FROM RIGHT WEB: The Ethics and Public Policy Center, founded in 1976, was the first institute to break ground in the new frontal attack on the secular humanists. It has been on the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against liberalism and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. When he founded EPPC, Ernest Lefever said that
part of the role of a ?small ethically oriented center? like EPPC was to ?respond directly to ideological critics who insist the corporation is fundamentally unjust.? Lefever said he was motivated to start the organization because “U.S. domestic and multinational firms find themselves increasingly under siege at home and abroad. They are accused of producing shoddy and unsafe products, fouling the environment, robbing future generations, wielding enormous power, repressing peoples in the third world, and generally of being insensitive to human needs.?
President Reagan?s first nominee to direct the State Department?s Office for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs was Ernest Lefever, EPPC president and a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger who was known as a fierce critic of President Carter?s human rights policy. Lefever?s dubious credentials as a human rights advocate came in part from the white paper ?The Trivialization of Human Rights,? published in 1978 by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In testimony before a Senate committee in 1979, Lefever set forth the neoconservative position on human rights–one that would soon characterize the policy of the Reagan administration and would two decades later be adopted by the Bush administration. He recommended that the human rights records of governments receiving U.S. aid should ?not be judged primarily by their internal policies but by their foreign policies.? (6)
An embarrassing conflict of interest between his EPPC and Nestle Corp., which had contributed $35,000 to this think tank, resulted in such bad publicity that the administration withdrew his nomination. In an article in Fortune magazine, Lefever attacked Nestle?s critics, who charged that the corporation?s aggressive marketing of its infant powdered-milk formula in the third world was causing a new surge in infant death, as ?Marxists marching under the banner of Christ.? (7)
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Given the highly selective character of U.S. human rights policy, the increased U.S. focus on religious rights has done nothing to diminish rising international concerns that the U.S. government accepts the assumption that there is a clash of civilization and what is more intends to defeat all cultural opponents, home or abroad.
In a January 2003 article for the National Review Online about President Bush’s state of the union address, EPPC President Hillel Fradkin wrote, ?President Bush’s question [‘why do they hate us?’] obviously concerned the radical Islamic terrorists who attacked us 15 months ago. Today that question might be raised not only about our manifest enemies but our alleged allies and friends, particularly in Europe. Why do they hate us? Haven’t we been good for and to them? It would be preferable if we could count on the support of France and other European and democratic states. It would also be just since only wounded vanity and envy seem properly to explain the posture of the French and others. But envy may prevail and we will have to live with this as well as Middle Eastern distrust if we are to perform the duty our power imposes on us.? (10) Several EPPC scholars and associates were tapped to serve in the Bush administration, including Elliott Abrams (National Security Council), Alex Acosta (attorney general’s office), Robert George (Council on Bioethics), and Nina Shokraii Rees (assistant to the vice president).
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