Religious leaders urge Bush, Gore to address nuclear weapons
9/11/2000
WASHINGTON (UMNS) - It is time for the leading presidential candidates to discuss nuclear disarmament as a moral issue in the election campaign, according to an interfaith group of religious leaders.
Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush made no comments on the morality of holding and using nuclear weapons when quizzed in writing by a group of nearly 50 religious leaders. The survey was prepared by Pax Christi USA, a part of the international Catholic peace movement, and Methodists United for Justice and Peace, an unofficial United Methodist group.
Howard Hallman, chairman of Methodists United for Peace with Justice, expressed concern that these topics remain unaddressed by the country's two leading candidates.
"There is a lot of talk about moral values in the election campaign," Hallman said. "We believe that nuclear weapons constitute a moral issue, not merely a matter of military strategy, and should be discussed as such."
Democrat Gore and Republican Bush also have not responded to survey questions dealing with elimination of the U.S. nuclear arsenal under a treaty ratified in 1969 and with the kind of targets each candidate believes appropriate for the use of nuclear weapons.
Bush aides sent copies of a speech and answers to a similar unpublished survey and let the religious survey group select quotes that fit the questions. However, the material supplied did not answer all 10 questions. The Gore answers were gleaned from his campaign Web site and a survey to which he responded during the primaries.
The survey group provided copies of the selections to the offices of both candidates before presenting them in a Sept. 7 press conference.
Only Ralph Nader, nominee of the Green Party, responded specifically to the survey questions. Neither candidate from the Reform Party replied to the survey.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, founding president of Pax Christi and pastor of St. Leo's Catholic Church in Detroit, stressed the importance of considering the morality or immorality of holding and using nuclear weapons. He said he sees this lack of response on the part of Bush and Gore as "a glaring failure because each of them has put forth their religious convictions as the reason for running for public life."
Gumbleton said he found Nader's response encouraging. Nader called the U.S. government's refusal to adopt a no-first-use policy "an example of political immorality." "As the first country to use nuclear weapons and the perennial leader in new technologies for using these horrifying weapons of mass destruction, the United States has a moral obligation to take the lead in working for their elimination," Nader said in the survey.
"All religious communities condemn the use of weapons of mass destruction," Gumbleton said. He added that to contemplate destruction of a biosphere - Earth - that has existed for more than 400 million years "is a blasphemy."
Bishop C. Dale White, who headed the United Methodist Council of Bishops' churchwide study and action program "In Defense of Creation" in 1986, spoke against the concept of nuclear weapons as a deterrence to war.
"Over the past few years, communities of faith around the world have declared the deterrence doctrine, the only conceivable rationalization for holding nuclear weapons, spiritually and ethically bankrupt," he said. He noted that in 1986 the United Methodist bishops said deterrence could not receive the church's blessing.
Last May, the United Methodist Church's General Conference reaffirmed "the finding that nuclear weapons, whether used or threatened, are grossly evil and morally wrong."
White also recalled that 60 senior military officers issued a statement in December 1996 saying "that as experienced military commanders they are convinced that nuclear weapons are 'of sharply reduced utility' in any legitimate military purpose." And he noted that in 1996, at the urging of the World Health Assembly and the U.N. General Assembly, the International Court of Justice declared the deterrence doctrine legally bankrupt.
"Clearly," White said, "communities of faith in the United States are justified in calling every candidate for high office in the country to state clearly the steps that they will take to eliminate nuclear terror as a political instrument, and to rid the world of nuclear devices and the means to produce them."
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