God's Politics

Democracy Project has a thorough and fairly ascerbic critique of Jim Wallis' book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. The review is too lengthy to reproduce in its entirety here, but it should be read by anyone who thinks that Jim Wallis is really seeking a "third way" in American politics. According to DP Wallis' position is that the Left is almost completely right except on abortion, and the Right is almost completely immoral and unChristian. In other words, Wallis' third way is for everyone to become Left-wing Democrats save with respect to abortion, but his prescriptions for actually ending abortion are apparently obscure:

So what does he want Democrats to do to make abortion rare? Moderate and moderate some more. Does that mean a ban on partial birth abortion? Wallis is silent. Parental notification? Silence again. A 24-hour waiting period. Silence. A ban on federal funding of abortions? Silence. Overturning Roe v Wade. Deafening silence. Returning the issue to political debate and the state legislatures? Total silence. Detailed information on the potential physical, emotional, and spiritual harm caused by abortion. Mum's the word. Stringent limitations on health of the mother exceptions. Not a word.

DP hammers away at Wallis' fondness for driving in the far left lane of the ideological highway, a proclivity apparent in the tendentious wording of much of what he writes. For example:

Jim Wallis is forever setting up straw men and offering false choices. "Oh really," I kept muttering to myself as I came across this or that line. "We are all diminished when our social life is reduced to the survival of the fittest" (as if that is the world according to those on the right). Or the Democrats need to, there he goes again, "moderate" their position on abortion "without criminalizing an agonizing and desperate choice" (as if jailing women is at the top of the pro-life wish list). Or the GOP is "wrong" to see religious issues "solely" in terms of "individual moral choices and sexual ethics" (solely?). Or the Christian Right is led by "theocrats," such as those ever-ready (and increasingly irrelevant) bogeymen, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and theocrats have a "fatal attraction" for violent solutions. (In truth, Falwell is as close to being a theocrat as, well, as Jim Wallis.)

Or, it is wrong to resort to "purely military solutions" (purely?). Or it is "mean-spirited to blame gay people for the breakdown of the family" (as if those who oppose gay marriage are unaware or otherwise unwilling to call attention to the myriad reasons for the collapse of the family).

Or, with Iraq occupied the Bush administration "now intends to control the rest of the world too" (must be that those neocons have been listening to the theocrats on the subject of violence -- or is it the other way around). In any case, such immoderate statements made in the name of moderation are more than moderately astounding.

Or, those who believe that "there is nothing we can do about poverty" are those who take comfort from Christ's reminder to his disciples that the "poor you will always have with you." Nothing?? Really?

There is much, much more to this review at the link and those likely to read Wallis' book or who are themselves interested in the mesh of politics and Christian faith would do well to give it a look.

If you would like a review which offers a more sympathetic treatment of God's Politics than Democracy Project does you can find a good one here.

Certain of Their Own Infallibility

Charles Krauthammer writes a fine essay in defense of certainty. The heart, but by no means all, of his piece is here:

The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers--principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics--bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong--indeed, deeply un-American--about fearing people simply because they believe. It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you. And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

What nonsense. The campaign against certainty is merely the philosophical veneer for an attempt to politically marginalize and intellectually disenfranchise believers. Instead of arguing the merits of any issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side displays unhealthy certainty or, even worse, unseemly religiosity.

Why this panic about certainty and people who display it? It is not just, as conventional wisdom has it, that liberals think the last election was lost because of a bloc of benighted Evangelicals. It is because we are almost four years from 9/11 and four years of moral certainty, and firm belief is about all that secular liberalism can tolerate.

Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter? Just days after 9/11, on this very page, Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

A few years of that near papal certainty is more than any self-respecting intelligentsia can take. The overwhelmingly secular intellectuals are embarrassed that they once nodded in assent to Morrow-like certainty, an affront to their self-flattering pose as skeptics.

Enough. A new day, a new wave. Time again for nuance, doubt and the comforts of relativism. It is not just the restless search for novelty, the artist's Holy Grail. It is weariness with the responsibilities and the nightmares that come with clarity--and the demands that moral certainty make on us as individuals and as a nation.

Nothing has more aroused and infuriated the sophisticates than the foreign policy of a religiously inclined President, based on the notion of a universal aspiration to freedom and of America's need and duty to advance it around the world. Such liberationism, confident and unapologetic, is portrayed as arrogant crusading, a deep violation of the tradition of American pluralism, ecumenism, modesty and skeptical restraint.

Well put. Krauthammer might also have mentioned that it's not really certainty that contemporary skeptics disdain, for they themselves are filled to overflowing with it. They are so certain that they are in the right politically, for example, that they are willing to go to any lengths to defame, discredit, mock and ridicule those with whom they disagree in order to crush all opposition and to insure that their views prevail. This is not the behavior of people cognizant of their own fallibility and at pains to maintain a modicum of intellectual humility.

No, it isn't certainty to which our Leftist elites object. What they find deplorable is the substance of those matters about which religious conservatives are certain. The maddening offense of religious conservatives is that their certitudes are in conflict with the certitudes of the secular Left. This the elite finds quite insufferable. They cannot abide that anyone would have the temerity to entertain a sense of certainty about matters so out of harmony with what they themselves are certain about.

Review of <i>Unspeakable</i>

Yesterday we posted a meditation on forgiveness which was triggered by a few lines in a new book by Os Guinness on the problem of evil. The post wasn't intended to be a review, but if the reader would like one an excellent overview of the book can be found here.

Did They Or Didn't They?

Now we're really confused. First we were told that Saddam was working on WMD in Iraq, then we were told that, ha, ha, Bush lied, there's no evidence that Saddam was working on WMD. Now we're told that tons of stuff that could be used to make biological and chemical weapons and banned missiles have been moved out of the sites where they'd been located prior to OIF:

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

Now which is it? Did Iraq have material that could have been used for WMD, or didn't they? Will somebody please get the story straight.

The Modern Sisyphus

Viewpoint has argued several times over the past year that any ultimate meaning to life is contingent upon there being a God. Now columnist Dennis Prager addresses himself to the same theme in his series on Judeo-Christian values:

As I have noted on occasion, there are three values systems competing for world dominance: Islam, European style secularism/socialism and Judeo-Christian values. As the competition in America is between the second two (in Europe, Judeo-Christian values are dying while Islam is increasing its influence), my columns on Judeo-Christian values have concentrated on differences between Judeo-Christian and secular values.

Perhaps the most significant difference between them, though one rarely acknowledged by secularists, is the presence or absence of ultimate meaning in life. Most irreligious individuals, quite understandably, do not like to acknowledge the inevitable and logical consequence of their irreligiosity -- that life is ultimately purposeless.

Secular and irreligious individuals raise two immediate objections:

1. Irreligious people, including atheists, are just as likely to have meaningful lives as any religious person. They need neither God nor Judaism nor Christianity nor any other religion to have meaning.

2. Secular and irreligious are not the same as atheistic; many secular individuals believe in God and therefore whatever meaning accrues from having a belief in God, they, too, have. They do not need religion or Judeo-Christian values to give their lives meaning.

The first objection denies a fact, not a subjective judgment: If there is no God who designed the universe and who cares about His creations, life is ultimately purposeless. This does not mean that people who do not believe in such a God cannot feel, or make up, a purpose and a meaning for their own lives. They do and they have to -- because the need for meaning is the greatest of all human needs. It is even stronger than the need for sex. There are people who lead chaste lives who achieve happiness, while no one who lacks a sense of purpose or meaning can achieve happiness.

Nevertheless, the fact that people feel that their lives are meaningful -- as a parent, a caregiver, an artist, or any of the myriad ways in which we feel we are doing something meaningful -- has no bearing on the question of whether life itself is ultimately meaningful. The two issues are entirely separate. A physician understandably views his healing of people as meaningful, but if he does not believe in God, he will have to honestly confront the fact that as meaningful as healing the day's patients has been, ultimately everything is meaningless because life itself is. In this sense, it is far better for an individual's peace of mind to be a poor peasant who believes in God than a successful neurosurgeon who does not.

If there is no God as Judeo-Christian religions understand Him, life is a meaningless random event. You and I are no more significant, our existence has no more meaning, than that of a rock on Mars. The only difference between us and Martian rocks is that we need to believe our existence has significance.

Now to the second objection, that you don't need religion or Judeo-Christian values, just a belief in God or, as is more popular today, in "spirituality" to imbue existence with meaning. Theoretically, one can posit the existence of the God of Judeo-Christian religions without actually believing in any of those religions or in any of their holy works. There is, however, some absurdity in believing in the God made known through texts whose authenticity one rejects. "I believe in the God made known to the world solely through the Old Testament but not in the Old Testament" is not logically compelling.

Whatever the logical inconsistencies or theoretical arguments in either direction, the fact remains that while secular individuals can believe that their own lives have meaning, secularism by definition denies that life has meaning. The consequences have been devastating to mental health and to social order.

Among these have been increased unhappiness and depression, increased reliance on drugs and numbing entertainment to get people through life, moral confusion, belief in nonsense (such as Marxism, fascism, communism, male-female sameness, pacifism, moral equivalence of good and bad societies, and much more), and perhaps most ubiquitous, political meaning as a substitute for religious meaning.

Given that the need for meaning transcends all other human needs, its absence must create havoc individually and societally. In government, secularism is a blessing; but most everywhere else it is not.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares human existence to the everlasting punishment imposed by the gods on the mythological Sisyphus whose sentence for rebellion against the deities was to push a stone up a hill only to have it roll back down. He had to do this over and over, forever. Camus says that human existence is every bit as futile, meaningless, and mind-crushingly absurd. And yet, he writes, "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One must imagine that Sisyphus is happy."

Actually, it is extremely difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy in such circumstances. Indeed, it is easier to imagine him on the verge of total insanity. A man suffering life without significance, without meaning, without hope for eventual release is a man teetering on the brink of madness.

Camus is right in his comparison of life without God to the existence Sisyphus was made to endure. If there is no God then life surely is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Shakespeare put it.

Camus is wrong, however, when he urges us to imagine Sisyphus as happy. To the extent that the modern Sisyphus is content it is because he has not allowed himself to consider the full implications of his naturalistic worldview. He refuses to permit the consequences of his atheism to obtrude into his thoughts lest he be forced to confront the sheer senselessness of his being and that of all humanity. To face honestly the fact that in the final analysis nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters is to weave dizzyingly on the precipice of a spiritual and psychological abyss that only the most intrepid, or nihilistic, atheists dare approach.

Semper Fi

Our country has lost a fine leader. Ilario Pantano has chosen to resign from the Marine Corps. After the hell he and his family were put through over the last year for defending himself in a stressful situation in Iraq, who can blame him?

There's lots of background on Pantano and his story here.

Kit Jarrell indicts both the military and the media for having grossly mishandled the Pantano case. She writes:

The Corps took one of their own - an officer who had served proudly and with distinction - and crucified him on the cross of political correctness, in a society where too many are more concerned with how we look to the world than how safe we are. His accusers were sloppy and unbelievable at best, and at worst they were simply malicious; determined to ruin a career and a man who was so much more than they would ever be. The case itself was flimsy on all counts - no real eyewitnesses, conflicting statements. Even prosecution witnesses ended up sounding like advertisements for the defense.

She concludes with this:

It could be argued that Pantano's resignation "lets the bad guys win", but I think that happened a long time ago. It happens every time the media slants their reports on the war. It happens every time a military recruiter is barred from a campus. It happens every time we bend over backwards to please the collective globe while leaving ourselves defenseless. It happened the minute someone listened to Sgt. Daniel Coburn.

And yet, the Pantanos that remain in the Marines; the Air Force; the Navy; the Army all fight on; hoping that when and if it is their turn to fire their weapon in the defense of our nation that they do not find themselves at the mercy of a disgruntled sergeant who couldn't even be trusted to lead his squad.

The idea that it could happen again is horrifying. The idea that it happened at all is the tragedy.

The rest of her essay is a blistering indictment of Pantano's accusers and the way the whole thing was dealt with by the Marines. Its worth reading.

Is Zarqawi Dead?

Adnkronos International has this report on Abu Al-Zarqawi:

Baghdad, 2 June (AKI) - The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq - died on Friday and his body is in Fallujah's cemetary, an Iraqi Sunni sheikh, Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir, has told the Saudi on-line newspaper Al-Medina. He claims that gunfights which broke out in Fallujah in the last few days involved militants trying to protect the insurgency leader's tomb from a group of American soldiers patrolling the area.

During a telephone conversation from the city of Fallujah with the Saudi newspaper, Nasir said al-Zarqawi was taken there after being injured in the city of Ramadi around three weeks ago, and may have been treated by two doctors who had worked with his aides in Baghdad. He said the two doctors had stopped a serious hemorrhage in al-Zarqawi's intestines, but that after his condition worsened last week, the militant died on Friday.

Nasir adds that in his will the insurgent leader left the order that no funeral should be held for him and the right to announce his death should be left to the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.

The Al-Medina newspaper reports that it also called the headmaster of a school in Fallujah, who preferred to remain anonymous, but confirmed that many people in the city were aware of the fact that al-Zarqawi had recently been taken to the city.

Sheikh Nasir's claims appear to correspond with reports several weeks ago that al-Zarqawi had been injured and taken to Ramadi hospital for emergency treatment, and with messages on the Internet talking of two Arab doctors accompanying him. Al-Zarqawi was reported to have been seen at the hospital on April 27. The hospital's director told an Iraq-based newspaper that US troops later surrounded and raided the entire building, searching for the Jordanian militant.

Only two days ago, an audio message attributed to al-Zarqawi was posted on the Internet, in which he assured his followers that he had only been lightly injured. Following the message, the US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned countries neighboring Iraq not to give any medical assistance to al-Zarqawi. "Our current theory is that he is in Iraq," he said. "Were a neighboring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they obviously would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the al-Qaeda network, and a person who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Rumsfeld continued. "And that's something that people would want to take note of."

How reliable this report is is hard to say, but as Bill Roggio at Winds of Change points out there is no doubt that right now forensics experts are examining the alleged remains to determine whether Zarqawi has indeed passed on to be with his 72 virgins, whom, we expect, will all be fat, ugly, and covered with pustules.

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.