FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED APRIL 16, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
TV bride gets her annulment
And so Darva Conger, the nurse and "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire" pageant winner, has been granted her annulment.
At least Las Vegas Family Court Judge Steven Jones required he bride to appear in person, attempting to stress the fact that the contract into which Ms. Conger entered -- on the air on Fox TV -- was a serious one.
Let's not put on any excessively sanctimonious airs. This is Las Vegas, where the only thing unusual about an entertainment consisting of ladies strutting about in bathing suits is the contestants' state of overdress, and where marriage has always been easier to enter into -- and dissolve -- than in other jurisdictions.
On balance, we'll keep it that way. Few would return to the days when the law erred at the other extreme -- preventing loving and devoted couples from formalizing their unions and legitimizing their children out of deference to an "insoluble union" with some spouse long vanished.
On the other hand, the "grounds" cited -- the multi-millionaire in question failed to disclose he'd been the subject of restraining orders -- sets a precedent disturbing for its flimsiness.
Restraining orders are not convictions. How would we view a scheme which lured an innocent woman into what she believed was a legitimate marriage, only to inform her a week later her paramour was leaving town, granted an "annulment" based on her failure to disclose unpaid parking tickets?
If no one else is willing to say it: Shame on Rick Rockwell, shame on Ms. Conger, and most of all shame on Fox TV. If their "pageant" had been to select a lady of the evening willing to provide her services to Mr. Rockwell for a set fee, such a mildly sordid event would have been legal in 15 Nevada counties; it would have been far less hypocritical; and it could at least have been concluded without dragging the once honorable institution of marriage down into the mud alongside these anything-for-a-buck TV hucksters.
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Meantime, astute reader Bill Krueger of Elko, Nevada was good enough to write in and challenge my summary, in a recent column, of how and when leading conservative Robert A. Taft endorsed the Eisenhower ticket in 1952.
Indeed, Sen. Taft entered the convention overconfident and conceded only after Gov. Dewey managed to "bludgeon and browbeat a score of openly committed Taft delegates" from the New York delegation "into the Eisenhower column," as detailed by former professor of Constitutional Law and Dean of Law at Notre Dame, Clarence Manion, in his 1966 book "The Conservative American."
By late August of 1952 the Scripps-Howard newspapers felt obliged to run a front page editorial warning that the Eisenhower presidential campaign was "running like a dry creek." The general, in desperate need of support from a GOP conservative wing which was otherwise threatening to sit on its hands, finally agreed to meet and reconcile with the man who had been his chief rival for the nomination, Sen. Robert A. Taft, at the general's Morningside Drive residence in New York on Sept. 12.
After a three-hour meeting and based on Gen. Eisenhower's solemn promises, Sen. Taft emerged from that meeting and endorsed the Eisenhower candidacy, telling the press:
"As I see it, there is and has been one gret fundamental issue between the Republican Party and the New Deal or Fair Deal of Stevenson Deal. It is the issue of liberty against the creeping Socialization in every domestic field. ... The greatest threat to liberty today is ... the constantly increasing power and expanding of the federal government. The price of continued liberty, including a free economic system, is the reduction of federal spending and taxes, the repudiation of arbitrary powers of the Executive ... and the stand against the creation and extension of federal bureaus. ...
"I am completely satisfied that General Eisenhower will give this country an administration inspired by Republican principles of continued and expanding liberty for all as against the continued growth of new Deal socialism," Taft concluded. "I urge all Americans and particularly those who have confidence in my judgment and my principles to vote for Eisenhower and Nixon. ..."
Thanks to Mr. Krueger (who says he remembers watching the Minnesota delegation changing its vote from Stassen to Eisenhower after the first ballot, "thus giving Ike the simple majority needed to nominate") for sending me back to refresh my memory on the timing of the Taft endorsement.
I stand by my conclusion, however, that within months of his inauguration Dwight D. Eisenhower broke these solemn promises with a shrug, calling for increased deficit spending, a massive new federally-funded interstate highway system, and creating the new federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare -- areas which, Dean Manion points out, had previously been "the exclusive dominion of the several state governments under the terms of the Tenth Amendment."
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He is the author of "Send in the Waco Killers."
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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