Culture Watch: Action Jackson.(Brief Article)

Redemption works fast these days. In the interval between NR's last issue and this, Jesse Jackson has fallen, risen, and gone back to work. A few aspects of the quickest story ever told should be remembered.

Jackson and his mistress, Karin Stanford, did one important thing right, by saving the life of their child. Jackson has been pro-abortion ever since he first ran for president in 1984. But before that, he had called abortion "murder." He had reason to do so, since his own mother, a teenager who became pregnant by a married neighbor, considered aborting him until a minister talked her out of it. How many of Jackson's fellows (millions of them black) have gone to the pyre of Moloch with his acquiescence? But when the choice came to him and his lover, they chose life. He is, it turns out, truly "personally opposed."

Miss Stanford's life could be a modern Rake's Progress. Before going to work for PUSH, she had a job teaching political science and black studies in Georgia. The scholarly work that first caught Jackson's eye was a book she had written on his effect on foreign policy-truly a weighty subject. What more fitting reward for the affirmative-action track than the attentions of a race hustler?

The public has no right to know everything about public figures. Libel laws once recognized "the peace of families" as an untouchable area, even when the families belonged to politicians and other celebrities. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it is also a real tribute. But when damaging truths come out, consequences should follow. Jackson's rubber-ball rebound reflects a larger pathology in American religion. It used to be a bit of ...