Beloved Utopian

Accuracy in Academia has lost a dear friend and peerless contributor with the passing of modern-day man of letters Joe Sobran.

That old-fashioned sobriquet suits him as his interest in, and knowledge of, the literary masters was one of his trademarks. Less well known are the breadth of interests he had that even his admirers were unaware of.

The last time that I saw him was at a book party for John Berlau, author of EcoFreaks, and quite the scholar and scribe himself. Sobran was a bit frail even then and sat with a cane and his back to the wall.

As he did so, two people in front of him strained to remember the lyrics to a forgotten dirge from 1970 called Joanne. Suddenly Sobran started reciting them.

“Her name was Joann and she lived in a meadow by the pond,” he intoned. He then finished the recitation with perfect enunciation and said, “That’s how it goes.” And so it did.

The first time I had seen him was in a classroom at Catholic University in the 1980s. The pro-life Sobran was making the case against abortion in a lecture sponsored by the Federalist Society.

Even then, a pro-life lecture by a devout Catholic in a school sponsored by the Mother Church was not the slam dunk it might seem to be. Moreover, facing a room mostly filled with less-than-sanguine pro-choice feminists, Sobran demonstrated a precious quality—grace under pressure.

One student asked him what criminal penalties the mother who undergoes an abortion should face in the absence of Roe v. Wade.  Sobran asked what penalties such women faced before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its Roe v. Wade decision.

“None,” came the answer. “Works for me,” was Sobran’s response.

These were mere cameos in his life, though obviously vivid in mine. I did have the privilege of working with his daughter Christina for a number of years.

Over the years, before my tenure here began, he spoke at a number of AIA events. In later years, he wrote a column for Fran Griffin which he puckishly called The Reactionary Utopian.

We posted a number of these on our website. The last one was particularly remarkable.

“Despite all the rhetoric of bigotry that assails us these days, it just isn’t that easy to hate indiscriminately,” he wrote. “In fact such hatred seems unnatural –
or, if you prefer, idiosyncratic.”

“But some people find a strange moral satisfaction in positing a ubiquitous ‘hate,’ usually against ‘minorities’ of one sort or another. And of course this
‘hate’ requires the state to take various actions to protect the alleged victims, to make reparations, to reeducate the bigoted public, and finally to ‘eradicate’ the proscribed attitudes. This stipulated ‘hate’ seems to fill a vacuum in the moral universe, much as the rarefied ether was once believed to fill the emptiness of outer space.”

Ultimately, Joe Sobran was a man of compassion, wit, charm and talent. At 64, we lost him much too soon and, in light of the above, we can rue the columns he never had a chance to write.

Yet and still, we can be grateful for the ones he did and even more so for the life that he led. Vaya con Dios.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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