U.S. Department of Justice During the Reagan Years

It’s a relief to know that The Times is also against “decapitation” (“Call to Battle,” editorial, March 5)! But your editorial on my in-house memorandum misrepresents not only what it says, but also positions the department has taken during the Reagan years.

You write that the memo says “the department should champion compulsory AIDS testing” and that it says “obscenity cases shouldn’t bog down in First Amendment considerations.” In fact, the memo says “we should make periodic reports on our four-point AIDS program” (announced last summer) and on our efforts in court to defend the program against challenges. Our program requires testing of all immigrants, refugees and legalization applicants. It also requires random testing of those entering prison, and testing of all leaving prison. But our program calls for no other testing. What, I must ask, is wrong with that policy, or with publicly discussing it?

As for obscenity cases, the memo does not say what you attribute to it. It says: Child pornography and obscenity “threaten the psychological health and physical safety of our children” and that “those trafficking in obscenity” do not have “a right to practice their trade.” It is hard to see how anyone seriously could disagree with that, but perhaps you do. Perhaps you support child pornography, and perhaps you think obscenity, which the Supreme Court has held is not protected by the First Amendment, is a blessed thing.

You also wrote: “In seven years this Justice Department has campaigned to restore school prayer, to abolish abortion and affirmative action.” Here you are thrice wrong. We’ve argued in favor of a moment-of-silence statute, but not for the restoration of school prayer in the classic and well-understood sense of the state-composed or state-sponsored prayer that was struck down by the court in Engel vs. Vitale (1962). We’ve argued as a constitutional matter in favor of returning the abortion issue to the states, but never, either as a constitutional or policy matter, in favor of its abolition (whatever that might mean). And we’ve argued in favor of vigorous affirmative action of a kind that casts recruiting nets far and wide so that employers can consider for employment qualified persons of both sexes and of various races and ethnic backgrounds.

You are blind to basic facts but also to differing points of view. You would do well to consider the reflections of a liberal publication that understands what my memo was driving at--the threats to the quality of life, particularly to the life of children, that are posed by drugs and other phenomena of the ‘80s.

In its lead editorial of Feb. 8, The New Republic observes: “Contemporary liberalism is so intellectually and psychologically invested in the doctrine of ever-expanding rights--the rights of privacy, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the rights of pornographers, the rights of everyone to everything--that any suggestion of the baleful consequences of that doctrine appears to (liberals) as a threat to the liberal idea itself.” Yet “the facts are clear. Licentiousness about drugs and sex have put our children at risk . . . The AIDS pandemic may be the most painful and most vivid symptom of that risk, but it is not the only symptom. Lives are ruined by the ethos of ‘anything goes’ just as surely as they are lost. In this insidious culture of lassitude, no one is safe, and no place.” It concludes that these issues demand “more public scrutiny” and “more public debate.”

Is The Times willing to open its mind? Or will it continue to indulge in its bigotry about the Justice Department, and jerk a predictable knee?

TERRY EASTLAND

Director

Office of Public Affairs

U.S. Department of Justice

Washington, D.C.