Copyright 1999 The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.

THE 'WEAK-MINDED' PEN LETTERS TO VENTURA
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

Ventura's crack drew almost instantaneous denouncement from the Democrat majority leader of the Minnesota Senate and from the chairman of the Minnesota GOP. A Roman Catholic organization in New York responded by re-labeling "The Body" as "The Bigot."

Even the Reform Party, to whom Ventura has become a kind of Populist standard-bearer, was distressed with the governor's remarks. Reform Party Chairman Russ Verney was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "We have been building the Reform Party based on principles, integrity and values, and this story is just so humiliating."

In an unsigned editorial, The Washington Post said, "Until now, Mr. Ventura had balanced provocation and seriousness successfully. This time he tipped."

Later, in a "20/20" interview with Barbara Walters, Ventura tried to clarify his critique of religion: "I should have said 'some'" Ventura offered. "The word 'some' should have been there in front of it. Some organized religion is a sham, . . ."

He suggested his remark was aimed at the Religious Right that "wants to tell us how to live our lives." He also claimed he never got to read the Playboy interview after it was done, and that it is the nature of Playboy to encourage its subjects to be provocative.

Finally, he weakly elaborated, "Weak-minded doesn't necessarily have to be bad. It means you have a weakness and if it's - if going to church will strengthen that mind, then for that person fine."

Ventura's remarks have followed him to Japan where he's traveling this week, keeping his criticism of religion in the news.

Less in the headlines are at least two responses to Ventura, both of them written in the form of open letters to the governor.

The first, by Washington Post political writer E. J. Dionne, who also writes for the Catholic intellectual journal, Commonweal, poses a series of intellectual challenges for the governor concerning several historically important people who worked through organized religion and demonstrated anything but "weak-mindedness."

Dionne's lineup includes Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Heschel, martyred theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Polish workers of the Solidarity trade union movement, classical thinkers St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther, and 20th-century theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber.

"They were towering intellectuals, I've always thought" Dionne writes to Ventura, "but perhaps I'm blind and you can help me see."

Dionne chides Ventura's attempt to explain: "You said: 'This is Playboy; they want you to be provocative.' Does that mean you would have said something different to the editors of, say, Christianity Today?"

With a tinge of nastiness, Dionne concludes: "Are you tough-minded enough to understand the meaning of the words: 'Your act is wearing thin'?"

The second open letter to Ventura comes from the pen of Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine and founder of the inner-city ministry group by the same name. Wallis spent the past year on a grant studying and teaching at Harvard. Wallis is a regular columnist in Sojourners magazine and also on the Web site of MSNBC.

Wallis shares Dionne's intellectual history, but he takes a more practical tack in challenging the governor.

"I've never been a biker, bouncer, or boa-feathered wrestler," Wallis begins. "And you, I'll guess, have never led a prayer meeting."

Calling himself "an inner-city pastor," Wallis says to Ventura, "Clearly, there's a lot you don't know about religious people, and now that you're a governor you'll want to find out. Lots of Lutherans in your neck of the woods."

Wallis introduces Ventura to colleagues who work the inner city of Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth, religious people who "live and work in urban war zones, places where you have to demonstrate the love of God, not just talk about it.

"I've been with some of those Minnesota pastors at gang peace summits," Wallis writes, "no place for the weak-minded, and they could teach you some stuff. I'll send you some names and addresses."

To Dionne's lineup, Wallis adds Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandella, Daniel and Phillip Berrigan and South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, who smilingly faced down South African police inside his cathedral and put this religious challenge to them: "You have already lost, so why don't you come and join the winning side?"

In his Playboy interview, Ventura also had made passing reference to the fun he had in the Philippines with so many young girls.

"What you probably didn't know," Wallis reminds the governor, "was that most of them were poor, rural girls lured into prostitution with the promise of urban jobs. They became virtual sex slaves... ."

Wallis speaks of walking the streets of Olongapo with a Catholic priest and a Mennonite relief worker "who were helping the girls overcome their addictions and disease."

"You can imagine," he tells Ventura, "how tough-minded those two were."

Wallis tells Ventura of the "hundreds of students" at Harvard -- where Ventura recently spent a day -- who come to classes on religion and public life. "Believe me, Jesse," he writes, "those kids are not weak-minded."

"You should have seen them turn out for Billy Graham the week before you visited the campus," Wallis writes. "What a strong, consistent, and scandal-free moral guide he has been."

It's clear Wallis would like to go one-on-one with Ventura. Not in the wrestling arena, not even as he jokingly suggests in arm-wrestling, but in the battle of minds and hearts, especially as they are affected by public policy.

Wallis ends his challenging suggestions with a personal note that speaks for all those characterized as "weak-minded": He writes to Ventura, "I suspect you're the kind of stand-up guy who would want to know when you got it wrong."

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net