty was in rounding up enough members and contributors so the work could go forward. The average homosexual, I found, was ignorant concerning himself. Others were fearful. Still others were frantic or depraved. Some were blasé. Many homosexuals told me that their search for forbidden fruit was the real spice of life. With this argument, they rejected our aims. We wondered how we could accomplish anything with such resistance from our own people.[15]

Of course, if it were no longer forbidden, then the “spice of life” would lose its appeal. The next attempt (the Mattachine society from above) was thoroughly leftist, founded by a leftist (a Marxist) and copied the organization structure (underground cells) of the Communist Party USA.

While you may be right that most homosexuals at the time were personally unfamiliar with the Mattachine society, it was the most prominent and known homosexual organization in America at the time. A lesbian equivalent based in San Francisco and founded around the same time also looked to the Mattachine society:

The early gay rights movement, then called the Homophile Movement, was developed by the [Mattachine Society](Mattachine Society - Wikipedia), formed in 1950. Although the Mattachine Society began as a provocative organization with roots in its founders’ communist activism, leadership of the Mattachine thought it more prudent and productive to convince heterosexual society at large that gays were not different from themselves, rather than agitate for change. They changed their tactics in 1953.[17] The Daughters of Bilitis followed this model by encouraging its members to assimilate as much as possible into the prevailing heterosexual culture.[18]

From the point of view of spectators and authorities, then, there was universal coherence among homosexual groups at the time.

 

[Thorolfr]

And a Communist bookstore in your neighborhood gave people the reality that Communist ideas were being spread.

Some people posting on this thread are all concerned about the spread of communist ideas and about what Russian sympathizers and spies were doing back in the 1950’s, and yet are probably unconcerned about what Vladimir Putin has been doing to influence our elections and about Mr. Trump’s overly warm and friendly relationship with him.