They Work Harder

Education blogger Joanne Jacobs has a story that is repeated every year in almost every school around the country which has Asian immigrants in its student body:

On News Gorilla, Ed Susman, former city editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Times, writes about handing out American flags to newly arrived immigrants. It was a community service thing and a nice photo for the paper. One day, he gave a flag to the first group of Vietnamese refugees.

No one spoke a word of English, but I managed to communicate with the 12-year-old daughter who spoke some French and I hadn't forgotten all my French from high school days.

Flash forward about 4-5 years, during the last days of the Times, and this young Asian woman shows up at my desk. In flawless English she thanked me for the flag so many years past. She was now graduating high school, had a scholarship to some school I would never have even applied to and was either valedictorian or salutatorian or something major in her high school class.

He asked why Asian students outperform native-born students. The girl said that after the flag picture appeared, a school official came to the door and told her mother to register the four children for school. Her mother explained she could afford only to register the two boys. She was told there would be no fees; education is free.

The girl told me that after the school official left, her mother gathered her children around her and said, "It is true that the streets are paved with gold in this country. They give away education. If any of you ever misses a day of class I will beat you so hard you will never sit down again." The girl said that grades less than a B were similarly punishable. All the girl's siblings were at the head of their classes.

An English teacher in San Jose once told me that all her best students were Vietnamese. This was a few years after the refugee influx. I said, "How can that be? They all speak English as a second language. How can they be the best in English."

"They work harder," the teacher said.

It's not necessarily that Asian kids are inherently brighter than kids in other ethnic groups (although they may be). Their academic success is correlated to the expectations of their families. If a family doesn't value education the children from that household are going to perform well below their potential no matter how much money the state spends on them and no matter how good their teachers are.

Must We Tolerate Islam?

David Foster, writing for the Claremont Institute, has an outstanding piece on whether, and under what conditions, Muslims have a right to practice their religion in a country founded on the principles of tolerance and freedom of religion. The reflexive response is to assert that freedom of religion, if it means anything at all, means that all citizens have the right to believe and practice whichever religion they choose, but Foster presents a persuasive argument, based on the writings of John Locke and George Washington, that this is simply not the case. Here are a couple of excerpts:

In order to merit toleration, then, believers must support a particular kind of society-the kind that protects religious freedom. If the basis of such a society is the distinction between church and state, then any religion that denied this distinction would have no legitimate claim to be tolerated. If some branch of Islam does not support that distinction, it is essentially hostile to the kind of open society we value and cannot be tolerated. If it does support that distinction, it deserves toleration. The most important means we have to know the truth is through the speech of its adherents: they must tell us plainly and publicly where they stand.

As Locke put it, those "who attribute unto the Faithful, Religious and Orthodox, that is, in plain terms, unto themselves, any peculiar Privilege of Power above other Mortals, in Civil Concernments...have no right to be tolerated by the Magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the Duty of tolerating All men in matters of meer Religion." Such men cannot be tolerated because their claim of special privileges or their (related) refusal to teach toleration shows that they are ready upon any "occasion to seize the Government, and possess themselves of the Estates and Fortunes of their Fellow-Subjects; [they] only ask leave to be tolerated by the Magistrate so long until they find themselves strong enough to effect it." We ought not tolerate the intolerant because it makes no sense to tolerate someone so that he can prepare to subjugate you.

But how can we address this problem without adopting dictatorial methods and losing the very freedoms we would protect? According to Locke, the answer is quite simple: tolerate any religious group whose leaders are known for teaching toleration and for disavowing special privileges for the orthodox (i.e., themselves). To take an example from our time, it is not enough for a cleric to say, as many do, that "Islam is a religion of peace." That may be true, but when radical Muslims say this they almost always mean that there will be peace only after the whole world is converted to Islam; and in that peace Muslims will have privileges denied to non-Muslims (this is the concept of dhimmitude). "Islam is a religion of peace" - if that is all that is said - is exactly the sort of ambiguous phrase that Locke warns can be a sign that the speaker must not be tolerated.

But to deserve toleration, all the clerics need to do is to become known for teaching their followers that the meaning of this phrase is that Islam is a religion that accepts the distinction of Mosque and state, and that it advocates good-will to all men, whether they are good Muslims (the orthodox), dissenters, or non-Muslims. In short, any clergyman deserves toleration who is known for teaching his own followers that they have a duty of tolerating all men in matters of religion.

In the past lovers of liberty in the West had to listen carefully to what various Christian sects were saying about religion and politics. That is still important. But in the modern world, most Christian churches have reconciled themselves with toleration and contort themselves to be ecumenical, and it is what some Islamic clerics are saying that most demands our vigilance. That, at least, is what toleration requires.

The real question is not so much whether Muslims in the West are willing to accept and teach the duties of toleration - if the wider society expects it, they will probably comply - but whether the West itself still understands and has the will to defend its own principles.

Islam, Foster argues, only has a right to be tolerated to the extent that it genuinely supports tolerance itself. If its goal is to establish an Islamic state by whatever means necessary and subsequently impose second class citizenship on unbelievers, then it forfeits its right to constitutional protection.

This essay should be read by everyone with an interest in political philosophy or simply in the appropriate response to the Islamic threat to Western civilization. Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

Good News From Iraq #11

The 11th installment of Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News From Iraq is on-line. Despite the lamentations emanting from the Democrat left there continues to be much to be encouraged about. As Chrenkoff says in concluding his report:

The obstacles are considerable, challenges huge, but day by day the Iraqi people, assisted by the Coalition and people of good will from around the world, are slowly forging ahead with the task of reconstructing their country - and more importantly - reconstructing themselves.

Complementing Chrenkoff's report are a couple of other items from the blogosphere. A post by Omar at Iraq The Model underscores the apparent willingness of Iraqis to fight to rid themselves of the pestilence in their midst.

Meanwhile the campaign to clean up the nests of insurgents in the Sunni triangle is underway. See here for a discussion and, of course, don't miss Wretchard's analysis at Belmont Club. It's excellent.

Chrenkoff's updates (He also does them for Afghanistan) are must reading for anyone who finds the constant metronomic negativity of the media and the Kerry campaign to be dispiriting. This is not to say that there are not very serious problems in Iraq. There are, but by focussing only on the problems the media give the impression that the situation there is chaotic and hopeless. Since they have abrogated their obligation to give us both sides of the story, in hopes of persuading Americans to reject President Bush in November, people like Chrenkoff are performing a very valuable, even essential, service.

Did Kerry Cheat?

Drudge has video of Senator Kerry flagrantly violating the rules of last Thursday's debate which explicitly prohibited the use of any notes, etc. The rules stated that "No props, notes, charts, diagrams, or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by either candidate.... Each candidate must submit to the staff of the Commission prior to the debate all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate, and the staff or commission will place such paper, pens and pencils on the podium..." Go to the video and see for yourself.

Whether these smuggled notes, if they were notes, helped Kerry or not is really beside the point. The question is, if he was in fact cheating, as it certainly appears that he is, what does it say about the Senator that he can't be trusted to do what he agreed to do in the negotiations for this event? If he feels compelled to cheat in a venue like this what kind of a man is he?

Those Ignorant Christians

Novelist Philip Roth, in speaking of president Bush, says that "born-again Christianity is the ignorant man's version of the intellectual life."

Let us pause a moment to pity the poor benighted believer bereft of the pleasures and satisfactions of Roth's intellectual life. The Christian serious about his faith will likely never know the joys of ending one's life slowly in chaos and dissolution as so many intellectuals have, or quickly with a bullet to the brain as have others. Instead he's destined by fate to plod through life finding his happiness in the company of family and in the toil of work. He'll never have a great idea like, say, socialism, and he'll never know the immense satisfaction that accompanies the publication of smutty novels.

He must resign himself to the paltry fulfillments of being a hero to his children and an inspiration to his co-workers and friends. When he dies there'll be no lengthy obituary in the New York Times with an enviable list of literary accomplishments, just a notice in the local paper that he was loved and admired by all who knew him. No one will ever say of him that he was a fine artist or thinker, they'll never be able to say that he spent his life creating things that no one has any use for. They'll have to be content with saying something insignificant about him like "he was a good man who spent his life trying to make other people's lives better." It really is too bad that those ignorant Christians will never know how great it is to be an intellectual like Phillip Roth.

On Belief In Miracles

On 9/21 Viewpoint posted an interview with Chuck Colson in which he said that one reason he believed the accounts of the Resurrection of Christ as recorded in the New Testament was that had Jesus not literally risen from the dead, his followers would not have been willing to suffer and die for a cause they knew to be based upon a lie.

If there was no Resurrection a lot of people would have known that the claim to the contrary was untrue and would have seen no point in perpetuating such an obvious error when it became clear that those who were involved in promoting it would be persecuted, imprisoned and executed.

What motive could the disciples of Jesus possibly have had for trying to promote the completely "unbelievable" assertion that a man had risen from the dead? What about that claim would have encouraged these men to bear up under deprivation, torture and death if it were not true? What was in it for them? As C.S. Lewis points out, men will often die for what they believe to be the truth, but only lunatics will die for what they know to be a lie. Just like the men involved in the Watergate cover-up that Colson alludes to, the followers of Jesus, were they really trying to foist a religious fraud upon people, would eventually have looked to their own self-interest and admitted to the authorities what had actually happened.

Any explanation or "debunking" of the miracle of Christ's Resurrection has to contend with the stark fact that this, however, is not what happened. The historical record produces no one who confesses to having participated in a hoax, even though they could have saved their lives by doing so.

Skeptics, however, have another means of justifying their refusal to accept the historicity of the Resurrection that avoids having to confront arguments like Colson's altogether. They argue that the nature of a miracle is such that no amount of evidence for one could ever overcome a presumption of the regularity of nature's laws. In other words, miracles are so much in conflict with the way we understand the world to work that the evidence that an exception to the laws of nature had really occurred would have to be exceptionally detailed and well-documented for us to accept it.

W.K. Clifford wrote that "It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence," and the evidence that a miracle had occurred is always going to be insufficient because, as David Hume put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. An account of a man rising from the dead is so extraordinary that no evidence, short of personally witnessing the event oneself, could ever be sufficient to justify one's belief that it occurred. Thus, no one is ever justified in believing that a true miracle, i.e. a supernatural intervention, actually happened.

This is certainly a nifty argument since it avoids the uncomfortable problem of having to counter the large body of evidence that a miracle really did occur in the case of Christ's Resurrection. However strong that evidence might be, the skeptic avers, such an event is so alien to our experience that a natural explanation, no matter how unlikely, is still more probable than that a man was raised from the dead.

There are problems, however with the skeptic's claim:

The first difficulty is that Clifford's maxim is self-refuting. There is no evidence that supports the assertion that we are always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Why, then, should we believe it? Why are we not within our epistemic rights to believe something on the best evidence available?

A second difficulty is that there is no way to determine what should count as "sufficient evidence" for believing in a miracle anyway. Why is the skeptic justified in setting the standard of plausibility so high that it effectively eliminates the possibility of ever justifying belief in a miracle? Can we not agree that an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence without agreeing that in the case of a miracle the evidence must be so extraordinary as to be impossible ever to attain?

Indeed, what counts as "extraordinary" is going to differ from person to person. How do we determine when the evidence has satisfied our notion of "extraordinary"? Someone who is hostile to the idea of supernatural interventions in the world is going to set the bar for satisfaction far higher than someone who is open to them.

To cite the American philosopher William James, "To preach skepticism as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for [a miracle] be found, is tantamount to telling us, when in the presence of the [claim that a miracle has occurred] that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser than to yield to our hope that it may be true." Better to err on the side of fear than of hope, the skeptic argues, but, as James counters, what proof is there that being wrong through hope is so much worse than being wrong through fear? The skeptic's position is that it's better to miss out on a truth than to fall prey to an error, but why should anyone agree with that? Where is the evidence that justifies our believing such a principle?

The skeptic makes the conditions for one's believing that a miracle has occurred so stringent that such belief is impossible to justify. But the only way we can know that belief is impossible to justify is if we know a priori that it is not possible for a miracle to have occurred. However, miracles can only be impossible if supernatural intervention is impossible, and supernatural intervention is impossible only if there is no God.

In other words, natural explanations are more probable than supernatural ones only if we know a priori that either there is no God or that God never interjects himself into history. Since we don't know either of those, we have no justification for assuming, prior to any consideration of the evidence, that any natural explanation is more likely to be true than one which relies on supernatural agency.

If God exists then it is possible that miracles occur and we should look at the alleged evidence for any instance of one and evaluate it on its own terms. If the possibility of a miracle is held open, then, to borrow from James once more, any rule of thinking that would prevent us from recognizing a miracle, if it really happened, is an irrational rule.

As numerous scholars have made clear, the historical evidence that Jesus literally came back to life after having died is quite compelling unless one has already decided that such an event can't possibly be true. If one's worldview doesn't allow for the possibility of a miraculous event, well, then, one will never be persuaded by the evidence that a miracle has occurred. To paraphrase Pascal, however, there's enough evidence that one did occur to convince anyone who is not already dead set against it.

Subliminal Voting

Apparently Diebald has released a sample of the ballots to be used in battleground states like Florida this November. It looks like those rascally Republicans are up to some dirty tricks.

Kerry v. Kerry

John Kerry debates himself at GOP.com. The site has a video clip of Kerry's inconsistencies titled Top Ten Iraqi Flip-Flops From First Debate and it presents Kerry disagreeing with a number of things he himself said in last night's debate. I'm not sure that all of the disagreements can technically be called flip-flops, but they certainly seem to be confusions.

CBS Breaking New Ground

The Holy Observer has a shocking story. Apparently CBS and Dan Rather have in their possession documents which they claim disprove the Resurrection of Christ. The article contains photos of the actual documents which are apparently fragments of a diary kept by the disciple named Thomas.

This might be just what Rather needs to rescue his career from the ignominy surrounding his recent debacle over the fraudulent National Guard papers.

Another Take On Outsourcing

Economist Daniel Drezner has an op-ed in The New York Times that'll be of interest to those readers who are concerned about job losses due to outsourcing. He looks at the numbers and concludes that it's a non-issue. Here are some excerpts:

The Government Accountability Office has issued its first review of the data, and one undeniable conclusion to be drawn from it is that outsourcing is not quite the job-destroying tsunami it's been made out to be. Of the 1.5 million jobs lost last year in "mass layoffs'' - that is, when 50 or more workers are let go at once - less than 1 percent were attributed to overseas relocation; that was a decline from the previous year. In 2002, only about 4 percent of the money directly invested by American companies overseas went to the developing countries that are most likely to account for outsourced jobs - and most of that money was concentrated in manufacturing.

The data did show that from 1997 to 2002, annual imports of business, technical and professional services increased by $16.3 billion. However, during that same half-decade, exports of those services increased by $20.5 billion a year. In 2002 alone, the United States ran a $27 billion trade surplus in business services, the sector in which jobs are most likely to be outsourced. The G.A.O. correctly stressed that it is impossible to compute exactly how many jobs are lost because of outsourcing, but unless its figures are off by several orders of magnitude, there's no crisis here.

Technological innovation is responsible for a far greater number of lost jobs than outsourcing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that in the first quarter of this year 4,633 workers were laid off because of offshoring. In the same period Kodak, for example, announced layoffs of 15,000 workers because the growth of digital photography reduced demand for film. Few Americans suggest technological innovation be stifled for the sake of preserving old jobs.

Go here to read the whole column.

What To Do About Iran?

Whether George Bush is relected president in November or not he's going to have a very difficult decision on his hands, a decision which evidently must be made before the New Year. Iran will, in a few months by some estimates, begin construction of nuclear weapons. Once they start they must be assumed to be prepared to use them as soon as they can because every day they delay they risk losing them to an Israeli or American attack (It is just fantasy to think that perhaps Europe would have the will to do something to prevent a nuclear-armed Islamist state).

Iran has fifteen sites working on the production of fissile uranium. Those sites are presumably hardened to withstand a bomb drop. Do we try nonetheless to destroy them with conventional ordinance? Do we insert troops? Do we have the manpower available to take out these sites if bombing doesn't work? How will the Iranians respond if we attack? What will they do if we let them produce nuclear weapons? Can we afford to wait and find out? Belmont Club has an interesting discussion of some of the relevant questions.

A Thought On the Debate

Quick debate analysis: Those who are impressed by style will say that Kerry won. He was smooth and articulate. Those who look for substance will say that Bush pretty much dominated. Kerry sounded and looked good, but if one listened to what he was saying there simply was nothing there.

His most puzzling statement, in our opinion, was his claim that Bush made a terrible mistake in going into Iraq and is mismanaging the post-war badly but that he believes we now have to fight to win and that's exactly what he'll do.

The reason this is puzzling is that the first part of this statement is exactly what people said about Vietnam, but Kerry's response then was not to demand that we fight the war properly but that we get out immediately. "How", he asked at the 1971 senate hearings, "do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Now he's saying that instead of cutting our losses and leaving, as he insisted we do in Vietnam, he would stay and fight to win in Iraq. Given his history why should anyone believe him?

Perhaps he would reply that Vietnam was different. He might argue that there are national interests at stake in Iraq that weren't at stake in Vietnam. If so, however, how does he justify his repeated claim, made again last night, that he fought as a young man to defend our country in Vietnam. If there were no national interests at stake in Vietnam then whatever he was doing over there he certainly wasn't fighting to defend the United States.

Kerry said that he hasn't wavered about anything in this campaign, but he certainly is trying to have this both ways.

Watching the Beauty Contest

Assessing the kind of president a man would be on the basis of a debate performance is like judging the kind of wife and mother a woman would be on the basis of a beauty contest. Whatever charms she dazzles us with in her swimsuit are really quite irrelevant to the judgment we have to make, and it would only be a callow young man, in thrall to his hormones, who would think otherwise.

The audience will sit on tenterhooks tonight waiting for one or the other speaker to make some trivial "gaffe" and then seize upon it as a reason to vote for the other guy. It's a ludicrous exercise. It debases our democracy and insults the intelligence of its citizens. In their promos for the debate the networks have been replaying what they consider to be the highlights, the salient moments, of past debates. They wax nostalgic over Nixon's heavy beard, Kennedy's attractiveness, Reagan's "there you go again" and his witticism about Mondale's "youth and inexperience," Bentson's ad hominem attack against Quayle, Bush '41's glance at his watch, Gore's oafish sighing and striding across the stage to try to stare down Bush, Jr., and so on.

These are the things people remember from past debates, but with the exception of Gore's buffoonery, perhaps, none of these events tells us what kind of leader a man would be. They may tell us whether the man is likeable or not, but there's no demonstrated connection between likeability and presidential ability. Both Clinton and Reagan were likeable, but you can find plenty of people who would argue that Clinton was a terrible president and probably just as many could be found to argue that Reagan was.

Aside from being an exercise in media auto-eroticism the debates do little more than satisfy the public's desire to turn everything into a spectacle or a game. Who will "win" the debate? It doesn't matter. The winner is whoever is most attractive to the audience. Viewers will not score these debates as if they were really forensics competitions, or as if they were genuine attempts to get at some deep political truth. Indeed, it wouldn't matter if they did because they're not going to vote for the guy who is the technical winner anyway unless he happens coincidentally to be the most articulate, or the best looking, or the most charming, or the wittiest, or the most relaxed guy on the stage.

Ninety five percent of the people watching the debates have already decided for whom they will vote, and they will not be swayed by anything that is said by Kerry or Bush. The other five percent, in an ideal world, should be dissuaded from voting at all. If they haven't decided by now what could they possibly be waiting for? Whatever it is, it can't be substantive because anything of importance that we're going to learn about these two gentlemen has been out there in the public arena for months or years. They can only be waiting for some superficial word or gesture that would rationalize a vote for one of the contenders. If that's the purpose of having these debates, however, to give a handful of people who couldn't care less about their responsibilities as citizens some trivial reason to cast their vote for one or the other candidate, then we're wasting our time.

Even so, I guess I'll watch it. Sometimes even a beauty contest can be interesting.

Fighting the Global War On Terror

Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute offers some excellent advice on what the U.S. needs to do to prevail in the war on terror. In an extensive analysis of what it will take to win this struggle Helprin claims that:

Neither the party in power nor the opposition has awakened to what must be done or what may happen if it is not. Neither party, nor the Left, nor the Right, nor the civilian defense establishment, nor the highest ranking military, nor the Congress, nor the people themselves, has been willing, in a war not of our own making, adequately to prepare for war, to declare war, rigorously to define the enemy, to decide upon disciplined and intelligent war aims, to subjugate the economy to the common defense, or even to endorse the most elemental responsibilities of government, such as controlling the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory.

Later in the piece he says this:

[T]he borders must be controlled absolutely, as is the right of every sovereign nation. It is hardly impossible and would demand no more than adding to the Border Patrol a paramilitary force of roughly 30,000, equipped with vehicles, helicopters, unmanned aerial drones, fences, and sensors. Crowded and slow entry points should be expanded to provide quick and thorough inspection by traditional methods and inspection to the limits of technological advance where traditional methods are impossible, as in searching the interstices of vehicles, or packed cargo containers, for nuclear or chemical warfare material. The sea frontiers can be secured if we undertake to supplement the Coast Guard with a few dozen high endurance cutters, 100 coastal patrol vessels, 50 long-range reconnaissance aircraft, 100 helicopters, and the appropriate additional personnel; and if the navy, by expansion of its anti-submarine assets, fixed and afloat, guarantees against submarine infiltration.

Helprin has much more to say on the matter of what we should be doing in the GWOT and how we should be doing it. His suggestions are certainly thoughtful and merit full consideration. Let's hope the Bush administration is listening.

First Things

The August/September First Things contains much that is excellent, but three articles are particularly good. The first, by Stephen Barr, is entitled here.

Two other pieces are also very much worth your attention. In Capital Punishment: The Case For Justice the inestimable Jay Budzizewski makes a powerful argument for the inherent justice of the death penalty. Some excerpts:

So weighty is the duty of justice that it raises the question whether mercy is permissible at all. By definition, mercy is punishing the criminal less than he deserves, and it does not seem clear at first why not going far enough is any better than going too far. We say that both cowardice and rashness miss the mark of courage, and that both stinginess and prodigality miss the mark of generosity; why do we not say that both mercy and harshness miss the mark of justice? Making matters yet more difficult, the argument to abolish capital punishment is an argument to categorically extend clemency to all those whose crimes are of the sort that would be requitable by death.

The questions we must address are therefore three: Is it ever permissible for public authority to give the wrongdoer less than he deserves? If it is permissible, then when is it permissible? Is it permissible to grant such mercy categorically?

The balance of the article is a fascinating and erudite attempt to answer those questions.

The equally distinguished Robert Bork makes a case for providing marriage with constitutional shelter in The Necessary Amendment. Judge Bork opens his essay with these words:

Within the next two or three years, the Supreme Court will almost certainly climax a series of state court rulings by creating a national constitutional right to homosexual marriage. The Court's ongoing campaign to normalize homosexuality-creating for homosexuals constitutional rights to special voting status and to engage in sodomy-leaves little doubt that the Court has set its course for a right to marry. This is but one of a series of cultural debacles forced upon us by judges following no law but their own predilections. This one, however, will be nuclear. As an example of judicial incontinence, it will rival Roe v. Wade, and will deal a severe and quite possibly fatal blow to two already badly damaged but indispensable institutions-marriage and the rule of law in constitutional interpretation.

The only real hope of heading off the judicial drive to constitutionalize homosexual marriage is in the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution.

He makes a good case. Conservatives are in a bit of a bind on this issue because they tend to be loath to tinker with the constitution. On the other hand they value tradition and perhaps no tradition is more highly esteemed than the tradition of marriage. How then can this valuable tradition be protected from complete dissolution without amending the constitution. It appears that legislative remedies are inadequate as they can easily be overturned by a single unsympathetic judge who deems any restriction of the marriage laws to be an unconstitutional infringement on the right of individuals to marry whomever they wish. That leaves conservatives like Bork with only two options: Either acquiesce to the Zeitgeist and watch homosexual marriage become a constitutional entitlement or amend the constitution now to define marriage as exclusively the union of one man and one woman.

Some ask why we should care if marriage is extended to homosexuals. How, we are asked, are we effected by an expansion of civil rights to include all citizens? A local radio talk show host said the other day that homosexual marriage doesn't affect him in the slightest and the rest of us should keep our religious views to ourselves.

In other words, if we think homosexual marriage is a good thing we should promote it in the public square, but if we think it is a bad thing then we should keep quiet about it. According to this gentleman, the only reasons one could possibly have for thinking that gay marriage is "bad" are religious reasons. Aside from the reply that the only reasons one could have for thinking that anything is bad in the moral sense are religious, one might also point out that whether one is religious or not, if he wishes to preserve heterosexual marriage and the family as we know it, changing our understanding of marriage makes the task several orders of magnitude more difficult.

As Viewpoint has argued before, once we change the definition of marriage from one man and one woman to include two men or two women we no longer have any non-arbitrary basis whatsoever for restricting marriage to just two people, or even to people. Proponents of gay marriage tend to scoff at this concern but to scoff is not to refute. If there are no rational grounds for limiting marriage to two people or to require that the blissful union involve only people it will be a mere matter of time before these conventions are challenged in the courts and when they are they'll be unsustainable. Marriage will come to mean whatever we want it to and at that point it will cease to mean much of anything at all. At that point marriage will be effectively dead.

If we agree with Bork that marriage is worth preserving then it seems that he's also correct that a constitutional amendment is, like some forms of surgery, an unpleasant but absolutely necessary measure to preserve the health of our society.

Winners Are Optimists

David Petraeus on Iraq's progress is an effective counter to the doom and gloom of the Kerryites. Petraeus is the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq and, among many other things, he says this:

[T]here are reasons for optimism. Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of which about 100,000 are trained and equipped) and an additional 74,000 facility protection forces are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being reestablished.

Within the next 60 days, six more regular army and six additional Intervention Force battalions will become operational. Nine more regular army battalions will complete training in January, in time to help with security missions during the Iraqi elections at the end of that month.

Iraqi National Guard battalions have also been active in recent months. Some 40 of the 45 existing battalions - generally all except those in the Fallujah-Ramadi area - are conducting operations on a daily basis, most alongside coalition forces, but many independently. Progress has also been made in police training. In the past week alone, some 1,100 graduated from the basic policing course and five specialty courses. By early spring, nine academies in Iraq and one in Jordan will be graduating a total of 5,000 police each month from the eight-week course, which stresses patrolling and investigative skills, substantive and procedural legal knowledge, and proper use of force and weaponry, as well as pride in the profession and adherence to the police code of conduct.

There will be more tough times, frustration and disappointment along the way. It is likely that insurgent attacks will escalate as Iraq's elections approach. Iraq's security forces are, however, developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition - and now NATO - support, this trend will continue. It will not be easy, but few worthwhile things are.

There are a couple of thoughts which come to mind when reading this article. First, it seems evident that time is on the side of the coalition. The longer things go, the more trained forces the Iraqis will be able to deploy against the terrorists in Fallujah and elsewhere and the less of a threat they will be. The worst thing we can do at this point is to pull out.

Second, no great thing has ever been accomplished by those who are always looking for reasons to justify their belief that it can't be done. Great deeds require men with vision and a positive spirit. They require leaders with a "can-do" mentality, men who see the goal and have the stamina, strength, and courage to pull the rest of us with them to that objective. Winners are optimists. They are cheerful and confident in the rightness of what they are about.

Senator Kerry offers us nothing but retreat, criticism, defeatism, and the politics of pessimism. According to him everything we're doing is wrong. We are, he asseverates, fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. Such an attitude certainly does not inspire our troops to strive for successful completion of their mission. It only discourages, disheartens, and demoralizes the people who hear him. His gloomy negativism makes him the wrong man to serve as our commander-in-chief in these momentous times.

The Politics of Paranoia

Massachussetts Senator Ted Kennedy has repeatedly made the claim that we are becoming less and less safe from terror attacks on our homeland. We keep hearing this assertion from all sorts of people in the opposition party but the question one wishes someone would ask the senator and anyone else who makes this fatuous claim is: How do you know that what you're telling us is, in fact, true? What is the metric by which Senator Kennedy can descry an increasing probability of a terror strike in the U.S.? Is it that he, like so many others in his party, believes that any assertion critical of the President, no matter how incredible or outrageous, is self-validating?

Of course, claims like these are low risk/high yield investments because there's no way they can be falsified. If there is a terror strike Kennedy and his votaries will shriek and howl about how they warned us that it was coming, and if there is no attack, well, they will assure us, it's on its way, and Bush is doing nothing to stop it. Either way, there's no price to pay for their reckless dishonesty. Indeed, it's possible that by continually shouting to the world that we are in a pitiful state of unpreparedness, the senator and his allies may well be emboldening the Islamists to attempt an attack that they might not otherwise have risked.

At any rate, these sorts of unsupported allegations are rhetorical parries directed at morons. The Democrats have decided that they will say, and perhaps do, whatever they think an intellectually uncritical public will accept. They're putting out so many baseless charges about the administration's "secret plans" to do dastardly harm to virtually every constituency the Dems can think of that the Republicans are finding it impossible to refute them all. There are "secret plans" to deprive African-Americans of their right to vote, to draft young people, to strip away social security from old people, just to name a few, and now Kerry reveals to us the administration's "secret plan" to take away subsidies from Wisconsin dairy farmers.

Perhaps we'll soon be hearing that Dick Cheney "secretly" had Halliburton pilots fly the planes into the WTT on 9/11 in order to boost the administration's poll numbers. One wonders in astonishment how Senator Kerry has come to be privy to the inner machinations of the Republican party. How does he uncover all these "secret plans"? Maybe Bush should have made Kerry head of the CIA when George Tenent resigned.

Of course, incessant assurances of "secret plans" to hurt this or that group of people is the politics of paranoia, and it's quite contemptible. The Democrat party, however, has long ago ceased to care how much it debases the American political process or how foul their allegations are against their opponents. For the left there are no moral constraints as most people understand them. For them the highest good is to win and regain power. Anything which achieves this goal is morally justified. The end of securing power warrants the application of whatever means are necessary.

If the voting public rewards their conduct with victory in November it will ensure that these tactics become standard fare in our elections, and in the long term it will have a severely corrosive effect on our democracy. These people don't deserve to win for a number of reasons, but the fact that they find such slimy tactics so agreeable to their character is surely foremost among them.

What is a Conservative?

In this election season it's not uncommon to hear the ideological labels "conservative" and "liberal" used to describe either an individual or a particular policy position. Since a lot of people may be unclear as to what these terms mean we thought it might be useful to offer a thumbnail sketch on what it is people are referring to when they use the word "conservative". Perhaps later we'll do something similar for the term "liberal".

There are at least four fields or arenas where the labels conservative and liberal are applied: Foreign policy, economics, social policy, and religion. Many people are conservative in some of these and liberal in others. Few people are uniformly one or the other so it behooves us to know, when someone is identified as a conservative, exactly what area of life he is considered to be conservative in.

It also should be pointed out that the ideological spectrum has shifted to the left over the past 100 years so that what is conservative today would in some cases have been considered liberal in the 19th century. Thus, to add to our confusion, people who are considered modern conservatives are sometimes said to be classical liberals. That is, they embrace the values of political and individual liberty advanced by liberals of the 18th and 19th century.

So what does one who calls himself a conservative believe? The foundational principle of conservatism is individual freedom. Conservatives tend to be in favor of small, decentralized government, low taxes and spending, and minimal governmental interference in our economic and personal lives. They believe that excessively high taxes are not only a violation of one's right to keep his own property but are also economically counterproductive.

Conservatives maintain that high taxes are counterproductive for this reason: The more money people have in their pockets the more they will save and spend and both of these activities are good for the economy. The more money people save the more money that is available for businesses and home and automobile buyers to borrow and therefore the lower interest rates will be. The more money people spend, the more money businesses earn and the more jobs that are created. The higher the earnings business enjoys, and the more people who are employed, the more taxes that are paid. Thus lowering taxes actually increases the tax revenues taken in by the government.

High taxes, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. They depress spending and saving and reduce the rate of job creation. This increases poverty and accomplishes nothing good except to allow people who resent the wealthy to feel good about taking their money.

The conservative emphasis on individual freedom and small, unintrusive government underlies their support for giving parents the right to send their children to whichever schools they wish. It also accounts for the conservatives' desire to privatize social security. They want the people who earn the money to have the freedom to decide for themselves how they will provide for their senior years, and they oppose what they see as a government sponsored pyramid scheme that passes the obligation to pay for social security benefits onto future generations.

Conservatives also tend to see human nature as inherently sinful or flawed. They believe that, although society should maximize individual freedom, it needs to balance liberty with the need to maintain a healthy moral environment for families to thrive in. Society needs to erect fences around human appetite to keep people from shedding the tenuous moral leashes which enable us to live together in community. Thus conservatives prize free speech, but believe that some speech, like anything taken too far, or too broadly interpreted, can be harmful to society. Thus the right to freedom of expression needs to be balanced by the right to raise one's children in a psychologically and morally healthy culture.

Conservatives, furthermore, tend to advocate a strong military which should be employed only in defense of our national interest. Many conservatives opposed the peace-keeping missions in Bosnia and Haiti in the nineties because they could see no national interest at stake. Many also opposed the war in Iraq, though not the war in Afghanistan, for the same reason.

This is one of the differences between "paleo" conservatives and "neo" conservatives. "Neo-cons" are much more willing to use American power in defense of those who cannot defend themselves. Paleo-cons would argue that we have no national interest in Sudan, for example, so we should do nothing more than use diplomatic and economic levers to effect change there. Neo-cons would argue that we should not stand by and allow people to be slaughtered if we can prevent it. We should do whatever we can to help those people, and if that includes the application of military force then we should not shrink from such a measure. "Paleos" tend to be militarily isolationist while "neos" tend to be more willing to intervene around the world on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

Conservatives also maintain that human rights need to be grounded in the transcendent, i.e. God. If there is no transcendent source of our rights then there are no rights at all. There are just arbitrary words on paper (See here for a fuller treatment of this topic). For this reason, it is less common to find atheists in conservative ranks than it is to find them among liberals who tend to see human rights as somehow inherent in persons.

Conservatives tend to hold, or at least support, traditional values and religious beliefs and oppose major structural change when undertaken just to accommodate current cultural, social or political fashion. They will, therefore, tend to oppose gay marriage, easy divorce, abortion on demand, and attempts to purge the public square of religious influence (for example, removing God from the pledge of allegiance).

They also tend to be strict constructionists with respect to interpretation of the constitution. The constitution, in their view, is not a document which can be stretched to mean whatever a handful of justices think it should mean. Conservatives believe that the constitution should be interpreted in the light of the intentions of those who wrote it. This leads them to oppose some gun control laws, which they see as an infringement of the second ammendment and to oppose the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which overturned the laws prohibiting abortion in every state in the union and for which they can find no constitutional warrant.

Conservatives are strong believers in personal accountability and consequently tend to favor tough enforcement of laws and serious punishment for serious crime. Their belief in personal responsibility combined with their conviction that government should be decentralized and unobtrusive leads them to be skeptical of the efficacy of many government welfare programs. Their objection to these has been primarily that historically they provide relief to people but require no accountability from the recipient and don't really help people in the long run. Indefinite relief with no accountability or reciprocation nurtures vices which tend to perpetuate the very poverty government wishes to eliminate.

It's probably fair to classify President Bush as a conservative or neo-conservative. He certainly fits this identification with respect to his positions on national defense, the constitution, and religion. He's somewhere in the middle of the ideological spectrum economically, favoring low taxes but indulging in high government spending, a combination that earns him criticism from both conservatives, who are aghast at the high spending, and liberals, who deplore low tax rates, especially if they apply to the wealthy.

On social issues Bush tends to be conservative in his stance on life issues like abortion and stem cell research, as well as on protecting marriage. He receives a lot of criticism for his immigration policy, but it's not clear that the criticism is ideologically grounded. He favors maximum opportunities for people to come to this country, but so do many conservatives and liberals. Both camps are split on this issue for quite different reasons.

There is doubtless much more that could be said about conservatism, and we invite readers to contribute their thoughts on the topic to our Feedback Forum.

PC Lunacy at UNC

Joanne Jacobs reports on a Washington Times story that administrators at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are trying to close down a Christian fraternity on the grounds the student group is violating the university's anti-discrimination policy because it excludes non-Christians and self-professed homosexuals from membership, the Times reports.

So, in order to continue to exist Christian organizations must allow atheists to join which would, in effect, cause them to cease to exist. In their desire to avoid discriminating against anyone the august administrators at UNC are demanding that Christian fraternities commit organizational suicide. Will they next be banning organizations that oppose abortion if they don't allow pro-choicers to join? Does UNC insist that Muslim organizations allow Jews to join? Why not insist that the basketball team allow midgets to participate? May men join the women's groups on campus? Did these administrators actually make it to college themselves or are they the product of an affirmative action plan to hire the mentally disadvantaged?

Apologies

Profuse apologies to the tens of thousands of readers and potential readers who were denied access to Viewpoint this weekend. Apparently the phone company in North Carolina upon which our server depends chose this weekend to shut down service for some sort of maintenance and we were unable to operate as a result.