Unspeakable

Os Guinness has written a fine book on the problem that evil poses to both believers and unbelievers and the responses to evil offered by each of the three families of faith: eastern, naturalistic, and Judeo-Christian. The book is titled Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.

Guinness touches a lot of bases and says many worthwhile things about the topic that anyone can read with profit, but one thing in particular puzzled me. Guinness holds to the view that one person may forgive another of a serious offense even though the other neither seeks nor desires that forgiveness. It is possible, in other words, to have forgiveness without reconciliation. Guinness suggests that as long as the "forgiver" doesn't seek redress for the offense, as long as he doesn't hold a "grudge", then he has forgiven the offender.

I guess my problem is that I'm not sure what "forgiveness" means given Guinness' view of the matter. Let me illustrate the difficulty: John does Dave a grave injustice. John is unrepentant and is not interested in Dave's forgiveness. Dave nevertheless says that he forgives John. He treats him with a modicum of courtesy, even behind his back, and seeks no revenge or redress for the hurt. Even so, he no longer respects nor likes John. Their friendship has been irreparably sundered, and Dave doesn't wish to have anything to do with John in the future. Whenever he thinks about the situation he cannot help but think that John is guilty of an offense even though he doesn't insist that John make any compensation. They go their separate ways.

In what sense, then, has Dave actually forgiven John? In other words, can there be any meaning to forgiveness if the forgiveness is not accepted and if there is no reconciliation?

If one man forgives another man's debt then all record of the debt is wiped away, but if Dave forgives John, in Guinness' understanding of the word, then there is no wiping away of guilt, only a decision not to press for retribution. So, is forgiveness just a refusal to seek recompense, which is what Guinness seems to say, or is it something more than that? If it's more, then exactly what is it?

It seems to me that forgiveness entails the restoration of a relationship to at least some semblance of the status quo ante, just as in the case of debt forgiveness, but I don't see how this is possible apart from some measure of reconciliation.

I've always thought of forgiveness as a transaction. One party offers it, and the other accepts it. Until it has been accepted there is no transaction even if the offer still holds. God, for example, holds out forgiveness to everyone, but only those who accept it can receive it. If this is not the way God's forgiveness works then classical Christianity has an interesting problem: People God has forgiven will nevertheless find themselves suffering eternal punishment because, though they've been forgiven, they've never accepted that forgiveness and are thus not reconciled to God. Yet if hell is a consequence of sin and all sin has been expunged from the ledger (because it has been forgiven), why will there be anyone in hell? Indeed, what is the substantive difference between forgiveness and no forgiveness?

This quibble notwithstanding, Unspeakable is an excellent read and can be ordered here. Viewpoint recommends it to anyone interested in the phenomenon of modern evil.

George Mikan, 1924 - 2005

George Mikan has died at the age of 80 from complications from diabetes. Perhaps no player in the history of basketball had as much of an impact on the game as he. There is a fine column on his life and his many contributions to basketball here. He was by all accounts an outstanding man.

Bleak Prospects

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times does the math and concludes that there's not much chance that the Democrats will retake the Senate in 2006.

Brownstein points out that there are more red states than there are blue states. Republicans hold 44 of the 58 red state senate seats and Democrats hold 28 of 36 blue state seats (six seats are in "swing" states). Moreover, the Dems are defending more seats in 2006 than is the GOP. The Republicans thus have more potential for gains than do the Democrats.

Of course, it might be asked why the Democrats should even worry about recapturing the majority as long as there are Republican senators like John McCain and his merry band who do everything possible to allow the Democrats to control things even when they're in the minority.

At any rate, there's a lot more interesting analysis in Brownstein's article. Incidentally, if he's correct and the Republicans hold on to, or even increase, their lead in the Senate, we expect a flood of editorials in liberal newspapers calling for amending the Constitution to allow for proportional representation in that body just as is done in the House. It rankles many Leftists that even though New York's senators represent more people than do the senators of many western states put together, each state gets two senators in Washington regardless of the population of the state. Thus a minority of small-state citizens can effectively neutralize the will of a large-state majority.

Call it "minority rights", of which senate Democrats should actually approve since they keep invoking the concept in order to justify the filibuster. Of course, the difference is that the right of small states to have the same number of senators as large states is fixed by the Constitution. That document is silent about any alleged rights of a minority political party.

Beslan Terror Trial

The only surviving terrorist who participated in the Beslan massacre was put on trial yesterday and pleaded not guilty. Unfortunately for him there are witnesses. Pictures and details can be found here.

Amnesty's Buffoonery

Amnesty International, which distinguished itself last week with singularly ridiculous allegations against the United States and a positively moronic suggestion that other countries arrest president Bush and his top officials, describes itself as nonpartisan. The following information is taken from an article in the Washington Times:

Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary-general, compared the U.S. detention center at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members are held, to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's "gulag" prison system.

Ms Khan has evidently never read Solzhenitsyn's One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch nor his monumental Gulag Archipeligo. If she had she would have been far more reluctant to make such a completely asinine comparison of the conditions which existed in the Gulag to those which prevail in the relative country club that is Guantanamo.

At the same time, William F. Schulz, Amnesty's executive director, issued a statement calling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials "architects of torture." Mr. Schulz suggested that other countries could file war-crime charges against the top officials and arrest them.

It now transpires that the top leadership of Amnesty International USA contributed the maximum $2,000 to Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign. Federal Election Commission records show that Mr. Schulz contributed $2,000 to Mr. Kerry's campaign last year. He also has contributed $1,000 to the 2006 campaign of Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Moreover, Joe W. "Chip" Pitts III, board chairman of Amnesty International USA, gave the maximum $2,000 allowed by federal law to John Kerry for President. Mr. Pitts is a lawyer and entrepreneur who advises the American Civil Liberties Union.

Amnesty International's Web site states it is "independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government."

Indeed. It only opposes the officials of those governments which have freed more people from tyranny in the last five years than have ever been freed by any nation in the entire history of the world.

Perhaps Amnesty should add to its governing principles not only freeing people from the oppression of political tyrants but also freeing the rest of us from the insufferable oppression of it's own buffoonery.

A Jewish Anti- Christian Defamation League

Christianity Today has an interview with Don Feder who is president of an organization of Jews formed last month which is committed to defending Evangelical Christianity from it's cultural despisers. This is an historically unprecedented undertaking on the part of religious Jews, and their aims and rationale for it are encouraging. At one point in the interview Feder says this:

Christians by and large aren't being attacked because Catholics believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation or because some evangelicals believe in the Rapture. They're not being attacked on theological grounds. They're being attacked on moral grounds. They're being attacked because they object to same-sex marriage; they object to abortion on demand; they support public displays of the Ten Commandments; they support voluntary school prayer or a moment of silent meditation at the beginning of the school day; because they want judges to interpret the Constitution rather than using the Constitution to legislate from the bench; because they object to, you might even say they were outraged by, what happened to Terri Schiavo. Christians are the last remaining obstacle to the triumph of secular humanist values. And that's why we say that if Christians fail, America will fail.

There's much in this piece that we found fascinating, especially Feder's response to questions about why he and others started the organization as well as his thoughts on Christian proselytism of Jews. Give it a look.

Moral Retards

He writes about the "logical impossibility" of "religion without fanaticism." In his essay, Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained, he opines that "humanity would be better off without religion," which he characterizes as "social poison," because believers are "susceptible to extreme forms of hatred and violence." He also calls religious believers "moral retards" and says they are "incapable of moral action."

He writes: "American Christians like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you. For your own good, of course." He then belittles religious believers "whose devotion is moderate," saying they "are only cowardly fanatics," not brave enough to "foment their own kind of holy war."

Who is he? His name is Timothy Shortell and he's just been named to chair the Sociology Department at CUNY's Brooklyn College. There's much more about Shortell and his radical Left politics here.

His claim that religious believers are incapable of moral action is a statement that only someone totally oblivious to cultural and social history could make. It is also philosophically inane. It is, after all, only religious believers who can even speak in moral categories. For the atheist there can be no morality. Shortell refers to himself as an "ubermensch", Nietzsche's term for the man who is beyond good and evil. Having adopted a Nietzschean attitude toward morality, it is disingenuous, if not fatuous, of him to pretend that he's morally superior to Christians or to pass moral judgment upon anyone. If, as we've argued many times, there is no God then there is no morality. There are just things that people do, some of which are preferred by some people over others.

If "moral retards" there be, among them are those who assert that one can have Christian moral principles without the Christian God.

Rocker Consultant

Those readers who are fans of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers may be familiar with a guitarist named Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. If so, you may be surprised at what Mr. Baxter is up to these days.

Embryo Adoptions

This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post on embryo adoptions in the United States. Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the piece:

Fertility clinics across the country, according to the most recent data available, held about 400,000 frozen embryos as of May 2003. Patients had reserved 88 percent of them for their own future use, and they had earmarked about 3 percent for medical research. Two percent -- or about 9,000 embryos -- were available for donation to other couples, according to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which collected the data.

When the Brinkmans ran into fertility problems, they first tried in vitro fertilization themselves, unsuccessfully. They also thought about a conventional adoption. But because they wanted to experience a pregnancy, Donielle Brinkman said, they turned to Nightlight Christian Adoptions of Fullerton, Calif., and its "Snowflakes" program, a name intended to emphasize that every embryo is unique.

More than half of U.S. fertility clinics allow clients to donate embryos to other couples anonymously. Nightlight, which has received more than $800,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote embryo adoptions, is one of only a few agencies that treat embryos exactly like infants.

For a fee ranging from $4,000 to $5,600, it arranges "open" adoptions in which the genetic and adoptive parents are matched according to detailed preferences and given an opportunity to get to know each other. Donielle Brinkman said that she did not want to make the genetic family's identity public, but that they have exchanged photographs, phone calls and information over the Internet.

It's worth reading the whole column.

The Survivor

Matt Drudge highlights some of the scandalous stuff in a forthcoming book on the Clinton presidency by Washington Post White House correspondent John Harris titled The Survivor. Viewpoint shamelessly repeats here the gossip Drudge has reported:

-- Bill Clinton was so upset that his weight-loss regimen in 2000 was not working that he made his aides release a bogus number after his annual Navy physical to make him five pounds lighter. (pg. 394)

-- Hillary taunted her husband's aides as being wimps by not fighting hard enough on Whitewater - "JFK had real men in his White House!" (pg. 108)

-- Tipper Gore was so disgusted in 2000 with Bill and Hillary that she stayed cloistered in a holding room instead of going to a New York reception with major Democratic fund-raisers where the Clintons would be. "No, I'm not doing it," she snapped to an aide. "I'm not going out there with that man."

-- The first conversation between Clinton and Gore after the Lewinsky story broke. Clinton is shouting at Gore, "This is a f-----g coup d'etat!" Gore just stared back blankly. pg 313.

-- Former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke on the record hitting Clinton for not having the guts to fire FBI director Louis Freeh, who Clarke called a major obstacle on anti-terrorism policy. "He should have just fired Freeh and taken the shit it would have caused." (pg. 408)

The context of the following is Sally Quinn's article from 11/98 explaining why the Washington Establishment was appalled by Clinton's behavior during the Lewinksy contretemps.

Some time afterward the president was going over papers with his staff on the upcoming Presidential Medal of Freedom awards. Spontaneously, he launched into a little riff for his assembled aides. His nominee for the prestigious award this year would be none other than the famous [Watergate editor] Ben Bradlee, husband of Sally Quinn.

The aides looked on in puzzled amusement.

"Anyone who sleeps with that bitch deserves a medal!" he explained.

Not very flattering or pretty. I doubt that this book will be added to the collection at the Clinton library.

In Search of Moderate Muslims

Joel Mowbray does the leg work to show that there are moderate Muslims. They're just not in the leadership of Muslim organizations in the United States:

In the first of its kind for an event organized by a major national Muslim organization, Kamal Nawash and the Free Muslims Coalition (FMC) recently held the Free Muslims March Against Terrorism. Not surprisingly, the leaders of every other major Muslim organization shunned the march and declined to take a public stand against terrorism and extremism.

Noticeably missing from the list of over 80 sponsors Nawash rounded up was any of the Muslim groups that claim to be moderates, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Though these groups pay lip service to opposing terrorism, they couldn't put their money where their mouth is and bring themselves to stand side-by-side with the Free Muslim Coalition.

The reasons for the absence of the major national Muslim groups are obvious. The empirical evidence has clearly demonstrated where the true loyalties of organizations such as CAIR and MPAC lie. In this particular case, it is anathema for many Muslim groups to identify themselves with the unambiguous message of the rally. Nawash is among the few Muslim leaders-and certainly one of the very few leaders of the overtly political Muslim groups-to explicitly confront the real threat, the real root cause of terrorism: radical Islam.

There's much more at the link.

Hypocritical Phony

NewsMax.Com states that Senator George Voinovich's opposition to John Bolton is completely a matter of personal pique that has nothing to do with Bolton himself:

Voinovich's stated reason for opposing Bolton: "I know, some of my friends say, 'Let it go, George. It's going to work out,'" said Voinovich, the only Republican opposing the appointment. "I don't want to take the risk. I came back here and ran for a second term because I'm worried about my kids and my grandchildren. And I just hope my colleagues will take the time and...do some serious thinking about whether or not we should send John Bolton to the United Nations."

His kids and grandkids? Had the Senator been so worried about his children and Bolton's nomination, he might have shown up for most of the Foreign Relations Committee hearings about Bolton. But the Senator missed almost all the meetings.

The real reason Voinovich is angry was a series of TV ads played by a conservative group in Ohio criticizing the Senator for not backing Bolton early. Bolton and the White House had nothing to do with the ads. But insiders say Voinovich was so ticked off by the local pressure he vowed to get Bolton.

What a phony.

The Washington Times ran a little piece a week or so ago which gave the lie to Voinivich's concerns that Bolton's temperament ill-suits him for the role of ambassador to the U.N. It turns out that Voinovich is criticizing Bolton for behavior in which he himself has indulged in the past.

"In 1995 when he was governor of Ohio, he had a temper tantrum at an airport because his plane was kept on the ground while Air Force One was in the sky." John Podhoretz wrote in the New York Post on May 13 (Subscription required). "He ordered his pilot to take off, screaming at air traffic controllers all the while and daring them to 'shoot us down.'"

An AP report at the time quoted Voinivich as using profanity and defying the authorities to put him in jail. Voinivich was fined by the FAA for his behavior.

"Interpersonal skills are important. The way you treat other people - do you treat them with dignity and respect? Very important." This was Voinivich during the senate Foreign Relations Committee vote a couple of weeks ago.

What a hypocrite.

In God We Trust

The battle to scrub the public arena free of any hint that God might be lurking in some obscure crevice of our public life opens a new front in North Carolina:

The words appear on every dollar bill and US coin. They are displayed at the entrance to the US Senate and above the Speaker's chair in the House. But when local officials in North Carolina placed "In God We Trust" on the front of the Davidson County Government Center, they soon found themselves in federal court facing a complaint that they were violating the separation of church and state.

The display was mounted in 18-inch letters that passing motorists could see on nearby Interstate 85. "If you are going to get sued, you may as well get sued for big letters," says Larry Potts, vice chairman of the Davidson County Commission. The case is one of an array of church-state battles across the country seeking to establish a bedrock answer to a difficult constitutional question: To what extent may the government bring God into the public square?

It is more than crosses, creches, and menorahs. Last year the US Supreme Court considered whether repeating the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First Amendment's prohibition of government establishment of religion. And the justices are currently weighing the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property in Texas and Kentucky. Decisions in the Ten Commandments cases could come as early as Monday, or, at the latest, by the end of next month.

Legal scholars are hopeful the Ten Commandments opinions will provide a legal landmark, offering lower courts more precise guidelines to help judges resolve the growing number of church-state disputes. At the center of the debate is whether the Constitution demands strict separation between church and state or whether it provides leeway to permit government acknowledgment of America's religious heritage. Others go further, saying the First Amendment bars establishment of a government-backed church but says nothing about government efforts to promote religiosity and faith-based morality.

The Davidson County debate over "In God We Trust" started in 2002. That's when Rick Lanier suggested posting the phrase on the side of the government center. At the time, Mr. Lanier was a county commissioner and a member of a local ad hoc group called the US Motto Action Committee, which was offering to pay for the display.

Not everyone on the county commission thought it was a good idea. Critics said it would be viewed as an endorsement of religion. Some said the commission might get sued. Lanier noted that in 1956 Congress designated "In God We Trust" as the national motto. After nearly 50 years, he said, what judge would dare declare a local display of the national motto unconstitutional? The measure passed 4 to 2.

To Lanier and other supporters, the display was seen as a local response to the 9/11 terror attacks and an answer to a growing number of lawsuits seeking to remove any mention of God and religion from public life. "For the past three to four years we went from a gradual process with legal challenges from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and American Atheists to a fast-track effort to try to completely secularize our society," Lanier says. He adds, "If you secularize and take God and our religious heritage out of [our society], then we open the door even wider to moral corruption and tearing down the very fiber that built this country."

Two local lawyers who conduct business in the county building objected to what they saw as the use of public property to present a religious message. "It is the semantic equivalent of putting up a sign that says Davidson County believes in the Christian God," says Michael Lea, a Thomasville, N.C., lawyer who filed suit with Charles Lambeth to have the display removed.

"I am a Christian and have been on the governing board of the local church. It is not that I am anti-Christian," he says. "I just don't think it should be up on a government building."

Faced with the prospect of open-ended litigation costs, the county commission began to reassess its decision. But the US Motto Action Committee responded by gathering 18,000 signatures on a petition supporting the motto. The group also raised $10,000 from local churches and individuals to cover the legal defense. In May 2004, US District Judge William Osteen upheld the display. "The phrase 'In God We Trust' is not inherently religious, particularly when considered in light of its history as this nation's official motto," he wrote.

Messrs. Lambeth and Lea appealed. On May 13, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., upheld the display. A reasonable observer would know "In God We Trust" is the national motto, not an endorsement of religion by Davidson County, the appeals panel ruled.

George Daly, a Charlotte civil rights lawyer, argued the case challenging the display. He says the Fourth Circuit got it wrong and he plans to file an appeal to the US Supreme Court. "You look up over the door and it says, 'We trust in God' - we, the government of Davidson County," Mr. Daly says. "That is direct government speech," he says, "and that is endorsement."

Daly adds, "The government, of course, endorses what the government says. I thought I passed the endorsement test hands down, but what the Fourth Circuit says is, 'No, no, no - everyone knows what the national motto is and that it is patriotic.'"

If the Supreme Court strikes down one or both of the Ten Commandments displays in question, that could make Daly's appeal much easier. Still, he faces another obstacle. "I just detect a great reluctance in the courts to want to allow religion to become the subject of a trial," he says. "But being a lawyer, I want a trial."

In addition to the Fourth Circuit, three other federal appeals circuits - the Fifth, Ninth, and 10th - have upheld the national motto against Establishment Clause challenges. Furthermore, the Sixth Circuit has upheld the constitutionality of Ohio's state motto: "With God, All Things Are Possible."

Davidson County isn't the only place posting the national motto on public property. The American Family Association (AFA) in Tupelo, Miss., has sponsored a campaign to display 11-by-14-inch "In God We Trust" posters in school classrooms and other public buildings. At least 18 states have passed laws supporting the posters.

"We have hundreds of thousands of posters in 18 states and not a single lawsuit filed. I think that speaks for itself," says Randy Sharp, an AFA spokesman. "Under a strict separation of church and state, even this type of endorsement of religion would not stand," says Rob Boston of the Washington-based group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "But the courts have never adopted a standard that strict. They have always carved out an exemption for certain types of civil religion, and this is another example of that."

He adds, "We haven't been involved in a case like this or taken any of them on simply because it is usually an exercise in futility. The courts aren't going to declare something like this unconstitutional."

George Daly is, in my opinion, correct in that the government, by inscribing the offending words on the walls of public buildings and on our currency, is claiming, accurately or not, that the American people do, in fact, trust God to protect our nation, and that the government endorses that trust. To defend the inscription by trying to reduce it to a mere expression of patriotism is silly and disingenuous.

Where Mr. Daly is not correct, however, is in thinking that this violates the intent of the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment. By expressing a sentiment such as the one carried by the statement in God we trust, the state is not establishing a religion nor is it interfering in the free exercise thereof. The state may be endorsing a theistic point of view but theism is not a religion. It has no clergy nor churches, it has no dogma nor sacred books. Nor is the government, by stamping its currency with these words, actively striving to establish a state religion of theism. Indeed, it is doing much less than the founders of this country regularly did in their writings, speeches, and other public pronouncements.

First Amendment jurisprudence has drifted so far from what the framers originally intended that it has become a parody of itself and the courts and lawyers which seek to totally secularize public life look like small-minded anti-religious bigots. Any mention of God by a public official is seen as a constitutional breach by the censors at the ACLU. Any acknowledgement of God which is in any way associated with tax dollars is cause for litigation. This is a ridiculous state of affairs which the founders could scarcely have foreseen nor desired, and it is time that our courts and legislators started acting like adults and reformulate the law so that it more accurately reflects what the fathers intended when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

The Most Beautiful Spot in the East

We're back from a Memorial day weekend at what is, in my judgment, the most beautiful place in the United States east of the Mississippi River - Acadia National Park in Maine. Like all of our National Parks, it is a public treasure and needs constant vigilance to protect and preserve it from those who see in such places little more than an opportunity for development and exploitation.

If political conservatism means anything it means having a strong predilection toward preserving and conserving our heritage - our values, our traditions, and our natural gifts. It is as sad as it is puzzling that more conservatives don't see conservation and preservation of land and natural beauty as logical consequences of the conservative ethos.

This is not to suggest that conservatives should not favor, say, drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but it is to say that such exploitation, which would be enormously profitable to the oil companies, should only be permitted if those who benefit from it compensate future generations of Americans by purchasing other significant lands elsewhere for incorporation into the National Wildlife Refuge or National Park systems.

Indeed, there is much land around all of our National Parks, Refuges, and Seashores which still needs to be protected from development. Why not make preserving some of it part of the deal for drilling rights in ANWR?

Keeping the Pressure On

For those interested in things military Belmont Club is almost always worth a visit. Wretchard's most recent post analyzes the significance of the increase in operational tempo of Coalition forces in Iraq. In his concluding paragraphs he writes:

The US ability to increase tempo effectively means that it has more troops, even though the actual number of personnel may remain the same. When 'toothpaste' is corralled faster than it can ooze, using the metaphor of the Iraq expert Toby Dodge, the insurgency will be forced into lower and lower energy states. The surprising thing about this up-tick in tempo is that there are actually fewer American troops in Iraq today than three months ago: it stands at 138,000, down from February's high of 155,000. The downside of increasing tempo means US troops are working at a faster clip and are exposed to more combat situations.

But high tempos may also cause a gradual breakdown in the enemy response times which may save lives in the long run. Historically, the winning force has sought to speed up operations once it felt the measure of the enemy. One of the best examples was the US Navy practice of using the same ships under different admirals during the Pacific War. Ships would sail as the 3rd Fleet and after their mission pick up a new command group to re-sortie as the 5th Fleet: "the same team of horses with a different driver". The practice was hard on the USN sailors but catastrophic for the Imperial Japanese Navy because the blows arrived faster than they believed possible. Historically, an acceleration in operations has often marked a discontinuity in what seemed to be static situations. While not always the case, it often signals that a crisis is approaching. Things will become clear soon enough.

Faster operational rates also suggest that our intelligence has markedly improved. We know who and where the targets are to a greater extent than we did six months ago and we're not giving them time to catch their breath. It's also a sign that Iraqi troops are much more competent and numerous than they were six months ago and are able to shoulder much more of the load. All of this is very good news, indeed.

The Wrong Man's Values

The New York Times is in a bit of a snit that the President is, in their view, imposing his moral convictions concerning the humanity and worth of human embryos on the rest of us:

[The President's] actions are based on strong religious beliefs on the part of some conservative Christians, and presumably the president himself. Such convictions deserve respect, but it is wrong to impose them on this pluralistic nation.

These blastocysts, as they are called, bear none of the attributes we associate with humanity and, sitting outside the womb, have no chance of developing into babies. Some people consider them clumps of cells no different than other biological research materials. Others would grant them special respect but still make them available for worthy research. But Mr. Bush is imposing his different moral code on both, thereby slowing research that most consider potentially beneficial.

There is so much nonsense contained in these two paragraphs that it almost takes one's breath away.

First, the claim that GWB is imposing his moral beliefs upon others is absurd. Bush isn't forcing people to accept his view of the status of the embryo. He's simply saying that if you wish to destroy incipient human beings that's your business, but you can't expect taxpayers to compensate you for it.

Second, the Times complains that different people view the status of human embryos differently and that Mr. Bush is [unfairly] imposing his views on all of them. But someone's views must prevail in the debate over how these embryos are to be regarded by the federal government. Is the Times' problem that someone is imposing his views, or that the wrong person's views are being imposed?

Third, even if the President were "imposing" his beliefs about morality on others why would that be wrong? If one has the political power and constitutional authority to impose one's beliefs why, precisely, is it wrong to do so? Would the Times hesitate for one moment to impose its beliefs upon the nation were it to have the power to effect such a catastrophe?

In a secular society such as the Times yearns for the U.S. to be, right and wrong are merely functions of whatever the law allows. There is no appeal to some objective moral standard because secularists do not permit any such standard to be brought into play. Thus, whatever a man can legally do he has a "right" to do. In the secular state if Bush has the constitutional authority to impose his values on the rest of us then he has the right to do so, and the Times' complaints are just so much sour grapes.

The Decline of Amnesty International

Amnesty International's recent condemnation of the United States shows how ideologically blinkered that organization is. Amnesty calls for the arrest of several high administration officials should they stray into another country as did former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who was arrested in London in 1998.

"If the U.S. government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal," William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said.

"If those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them," he added. "The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera..."

Torture and other grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions amount to crimes against humanity and therefore all states have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute people responsible for them, Amnesty said in its 308-page report.

George Bush is among a dozen former or current U.S. officials who should be probed by foreign governments....Others on the Amnesty list of potential targets for investigation and prosecution include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief George Tenet.

Perhaps we just don't remember but has Amnesty ever called for the arrest of Fidel Castro, or, prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Saddam Hussein? Have they ever called for the arrest of any of the murderous tyrants in black Africa or of Kim Jong Il in North Korea? We don't recall.

Nor have they ever urged the arrest of any of the potentates in the Islamic world which is odd since part of the indictment against the United States is that it practices rendition of prisoners, i.e. we send them to their country of origin in the Mideast to be interrogated. This is severely criticized by organizations like Amnesty because everyone knows what happens to people in the prisons of Islamic countries. Well, if that's all true, why isn't Amnesty putting out an APB on the leaders of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. for the appalling abuses of human rights that occur regularly in those countries? Their focus on the United States seems to suggest an ideological antipathy that ill-becomes an organization which is supposed to be non-ideological.

Nor does Mr. Schulz seem to understand the implications of what it is he's urging some hapless country to do. He's calling for, say, Belgium, to arrest President Bush should GWB ever wander into Brussels. Has Mr. Schulz tried to imagine what would ensue if a foreign nation took into custody the President of the United States? Either the executive director of AI is a complete fool or he's deliberately trying to instigate a military conflict between the U.S. and whatever nation is naive enough to heed his advice.

Amnesty International is an organization which could do much good around the world, and it's therefore especially unfortunate that its manifest bias and ridiculous recommendations are turning it into a discredited and irrelevant voice in world affairs today.

Left Lane Hogs

From time to time the thought has occurred that I am the only person still alive who believes that the left lane of an interstate highway is for passing only. Apparently, however, there are others out there who think the same way and who are growing weary of both the rudeness and the hazard posed by drivers who drive in that lane but don't pass anyone. This article talks about two states that are doing something about it. Some highlights:

Some good news: Left lane hogs are finally getting the attention they deserve from traffic cops -- and traffic laws.

In at least two states -- Colorado and Florida -- cops are begiining to target drivers who squat in the far left lane and refuse to move right to let faster-moving traffic get by. For decades, these drivers have been allowed to create rolling roadblocks and interrupt the smooth (and therfore safe) flow of traffic with virtual impunity because "faiure to yield" laws were either not on the books -- or not enforced. And twenty-plus years of ddumbed-down, politicized "driver's education" and "safety" campaigns had effectively propagandized the populace into believing their was only one cardinal sin -- "speeding."

In Colorado, state police have written more than 500 tickets to left lane hogs since the beginning of the year; in Florida, a bill is on the legislative docket that would impose a $60 fine and four DMV "demerit points" on the driving record of motorists who refuse to allow faster moving traffic by.

Twenty years ago, this would have been an unthinkable violation of the politically correct orthodoxy that only "speed kills" -- and therefore only enforcing speed limits (no matter how absurd or contrived) matters.

But in fact, people who refuse to move right represent a major traffic safety hazard -- whether "they doing the speed limit" (as they often bleat in self-righteous high dudgeon) or not.

By refusing to allow other motorists to get by, the left lane dawdler causes traffic to back up unnaturally; drivers then angrily jockey for position -- and typically are forced into making a passing attempt in the right lane to get around the hog -- who seems to get some sort of weird passive-aggressive satisfaction from his obstinacy.

The situation is frustrating, distracting -- and very unsafe. In fact, the lack of reflexive lane courtesy in this country is arguably the biggest single safety problem we have -- not "speeding."

It will take time for the facts about the danger of left lane hogging to sink into the general consciousness -- the consequence of 20-plus years of neglect and outright disinformation peddled by know-nothing "safety" advocates. But, at last, things are beginning to change for the better.

Now if they can do something about two other pet peeves I'll be a much happier driver. The first is people who zoom ahead of merging lines of traffic and then cut in at the bottleneck, essentially slowing down the progress of everyone who has already merged. This is an act of incivility so rude as to merit, in my mind, severe flogging.

The second is drivers who make left-hand turns from well to the right of the median, thereby preventing traffic behind them from passing them to their right. Related to this is the driver who wishes to turn left at an intersection but who, while waiting for oncoming traffic to clear, doesn't move into the intersection to make the turn. This causes traffic to pile up behind the turning car, and if there's a traffic light at the intersection the backed up traffic often has to wait another light cycle before they can proceed.

All of us make thoughtless mistakes on the highway from time to time, but some people just never ask themselves what effect their driving has on everyone else. Their obliviousness is inadvertent, of course, but it's nevertheless inconsiderate and discourteous.

The Embryonic Stem Cell Debate

The controversy surrounding the use of federal funds to subsidize embryonic stem cell research is culminating in legislation which the president has promised to veto.

It should be noted that research on or with embryonic stem cells is not illegal. The president has simply said that tax dollars will not be used to subsidize what many regard as a deliberate taking of human life.

This position is based upon an important principle: Human life should never be created simply to farm its tissues. We agree with that principle. To permit tissue farming would place us on a slippery slope where ultimately babies could be conceived simply to allow for the sale of their tissues and organs.

Parenthetically, it's curious that Pro-Lifers who oppose the extraction of stem cells from surplus embryos produced at fertility clinics aren't more vociferous in their opposition to the work of those clinics. The clinics fertilize a number of ova in order to insure that at least one will be viable. If it is, then the others are discarded. It's hard to understand why those who oppose abortion from the moment of conception have not been more fervent in their objections to this practice. The fact that they haven't been suggests that there is perhaps some ambiguity in the thinking of at least some of them concerning the deliberate disposal of excess embryos.

Viewpoint's opinion, ill-informed as it probably is and subject to revision upon further argument, is that the government should neither underwrite nor permit the production of embryos solely for the purpose of harvesting tissue. In the age of Roe it may be hard for government to prohibit such a practice, but certainly it can refuse, as GWB has done, to finance it.

It should in any case, however, remain legal to produce embryos in fertility clinics, even though those embryos may subsequently be destroyed, since they are not being produced solely for the purpose of providing cells or tissue. Fertility clinics should be monitored to insure that they're not producing more zygotes (fertilized ova) than is consistent with standard industry practice, and they should be permitted to donate those extraneous embryos to researchers working on stem cells. They should not, however, be permitted to sell them for profit and the government should require a strict accounting of the clinics' practices along these lines.

Nor should the federal government subsidize research on embryonic stem cells (although research on other stem cell lines could, and perhaps should, be subsidized) through grants and other tax-based sources of support. Rather, financing for this work should be sought from private foundations and individual donors.

An article in The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal shows that this is already well underway:

So what's happened, research-wise, since 2001? Given the rhetoric of some of the President's critics, you might think the answer is nothing. In fact, federal funding for all forms of stem-cell research (including adult and umbilical stem cells) has nearly doubled, to $566 million from $306 million. The federal government has also made 22 fully developed embryonic stem-cell lines available to researchers, although researchers complain of bureaucratic bottlenecks at the National Institutes of Health.

At the state level, Californians passed Proposition 71, which commits $3 billion over 10 years for stem-cell research. New Jersey is building a $380 million Stem Cell Institute. The Massachusetts Legislature has passed a bill authorizing stem-cell research by a veto-proof margin, and similar legislation is in the works in Connecticut and Wisconsin.

Then there's the private sector. According to Navigant Consulting, the U.S. stem-cell therapeutics market will generate revenues of $3.6 billion by 2015. Some 70 companies are now doing stem-cell research, with Geron, ES Cell International and Advanced Cell Technologies being leaders in embryonic research. Clinical trials using embryonic stem-cell technologies for spinal cord injuries are due to begin sometime next year.

President Bush has taken a stand on this matter that appalls his critics, but seems nevertheless to be a perfectly reasonable position, one which does not preclude those who disagree with him from doing research on embryonic stem cells nor from contributing as much to that work out of their own pockets as they desire.

Editorial Judgment

It's easy to get somewhat discouraged when trying to discuss the controversy surrounding Darwinism and Intelligent Design because it's a complicated issue and some of the concepts are not easily made understandable to lay-people. It's even more discouraging when the local media choose to edit your attempts to explain so as to render them almost incomprehensible.

Recently, a representative of the Ayn Rand Institute named Keith Lockitch had a piece published in the local newspaper which was critical of ID. I wrote a reply to Dr. Lockitch's column which I posted here and forwarded to the paper for publication.

This, however, is what appeared in the paper after suffering the ministrations of the paper's editor.

Oh, well.