Focusing on Candidate Pat Robertson

Regardless of one’s opinion of Pat Robertson, your editorial “The Robertson Pitch” (Feb. 14) is, to be charitable, complete nonsense.

What astounds is not that Robertson views the world in terms of good and evil, and human choices in terms of right and wrong--a few billion seem to share his view; rather, it is your continuing editorial effort to deny the meaning, if not the existence, of these principles.

It is precisely because you neither hold to nor follow “clear moral guidelines” that you look upon the world’s problems and see only gray. You will never distinguish a clearly right from a clearly wrong moral choice because you have nothing against which to judge either. Accordingly, you are prevented from taking a convincing stand on anything, regardless how you might feel about the person (including Robertson) or the issue in question.

You are right that the framers were men of strong religious faith, but wrong and dissembling to say they left their “theological leanings” out of the Constitution. On the contrary, the Constitution is suffused with religious beliefs and values (specifically derived from Judeo/Christian tradition; not from some fanciful “tapestry of all civilized culture”); what the framers wisely disallowed was a respect for the establishment of religious institutions. You fail to see the difference.

Finally, you get to your main point; namely, that we must not tolerate any public figure who gets hung up on antiquated notions of good and evil and right and wrong. No, what we need is a President who can inspire “openness, compassion and tolerance.” These are your clear moral guidelines, and may God help us. The word “compassion” no longer means anything, except perhaps giving in to demands; “tolerance” means paying obsequious court to any absurdity, obscenity, fad or cracked-pot point of view, and “openness” could mean anything (even perhaps the tolerance of compassion)!

JOHN GRAHAM

Sherman Oaks