Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON - POSITIVE REFLECTIONS ON IRAQ THIS MEMORIAL DAY

Victor Davis Hanson does it again.  He has written another superb tract on the significance of the current Iraq contest.  Writing with a breadth of perspective few other historians and contemporary commentators display,VDH is proving essential reading to avoid being drowned in the MSM's drumbeat of negativism.  Here's his article.   I consider any opinion of Iraq of questionable value until it has vigorously interacted with VDH's arguments.

DESIGNER BABIES ONLY, THANK YOU

Jonah Goldberg over at National Review's blog, the  Corner, excerpts the following from the Times of London:

MORE than 20 babies have been aborted in advanced pregnancy because scans showed that they had club feet, a deformity readily corrected by surgery or physiotherapy.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics covering the years from 1996 to 2004, a further four babies were aborted because they had webbed fingers or extra digits, which are also corrected by simple surgery. All the terminations took place late in pregnancy, after 20 weeks.

Last year, according to campaigners, a healthy baby was aborted in the sixth month at a hospital in southeast England after ultrasound images indicated part of its foot was missing.

News of the terminations has reignited the debate over how scanning and gene technology may enable the creation of “designer babies”.   In 2002 it emerged that a baby had been aborted late — at 28 weeks — after scans found that it had a cleft palate, another readily corrected condition.

THE RELIANCE OF LIBERALS ON ONE WORD PUT-DOWNS

Dennis Prager points out that liberals rely on one word put-downs as a substitute for genuine thought.    A sampling:   

Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:

Racist
Sexist
Homophobic
Islamophobic
Imperialist
Bigoted
Intolerant

And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:

Peace
Fairness
Tolerance
The poor
The disenfranchised
The environment

These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways.

First, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person.

Second, these words make it easy to be a liberal – essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy. That is one reason young people are more likely to be liberal – they have not had the time or inclination to think issues through, but they know they oppose racism, imperialism and bigotry, and that they are for peace, tolerance and the environment.

Third, they make the liberal feel good about himself – by opposing conservative ideas and policies, he is automatically opposing racism, bigotry, imperialism, etc.

Examples could fill a book.

Read the rest of the article ...

CONTRAST OF TV NETWORKS' COVERAGE OF "THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST WITH "THE DA VINCI CODE"

Tim Graham asks, "Have you ever wondered how the media hype surrounding The Da Vinci Code stacks up against the does-Mel-hate-Jews frenzy over The Passion of the Christ?"  To answer the question, Graham wrote a study for the Media Research Center called the Trashing of the Christ which documents the contrasting coverage the networks --ABC,CBS, and NBC-- have provided The Da Vinci Code movie and that given to The Passion of the Christ movie.  Conclusion:  "The contrast is stark:  hostility to The Passion and gleeful promotion of The Da Vinci Code.   Read the full report for details. "Network television news stars may boast at seminars that they are touch on everyone, but in real life, their devotion to secularism is almost religious in its intensity."

FACT CHECKING GORE

TCS has a very handy fact-check sheet on Gore's new movie here .   (HT: National Review Corner)

UPDATE 5/25/06  from National Review Corner
TCS Fact Check [Jonah Goldberg]

Yesterday I posted a fact-check of the Gore movie from TCS. Since then I've gotten a bunch of email saying that the piece was "debunked" at Andrew Sullivan's site. I asked Nick Schulz, editor of TCS, what he thought about it. Here's the relevant excerpt from the email: 

The supposed “rebuttal” to the TCS commentary on the Gore movie is pretty thin gruel. The IPCC says “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” That doesn’t mean there won’t be in the future, but it’s helpful for understanding what has actually happened on the planet so far. The “rebuttal” also refutes itself by saying “what is happening now is highly unusual” and cites as support the IPCC claim that “The most rapid rise in global sea level was between 15,000 and 6,000 years ago.”

The “rebuttal” also says that by linking to the IPCC report we suggest the report supports our case. This is nonsense. TCS has been highly critical of IPCC reports for, among many other problems, overstating likely future emissions based on highly dubious population and economic statistics. We link to the IPCC report because even that alarmist document doesn’t support some of what Gore asserts and insinuates in his film – which suggests just how exaggerated the film is.

Of course, Gore himself, in an interview with Grist magazine recently shed light on his efforts to persuade people by saying, “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” Over-representation, indeed.

ANTIWAR MYTHS ABOUT IRAQ DEBUNKED

Peter Wehner has published an excellent piece in Opinion Journal on "Revisionist History: Antiwar myths about Iraq, debunked."    These myths abound and become presuppositions and assumptions of the Left.   All faulty.   

Iraqis can participate in three historic elections, pass the most liberal constitution in the Arab world, and form a unity government despite terrorist attacks and provocations. Yet for some critics of the president, these are minor matters. Like swallows to Capistrano, they keep returning to the same allegations--the president misled the country in order to justify the Iraq war; his administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments; Saddam Hussein turned out to be no threat since he didn't possess weapons of mass destruction; and helping democracy take root in the Middle East was a postwar rationalization. The problem with these charges is that they are false and can be shown to be so--and yet people continue to believe, and spread, them.  Let me examine each in turn:

Read the article.

PRESIDENT BUSH AMONG THE BRAVEST OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS? - SO SAYS MICHAEL NOVAK

Michael Novak has published the most stirling tribute to President  Bush I have read in recent days (or weeks and months).   He argues without equivocation that President Bush ranks among the bravest of American presidents.

What I do want to argue is that, after Washington and Lincoln, Bush is the bravest of our presidents.  He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years.  He has faced hostility over a longer time, in possibly the most dangerous period of international warfare in our national history.  He has remained constant, firm, decided, and generous (to a fault) with his opponents.

He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power.  Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

On the number-one issue facing the nation—the war declared upon us by fascists who pretend to be religious—he has not wavered, he has not bent, he has stayed on course and true.

Novak goes on and on.  It is definitely worth a read.  You probably won't find any other article so contrary to the general run-of-the-mill critiques now current.  He concludes:

If you were in his shoes, would you not prefer the fame of 30 years from now to popularity in your own time?  Being popular is neither within one's own control nor, in the larger scheme, a goal worth pursuing.  Doing the right thing steadily, as best one can, is.

I like this guy. And I admire his guts, and his decency.

Bush has frustrated me of late.  Maybe I need to reconsider.   I respect Michael Novak hugely and so I take seriously this challenge to conventional thinking. 

CHILDREN'S ISLAMIST EDUCATION IN SAUDI ARABIA

What do we know about education in other countries?  What do we know about education in Saudi Arabia?  More specifically, what do we know about religious education in Saudi Arabia?   Nina Shea at Freedom House looks under that rock in a recent Washington Post article.  Some excerpts: 

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government's statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to "spread the faith."

Scholars estimate that within the Saudi public school curriculum, Islamic studies make up a quarter to a third of students' weekly classroom hours in lower and middle school, plus several hours each week in high school.

Saudi Arabia also distributes its religion texts worldwide to numerous Islamic schools and madrassas that it does not directly operate. Undeterred by Wahhabism's historically fringe status, Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as the world's authoritative voice on Islam -- a sort of "Vatican" for Islam, as several Saudi officials have stated-- and these textbooks are integral to this effort. . .

Nina Shea offers some representative quotes from the curriculum:

EIGHTH GRADE

---

"As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus."

NINTH GRADE

---

"The clash between this [Muslim] community (umma) and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills."

"It is part of God's wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour [of judgment]."

"Muslims will triumph because they are right.  He who is right is always victorious, even if most people are against him."

ELEVENTH GRADE

---

"The greeting 'Peace be upon you' is specifically for believers. It cannot be said to others."

"If one comes to a place where there is a mixture of Muslims and infidels, one should offer a greeting intended for the Muslims."

"Do not yield to them [Christians and Jews] on a narrow road out of honor and respect."

TWELFTH GRADE

---

"Jihad in the path of God -- which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it -- is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God."

We in the West,  in lands traditionally non-Muslim, are forfeiting our heritage and our future by failing to take education seriously.   In our blindness, we not only fail to interact with Wahabbi Islam as it is spreading around the world, but we inoculate our children against recognizing the truth about the Islamist threat.  Consider the way Islam is now in the classroom  in California.

UPDATE:  After writing the above, I came across an incredibly important article by Robert Spencer in which he provides an extended commentary on Nina Shea's report.  He  illustrates with chapter and verse that "much of the objectionable material is actually derived from the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, and from Hadith (traditions of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad considered authentic by Muslims and for them second only to the Qur’an in importance)."   He says further

To shy away from pointing out the deep Islamic roots of the material leads one to the impression that this material originates with the Saudi Wahhabis, when in fact it is a much broader problem within the Islamic community worldwide. . .

The implications of this will sooner or later have to be faced.  But up to this point this entire issue has been shrouded in ignorance.  For instance, a recent report in Australia’s Herald Sun about hate books being sold in Australian Muslim bookstores ascribed this quote to a book called Jihad in the Qur’an and Sunnah: “When you meet those who disbelieve, smite at their necks ‘til when you have killed and wounded many of them, then take them as captives.” In fact, that is a direct quote from the Qur’an itself (47:4).

How can Western authorities face the implications of all this? Should the Qur’an be banned as inciting to hatred and violence? It is inconceivable that the governments of Europe and the United States would take such a step. It is not inconceivable, however, that such verses as those quoted above and others that are used by jihadists to recruit and motivate Muslims to commit acts of violence would become widely known among government and law enforcement officials. They could then ask the difficult questions of Muslims in the West that should have been asked since 9/11 and before that: how do you understand this material? What concrete, practical steps have you taken to counter the literalist understanding of the Qur’an and Hadith that jihadists are using to incite Muslims to violence? When will you issue an explicit statement acknowledging that jihadists use these passages and others in this way, rejecting their understanding and use of them, and proposing a viable alternative?

 
The longer this is not done, the longer this material will continue to play a quiet and unnoticed role in the proliferation of jihad terrorism worldwide.

AMERICA: THE LAST BEST HOPE - BILL BENNETT'S LATEST BOOK

Bill Bennett has a new book out today.  It is Vol. I of America:  The Last Best Hope.  From the Age of Discovery to a World at War.    From a Kathryn Jean Lopez interview:

Lopez: What was your approach to tackling a fairly vast body of American history?

William J. Bennett:  The first thing was to make it a ripping good story because this is the second greatest story and the best political story ever told.  American history is full of sound and color and character and blood and guts and gore and high principle.  And it’s all in here. . . .  I cut my teeth on the Greeks—Plato and Aristotle.  But I gotta tell you a few hundred square miles in rural Virginia produced philosophical, political, practical thought that rivals anything ever done in Athens.   As lawgivers, Solon, Pericles, Hammurabi stand behind Madison.

Bennett's enthusiasm about America is infectious.   It looks to be a timely and much needed book.

CONSERVATIVES' PRECARIOUS CULTURAL POSITION

Stanley Kurtz, in offering some reflections after seeing the movie, The Da Vinci Code, is exactly right when he says that though Narnia was a big deal,

"the fact remains that when it comes to exercising influence on the fundamental levers of American culture, conservatives remain in a pathetically weakened position. 

He speaks of

the entirely unsecret conspiracy against patriotism, tradition, and religion hiding in plain sight on our movie and television screens, in our universities, and on the pages of the mainstream press.   Conservatives have forgotten just how precarious our position is.  One cable news channel, talk radio, and the blogosphere do not an invincible army make.   It only seems that way because we also have nominal control of the reigns of power.   But lose our foothold in government, and conservatives are up a creek.  The other side controls the levers of cultural power in this country, and we are the enemy in their eyes (and on their screens).

Conservatives need to face the fact that our position in this culture is genuinely precarious.  If we lose our hold on power, we’ll scream bloody murder on our outlets at everything the other side does.  Yet those screams may only confirm our helplessness. . .   the truth is, other than the government, the left is still in control of our critical cultural institutions.  Should the left recapture the government as well, it may well succeed in pushing traditionalists aside in the culture at large.

The battle is radicalizing.  Big Love and The Da Vinci Code are far more direct and brazen attacks on tradition than we might have anticipated just a few years ago.  Conservatives are the targets, and Hollywood is aiming and shooting repeatedly.

WHY SOME CHRISTIANS ARE SO PRO-ISRAEL

Kathryn Lopez of National Review Online published today her interview with David Brog, author of the book, Standing with Israel:  Why Christians Support the Jewish State.

Brog is a former chief of staff to Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.   Brog contends that "the evangelical Christians who support Israel today are nothing less than the theological heirs of the righteous Gentiles who sought to save Jews from the Holocaust."  The interview includes mention of the Ten Booms of Holland and concludes with this Q & A: 

Lopez: Whom do you want to read your book?

Brog: I want Jews to read my book so that they will get over their fears of evangelicals and embrace our friends. I want Christians to read my book so that they will understand both the imperatives of supporting Israel and the wary reaction they will receive from the Jewish community. And I want people who are interested in politics and foreign policy to read my book so that they can better comprehend the birth pangs of what in time will be a very important alliance.

DA VINCI CODE RESOURCES, REFLECTIONS, AND CRITIQUES

For a long time I've thought about putting up a major post with links to various resources related to the Da Vinci Code.   I have put off doing so (apart from a few brief mentions ) because I always felt I needed more time to visit various websites to cull out the very best.  I've decided I need to go a more modest route and simply link to sites that I have found helpful, realizing there are probably many more out there that are also very good.

Following Hugh Hewitt's  directive, a comprehensive and accurate commentary on many historical and theological aspects related to the Da Vinci Code can be found at Mark D. Roberts' website.  Roberts is an evangelical pastor and Harvard-trained Ph.D. in New Testament with personal experience studying the Nag Hammadi gnostic materials.   It's an excellent site.

The other day I came across a fine Roman Catholic website which offers an exceptionally  useful and comprehensive FAQ.    Although it is quite weak on the Gnostic Gospels and gnostic materials in general, that can be easily remedied by looking at the material at Mark D. Roberts' site or at the next site.

A really excellent study (a two-part series with extraordinary links), perhaps the best on the internet, has been produced by Roman Catholic scholars Carl E. Olson with Sandra Miesel here and here   They are also the authors of the book, The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in the Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Dialog has (at last count) forty-one essays on a variety of topics related to the book.  It's worth scanning. 

Sometimes a mediocre website has some unique links at the end that make it worth checking.  I found that to be the case at this site.   As an example, the site has a link to Prof. Ben Witherington's helpful article that was published in the Biblical Archaeology Society's publication.

Campus Crusade for Christ has a website  devoted to the Da Vinci code, as does Focus on the Family.   Dr. D. James Kennedy produced an excellent one-hour television program examining the claims of the Da Vinci Code which he is making available in either DVD or VHS along with a book.   

Columbia International University's psychology professor, Stephen Farra,  has both a short version and a long version of a paper noting the correspondence between the underlying thought-stream in the novel and Wiccan beliefs.   Speaking of Wicca, the other day I purchased  Brooks Alexander's book, Witchcraft Goes Mainstream.  It is proving as good as I expected.  I first gained a high regard for Alexander's work many years ago when he was associated with the Spiritual Counterfeits Project.   

Opus Dei defends itself agaisnt the The Da Vinci Code's vicious allegations here and an Opus Dei priest maintains a blog here.

Here is a wonderful modern "Screwtape" audio presentation that really deserves to be heard.  It's exceptionally creative and  unique!

So that will about do it.    Every blessing to everyone reading this blog.

MEATY DA VINCI CODE MOVIE REVIEWS

I have not yet seen the move, The Da Vinci Code, and am in no rush to do so.   I have, however read the book.  What follows are noteworthy movie reviews from people whose opinion on other matters I value highly.

Peggy Noonan  writes:

I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard? They're both already rich and relevant. A desire to seem fresh and in the middle of a big national conversation?  But they don't seem young, they seem immature and destructive. And ungracious. They've been given so much by their country and era, such rich rewards and adulation throughout their long careers. This was no way to say thanks. . . .

"The DaVinci Code" could still triumph at the box office, but it has lost its cachet, and the air of expectation that surrounded it. Its creators have not been rewarded but embarrassed. Good. They should be.

Michael Novak  (author of many books)

Confession: I have not read the book. Its first few pages of bad writing and howling history filled me with too much disgust.

The one thing that really shocked me was the movie's underlying intention, stated several times with great clarity: the depth and passion of its anti-Christian, anti-monotheism craziness.  To say the movie wishes actually to be the anti-Christ would only sound extravagant; still that is the constant and underlying message.  The "heroes" of the film have to save the world from the oppression and injustice brought into it, not only by Christianity, but by all monotheistic religions.  Wherever there is monotheism, the secular hero says, there is violence, or oppression, or something like that.

All that matters, Tom Hanks tells the only living descendant of Christ, is what you believe.  Not truth, not reality, but whatever you believe.  That's what matters.  You make up reality as you go.  The professor Hanks plays makes plain that he believes that Jesus is only a man—a man and that's all.  A great moral teacher, perhaps, but only a man.

That, of course, is the one thing that the Jesus himself does not allow us to believe.  If Jesus is only a man, he is no great moral teacher.   He is on the contrary a fraud, a pretender, a horrible spendthrift with his own life and the lives of his apostles—all twelve of whom met a martyrdom like his, some of them crucified, all of them most brutally killed without the utterance of a single recantation.  If He was not the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he was either a mountebank or a lunatic, and deserves our contempt, not our praise.  His every moral teaching would be vitiated by its radical emptiness and fraudulence. . .

Some, of course, may be so crazed themselves that they will truly enjoy the Catholic bashing—all these scheming, hideous, bloodthirsty, maddened cults and their captives, all those mysterious blessings and signs of the cross on the way to murder most vile.  Is this what the author and filmmakers actually think moves the more than 1.2 billion Catholics on earth today?  Are these artists so blinded by hatred that they cannot see, in the very paintings and glorious churches aspiring toward the sky in whose midst they do their filming, a reaching upwards toward "the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars"?

I think I have never for two-and-a-half hours felt so surrounded by decadence and hostility toward Christ.

Thomas Hibbs (author of many books)

 For a book that propounds a subversion of patriarchy by the eternal feminine, The Da Vinci Code embodies a blandly traditional gender relationship between the elder, experienced male (Langdon) and the youthful, naïve female (Sophie). One of Langdon’s great paternal moments of pedagogy comes as he listens calmly to Sophie’s distraught confession that she had a “rift” with her grandfather after she inadvertently discovered his participation in a strange sexual ritual. Langdon patiently asks Sophie whether the ceremony took place around the time of the equinox, with androgynous masks. When she responds affirmatively, he explains that she witnessed an ancient ceremony called “Hieros Gamos” or sacred marriage, which celebrates the “reproductive power of the female.” What appears to be a “sex ritual” has in fact nothing to do with eroticism. “It was a spiritual act,” a means of achieving “gnosis—knowledge of the divine.”

The term “gnosis” calls to mind, as Brown’s book does explicitly in many other ways, the ancient religious cult of Gnosticism, which sought a complete transcendence of the body and an ascension to a realm of pure spirit. The most advanced members of the sect were thought to have already transcended the realm of the body. That’s the supposition behind Langdon’s assertion that the sexual ritual was void of eroticism.

But this is where Brown’s use of Gnosticism itself becomes incoherent. The great emphasis in the book’s final chapters is not on transcending the body to achieve pure spirit, but on the “power of the blood coursing through the veins of Sophie Neveu,” whose parents are both from “Merovingian families—direct descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.” The Priory of Sion guards the secret in order to protect the “surviving royal bloodline.” (It is interesting to note that the Priory of Sion is not ancient, as Brown’s book says it is, but is rather a mid-20^th century invention intended to advance unseemly political interests in France.)

There is double trouble here for Brown’s heroes. First, how do we get from the Gnostic repudiation of the body in favor of the spirit to the assertion that what is most significant is pure biology, a bloodline? Second, why should anyone today care about the protection of a royal bloodline? On the one hand, Brown wants to demote Christ, who is no longer to be conceived of as divine, but merely as an influential human; on the other hand, Brown wants to elevate Christ’s human bloodline, his royal genealogy. But unless we harbor nostalgia for hereditary monarchy, why should we be moved by this or deem it worthy of protection? Is there not something deeply troubling about Brown’s enthusiastic embrace of the purity of blood?

Frederica Mathewes-Green (author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism and many other books,  who tells the story of her own encounter with Christ here)

The first hour, though very busy (and bloody), is so packed with verbal exposition and so lacking in character dynamics that it plods laboriously. It feels like a droning afternoon class, where you have to pay attention because this is going to be on the test. . .   

The movie’s premise, that the Church degraded St. Mary Magdalene and concealed her tomb, is such a whopper that it deprives the plot of traction; only the completely ignorant can maintain such extreme suspension of disbelief. St. Mary Magdalene was so beloved and admired that both Ephesus and Provence claim she spent her final years evangelizing among them, and her relics—far from hidden—were enshrined and venerated in both locations. She’s honored as a great saint, named patroness of churches and convents, pictured in icons, and celebrated with liturgical hymns. How ignorant of history would you have to be not to know this?  . . .

Even within the logic of the story, it’s not logical. The evil bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina, who oozes presence—this contrasts with Hanks, who oozes absence) says that when he finds the evidence he will destroy it; Sauniere, responsible for protecting the evidence, seals it in a device that, if mishandled, will destroy it.  He ends up spending his dying moments writing riddles for Sophie that are kind of hard, but not very; they don’t insure that she alone could decipher them, or even that she’ll be able to decipher them at all.  Both Aringarosa and Silas (Paul Bettany) are complex figures in the book, with some touching attributes; here they’re just plain evil.  (And the movie Silas is not an albino, he’s a blond—a surfer without a tan.) Sophie hisses at Silas, “Your God doesn’t forgive murderers. He burns them!” (Nope, the most basic Christian teaching is that God freely and completely forgives all who repent. But it’s kind of creepy to discover that theological revisionists are this eager for a wrathful, punishing God.)   The film’s violence is absurdly gratuitous: when a flight controller is slow in giving Captain Fache information, he breaks his nose, knocks him down, and then starts kicking him. Was Howard afraid the audience might be getting bored?

So skip buying a ticket, and wait to rent this movie some night when you’re in the perfect mood to get a lecture from a conspiracy-minded blowhard.  In the meantime, you can mull this over. The Da Vinci theory has everybody talking about where St. Mary Magdalene’s bones are.  How come nobody asks where Jesus Christ’s bones are?

CORRUPTION IN CONGRESS - EXHIBIT A: REP. HAROLD ROGERS (R - KY)

The editors of National Review Online rightly focus on the disgraceful behavior of Rep. Harold Rogers of Kentucky, chairman of the Homeland Security appropriations committee.   

Private companies have courted his favor with political donations, golf excursions, and exotic vacations, and he in turn has channeled millions of taxpayer dollars in their direction. . .  The power of lawmakers to direct public funds to private recipients with little oversight is a great facilitator of corruption. If anyone wonders why many conservatives recoil in disgust from the current Congress, look no further than Chairman Rogers.

Read the article for details.  It should give you a stomach ache and make your blood boil.

CONDOMS, AIDS & AFRICA

Father Thomas D.  Williams, moral theologian and dean of the theology school at Rome's Regina Apostolorum University sets the record straight on the relationship between AIDS and the use of condoms in Africa.

One thing is abundantly clear: the Church will never “promote” condom use as the remedy to the AIDS problem in Africa.  The reason for this policy is twofold.  First, promotion of condoms inevitably means the sanctioning of promiscuity, and consequently, the increasing of AIDS itself.   Second, existing data suggests that condom promotion simply doesn’t work, while abstinence programs have more of a shot.  As much as we may wish to shout about “safe sex,” condom distribution first and foremost sends a message about sex itself: it is perfectly fine to be promiscuous.   And only as a side note: oh, and be safe.

I have spoken to a number of Africans who find the Western supposition that “they’re going to do it anyway” to be insulting and, frankly, racist.  Prejudice against Africans as primitive peoples with no self-discipline or control over the sex drive simmers just beneath the surface of much anti-abstinence propaganda. Behind the cries for “realism” stands the unspoken assumption that Africans are naturally and incorrigibly promiscuous.

This supposition, however, besides its thinly veiled racism, flies in the face of statistics.  If we truly want to be “realistic” and objective, we should look to Uganda, the only African nation that has substantially curbed the rate of AIDS infection.  Through an intense abstinence-based campaign, Uganda managed to reduce the infection rate from 29 percent to 4 percent in just ten years.  As South African Cardinal Wilfred Napier put it, the unified message in Uganda, beginning with the president, was “Change your behaviour ... change your behaviour.”

Compare Uganda’s success with the dismal failure of the two most condom-flooded African nations, Botswana and South Africa.  South Africa has been inundated with condoms and its rate of AIDS infection continues to soar at 22 percent of the entire population.  Botswana’s situation is even worse, with 37 percent of the adult population infected by AIDS. Professor Norman Hearst, of the University of California at San Francisco, notes that in Botswana condom sales rose from one million in 1993 to 3 million in 2001, while HIV infection among urban pregnant women rose from 27 percent to 45 percent.  In Cameroon, as well, condom sales rose from 6 million to 15 million, while HIV prevalence rose from 3 percent to 9 percent.

ISRAEL MUST NOT GIVE UP MORE TERRITORY TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

Daniel Pipes counsels against Israel ceding more territory to the Palestinian Authority.  Giving up Gaza has had serious consequences and giving up more land will have even more serious consequences.   Pipes draws on Caroline Glick's study, Ehud Olmert's “Convergence” Plan for the West Bank and U.S. Middle East Policy.  She cautions that Olmert’s plan will likely harm U.S. security interests by destabilizing Israel and Jordan.  Pipes writes,

In painstaking detail, she documents how the 2005 Israeli retreat from Gaza radicalized Palestinian society, caused Gaza to descend into anarchy, opened it to global terror forces, jeopardized Israel’s national infrastructure, tied down Israeli troops, permitted the build-up of a substantial Palestinian arsenal, and created a range of new Israeli problems with Egypt.

She predicts that, in similar fashion, handing territory to the Palestinian Authority will destabilize the West Bank, harm Israel, and “directly threaten the survivability of the Hashemites” in Jordan. This damage will have many negative implications for the United States, she argues, by:

• Endangering U.S. military assets warehoused in Israel and Jordan.
• Enhancing the prestige of states that sponsor Palestinian terrorists.
• Strengthening the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority which, with its Syrian, Iranian and Hizbullahallies, will provide what Glick calls “a training, logistics and information warfare base” for terrorist groups at war with the United States.
• Threatening the land routes through Israel and Jordan that supply U.S. forces in Iraq.
• Enabling terrorists fighting American forces in Iraq to establish training bases in the West Bank.
• Creating a perception of U.S. weakness, given that Israel is so widely seen as an agent of Washington.
• Gratuitously handing a victory to Islamists and jihadists.

CRUCIAL QUESTIONS GERMANE TO DIALOG WITH MUSLIMS

Andrew G. Bostom,  Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, is also a prodigious student of Islam and Islamic history, having published last fall his 789 page book, The Legacy of Jihad:  Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims in addition to an ever-growing list of articles.   His most recent article cites questions raised by Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, for his Muslim interlocutors wishing to engage in meaningful interfaith dialogue:   

1)  Do they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated by the verses of the sword?  (see here, pp. 67-75)

2) Is the program of military expansion (100 years after Muhammad’s death Muslim armies reached Spain and India) to be resumed when possible? 

3) Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose Shari'a (Islamic religious) law?  (see here) 

4) Can we discuss Islamic history (here  and here) -- even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran (see here, here, here, and here) -- without threats of violence?

These are questions (and Bostom adds two others) that need to be asked and answered.  Incidentally, it's wonderful that video has now become so readily available on the internet.  Here is Bostom's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, May 10, 2006. 

SAME SEX MARRIAGE & RELIGIOUS FREEDOM REVISITED

A week ago I posted a Stanley Kurtz article warning about the inevitable clash between same-sex marriage and religious liberty.   Today, Chuck Colson's "Breakpoint" tackles the same subject in a briefer, more accessible way.  I urge readers to click through to the article.   Citing the Massachusetts law that requires all adoption agencies (including Roman Catholic ones) to place children with same-sex couples or close their doors, Colson warns that

"if sexual orientation comes to be seen as analogous to race, which is already the view among many elites, including some in the judiciary. . . then all the force of law unleashed by racism charges will be brought to bear against the Church. 

This is serious stuff.  These are consequences that Mary Cheney, Vice-President Cheney's charming lesbian daughter, has not considered adequately in her book or interviews.   

SEXUAL MYSTICISM, THE DA VINCI CODE, AND BEYOND

Vishal Mangalwadi, the noted Indian philosopher and Christian thinker who straddles both East and West, suggests in an upcoming Hollywood Distinguished Lecture "Sexual Mysticism, The Da Vinci Code, and Beyond" that

Dan Brown's blockbuster novel, "The Da Vinci Code," has the potential to turn the eccentric fringe movement of sexual mysticism into a mainstream phenomenon. Brown condemns the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and in its place offers the "APPLE" of secret "knowledge" (Gnosis) to help men and women realize their divinity through sexual union.  Many teachers and gurus in the last century have promoted sex as a path to mystical Enlightenment.  But The Da Vinci Code teaches "sacred sex" not on the basis of Pagan, Hindu, or Buddhist philosophies but by invoking the authority of Jesus--albeit a Gnostic rather than Jewish Jesus.   Many Christians have responded to The Da Vinci Code, but hardly any have addressed the book's central point -- the spirituality of the "Sacred Feminine". 

This strikes me as a most serious omission.   I have read many of Vishal Mangalwadi's books and consider him one of the most valuable commentators around.   A preview of his full May 22nd lecture to be given at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church is available online here. 

For those who will not take the time to read the lecture, here is more of the summary already linked to.

His talk will survey writers from Moses and Plato through Osho Rajneesh to Dan Brown.   He will explain that when St. Paul embarked on his missionary journeys in the first century, some of the West’s pagan temples employed as many as one thousand prostitutes.   Even aristocratic wives in Rome often registered themselves as temple prostitutes.   Many of these goddess-worshipping women began flocking to Paul, who preached a gospel that liberated women from sexual exploitation in the name of religion.   In a few centuries St Paul's movement sent Pagan “religious” sex into oblivion.
 
 As a result of these teachings, the West for nearly two thousand years held that matrimony was holy, that the only sacred expression of sex was within marriage, and that the ministry of the Holy Spirit consisted in turning "the hearts of fathers to their children” ― away from a pursuit of selfish pleasure to building strong families.

Dr. Mangalwadi proposes that this view started being attacked first about a century ago when Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu guru who founded the Ramakrishna Mission, brought a sanitized version of Tantra to America. However, another Indian guru, Osho Rajneesh, who became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his fleet of Rolls Royces and huge ranch in Oregon, felt no need to be secretive.   He persistently communicated his view that Jesus taught sacred sex as the path to Super-consciousness (becoming divine).   Rajneesh himself became notorious, but his followers remained on the fringes of American consciousness, although terms such as “chakras” and “tantra” became a part of the mainstream vocabulary.

Brown’s mysticism represents the latest incarnation of this movement.   Beyond challenging the Nicene Creed, it undermines the West’s unique commitment to words: to the sanctity of creeds, covenants, contracts, and constitutions—i.e., the West's logocentric worldview.   Brown replaces the idea that men and women are sinners with the idea that we are gods and goddesses.   Accepting Brown's view would destroy not only the authority of the Bible, the Church and democracy, but re-establish the authority of (neo)pagan priests who lost to Christianity in the first place because they used the promise of salvation as a cover for sexual abuse.

DVD and CD copies of the lecture will be available through BOM International. Inquiries about media orders can be sent to [email protected]   

IMPORTANT INTERVIEW WITH MELANIE PHILLIPS, AUTHOR OF "LONDONISTAN"

Jamie Glasov of Frontpagemag.com has a short, but powerful interview with Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.    This interview needs to be read in its entirely.  It is not long.  The following quote does not do full justice to the interview.

The British establishment, as I have said, has a historic proclivity towards appeasement.  It takes the cynical view that there is no group in the world whom it cannot buy off one way or another.   In addition, it has an absolute blind spot about religious fanaticism.   It refuses to acknowledge the religious nature of Islamic fascism -- maybe because to do so would mean facing up to horrendous challenges, or maybe because the British elite simply cannot take seriously something that sounds to its super-sophisticated ears so absurd as the restoration of the medieval Caliphate and the Islamisation of the world. . .

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America says this about the book:  

In contrast to the overwhelming majority of her British compatriots, who prefer to avert their eyes from the radical Islamic horror growing in their midst, Melanie Phillips has compiled a unique record that fearlessly, brilliantly and wittily exposes this problem.  Londonistan builds on and goes beyond her prior work by showing the role of what she calls the British ‘spiral of decadence’ in permitting Islamist ideas and demands to ride roughshod over the UK’s traditional ways. Phillips rightly warns Americans of the acute dangers for them, too, from Britain’s being a source of Richard Reid–like terrorists to the ending of the two countries’ special relationship.

Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us  says this:

"Londonistan" is one of the most compelling books you will ever read on the ascendancy of Islamic fundamentalism, violence and intimidation in the West. Melanie Phillips exposes the scandalous appeasement of militant Islam by British officials, the media, even the Church of England, capturing in extraordinary detail how British society and institutions have either ignored or actively fostered the growth of extremist groups on British soil. This book will both enlighten and enrage. Although its story is focused on the United Kingdom, it could be applied to any European capital or to the United States.

HUGH HEWITT TAKES ANDREW SULLIVAN TO TASK FOR EMPLOYING THE TERM "CHRISTIANIST"

Hugh Hewitt  in a brief World Magazine article, takes Andrew Sullivan to task for employing the term "Christianist"  in a Time magazine essay.  In Sullivan's terminology, Christianist is to Christian what Islamist is to Muslim.   Sullivan says,

I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda.   It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike."

To which Hewitt replies,

Most pundits have rejected "Christianist" because it obviously tries to link Islamists and those evangelicals Mr. Sullivan loathes.   He is attempting to dress up hate speech as simple precision, but given the vast spectrum of political opinions among believers on the center-right, "Christianist" is a howler.   Still, no one should be laughing when a once-respected newsweekly defines a huge portion of the American mainstream as the equivalent of the Islamists who attacked the country on 9/11.   Be prepared as others pick up Time's term.

A reader complained to Hewitt that he wasn't taking seriously Andrew Sullivan's disclaimers.  Hewitt responded (May 12th post):

There are zero evangelical Christians with any public profile who practice or endorse violence.   There are also no major figures within American evangelical circles who endorse any sort of theocracy.  Sullivan objects to the political positions of many evangelicals, but given the widespread support for these positions --opposition to the judicial imposition of same sex marriage for example-- Sullivan refuses to engage their positions on a case by case basis, and instead invents a new description in an attempt to deligitimize them.

THE DIVINE MOMENT IS THE PRESENT MOMENT

Andree Seu in an article  for World Magazine wrote,

A friend objected to my piety.   Not  "Lord, help me to trust in You" (quoth he) but "Lord, I trust in You!   Yea, by Your grace I trust in You!"    There's something psychologically different here, my chastened soul took note. . . 

Seu quotes Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life: 

Life is a series of problems.   Either you are in one now you're just coming out of one, or you're getting ready to go into another one. 

She later adds:

The dog bites and the bee stings and you're feeling sad.   But blest are those who praise God in the midst of it, who praise Him when their heart is broken.   "As they go through the Valley of Baca they make it a place of springs (Psalm 84). . ."

It is not tomorrow in which we should plan on praising God, but today, in the midst of our challenges.      Which reminds me of a wise statement I read long ago:   "The divine moment is the present moment."    Add to that the equally wise words of C.S. Lewis from Letters to an American Lady:

Yes--it is sometimes hard to obey St. Paul's "Rejoice".   We must try to take life moment by moment.   The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future.   How right Our Lord is about "sufficient to the day".      (page 100 in my edition)

CAPITALISM: THE CONTINUING DEBATE

Hillsdale College provides a unique service by offering (through the mail and on the internet) their Imprimis publication.   In the March, 2006 issue, Steve Forbes offered his take on what he called "The Great (and Continuing) Economic Debate of the 20th Century."    He wrote:

"The great economic debate of the twentieth century was between collectivists and free-marketers.   In one sense, the free marketers won:  When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was widely acknowledged that Soviet socialism had been a catastrophic, not to say murderous, failure.   But in another sense, the debate continues.  Democratic capitalism still has not vanquished the idea of collectivism.  Far from it.  .  .  .   

The reason that the great economic debate continues into the 21st century, despite the proven superiority of free markets in terms of delivering prosperity, is because of the misperceptions that keep democratic capitalism from capturing the moral high ground.  Dispelling these misperceptions should be our priority as we carry on that debate in the years ahead.

In this speech/article, Forbes does a good job dispelling those misperceptions.   He offers here a great primer on capitalism's strengths (including moral strength) and superiority over other systems.    His "five basic principles of economic growth" need to be understood by supporters and critics alike:  1) Individual equality before the law  2) Property rights  3) Low taxes  4) making it simpler to launch legal businesses (i.e. get bureaucracy out of the way)  5) free trade

C.S. LEWIS SCHOLAR, LOUIS MARKOS

I am impressed with C.S. Lewis scholar, Louis Markos, Professor of English at Houston (TX) Baptist University.    He produced a vision statement on his website which I very much appreciate.

Although a devoted professor who works closely with his students, I am dedicated to the concept of the professor as public educator.  I firmly believe that knowledge must not be walled up in the academy, but must be freely and enthusiastically disseminated to all those "who have ears to hear."  As a specifically Christian professor, I also adhere to a second goal: to fuse into a single stream the humanist strivings of Athens and the Christian truths of Jerusalem.  Believing that “all truth is God’s truth,” I seek to measure all human knowledge against the touchstone of orthodox Christian doctrine (the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection).  Believing further that Christianity is not the only truth but the only COMPLETE truth, I seek to discover in the cultures, mythologies, religions and philosophies of the ancient (and modern) world intimations and foreshadowings of the greater truths revealed in Christ and the Bible.  In pursuing this goal, my three principle mentors have been Plato, Dante, and C. S. Lewis, my central vision has been that of the Magi (whose pagan wisdom proved a partial guide to encountering the Christ child), and my core biblical passage Paul's address to the Areopagus at Athens (Acts 17). 

His book Lewis Agonistes:  How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World is very much worth reading, as is his truly excellent  movie review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.   His extensive treatment of the movie's shortcomings in its depiction of Aslan is one of the best and most comprehensive I have read.   He concludes by saying

Perhaps our modern age and cinema are not capable of fully conceiving and realizing a character like Aslan.   Perhaps Lewis was right that we have lost our ability to perceive of something as being both beautiful and terrible, that we have lost (really lost) our sense of the sacred.   "When they tried to look at Aslan's face," writes Lewis in Chapter XII, "they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes and then they found they couldn't look at him and went all trembly."   Does there lurk in this sentence a kind of real magic that our modern world, that not even the Hollywood Dream Factory, can capture or understand?

If so, we had better start reading our Lewis again. . . and our Bibles.

Markos will be a plenary speaker at the Taylor University conference on C.S. Lewis and Friends  in June of 2006

NEW YORK C.S. LEWIS SOCIETY ON THE WEB

I am happy to say that for many years I have been a member of the New York C.S. Lewis Society.    The requirement has been $10 a year (best bargain going!!) which gives you a monthly bulletin containing a highly literate article or two which you will want to file away.   I see that they have updated their website and have made available for purchase back issues of the Bulletin.    The Society has also conveniently listed all books written by CSL, plus secondary works (books about Lewis and/or his writings), all of them linked to Amazon.com.   And, of course, meeting topics are listed.  Meetings are held the 2nd Friday of each month in New York City.  Needless to say, most members of the NYCSLS live a distance from New York City and must content themselves with reading reports of the meeting in the Bulletin.

By reading the News link, I learned of a conference at Taylor University coming up the first week in June, a C.S. Lewis Summer Institute to be held at Williams College, and four free lecture telecasts titled "The Art and Faith of C.S. Lewis" made available by Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City.   All very intriguing finds!   

The lead article in the current (May-June, 2006) issue is by William J. McClain and titled "C.S. Lewis and the Reflective Christian."    He rightly states, quoting Gene McGovern (a founding member of the NYCSLS), that readers appreciate C.S. Lewis because

They find that he has encountered their difficulties and dealt with them, that he has anticipated their objections and has articulated them better than they could.  It is not too much to say that... he convinces his readers that however far they go he has been there before them and they are meeting him on his way back, back from having addressed these subjects that matter most and having thought them through to the end, to "the absolute ruddy end." 

STATISTICS AND INFORMATION ON PORNOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES

This website tells you all you want to know about the statistics related to pornography in the United States.    And speaking of pornography, CBN offers a website with lots of links for those seeking help.   A recent 700 Club program featured the story of Shelly Luben, a former porn actress now helping people with sexual addictions.  Here she writes about "The Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn."

RAMESH PONNURU'S NEW BOOK: "THE PARTY OF DEATH"

Update 11/5/07 - Ramesh Ponnuru has an essay on the critical reaction to his book, The Party of Death, in the new Human Life Review.

Update 12/04/06 - Wilfred M. McClay, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, offers a comprehensive, thoughtful review of Ponnuru's book in the Fall, 2006 New Atlantis.   Any evaluation of Ponnuru's book will profit greatly from consulting this extensive review.   (HT: Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner)

 

Update:  Wesley J. Smith offers a significant review in the July 3, 2006 issue of the Weekly Standard.   

**

Ramesh Ponnuru has published a new book, The Party of Death:  The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life   It's  getting lots of reviews.    His colleague, Kate O'Beirne, no slouch herself and author of Women Who Make the World Worse, says of it:

Ramesh's remarkable new book is the occasion for a big celebratory one.  Now everyone can have the benefit of what I have repeatedly relied on when I ask "Ramesh, what are your quick thoughts on [insert whatever topic I am expected to have insightful views about]."   Over the years, his thoughtful, incisive answers have made me look smarter on everything from taxes and trade to amnesty and abortion.   Although I have debated the issue of abortion for decades, I now can't imagine how I did so persuasively without a copy of The Party of  Death.  It's a beautifully written and powerfully argued expose of the culture of death. Ramesh's reporting reveals facts about abortion and life issues that I was unaware of. (The tiff over the deliberately provocative title is telling. It provides an excuse for failing to confront the book's devastating contents). For busy well-informed people, The Party of Death   is the rarest of books - a must-read.

Mark Steyn embeds some commentary in the midst of a larger article saying:

The Party Of Death is a very tightly argued case: by halfway through, Ponnuru had made me realize he was pro-life for much better reasons than I am.   Yet the book isn't about abortion per se, so much as "the politics of personhood."   One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life a matter of "choice," it made it easier to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren't. Down's syndrome?  Abort.  Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort.  But it's foolish to think you can raise entire populations -- not to mention generations of doctors -- to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn't and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters.  The "right to choose" is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience conception to convenience euthanasia is a short one, and the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia shorter still.

Commentators like Andrew Sullivan have attacked Ponnuru, somewhat hysterically, not for his book's argument but for its title.  In fact, the author got it from Ronald Dworkin, a liberal legal theorist, pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia, but nevertheless intellectually honest enough to admit that these are "choices for death."  They lead not just to literal death but to a societal and spiritual death, too. In The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel begins his lively dissection of "politics without God" with a bracing series of questions, including the following:

"Why do certain parts of Europe exhibit a curious, even bizarre, approach to death?  Why did so many of the French prefer to continue their summer vacations during the European heat wave of 2003, leaving their parents unburied and warehoused in refrigerated lockers (which were soon overflowing)?  Why is death increasingly anonymous in Germany, with no death notice in the newspapers, no church funeral ceremony, no secular memorial service -- 'as though,' Richard John Neuhaus observed, 'the deceased did not exist'?"

Update:  Wesley J. Smith offers a significant review in the July 3, 2006 issue of the Weekly Standard.   

SAME SEX MARRIAGE & RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Stanley Kurtz over at National Review Online's Corner posts the following which I think will prove an accurate prophecy of what is to come if same sex marriage becomes legalized.  I have reproduced Kurtz's comments in full.

Maggie Gallagher has opened up a whole new dimension in the argument over same-sex marriage with her piece, "Banned in Boston."

If you support the traditional definition of marriage, or if you value religious liberty and freedom of speech, you ought to be very concerned by the scenario Gallagher lays out.

Scholars on the left and right agree that the gay marriage movement has raised the specter of a massive and protracted battle over religious liberty.  In states that adopt same-sex marriage, religious liberty is clearly going to lose.   The source of the problem is the flawed analogy between the battle for same-sex marriage and the sixties movement for civil rights.   Gay marriage proponents argue that sexual orientation is like race, and that opponents of same-sex marriage are therefore like bigots who oppose interracial marriage.   Once same-sex marriage becomes law, that understanding will be controlling.

So in states with same-sex marriage, religiously affiliated schools, adoption agencies, psychological clinics, social workers, marital counselors, etc. will be forced to choose between going out of business and violating their own deeply held beliefs.   If a religious social service agency refuses to offer counseling designed to preserve the marriage of a same-sex couple, it could lose its tax exempt status. Religious schools would either have to tolerate conduct they believed to be sinful, or face a cut-off of federal funds.   In effect, religiously affiliated organizations that oppose same-sex marriage would be treated like Bob Jones university was when it maintained a prohibition on inter-racial dating. It's already happening, as we've seen with the recent withdrawal of Boston's Catholic Charities from the adoption business.

Free speech could also be under threat, as sexual-harassment-in- the-workplace principles are used by nervous corporate lawyers to draw speech prohibitions on the marriage issue. Fear of litigation will breed self-censorship.   One expert predicts "a concerted effort to take same-sex marriage from a negative right to be free of state interference to a positive entitlement to assistance by others."

I don't think there's any doubt that such a campaign is in the offing. Just look at the news.   A campaign has been launched to prevent John McCain from delivering the graduation address at New York's New School, the chief reason being McCain's support for a state marriage amendment and his willingness to speak at Jerry Falwell's university.   I remember 1990, when there were protests against Colin Powell speaking at Harvard's commencement, ostensibly because of "Don't ask; don't tell."  Until recently, military recruiters have been banned from campuses for the same reason.

Until reading Gallagher's piece, I never made much of the use of "Don't ask; don't tell" and related issues as reasons to block speech.  To me, these excuses were convenient covers for a determination to block speech on broader grounds: opposition to Republican politicians and/or opposition to the military.   But now I see that these "excuses" have to be taken seriously in their own right.  The very fact that opposition to gay marriage can be treated as the most publicly acceptable reason to suppress someone's speech is an ominous sign.   If gay marriage is legalized, there will surely be "a concerted effort to take same-sex marriage from a negative right to be free of state interference to a positive entitlement to assistance by others."  We can be certain of that, because it's already happening.

A few proponents of same-sex marriage might endorse conscience exemptions, but they won't control the gay marriage movement as a whole. Notice that in Massachusetts, no one but Governor Romney favors a conscience exemption, and he's out of office soon.

For religious folks, the lesson in all this is clear.   There's a lot more at stake in the battle over same-sex marriage than the marriage issue itself, important as that is.   The very ability of religiously affiliated organizations to exist and operate is under threat.   Same-sex marriage will be used as a tool, not only to silence opposition, but to unstring religion itself as a force in American life.

THE ENEMY IS EVIL

I am reproducing the following post from Power Line blog.     Warning:  you may not want to read the Mudville Gazette link.   The story is sickening, gory, and it will turn your stomach.   Guaranteed.

The Enemy is evil

And don't ever forget it. Someone filmed the appallingly brutal murder of one of Iraq's leading journalists, a young woman named Atwar Bahjat, some weeks ago. At the time, she was reported to have been shot by terrorists.   The truth, as detailed by Mudville Gazette, is infinitely worse.

The enemy is evil, and those who try to excuse that evil, or who lavish ridiculous amounts of news coverage on stories like Abu Ghraib while leaving their readers in the dark about the real atrocities perpetrated by the Islamic terrorists, are complicit.

Posted by John at 01:30 PM

Jihad Watch refers to the same story.   Robert Spencer writes:

Anyone who thinks that God's greatness is established by such acts of barbaric cruelty must be resisted at all costs.   Yet those who hold to the same ideology, and who think that God Himself will grant Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for Him (Qur'an 9:111), are streaming into Western countries, by the design and forethought of Western leaders, with no attempt whatsoever made to determine whether or not they approve of such slaughters and the ideology that motivates them.

This is insane.

Check the Jihad Watch post to read comments from lots of people.

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF DENOMINATIONS IN THE U.S.

I found the maps that Albert Mohler links to quite fascinating.  Did you ever want to know where most Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, or Catholics (and others) live ?   Check out the links provided in Mohler's article.   Truly fascinating. 

THE DA VINCI CODE - HERE'S ANOTHER GOOD WEBSITE

It's time to list another website (in addition to my original post), that offers substantive help in sorting out truth from error in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.      CBN.com offers an extensive array of helps, including video talks by Dr. Erwin Lutzer, Lee Strobel,  and Josh McDowell.  It also includes articles by Charles Colson, Richard Abanes, Eric Metaxas, plus many others.   It offers a cornucopia of links to other web sites treating The Da Vinci Code.   Finally, it suggests books and videos, and also has a section keeping track of news events.   This website looks terrific.

FAMILY KICKED OUT OF BUFFET RESTAURANT FOR WASTING FOOD

Have you ever been to a buffet and walked past a table where people have just left and seen piles of food left on the plate?  Has it produced revulsion in you?  It has me, too.   Check out this AP Report:

Wendy Dershem may think twice before  leaving that egg roll on her plate at her next Chinese buffet.  The Des Moines woman, her boyfriend and her two children were kicked out of a restaurant last week after management accused her of leaving too much food on her plate.  "They told us we are not welcome there anymore," said Dershem, a repeat customer at the Dragon House buffet. "We waste too much food. But the buffet is all you can eat. And you know kids. They won't always eat everything and they want something else."

Dershem said she paid her $5.95 fee but was abruptly told to  leave after eating one plate of food.  "They just take one bite and throw it away," said cashier Lin Huyen. "They take four egg rolls and crab rangoon, take one bite of egg roll and throw the whole plate. That is wasting food."    Dershem said she was shocked by the scolding and complained to  management.  Dragon House manager Kent Cao said his restaurant offers all you can eat buffet, not all you can waste. Dershem's family took food, didn't finish it and then piled on the same food again, he said.    "Shes done that too many times," Cao said. "We would welcome  her back if she has respect and knows what she wants."

Hat tip: Drudge Report

IS THE U.S. BETTER OFF WITH THE MIDDLE EAST AS IT IS NOW THAN AS IT WAS BEFORE 2001? - VICTOR DAVIS HANSON GIVES HIS ANSWER

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in once again as he does every Friday on the National Review Online website.   Today he asks the question, "Is the U.S. better off with the Middle East as it is now than as it was before 2001?"   He surveys the situation in seven nations, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and says, "So where does all this leave us?   In every case, I think, far messier—but far better—than before September 11."   

He surveys attitudes in the U.S. from the hard right to the left and says, "What is lacking has been a consistently spirited defense, both unapologetic and humble at the same time, of our efforts since September 11."    There follows reflections on what our alternatives were, our motivations, and the current state of the effort.  As always, VDH is well worth a read.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF LATIN AMERICA OFFERED BY FRANK GAFFNEY

Here is Frank Gaffney  on the need to pay attention to what is happening in Latin America.   He offers a useful brief survey, a good introduction to a region that needs more concentrated attention.

THE RADICAL ISLAMIC THREAT - WHAT MUST BE DONE? SERGE TRIFKOVIC OFFERS SUGGESTIONS

There is no lack of analyses on the condition of the West in its struggle with radical Islam.   Many, however, hardly view it as a struggle, and play down the threat of Islam.   Serge Trifkovic, author of Defeating Jihad and The Sword of the Prophet,  does not belong to those optimists.   He has unconventional ideas, many of which need to be openly debated.    He delivered a speech April 28, 2006 in California that offers a summary of his thinking.  Here are a few excerpts from that speech, a speech that should be read in its entirety.

Hilaire Belloc, in The Great Heresies (1938), presciently wondered, "Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?"   Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada – and here in the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. 

The latter include elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories and common culture; the loss of a sense of place and history; rapid demographic decline, unparalleled in history; rampant Third World immigration; collapse of private and public manners and morals; imposition of "diversity," "multiculturalism," "sensitivity"; and demonization and criminalization of any opposition to any of the above. . .

There is a problem, however. It is that a depraved mass culture and multiculturalist indoctrination in state schools have already largely neutralized the sense of historical and cultural continuity among young West Europeans and North Americans. . .

Race, Gender and Sexuality have replaced the Proletariat as both the oppressed underclass (hence the cult of the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual victimhood), and as the historically preordained agent of revolutionary change. . .

The war against jihad can and must be won. The first task is to start talking frankly about the identity and character of the enemy and the nature of the threat. It is essential to discard the taboos and to discuss Islam and the Muslims without fear or guilt, or the shackles of mandated thinking. The obligation to do so is dictated by morality no less than by the need for self-preservation. "Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo," Bernard Lewis warned over two decades ago, "not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently."

"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles," says Sun Tzu. We know the jihadist enemy. We know his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions. We also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy or a functional, harmonious society. 

The main problem is with ourselves, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn our diagnosis.  Having absorbed postmodernist assumptions, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any serious faith except that in their own infallibility but loath to be "judgmental," members of our own elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself.   The result is a plethora of proposed "cures" that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia. . . .      Having reduced religion, politics and art to "narratives" and "metaphors" which merely reflect prejudices based on the distribution of power, the elite class saw the [French] rioters’ shout of "Allahu akbar!" as a mere idiosyncrasy that would be cured if the French state gave those "youths" more jobs, dark-skinned TV anchors, and, of course, lots of "affirmative action" in employment and education.

So what does Trivkovic propose?

For starters, it is essential to refuse or rescind U.S. citizenship to Islamic activists. . ..   The citizenship of any naturalized American who preaches jihad, inequality of "infidels" and women, the establishment of the Shari’a law etc., should be revoked, and that person promptly deported to the country of origin.

A foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath, "that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."  . . .

New immigration legislation should include laws to exclude all persons engaged in Islamic activism from America. Such activism should be defined as the political act of propagating, disseminating or otherwise supporting "Jihad" (in its primary sense of divinely sanctioned war against non-Muslims), discrimination against Christians, Jews and other "infidels," discrimination and violence against women and sexual minorities, sanction of slavery, poll tax, etc. This definition of Islamic activism would be a major step in the direction of denying actual or potential terrorists a foothold on American shores.

New legislation should treat a resident alien’s or prospective visitor’s known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook or affiliation with the propagators of Jihad, sharia, etc. as excludable – excludable, let us re-emphasize, on political, rather than "religious" grounds. The broad model is provided by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA, the McCarran-Walter Act), mandating the exclusion or deportation of any alien who engaged or had purpose to engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest or subversive to national security.

Islamic activism should be treated as the grounds for the exclusion or deportation of any alien, regardless of his status or ties in the United States, because such activism is inherently prejudicial to the public interest and injurious to national security. Useful precedents exist.   [See for more]

We are in a war of ideas and religion, whether we want that or not and however much we hate the fact.   This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep conviction that the West is on its last legs. The success of its demographic onslaught on Europe enhances the image of "a candy store with the busted lock," and that view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for self-perpetuation is indeed in peril.   (My emphasis)

Targeting people for screening, supervision and exclusion on the basis of their genes would be discriminatory indeed, but doing so because of their beliefs, ideas, actions, and intentions is justified and necessary.

Islamic beliefs, ideas and intentions as such pose a threat to our civilization and our way of life, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of Muhammad’s faith. The elite class rejects this diagnosis, of course, but among reasonable, patriotic, and well-informed citizens the debate on Islam’s nature should be long over. Americans did not agonize over communism’s "true" nature during the Berlin air lift in 1949, or at Pusan in 1950, but acted effectively to contain it by whatever means necessary.

Yes, back then we had a legion of Moscow’s apologists, character witnesses, moles and fellow-travelers, assuring us that the Comrades want nothing but social justice at home and peaceful coexistence abroad.   They held tenured chairs, staffed the New York Times’ Moscow bureaus, controlled many Hollywood studios, and dominated all smart salons on both coasts.   They explained away and justified the inconsistencies and horrifyingly violent implications of the source texts of Marx and Lenin.   They explained away and justified the appalling fruits: the bloodbath of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, the genocidal crime of the great famine, the show trials and purges, the killing machine that destroyed millions of innocents known as the Gulag, the pact with Hitler, the works.

Today their spiritual heirs in politics, the academy and the media establishment act as Islam’s apologists, character witnesses and fellow travelers. They explain away, with identical scholastic sophistry and moral depravity, the dark and violent implications of the source texts, the Koran and the Hadith, the deeply unnerving career of Muhammad, and 14 centuries of conquests, wars, slaughters, subjugation, decline without fall, spiritual and material misery, and murderous fanaticism

(I am having to omit much that really should be read!) 

Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil.  They are our main enemies and jihad’s indispensable allies. The elite class, rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, and irreversibly jihad-friendly, has every intention of continuing to "fight" the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win.

It is up to the millions of normal Americans and their European cousins to stop the madness. The traitor class wants them to share its death wish, to self-annihilate as people with a historical memory and a cultural identity, and to make room for the post-human, monistic Utopia spearheaded by the jihadist fifth column. This crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty

IMMIGRATION MADNESS - TONY BLANKLEY SPEAKS OF "LUNACY"

Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of the Washington Times, usually has  something interesting to say.   Here he weighs in on the immigration controversy.   He asks a question that certainly must have occurred to most of us:  if we are to have open borders, why only Mexicans?  Why indeed?    Some sample paragraphs from his article:

It is almost inconceivable that an argument is taken seriously that we don't have the right to secure our borders and determine who shall enter our country.  Not only has such lunacy become respectable, but our mainstream media instantly, instinctively embraces such a postion. . .    But why stop with 85 million Mexicans. For the open-border crowd -- which apparently includes virtually the entire American political, media, academic and business establishment -- there is no reason to try to keep out anyone who wants to come in. . .

There are still about 700 million Chinese peasants waiting impatiently for a decent job; probably about an equal number of Indians. And most of the African continent could surely live better in Phoenix than they do being butchered in genocidal wars or starving in man-induced famines.

What is the moral basis for discriminating against that part of suffering humanity unlucky enough to find itself not sharing a border with the good old US of A? Perhaps the Dubai port company could start chartering ships to bring the rest of suffering humanity to our shores. . .

You can't do satire in a lunatic asylum or in present-day American politics.

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THE MOUSSAOUI PRISON SENTENCE?

I reproduce here two comments on the life imprisonment sentence handed Zacarias Moussaoui.  The first, by Peggy Noonan, is fairly conventional.  The second, by Robert Spencer, offers insights from a less conventional angle and deserves special pondering.

First, Peggy Noonan:

No one wants to say, "They should have killed him."   This is understandable, for no one wants to be called vengeful, angry or, far worse, unenlightened.   But we should have put him to death, and for one big reason.

This is what Moussaoui did: He was in jail on a visa violation in August 2001. He knew of the upcoming attacks.  In fact, he had taken flight lessons to take part in them.  He told no one what was coming.   He lied to the FBI so the attacks could go forward.   He pled guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda; at his trial he bragged to the court that he had intended to be on the fifth aircraft, which was supposed to destroy the White House.

He knew the trigger was about to be pulled.   He knew innocent people had been targeted, and were about to meet gruesome, unjust deaths.

He could have stopped it.   He did nothing. And so 2,700 people died. . .

I happen, as most adults do, to feel a general ambivalence toward the death penalty.   But I know why it exists.   It is the expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of a human life.   It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting of the life of the perpetrator. It is society's way of saying that murder is serious, dreadfully serious, the most serious of all human transgressions.

Robert Spencer, the Islamic expert, does us the service of telling us what the world looks like through Moussaoui's eyes.   

He told prosecutors that he felt “no regret, no remorse” for 9/11: “We want pain in your country. I wish there would be more pain.”  Why?  At his death penalty hearings, according to AP, Moussaoui “told jurors that Islam requires Muslims to be the world’s superpower as he flipped through a copy of the Koran searching for verses to support his assertions.   One he cited requires non-Muslim nations to pay a tribute to Muslim countries.”  It is likely that he cited Qur’an 9:29, which commands Muslims to make war against the “People of the Book” (i.e.. primarily Jews and Christians) until they pay the jizya, a poll tax not collected from Muslims, and “feel themselves subdued.” An echo of this verse comes through in Moussaoui’s statement that “we” -- the Islamic world -- “have to be the superpower. You have to be subdued. We have to be above you. Because Americans, you are the superpower, you want to eradicate us.”

 Moussaoui made himself very clear.   He identified himself as an adherent of the jihad ideology that fuels Islamic movements around the globe today, who are fighting in part because of the conviction enunciated decades ago by the Pakistani jihad thinker and politician Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi: he declared that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of Allah’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.”   If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”

 From this perspective, why should Moussaoui feel any remorse for what he did? As he put it, “There is no regret for justice.” He sees 9/11 as the Muslims doing their utmost to dislodge the infidels from political power. He believes that when he inflicts pain upon those who are at war with Islam, he is doing what pleases Allah. He is working for justice in this world.

Spencer says further,

While there is little doubt that a dead Moussaoui would nevertheless be lionized in the Islamic world as another victim of America’s putative “war on Islam,” he is of more value to the global jihad alive than dead.

 
There are several reasons for this:

 
[1] The verdict will be seen in the Islamic world as another manifestation of American cowardice and failure of will, akin to Bill Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia after the Black Hawk incident -- which convinced Osama bin Laden that America could be beaten. A man who believes that the Almighty commands him to be “merciful” to his fellow Muslims but “ruthless” to the unbelievers (Qur’an 48:29) does not readily understand acts of mercy or forbearance as anything other than weakness. In this view a strong America would execute Moussaoui; a weak America allows him to live on.

[2] Moussaoui’s trial has aggravated the fissures between the United States and Europe.   France has offered Moussaoui, a French citizen, consular protection.   A living Moussaoui will be able to continue to try to worsen the tensions between the emerging Eurabia, made up as it is of terrified governments desperate to placate their growing and restive Muslim populations, and a  U.S. still pursuing the war on terror.

[3] A living Moussaoui could become the Leonard Peltier of the jihad movement.  Moussaoui executed will cause outrage for a moment; Moussaoui imprisoned will provoke outrage for a lifetime.   For the next fifty years Moussaoui could become a symbol of American injustice: a rallying point for protestors, a new occasion for the international Left and the global jihad to make common cause.   He himself has a tendency to make extreme, inflammatory statements -- so he will fit right in with the Left’s current crop of overheated rhetoricians.

 

[4] Moussaoui himself could become a heroic figure, most especially in whatever prison in which he is ultimately incarcerated.   He will provide a new impetus for prison conversions to Islam, and a rallying point for jihad recruitment in his prison.   This may be the most important reason of all why Moussaoui declared victory on Wednesday: he can see himself training up the next generation of mujahedin who will see his great battle for Allah through to final victory over the American Great Satan.

Of course, none of these reasons are likely to have been considered by anyone connected with Moussaoui’s sentencing. They were, in contrast, preoccupied with questions of Moussaoui’s sanity.   It is unfortunate that they apparently did not understand or attach much weight to Moussaoui’s statement that suicide bombings were “not crazy but based on Islam.”  If they had, they might have realized that by sentencing him to life in prison, they were only helping his cause.