Japan's economy, Louise Woodward and homosexuality - 19 June 1998

No need, for once, to roam or navigate the mental internet to decide what to talk about. I daresay that if a nationwide survey were taken this weekend, there would prove to be three topics above all others on everybody's mind. That's a large sentence. Perhaps I'd better say, as very unhumble politicians say, that in my humble opinion, there are three topics that will be on the minds and the tongues of millions of Americans this weekend.

First, of all the anxieties that beset us, the fate of the Japanese economy. The intervention for the first time in history of an American president to move into the currency markets to help weaken his own currency. Secondly, a 20-year-old English girl's return to her Cheshire home. And thirdly, one of the momentous social issues of our time that is talked about incessantly in private but rarely condemned, or even mentioned out loud, by politicians. It is what Oscar Wilde, a century ago, called "the sin that dare not speak its name". Well, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate has spoken its name. First, because it could affect the bank balance of all of us soon: what I call the anxious matter of the Japanese yen.

On Wednesday, the president performed the amazing act of authorising the sale of $4 billion to prop up the weakening yen against the too-strong dollar. And for one day, at least, Americans started buying yen at a record rate. The president sent a small team to Tokyo, headed by the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and a member of the Federal Reserve Board. There's no question what this is all about. It's an attempt to strengthen the yen because already there were signs that, if it came close to collapse, China might be forced to devalue its own currency and if that happened a former Treasury official, just back from Tokyo, said that would start a cascade of devaluations with disastrous effects on all the economies of Asia. And after that, who knows what might follow in Europe and the United States?

This old official was encouraged, in an interview, to see the presidential intervention as a silver lining in the black cloud that hangs over Japan, but he wouldn't bite. Tinkering with the currency markets might be a temporary shot in the arm. But he thought it to be no cure for the sick Japanese banking system and the reckless appalling debts it has incurred. Many of you will remember because you still bear the scar from the sting of that international bank that boasted a mountain of credit hiding an actual molehill of money.

The old Treasury man also reminded Americans of the frightful savings and loan building society scandal whose failure involved millions of ordinary folk. A scandal that cost the Congress, which meant of course ultimately the taxpayers, over $100 billion, to get these disgraceful and disgraced companies out of the hole. The man maintained that the Japanese banking system is afflicted by a similar sickness and that the present currency treatment could offer only a package of Band-Aids that will leave the patient still sick. Hence his conclusion that, as he put it, in the middle of the week, "There is, in Japan, overall pessimism".

A girl, sorry, a young, a 20-year-old, Englishwoman was released on Tuesday from, you might say, house arrest and allowed – on the order of the highest Appeals Court in Massachusetts – to go home. It was, at last, the end of the case of Louise Woodward, who was convicted last autumn of killing a baby boy in her care.

Well, not quite the end and we'll say why not in a minute. You'll remember that she was charged by the state of Massachusetts with second degree murder and, after a jury trial, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Everybody will remember the shock of that verdict and the aftershock of protest that Miss Woodward's defence team had not offered an alternative of manslaughter. And there then stepped in, after appeals by both sides, one Judge Zobel of a superior court.

He took the astonishing – and rarely taken – step of drastically altering the jury verdict. He said it was much too harsh. He cancelled the murder conviction, reduced the charge to manslaughter and reduced the life sentence to the time she'd already been held in custody, 279 days. The defence was plainly greatly relieved but the state's prosecutors immediately appealed, maintaining that the judge had in fact no legal power to take such a drastic step in pursuit of what he himself called a compassionate conclusion. So the case now went to that highest court.

The seven appeals' judges agreed that indeed Judge Zobel was within his rights and had proper legal power to reduce the verdict. They agreed too, though, that he had committed a legal error in allowing the defence's so-called "go for broke" tactic in asking that the jury be allowed to consider no other verdict than murder. It was a tactic that blew up in their faces. They tried it in the confident belief that no jury would possibly convict this youngster of murder. The judges voted 4-3 to let Judge Zobel's ruling stand, and so put an end to the criminal case. Four to three sounds like a very near thing but a minority of dissenting judges have in Massachusetts no legal power of redress, only of advice. They wanted Judge Zobel's sentence reconsidered. They wanted to be sure that Miss Woodward did not make money from her story and they urged that she be put on a long parole. Their advice was ignored. The criminal case is over.

But a stigma remains on Miss Woodward. And the moment after the Appeals Court's decision was announced, the father of the dead baby filed a civil suit against Miss Woodward, this time in federal court, a suit for wrongful death which seeks damages and requires that Miss Woodward be stopped from any deals for books, interviews, television, whatever, that would enable her to profit from the death of the child. Whether this suit and its outcome here will be honoured by the British courts is a big question. I suppose the last time, maybe the first time, most people outside the United States heard of a civil wrongful death suit was the second trial of O.J. Simpson. Now, of course, yes, the Constitution declares in the Fifth Amendment "nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb".

This double jeopardy clause sounds clear enough, but in 200 years, the Supreme Court has done nothing to simplify it. Indeed, the judges have fought furiously against each other and floated dozens of different interpretations. They agree on only one meaning: you cannot be tried twice in a criminal court for the same crime. Hence, O.J. Simpson can never again be charged with his wife's murder. But the dead wife's offended parents mounted a civil suit for wrongful death; the rules of evidence are looser and you don't need a unanimous jury. And they won. They have, more or less, locked up Simpson's financial resources, existing and to come, for the rest of his life.

The High Court's last word made clear the limits of Miss Woodward's freedom. "We do not view the judgment against Woodward as a light matter. She stands guilty of causing an infant's violent death. The outcome of this criminal trial, most assuredly, was not an acquittal".

Now we come to the third issue. Homosexuality. Of course it's in the headlines and the courts all the time, in cases where people are protesting job discrimination or want to adopt children or, most of the time, are demanding new laws that will give two men or two women companions the same social benefits as married couples. But when did you last hear a politician come out and declare that homosexuality itself is, at all times, a sin?

Radical Christian and Muslim Evangelists and the professors of other religions, yes. But here, the other day, the senior Republican in the Senate, Senator Dole's successor, Mr Trent Lott, a quiet, courtly Mississippian, said on television as if it were an accepted article of faith among all Christians, "Homosexuality is both a sin and a disease. And while homosexuals should not be condemned or denied political rights, they should be helped to overcome their affliction, as they might alcoholism or kleptomania".

Senator Lott's remarks were deplored at once by the White House as backward thinking, and brushed off, half-amusedly, by the television commentators as nothing of great weight since Senator Lott is not a firebrand, but a very pleasant civilised man with, perhaps, a kink in this regard. What we did not hear was the echo of an "amen" from, perhaps, 90 million Americans. Senator Lott is a Baptist and there are 33 millions of them, second only as a religious community to Roman Catholics, of whom there are 59 millions, one American in four. Not all of them subscribe to church doctrine, but a great many do. And both sects condemn homosexuality with the word that we rarely hear in modern times. The word "wrong".

In the media, the arguments over homosexuality assume that most Americans approve of people being what they choose to be sexually, with an opposition almost exclusively of wild southern evangelists. I believe that the range of opinion, of judgement, is far wider than these two extreme attitudes suggest. I think the gamut extends from upscale Bohemians who think the acceptance of homosexuality is a sign of progressive thinking, through many different attitudes, till we come to the other end, to people, religious or not, who feel, with the gifted comedy writer, M*A*S*H's author, Larry Gelbart, that they are living through the last ten minutes of the Roman Empire.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.