Column/Legend
1 - Prefix  - L-Life,  H-Homosexual Behavior/Perversion, R-Religion/Legal Persecution/ACLU, E-Education, M-Media Bias, O-Other
2-7 - Yr, Mo, Dy
8 - L -Letter to Editor, C-Commentary, O-Op-Ed, M-Metro

Hotlink Index of this weeks's family values related news:  [Life]   [Homosexual Behavior/Perversion]   [Religion/Religious Persecution]   [Education]   [Media]   [Other]

LIFE
L041226C   Euthanasia . . . or a 'Dutch treat'
L041228     Misleading proposition
L041228L   Beware the slippery slope
L041230     Backing Congress
L041230C  Democrats try to backtrack
L041230L   Stop obstructing nominees
L041239E   The Democrats' filibuster

HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR/PERVERSION
H041230      ARKANSAS  Judge strikes downgay foster parent ban
H041231E   Homosexual 'marriage' debacle

RELIGION/RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
R041226    Religious order to pay millions to settle suits
R041227    Award winners
R041227    Falwell's new group
R041227    Lesbian minister to appeal
R041227    Panicky liberals
R041227    Revival rescues Christmas, McCarrick says
R041228L  The role of the church
R041229L  Democracts need new 'old' ideas?
R041229L  Government, faith and Christmas
R041231    PENNSYLVANIA   Leaders say gay issue threatens church unity
R041231    Public Christian symbols backed
R041231L  Muslims recognize importance of season
R050102E   Forum: New Year's resolution: Prayer

EDUCATION
E041227      College activists protest left bias
E041229      WASHINGTON   Five Christian schools join to create system
E050102C   Attacking Western values

MEDIA
M041230    Hollywood drag
M041230C You go to war with the press you have

OTHER
O041226C  Children having children
O041228E  A renaissance for marriage
O041228M Deadbeat defense removed
O041230    Abstinence-education backers tout new oversight
O041230    Army works on marriage
O041230E Three wise men 'get it'?
O041231    U.S. pop culture seen as plague
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

R041227   Revival rescues Christmas, McCarrick says
 

By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The tug of war between political correctness and Christmas became more prominent this year because of a revival of Christianity, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, said yesterday.
    "Those who are so opposed to [Christmas] feel that the tide is turning now, once again, against them," Cardinal McCarrick said. "I think that might be because those who are so opposed to it feel that they're caught in a corner.
    "I believe there is a real revival of religion in our country, not just of Christianity, not just of the traditional religions, but of people who really believe in God and may not be able to express it in the words of present-day religion," the Catholic cleric told "Fox News Sunday."
    A Fox News-Opinion Dynamics poll found that 51 percent of those surveyed agree public displays of Christmas symbols were more under attack this year than before.
    Many local leaders are calling Christmas trees "community trees"; a New Jersey school district banned Christmas carols; a judge ordered a Florida town to take down a manger, but it was allowed to put up a menorah.
    These were among widespread signs of the de-Christianizing of Christmas that made national news.
    Noting the hugely successful movie "The Passion of the Christ" depicting the final hours in the life of Jesus, as well as best-selling editions of Time and Newsweek devoted to Christ's birth, Cardinal McCarrick said fascination with, and faith in, Jesus continues to grow.
    "There are more than a billion and a half people in the world today who believe in the Lord Jesus," the cardinal said.
    Even many nonbelievers continue to celebrate Christmas to mark the birth about 2,000 years ago of Jesus Christ, whom Christians believe to be the perfect son of God, who later would die on a cross so that God could forgive the sins of mankind.
    Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, was asked during her own appearance on Fox about the political correctness of banning Christmas trees and depictions of the Nativity.
    Mrs. Cheney said it began with an honest effort by Americans to be polite and considerate and say "season's greetings" or "happy holidays" because those they greet might not celebrate Christmas.
    "But in our effort to be nice ... we let the pendulum swing too far," Mrs. Cheney said. "It is one thing to be sure to be inclusive. It's another thing entirely to exclude Christmas."
    Mrs. Cheney said she has heard numerous examples of such exclusions from mothers of schoolchildren.
    "One mom was telling me a story about her little girl coming home from nursery school saying, 'Mom, do we celebrate Kwanzaa or Hanukkah?' when, in fact, they celebrate Christmas.
    "She had not really understood from her nursery school that [Christmas] was an option. We need to be inclusive with Christmas as well," Mrs. Cheney said.
    Another mother described to Mrs. Cheney a school pageant that celebrated all holidays but had only a suggestion of Christmas.
    "It only involved the Three Kings and not the Christ child," Mrs. Cheney said. "The Three Kings, of course, are a favorite as a part of many pageants now because they're multicultural, and that's a good thing. But the Christ child should be in, too."
    Cardinal McCarrick said the Constitution's separation of church and state meant that no one church would be established by the government as a state religion.
    "It didn't mean that no church was to be loved here and respected here," the cardinal said.
    "The history of our country seems to have not only established religion, which is what it's supposed to do, but also it seems to have disestablished a religion."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

E041227   College activists protest left bias

ASSOCIATED PRESS
    At the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sued over a reading assignment they say offends their Christian beliefs.
    In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicized student accusations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty get hate mail and are pictured in mock "wanted" posters.
    The episodes differ in important ways, but all touch on an issue of growing prominence on college campuses.
    Traditionally, clashes over academic freedom have pitted politicians or administrators against instructors who wanted to express their opinions and teach as they saw fit. But increasingly, it is students who are invoking academic freedom. They say biased professors are violating their right to a classroom free from indoctrination.
    To many professors, there is a new and deeply troubling aspect to this latest chapter in the debate over academic freedom: Students are trying to dictate what they don't want to be taught.
    "Even the most contentious or disaffected of students in the '60s or early '70s never really pressed this kind of issue," said Robert O'Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and former president of the University of Virginia.
    Those behind the trend call it an antidote to the overwhelming liberal views of university faculties. But many educators worry that students just want to avoid exposure to ideas that challenge their core beliefs — an essential part of education.
    Some also fear teachers will shy away from sensitive topics, or fend off criticism by "balancing" their syllabuses with opposing viewpoints, even if they represent inferior scholarship.
    "Faculty retrench. They are less willing to discuss contemporary problems, and I think everyone loses out," said Joe Losco, a professor of political science at Ball State University in Indiana, who has supported two colleagues targeted for purported bias. "It puts a chill in the air," he said.
    Conservatives say a chill is in order.
    A recent study by Santa Clara University researcher Daniel Klein estimated that among social science and humanities faculty members nationwide, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least 7-to-1; in some fields the ratio is as high as 30-to-1.
    Leading the latest movement is the group Students for Academic Freedom, with chapters on 135 campuses and close ties to David Horowitz, a one-time liberal campus activist turned conservative commentator.
    Instructors "need to make students aware of the spectrum of scholarly opinion," Mr. Horowitz said. "You can't get a good education if you're only getting half the story."
    Conservatives say they are discouraged from expressing their views in class, and blackballed from graduate school slots and jobs.
    "I feel like [faculty] are so disconnected from students that they do these things and they can just get away with them," said Kris Wampler, who recently identified himself as one of the students who sued the University of North Carolina. Now a junior, he objected when all incoming students were assigned to read a book about the Koran before they got to campus.
    Efforts by him and others are having mixed results. At UNC, the students lost their legal case, but the university no longer uses the word "required" in describing the reading program for incoming students.
    In Colorado, conservatives withdrew a legislative proposal for an "academic bill of rights" backed by Mr. Horowitz, but only after state universities agreed to adopt its principles.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041227   Lesbian minister to appeal
 

By Richard N. Ostling
ASSOCIATED PRESS

A Methodist minister who was defrocked for declaring that she is a lesbian living with her partner is taking her case to a church appeals court.
    The Rev. Irene Stroud, of Philadelphia, was ousted Dec. 2 for violating the United Methodist Church's law against "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" in the clergy.
    Ms. Stroud decided last week to appeal, but delayed the announcement until after Christmas weekend. Notice of appeal must be filed this week.
    Ms. Stroud said she hesitated to appeal because she is tired and dislikes being in the spotlight, but "there are questions the larger church needs to discuss and wrestle with."
    She said one factor in her decision was something retired Bishop Joseph Yeakel, the judge who presided at her church trial, said to her after the verdict. Bishop Yeakel told Ms. Stroud "the day will come when the church apologizes for this decision."
    Ms. Stroud was tried by her own Eastern Pennsylvania Conference. The case now goes to an appeals panel of the Northeastern Jurisdiction, which covers 12 states and the District of Columbia.
    At the trial, Bishop Yeakel barred testimony from six witnesses for Ms. Stroud who oppose the Methodist ban, citing both legal and theological arguments. But the six filed material that is part of the trial record and the Northeastern Jurisdiction will review that.
    Ms. Stroud wants the appeals panel to consider that Methodist law, known as the Book of Discipline, "calls us a church to stand against every form of discrimination" and "treat all people as equally loved by God."
    "When you look at those provisions of the Discipline and some of the prohibitions on homosexuality, you have to make a choice," she said. The six witnesses' filings made similar points.
    If the Northeastern Jurisdiction decides trial procedures were mistaken, it could direct a second Pennsylvania trial, Bishop Yeakel said. It could also refer questions on interpretation of Methodist law to the church's national Judicial Council.
    The case originated last year when Ms. Stroud announced her same-sex partnership in a sermon. At the trial, an all-clergy jury voted 12-1 that she was guilty of violating Methodist law. In a subsequent penalty phase, jurors voted to defrock her by 7-6.
    Ms. Stroud is one of three homosexual clergy members tried since the Methodist General Conference passed its homosexual ban in 1984. The Rev. Rose Mary Denman of New Hampshire was defrocked in 1987, and the Rev. Karen Dammann of Washington state was acquitted last March.
    Philadelphia's First United Methodist Church of Germantown has continued to employ Ms. Stroud as a lay worker.
    vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041228   Misleading proposition
    "California voters approved a stem-cell initiative known as Proposition 71 on November 2. But only recently has anyone gotten around to analyzing the fine print," the Wall Street Journal says.
    "The law, which passed with 59 percent of the vote and vocal support from Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, authorizes $3 billion in bonds to pay for new research and facilities. And even though the interest rate will double the ultimate cost over 10 years, backers of the initiative said that the money raised from the bonds won't cost the state anything for the first five," the newspaper noted in an editorial.
    "Or so most Californians thought before a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle noting that the Prop. 71 campaign misrepresented the measure in major ways. In fact, says the paper, 'Interest payments will begin immediately, paid out of the bond money itself — meaning that tens to hundreds of millions of "research" dollars must be used to pay debt service.'
    "Moreover, the law says the research money doesn't even have to be spent on embryonic stem-cell studies. It can go to 'other scientific and medical research and technologies' to be determined by the independent governing board. Topping things off is a provision that hamstrings Sacramento with respect to any changes. Prop. 71 can't be modified for three years, and then 70 percent of both Houses and the governor must approve any tinkering."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041227   Panicky liberals
    "Secularists are in a state of panic about the role of evangelical Christians in the re-election of George Bush. They actually believe that American democracy is in danger, that we are on the verge of becoming a theocracy," Gene Edward Veith writes in World, a magazine that reports the news from what it calls "a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God."
    " 'Putting God in the public square runs the risk of turning our democracy into a theocracy,' frets DeWayne Wickham in USA Today. Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald warns darkly of 'the soldiers of the new American theocracy who want to force "creation science" on the schools.'
    "Former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart warns that 'America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic. Because of this, it should concern us that declarations of "faith" are quickly becoming a condition for seeking public office.'
    "Historian Garry Wills calls Nov. 2 'the day the Enlightenment went out,' saying that with the influence of Christian 'fundamentalists,' Americans have now come to resemble the Islamic jihadists that we are fighting," Mr. Veith said.
    "According to this way of thinking, which has become commonplace in academia, evangelicals and jihadists are essentially the same. They both oppose homosexuality (as if opposing gay marriage were the same thing as stoning homosexuals to death). They are both 'anti-women' (with opposition to abortion as the moral equivalent of the utter subjugation of women in Muslim countries).
    "They are both opposed to modern science (meaning skepticism about evolution and revulsion at embryonic stem-cell research is the same as Muslim primitivism). Fundamentalists of both sides are violent, murderous and oppressive (with the war against terrorism as the moral equivalent of terrorism itself.)
    "The line of thinking considers President Bush to be no different from Osama bin Laden, Christian conservatives to be just as scary as Muslim conservatives, and America as perhaps soon resembling Afghanistan under the Taliban."
    Mr. Veith added: "Conservative Christians actually are more supportive of reason than postmodern secularists. Note, for example, who is descending into irrational hysteria."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041227   Award winners
    "A Dec. 22 press release from the interfaith Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announces the 'Ebenezer Award' for 2004: a lump of coal in a red stocking sent by FedEx to the person or group responsible for the most ridiculous affront to the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays,' " the Wall Street Journal notes.
    "This year's winner is Principal Mark Robertson of Seattle's Lake Washington High School, who canceled a performance of 'A Christmas Carol' by a private group because it might inject religion into a public school. Coming in second, with a dishonorable mention, is the Plano School District near Dallas, for 'prohibiting student speech about Christmas so severely that, [on Dec. 16], a federal court ordered the school to allow students to engage in religious expression at the school's 'Winter Break' party," the newspaper said.
    "The Becket Fund also cited Macy's for ordering employees to stop saying 'Merry Christmas' and for changing decorations to read 'Happy Holidays' or 'Season's Greetings.' As the Fund's media and legal counsel, Jared Leland, explained: 'It's ironic that the setting for the classic Christmas film "Miracle on 34th Street" ... suddenly forgot its history. Not to mention the reason why the bulk of its customers come flooding in this time of year.' "
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041227   Falwell's new group
    The Rev. Jerry Falwell has started the Faith and Values Coalition, which he describes as a "21st-century resurrection of the Moral Majority."
    The new coalition will lobby for pro-life judicial appointments; a federal amendment barring same-sex "marriage"; and the election of another conservative president in 2008, CNSNews.com reports
    Mr. Falwell, 71, said he would serve as national chairman of the new coalition for four years.
    "Following the sweeping re-election of President Bush and a new generation of conservative lawmakers nationwide, a new organization, the Faith and Values Coalition, has been launched," Mr. Falwell announced last week from his headquarters in Lynchburg, Va.
    He said the group would capitalize on the momentum of the Nov. 2 elections "to maintain an evangelical revolution of voters who will continue to go to the polls to 'vote Christian.' "
    Mathew Staver, founder and general counsel of the Orlando, Fla.-based Liberty Counsel, will serve as vice chairman of the Faith and Values Coalition. Mr. Falwell's son, Jonathan, will serve as executive director. And theologian Tim LaHaye will serve as the board chairman.
    "One of our primary commitments is to help make President Bush's second term the most successful in American history," Mr. Falwell said. "He will certainly need the consistent prayer and support of the evangelical community as he continues to spearhead the international war on terror and the effort to safeguard America."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041226    Religious order to pay millions to settle suits
    CONCORD, Calif. — A Roman Catholic religious order has agreed to pay $6.3 million to settle lawsuits brought by three former students who were sexually abused at an elite private school in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
    The largest of the three settlements, $4 million, would be one of the biggest in California for a plaintiff in a clergy sexual abuse case, attorneys and victim advocates said Friday.
    The abuse occurred when the plaintiffs, now in their 30s and 40s, attended the Concord school operated by the Christian Brothers religious order.
    The order had transferred the abuser to Concord even though he was known to have had relationships with "sexual overtones" at another school, according to a 1968 letter from a Christian Brothers provincial leader, which the order turned over as part of the lawsuit.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041226C   Children having children
 

By Larry Elder

A few years ago, I visited a friend in Cleveland's inner city. As we sat on my friend's porch, not one, but two teenage girls — visibly pregnant — walked by. My friend cheerfully called out their names. They smiled and waved back as they continued walking. I turned to my friend and said, "You see that?"
    She said, "See what?"
    I said, "That."
    She said, "What?"
    I said, "Those two girls, they're both pregnant."
    She says, "Yeah."
    I said, "What about that?"
    Pointing to houses, she said, "What about the one over here, the one over there and the one down there?"
    I said, "So this is acceptable?"
    She said, "I didn't say it was acceptable — it just is."
    Fantasia Barrino, winner of the recent "American Idol" contest and a single-parent mom, dropped out of school in ninth grade, got pregnant and gave birth at age 17. Fantasia, in a recently released CD, calls single-parent motherhood "a badge of honor." In "Baby Mama," Fantasia sings, "It's about time we had our own song. Don't know what took so long."
    While the song does talk about the struggles single parents face — "I see you get that support check in the mail, Ya open and you're like, 'What the hell.' You say, 'This ain't even half of day care.' Sayin' to yourself, 'This here ain't fair.' To all my girls who don't get no help. Who gotta do everything by yourself. ... " — nevertheless, in referring to single parenting, she says, "Cuz now-a-days it like a badge of honor."
    A badge of honor?
    According to the World Almanac 2005 — which now lists illegitimate birthrates under the politically correct heading "Nonmarital Childbearing" — nearly 70 percent of black children are born outside of wedlock. With Latinos, the rate is almost 45 percent, whites nearly 30 percent, and Asians 15 percent. Overall, about 34 percent of America's children today are born outside of wedlock.
    According to the Heritage Foundation, children born outside of wedlock were more likely to engage in early sexual activity and have children out of wedlock. The report further stated, "Compared to children living with both biological parents in similar socioeconomic circumstances, children of never-married mothers exhibit 68 percent more antisocial behavior, 24 percent more headstrong behavior, 33 percent more hyperactive behavior, 78 percent more peer conflict, and 53 percent more dependency. Overall, children of never-married mothers have behavioral problems that score nearly 3 times higher than children raised in comparable intact families."
    About her life before hitting it big in "American Idol," Fantasia said, "I wasn't working. I wasn't doing anything, and Zion [her daughter] wasn't in day care.... I had my own little apartment [presumably at taxpayers' expense] and I would do her hair all day, watch movies. ... We would play dress-up. We had nothing to do." Her baby's father, Brandel Shouse, was arrested and pled guilty for assaulting Fantasia. (They are said to be on cordial terms, now.)
    A badge of honor? Tell that to Coach A.
    Coach Ted Anderson worked as the basketball coach for the Memphis, Tenn., Hamilton High Wildcats for more than 20 years. Memphis, until recently, allowed corporal punishment, one of the few big-city districts that did so. Coach Anderson, who, himself, attended Hamilton High — where he received the occasional paddling — earned a reputation as a basketball coach for being hardworking, fearsome, and who would, from time to time, administer the correctional swat.
    Mr. Anderson said he swatted kids for tardiness, unruliness, disrespectful behavior, poor grades and — twice in his career — for poor play. Unfortunately for Coach A., at a tournament during halftime, he swatted three players for poor play, one parent complained and despite no other complaint in his 20-years as Hamilton's basketball coach, the school board fired him as coach and transferred him to a middle school class.
    During Coach Anderson's career, single moms brought their children to him precisely because they wanted their sons to see a strong male figure, a presence frequently absent from the kids' lives.
    One of Anderson's former student athletes told me he credits Anderson with his success in life and in business. Several other former students rallied to his support in urging the district to reconsider.
    Many studies show the best predictor of violent crime in a community is not the race or economic status, but the proportion of households without fathers. Most juvenile and adult offenders come from homes without fathers.
    In his book "My Father's Face," James Robison wrote about a chaplain in a federal penitentiary who decided to improve morale. He persuaded a greeting card company to supply him with Mother's Day cards for the inmates. The prisoners enthusiastically sent each mom a card. Morale improved so dramatically the chaplain decided to repeat the success on Father's Day. The chaplain offered the cards to the inmates. But not one inmate sent a card to his father. Not one.
    A badge of honor?

    Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated columnist.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041226C   Euthanasia . . . or a 'Dutch treat'
 

By Bob Barr

One Halloween, when I was probably about 8, my older sister and I were festooned in "Dutch" garb by my Mom. We wore cute little wooden Dutch shoes and what we took to be "Dutch" clothes, much as we imagine Hans Brinker and sister would wear. "Aren't they cute," were comments I recall.
    Not nowadays. Dressing up in "Dutch" regalia would entail dressing like the Grim Reaper. The Netherlands, once the Land of Tulips and Windmills, is now known worldwide not for flowers and irrigation ingenuity, but for death and abortion. Were he attempting to escape allied justice today, Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death," would not have make his way to the jungles of Brazil; the Netherlands would probably welcome him with open arms. It's the new "Dutch Treat."
    Several years ago, the Netherlands placed itself with pride at the cutting edge of modern decadence by enacting the world's most liberal assisted-suicide laws. The country' powerful medical community now has taken a quantum leap toward a society that values death over life, in proposed new legal guidelines that would turn that country's assisted-suicide law into a mandate for medical homicide.
    Currently, Dutch law permits doctors to administer a lethal dose of muscle relaxants and sedatives to terminally ill patients, at their request. The Groningen Protocol, as it is known, would permit doctors to euthanize patients who, according to the opinion of these "doctors" and other medical "experts," lack "free will." This category of unfortunate individuals would include newborn babies, persons in irreversible comas and persons with severe mental retardation.
    Worse, the Groningen hospital, after which the protocol is named, has already begun to administer the procedure, even without formal legal sanction. To date, Dutch prosecutors have refused to step in. Hey, if we can get rid of society's "deadwood," why let niceties of law or morality get in the way?
    Regardless of how one feels about euthanasia of the willing, I would hope most people agree ending someone's life without consent puts us at the top of a deeply disturbing, indeed frightening, slippery slope.
    When the person to be euthanized gives his or her consent, the line of contention rests between the innate value of human life (and the chance that consent will not be informed) and what control an individual should have over his or her ultimate fate. That, in my estimation, is a legitimately contested debate.
    Groningen's guidelines, however, involve the actual medical homicide of individuals who can't protest or defend themselves. I have no doubt that if the Groningen Protocol becomes official, parents who don't want to contend with raising a disabled child will have their baby or young child euthanized, even if the baby has a fighting chance at a meaningful life. Likewise, family members who fear the burden of coping with a disabled or comatose loved one will seek his or her involuntary euthanasia out of their own self-interest.
    Medical ethics has to be one of the most maddeningly complex fields of endeavor on the planet. The mental agility needed to contend with some of these issues is considerable. There is, however, one basic starting point for any ethical inquiry in medicine; one which, though not actually in the Hippocratic Oath, encapsulates its message. It is: "above all, do no harm." In other words, life of any quality is sacred in itself, and throughout the morass of ethical issues that arise in the practice of medicine and healing, the alpha and omega of everything should be the preserving of life.
    The idea of involuntary euthanasia stands foursquare against that presumption in favor of human life. In fact, the Groningen philosophy is one in which the patient's life becomes disposable when the quality of that life drops below a certain threshold, and when its maintenance becomes inconvenient to the patient's kin or the state. The premium placed in traditional medical ethics on preserving life as an end in itself has been lost entirely in the thicket of a misguided communalism.
    In America, this almost cavalier attitude toward life as a thing of independent value poses unique problems, as the right to life here stands on the same shelf as the right to liberty. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." This basic conviction — that our right to speak and think freely, for instance, comes from the same font as the right to live, and that both are equally inviolate — does not end at the hospital doors. Moreover, it ought to apply as much to patients whose mental faculties are insufficient to formulate consent as it is to the rest of us. We — at least the majority of Americans — do not value life on a sliding scale. All are equal.
    Indeed, the idea of involuntary euthanasia evokes the very same disregard for the rights of the individual that pervaded the worst historical excesses of the American legal system against the physically and mentally disabled. For example, in 1927, the Supreme Court found constitutional the forced sterilization of a woman whose mother and daughter were both retarded. Under law, the Supreme Court reasoned, society had a valid interest in making this woman barren because she would pollute it with defective children (though the opinion puts it more artfully). One has to admit that, even the most liberal of today's Supreme Court justices are better than the crowd that rendered that opinion.
    Similarly, one could compare the deprivation of liberty in the case of involuntary euthanasia to that in the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill. Until only a couple of decades ago, the commitment rules in America were quite lax. People with varying degrees of mental illness could be committed indefinitely in state institutions, where they could be subjected to all flavors of mistreatment (think, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), up to and including forced medical experimentation. During the 1950s, close to 600,000 people lived in state mental institutions; today that has been reduced to only about 100,000. Again, the same sort of disregard for individual liberty that justified those commitment rules undergirds the premises behind involuntary euthanasia.
    Anyone considering having a child while in the Netherlands, or traveling there with someone whom the Dutch authorities might consider disabled, should think again.

    Bob Barr, a former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, is a columnist for United Press International. This article special to The Washington Times.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041228E   A renaissance for marriage

Marriage is making a comeback. Or, at least, that's what a panel of 140 observers of marriage including James Q. Wilson and George Gallup, Jr. said last week in a heartening new statement on our oldest social institution. The "marriage movement," as the authors are calling themselves, compiled existing marriage research to report that a number of key indicators — divorce, unwed childbirth and teen pregnancy, among others — are either pointing in positive directions or have stopped moving in negative ones for the first time in decades. The document, along with other studies making similar conclusions, suggests that maybe some changes for the good in our social attitudes are underway.
    The drop in teen pregnancy is the most dramatic: A 10 percent decline in two years. In 2002, the latest year for which we have data, there were 42.9 births per thousand women aged 15-19. That's down 5 percent from 2001, when 45.3 per thousand occurred. It's down 10 percent from 2000, when 47.7 births per thousand occurred. Looking at the numbers for early teenagers, the drop was even more dramatic: Pregnancies among girls aged 15-17 were down 14 percent compared with 2000.
    An apparent levelling-off of the divorce rate has taken place, too. The data aren't perfect — some states, including California and Colorado, don't even keep track of divorce — but the numbers the authors point to, collected by the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that the divorce rate decreased slightly from 1991?2001 in the states that do collect data. In some years, the absolute number of divorces actually seems to have decreased; the NCHS recorded more than 3,000 fewer divorces in 1999 than in 1998 despite a growing population. Americans are still quite divorce-prone: There were nearly a million divorces in 2000. But we are now less likely to divorce than at any time in recent decades.
    Then there is unwed childbearing, which has stopped growing relative to the population and hasn't changed much since 1995. As the NCHS data tell it, 43.7 births per thousand unmarried women took place in 2002, down slightly from 2001 with 43.8 per thousand, reversing a decades-long growth trend. In absolute terms there are more children born to unmarried women than ever — over 1.3 million in 2002, the highest number in the six decades for which we have data — but as a percentage of the population it has evened off.
    Even marital happiness seems to have levelled off, at least to judge by survey data. Data from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago show that the percentage growth in people who say they are dissatisfied with their marriages started declining quickly in the 1970s and continued to do so through the early 1990s, but now have bottomed out. We're not regaining the numbers lost in the 1970s and 1980s, but at least we're getting no worse.
    Some of the most promising indicators are the ones on blacks. From 1995 to 2000, the proportion of black children living with a married couple increased by about 4 percent. As an analysis by the Center on Budgetary and Policy Priorities shows, the figure for Americans overall seems to have improved slightly, by 1.5 percent, but the gains were much greater for blacks. Maybe the calls for black fathers to become more involved have been heeded after all.
    It's hard to know exactly why these indicators have improved, and there may be reasons to think the changes owe less to attitudinal shifts than we might hope. Immigration may have changed them, for instance, by shifting overall numbers in more conservative directions on matters of family and marriage. Whatever the reason, the authors sound an encouraging note. "For the first time in several generations," they write, "those working for the renewal of marriage in the United States may have the wind at their backs."
    To take advantage, they're aiming for what they call a marriage renaissance in the United States, beginning with heightened awareness of marriage's value as a social institution, its relative decline in recent decades and the recent comeback the numbers are suggesting. The note of optimism they sound is a good beginning. Marriage's future "is an event in freedom, dependent upon the conscious choices that we make as individuals and as people," the authors continue. "There is nothing inevitable about the decline of marriage in America." We agree, and we hope the changing marriage winds continue to fill their sails.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041228L   The role of the church
     In response to your article about the religious left attempting to broaden "moral values" to include "economic justice," I view with skepticism those in the religious left who want to use the power of the government to push a social agenda that broadens moral values to include economic justice ("Economic morality?" Culture, et cetera, Thursday).
    Are they not aware that the more we are taxed and the more government does, the fewer the reasons we have to rely on the benevolence of the church? Will the government also pay for mission projects in Africa?
    One just has to look at what happened to the churches in socialist Europe. They have become irrelevant to any agenda, social or spiritual, as governments have taken over an expansive role.
    There is no doubt the leadership of liberal denominations like the United Methodist Church would rather talk about the poor, the needy, and the homeless, because if their flock knew where their church stands on abortion, homosexual rights and "marriage," gun control, and capital punishment, perhaps the tithing would not be as reliably blind. Again, we conservatives are the intolerant.

    BORIS NAZAROFF
    Sterling
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041228L   Beware the slippery slope
    Bob Barr wisely warns of the Dutch euthanasia policy, most recently exposed in the province of Groningen, that would permit "the actual medical homicide of individuals who can't protest or defend themselves" ("Euthanasia ... or a 'Dutch treat'," Commentary, Sunday).
    I heard about this when I traveled to the Netherlands to research its liberal euthanasia policy. I interviewed Dutch citizen Henk Reitsema, who related how his beloved grandfather, a cancer patient, naively asked a nursing home doctor in Groningen for relief of a painful thrombosis in his leg. The "compassionate" Dutch physician, trained in a medical culture that has promoted euthanasia more aggressively than palliative care, instead withheld food and water from the elder Mr. Reitsema while administering lethal doses of morphine.
    Family members discovered this too late, and their beloved grandfather died at the hands of a physician who deemed his life not worth living. The news media eventually uncovered records suggesting that the nursing home had a "bed-clearing" policy of involuntary euthanasia.
    "The family wanted to press charges against the doctor," Mr. Reitsema explained to me, "and collected some of the data for that. But it proved to be a no-win situation. Only the most extremely harsh cases ever come to court, and even then, the approach of the court is always extremely lenient. It's always in favor of the doctors: 'Maybe a judgment error.' "
    Unfazed by such "judgment errors," Groningen University Hospital has reportedly empowered its doctors to euthanize certain children under the age of 12. Like all other supposed restraints against medical killings, the Groningen protocol "safeguards" are virtually unenforceable — the unassailable doctors must simply diagnose the child as having an "incurable illness" or "intolerable" suffering.
    Don't think the flood of nonvoluntary medical deaths in Holland, which officially number more than 1,000 a year, will remain behind Dutch dikes. Oregon now sanctions assisted suicides and shrouds them in a veil of state secrecy. Legislatures and voters in other states, including Hawaii, Michigan, Maine, California and Vermont, have also considered doctor-assisted death bills and initiatives.
    Americans would do well to examine how the Dutch euthanasia and assisted suicide model has falsely promoted libertarianism and patient autonomy while granting doctors virtually unchecked power over life and death. Physicians today can draw from the highest technological advances in pain relief to provide effective consolation to suffering patients, yet restrictions have chilled aggressive use of this pain technology. The answer to suffering near the natural end of life is not to empower doctors to kill, but to empower them to ethically and compassionately comfort their patients.

    JONATHAN IMBODY
    Senior policy analyst
    Christian Medical Association
    Washington Bureau
    Ashburn, Va.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041228M   Deadbeat defense removed

TOWSON, Md. (AP) — Until recently, judges in Baltimore County could order parents to pay child support. They could direct employers to subtract the payments directly from parents' paychecks, and they could send some nonpaying parents to jail for not obeying orders.
    But judges could do nothing about the one problem they hear most frequently from parents behind in child-support payments: They cannot find a job.
    A new county initiative — developed in large part by Judge John O. Hennegan and funded through a $150,800 federal grant — aims to address that problem. Begun this month, Baltimore County's Family Employment and Support Program pairs chronic underpayers with an employment coordinator who meets weekly with the parent to help him find a full-time job and monitor his child-support payments.
    Participants must show evidence that they have applied for at least four jobs a week, said Janet Glover-Kerkvliet, the first of two court employment coordinators to be hired with the grant money. (The other is expected to be hired next month.)
    "When we see they're serious about getting a job, we'll start marketing them through our network of employers," Mrs. Glover-Kerkvliet told the Baltimore Sun.
    After only two mornings of court hearings, Mrs. Glover-Kerkvliet enrolled about a dozen parents in the program.
    Susan Engle Parks, special counsel for the Baltimore County Office of Child Support, said she is eager to see what kinds of results the employment coordinators get with the parents — mostly fathers — who say they can't pay child support because they don't have a job.
    "It's an opportunity to take that defense away," she said. "We'll say, 'Fine, we'll help you find a job.' That way, we weed out the ones who really can't find work from the ones who are just not paying because they don't like the mothers or for whatever other reason."
    Baltimore County justice system officials estimate that $30 million in unpaid child support is owed in the county. That figure has climbed to more than $92 billion nationally, according to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. In Maryland, $1.4 billion in unpaid child support has accumulated, the office said.
    Judge Hennegan is blunt about the options of the nonpaying parents who reach his courtroom.
    "It's jail or this program," he said.
    The project is an attractive alternative for parents facing the prospect of time behind bars for not paying child support.
    "Jail is like a last resort, for people who have committed a crime," said Rashid M. Hall, 30, who agreed to participate in the new employment program and, according to court records, owes about $20,000 in child support. "Is not paying a bill really a crime? Putting somebody in a cage, that's not an answer."
    With a 5-year-old boy, an infant son and his wife of five years working full time as a nurse, Mr. Hall said he has been the Owings Mills family's stay-at-home dad.
    The child to whom he owes child support is an 11-year-old boy he says he has never met — the result of a fling he had in his hometown of Parsons, Kan., after his high school graduation, he said.
    Mr. Hall was ordered in November 1994 to pay $100 a month in child support and $25 a month toward the amount he owed but had not paid since the child's birth, court records show.
    Asked by Judge Hennegan what problem had kept him from getting a job to help him pay the child support he owes, Mr. Hall said, "There's no problem. I just haven't put my best foot forward."
    "Well," the judge said, "we're willing to help you do that."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041231   Public Christian symbols backed
 

By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

American Christians increasingly want their religion reflected in public symbols and language, they overwhelmingly reject homosexual clergy, and the largely unchurched West Coast is showing signs of spiritual growth, evangelical Christian pollster George Barna says.
    The survey found some things to praise about American religiosity, but also found much more to criticize, particularly in matters relating to the depth of American Christians' faith.
    For example, Mr. Barna said, the typical American adult watches football games more often than he attends worship services, and tithing, the practice of giving a tenth of one's income to the church, is "pitifully uncommon" among Christians and "almost nonexistent" among people younger than 40.
    Only about 7 percent of all born-again Christians tithe, said Mr. Barna, who recently released his annual roundup of the information gleaned from 10,000 telephone interviews in multiple 2004 polls by his Ventura, Calif.,-based polling firm.
    Mr. Barna, the author of 35 books on American religious and cultural trends, was disappointed with the lackluster effects of one of the year's biggest religious stories — the blockbuster success of the Mel Gibson film "The Passion of the Christ."
     "I really thought 'The Passion' would have a much bigger and more dramatic impact than our research showed," he said. "That movie got so much buzz and made a ton of money."
    Among the other bad news about American religiosity that he noted in his year-end review was the continued rise in the number of unchurched Americans and the continuing alienation of men from churches.
    He said the number of unchurched adults has nearly doubled from 38 million adults to 75 million in the past decade. The "unchurched" trend was strongest among men, people younger than 40, singles and people living in coastal states.
    Those Christian men who say they are "deeply spiritual" and possess an "active faith" (meaning church attendance, regular prayer and Bible reading) is declining. Although men are slightly less than half of the national population, they constitute 55 percent of the unchurched, he said, and represent only 38 percent of the born-again public.
    "Men who are leaders typically aren't allowed to lead within the church," he said. "They come into an environment where the senior pastor is a teacher pretending to lead. Thus, men who are called and gifted as leaders become a threat to the pastor. For those men, church is a very frustrating place to be."
    In addition, he said, "Church is not intellectually challenging for them. Men look around and see how poorly run the ministry is — in ways they could never get away with in their business — and they're not willing to put up with that on their free time. And they don't have any meaningful relationships arising from their church."
    Mr. Barna has conducted annual reviews of American religion since 2000 and has polled the country's religious scene since 1984. This year's review singled out female pastors and senior Protestant ministers for creating such "challenging" conditions for American spirituality.
    Female pastors, Mr. Barna said, have "substantially different" theological beliefs than male ministers, tend to be more liberal, have less of a "biblical worldview," are less likely to describe themselves as born-again and are more likely to be divorced.
    Only 51 percent of all senior Protestant pastors have what Mr. Barna called "a biblical worldview," based on several criteria: believing that God is all knowing and all-powerful; that Jesus Christ never sinned; that Satan is real; that salvation only comes through faith in Christ and not by good deeds; that the Bible is accurate; that absolute moral truth exists and is described in the Bible; and that Christians should share their faith with nonbelievers.
    And for those people seeking spiritual solace, churches are "difficult to reach," he reported.
    Only 55 percent of Protestant churches polled provide callers with a human response, even after multiple attempts made by his pollsters at different times of the day on successive days. This was true, he added, even during religious holiday seasons, when seekers would be more apt to call.
    Among Mr. Barna's other findings:
    •Unlike Europeans, Americans like public displays of faith, as in the "In God We Trust" wording on their currency, the phrase "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, displays of the Ten Commandments on public property and creationism being taught in public schools.
    •Large majorities of adults reject the ordination or retention of actively homosexual clergy.
    •The greatest national increases in daily Bible reading came from Oregon, California and Washington, where 29 percent engaged in the practice in 1994, but 44 percent did in 2004, a 52 percent increase. Church attendance rose 24 percent, and small group participation went up 136 percent during the same time period in those states.
    •Black Americans were the highest ethnic group — surpassing whites, Hispanics and Asians — to exhibit evidence of their Christian beliefs. "Most blacks still find life somewhat painful, difficult and challenging," Mr. Barna said. "Their faith in Christ helps put all this into perspective and makes life tenable."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041231   U.S. pop culture seen as plague
 

By Scott Galupo
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Par Five of Five:
    Robert H. Bork remembers his ambivalence in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down and dungarees and rock music poured into the former East Germany.
    "You almost began to want to put the wall back up," says the former Supreme Court nominee, a tart critic of American popular culture.
    If there is one proposition on which Western European elites and radical Islamists, American social conservatives and snobby latte town aesthetes all seem to agree, it is this: American popular culture is a subversive thing.
    The critiques are both secular and sectarian, and they gained intensity in 2004.
    French President Jacques Chirac, during a visit to Hanoi in October, accused the United States of spreading a "generalized underculture in the world."
     This juggernaut of crassness, if unchecked, he suggested, will stamp out whatever folkways and native idiosyncrasies lie in its path.
    "All other countries would be stifled to the benefit of American culture," Mr. Chirac warned, speaking in a city once under French dominion. "If there was a single language, a single culture, it would be a real ecological disaster."
    For Islamic fundamentalists, American pop culture beckons the faithful to depravity.
    Sayyid Qutb, a founder of political Islamism, spotted the subversive potential as early as the late 1940s. Not in Manhattan or Hollywood, but in Greeley, Colo. At a church dance. While a disc jockey played the swing-era classic "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
    "The dancing intensified," wrote Qutb, an Egyptian then studying America's education system, in his influential book "Milestones." "The hall swarmed with legs. ... Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love."
    After love, license. Followed by perversion. Then chaos.

    'Global theme park'
    Things have gotten considerably racier since Harry S. Truman was president — and American pop culture has become ever more pervasive.
    The world is way more "American." The pull of our ideals, media culture and economic opportunity works in mysterious counterpoint, and often dissonantly, with the overwhelming military might and principled clout for which we have been chided of late in the court of the "world test."
    This series has considered aspects of this pervasive American influence — from ideals of freedom to language, entrepreneurial ingenuity and sports — and some of the consequences and repercussions.
    Sometimes, you'd think we were the bad guys. As it turns out, though, individual national identities tend to more than hold their own against American pop culture within their borders.
    But even so, not one of these countries is a serious rival to America as an international culture. (Maybe that's what's eating the French.)
    Our pop culture is resented in parts of the world as evidence of a poisonous contagion. "Coca-Colonization" it's been called, another takeover of the Third World, but with a twist: imposing a cookie-cutter consumerist culture from without rather than looting natural resources from within.
    American-made movies, music, television shows and pop icons are said to litter the globe, disrupting cultural ecosystems and Americanizing (read: corrupting) impressionable minds. The effects are everywhere.
    Last month, an advertisement in Jerusalem featuring "Sex and the City" actress Sarah Jessica Parker hawking soap was deemed too revealing.
    Two weeks ago, Chinese censors suspiciously eyed a poster of a semi-naked Pamela Anderson, the "Baywatch" icon, protesting the fur industry.
    Singer Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" in February was a sneak preview seen 'round the world.
    There's fear and revulsion here at home, of course, on both the left and right.
    "Jihad vs. McWorld" author Benjamin Barber, a liberal communitarian, has written that American "cultural imperialism," fueled by a global economy, will "mesmerize peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers and fast food — MTV, Macintosh and McDonald's — pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park."
    The most recent reports from the Motion Picture Association of America show that in 2003, the top five films worldwide were all American-made. Offshore box-office business overall hit $10 billion for the first time, and the MPAA attributed the growth of 5 percent to the strong performance of movies such as "Finding Nemo," "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
    In recent years, American recording artists accounted for 50 percent to 60 percent of the top 100 albums in major world markets, according to data provided by the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
    But IFPI also says that up to seven in 10 records sold worldwide carry music from artists native to the local market. In France, for example, French artists still accounted for about 60 percent of sales this year.

    Cross-pollination
    "American dominance is just a myth," says Charles Paul Freund, senior editor of Reason magazine. "The biggest films in most major markets are really not American films."
    Mr. Freund notes that Bollywood movies still rule the Indian market. Likewise in Western Europe, native films are more popular than American imports. Even the Chinese film industry may become a juggernaut within a generation.
    Cultures are cross-pollinating to compete in an increasingly global marketplace. And just as in pro sports, American music, movies and TV suck in talent from other places and recast and regurgitate them in more potent ways.
    More foreign stars are showing up in Hollywood films: Producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard plan to cast foreign actors alongside Tom Hanks in their adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code."
    For the first time a Japanese movie — this year's horror flick "Ju-on: The Grudge" — was remade for American audiences by the same director, Takashi Shimizu. And don't forget a New Zealand filmmaker, Peter Jackson, directed the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
    America imports reality-TV concepts from the United Kingdom, echoing the way "All in the Family" and "Sanford and Son" were drawn from British sitcoms back in the day. Our TV shows have to fight for foreign audiences compared with 20 years ago.
    "Seinfeld," at the peak of its U.S. ratings strength in the mid-1990s, earned only a late-night slot in Britain because its American quirkiness didn't generate demand, notes Harvey Feigenbaum, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who studies the overseas appeal of U.S. culture.
    More than 70 percent of the most popular shows in 60 different countries were produced locally in 2001, Mr. Freund says, with American programs struggling in prime-time slots.
    Mr. Feigenbaum says foreign viewers generally prefer to see their own culture beamed back from their television sets. And yet they still have a healthy appetite for American fare in a way that we don't have for theirs.
    Some competitive realities work in favor of American content. Thanks largely to spreading privatization, the number of television networks internationally has exploded, greatly expanding the demand for cheap programming.
    Stateside shows such as "ER" and "Lost" may cost oodles to produce, but they can be sold easily overseas because the fixed cost is spread over numerous buyers. Foreign production companies, by comparison, generally sell shows for one market, their own, so the full costs must be covered.
    "They're willing to suffer a drop in market share because that's what they can afford," Mr. Feigenbaum says of international networks' interest in U.S. shows.

    Whose culture?
     It's sometimes a thin line between American pop culture and "global" culture.
    "Somebody would look at Pizza Hut in Thailand and say this is American cultural imperialism," postulates Harvard University's Joseph Nye. "But wait a minute — where did pizza come from? We're a country of immigrants. Our culture is constantly changing, and we often repackage things that were cultural exports to this country."
    OK, Italian immigrants invented pizza. Optimists say globalization means more cultural choices for everyone, not global homogeneity.
     "No American artifact will 'Americanize' a foreign user any more than playing a Japanese-produced video game will make you Asian," Mr. Freund argues. "It's preposterous."
    The spread of American pop culture is potentially "a force for good," a prescription for gaining allies through attraction rather than coercion, says Mr. Nye, author of "Softpower: The Means to Success in World Politics."
    "In Iran, you'd find that the ruling mullahs would be repelled by our country," he says. "But if you look at Iranian teenagers, there's nothing they would like more than to watch an American video in the privacy of their own home."
    Mr. Nye says even a movie such as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," the screed against President Bush that recently opened in Tehran, could wind up having a counterintuitively positive effect within closed societies. He paraphrases how Soviet audiences reacted to the 1957 movie "12 Angry Men," with its narrative of American bigotry and racism: " 'If they can make that movie about themselves, they must be free.' "

    Reason to worry
    The chance that a young Middle Easterner will see expressions of freedom in American culture is, to Mr. Bork's mind, dim. Because he thinks most of what Hollywood exports is "trash."
    Of course, one man's "trash" is another's retro refinement: The biggest U.S. crossover into Europe's pop music market this year was jazz-pop singer Norah Jones, who triumphed at home as an antidote to the very sort of puerile, youth-pandering pop music that Mr. Bork detests. Her "Feels Like Home" album was a top seller in Germany, Britain, Holland and Australia.
    Sure, there's the bloody "Kill Bill" movies. But what's so "trashy" about international hits such as "Finding Nemo," Pixar's family-friendly aquatic hit? Or, more recently, "The Incredibles," which tweaks the nanny-state risk-aversion and hyper-litigiousness stifling American energy and creativity?
    Another controversial American movie — Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" — proved almost as popular overseas as the Good Book it was based on.
    Fittingly enough for our theme, the Nicolas Cage movie "National Treasure" proved to be good, clean fun and with more than one twist on American history.
    Granted, these are exceptions in artistic taste and vision. Conservatives who detest the ABC phenom "Desperate Housewives," gangsta rap and the entertainment mainstreaming of homosexuals, however, are not likely to prefer a measure of tyranny to a free culture awash in sex, violence and indecency.
    In a recent cover story in National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the conflation of American religious conservatives and Islamic fundamentalists is unfair. The former don't want to live under a theocracy; they seek no more than a return to the moral norms and restraint of the 1950s.
    Still, Mr. Bork, author of "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," thinks some conservative (not to say radical) Muslims have a legitimate point — as do American evangelicals and others on the religious right.
    "They have good reason to be very worried about" the spread of American movies, music and fashion, Mr. Bork allows. "I suppose it's better than what they have now, but I wouldn't celebrate too much if they began to adopt our popular culture."

    Power to provoke
    Mr. Freund offers an inspiring anecdote. In Talibanized Afghanistan, in 1997, all aspects of culture — movies, music, photographs, art — were strictly forbidden. Yet smuggled copies of "Titanic" (which many an American pastor preached against) found their way into Afghan homes.
    The movie was so popular that young men in the capital of Kabul wanted their hair cut in the style of star Leonardo DiCaprio. At weddings, cakes were shaped like the Titanic.
    It seems as if pieces of "Titanic," so to speak, are tastiest where local cultural cuisines don't nourish.
    So maybe American pop culture in a host of forms doesn't rock the world in quite the same way as our love of freedom, our faith, our big-heartedness, our enterprise, our language and higher education system, and our passion for winning a good ball game all do.
    But move over, Jacques Chirac. A former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, holds that America's power in the post-Cold War era continues to rest on our ability to "inspire the dreams and desires of others, thanks to the mastery of global images through film and television."
    British Invasions and Bollywoods, if not despots, have nothing to fear from our pop culture. Even in crasser forms, it likely will go on reflecting America by inspiring, challenging and provoking.
     And when not suppressed by censors or stifled by state subsidy, the individual artist, entrepreneur or pol in other lands will tend to want to compete.
    Now that's Americanization.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041230   Abstinence-education backers tout new oversight
 

By Cheryl Wetzstein
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Abstinence-education supporters are cheering the recent move of the nation's two largest abstinence-grant programs to a new — and friendlier — agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.
    The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which is led by child psychologist Wade Horn, recently received oversight of the $50 million Title V and $104 million community-based abstinence-education grant programs.
    "Wade Horn's leadership and commitment to abstinence will be a tremendous benefit to abstinence education," Bruce Cook, founder of Choosing the Best abstinence program, said of the HHS assistant secretary in charge of ACF.
    Mr. Horn "will do a wonderful job of promoting the [abstinence] message with the passion and commitment it deserves," said Libby Gray, director of the Project Reality abstinence group in Glenview, Ill.
    To other observers, moving the abstinence programs from HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration's Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) to Mr. Horn's agency is "ideology trumping science."
    Abstinence funds will become part of the same federal agency that promotes marriage and responsible fatherhood, said Marcela Howell, public-policy director at Advocates for Youth, which supports comprehensive sexuality education.
    "We're concerned about the politics that may go into the oversight of these programs," she said. Mr. Horn "clearly has an ideology to push. ... It's clearly very political."
    In an interview, Mr. Horn said that HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson moved the abstinence programs so they could be integrated into "the broader positive youth-development perspective that we have been pursuing here at ACF."
    Young people should be encouraged to make good decisions about sex, smoking, drinking, drugs, staying in school and using seat belts, said Mr. Horn, a child psychologist.
    Sexual abstinence, he added, "is the only 100 percent effective way" for a teen to avoid becoming a parent or getting a sexually transmitted disease. Therefore, he said, "The goal is to find the most effective strategies to help young people make that choice."
    A majority of teens, including almost two-thirds of girls, told a recent Gallup poll they think young people should abstain from sex until they are married.
    The reassignment of the two abstinence programs, which was authorized in the recent spending bill, comes after years of grumbling from abstinence supporters that MCHB officials didn't want to promote abstinence education as Congress narrowly defined it and sometimes gave grants to groups that also promoted the use of condoms.
    Both the 1996 Title V program and the 2000 Special Projects of Regional and National Significance Community-based Abstinence Education grants have an eight-point definition for abstinence education.
    Grant recipients are supposed to teach, among other things, that abstinence is "the expected standard" for school-age children and that nonmarital sexual activity "is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects."
    Many health experts are skeptical of such statements. For example, at a 1997 MCHB meeting, when implementation of the Title V grants were first discussed, health professionals raised concerns that the eight-point criteria was confusing, inaccurate or overly religious.
    "There's a lot of room to be creative" with the grants, an MCHB official assured them.
    Mr. Horn said he assumes that only qualified abstinence programs were funded and that his agency will be diligent in its oversight. If abstinence grant recipients are not meeting the eight-point criteria, Mr. Horn added, "They'll either have to come into compliance with the statute, or they won't be able to continue to be a grantee of this program."
    Meanwhile, a recent congressional report has escalated the ongoing debate about whether youth should be taught "only" about an abstinent lifestyle or "comprehensive" sex education that also includes instruction about condoms and birth control.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041230   Army works on marriage

HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. (AP) — When Sgt. Jose Bermudez returned from Iraq early this year, he came home to a new baby and a troubled marriage.
    "We were on the brink of divorce," Mandy Bermudez said as the couple ate lunch recently with their three children, all younger than 3.
    The Bermudezes were among 300 couples with the Fort Campbell-based 101st Airborne Division who have attended "marriage enrichment" seminars provided by the Army in hopes of saving war-ravaged relationships.
    With studies showing divorce rates as high as 21 percent among couples where one spouse has been sent off to war, the Army is spending $2 million on a variety of marriage programs, including vouchers for romantic getaways to places such as the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn.
    "I've been in the Army 20 years, and I've never seen the Army pay for programs like this," said Lt. Col. Chester Egert, chaplain for the 101st.
    One program being implemented Armywide teaches couples forgiveness and the skills to communicate. It includes a 40-hour course with lessons on the dangers of alcohol and tobacco and how to recognize post-traumatic stress. Soldiers who complete the course are rewarded with promotion points and a weekend retreat with their spouse.
    "If you learn those skills, you can make an impact on the number of divorces, and the number, we think, of reports of physical violence," said Col. Glen Bloomstrom, director of ministry initiatives for the chief of chaplains.
    To make the program more desirable, commanders are encouraged to give their soldiers time off to attend. Baby-sitting often is provided.
    "What we're trying to do is change the culture, that it's OK to work on your marriage and take some time, and invest in your lifelong relationship — especially now when we're asking so much of your military spouses," Col. Bloomstrom said.
    Sgt. Bermudez said it seems as if everyone he knows at Fort Campbell is either getting a divorce or contemplating one. Many couples want decisions to be made because the division has been alerted that it could return to Iraq as early as mid-2005.
    At Fort Campbell and elsewhere, many couples got married right before one spouse left for Iraq. Others, like the Bermudezes, have been married longer but have spent little time together.
    The Bermudezes met in 2000 and married six months later. Sgt. Bermudez was sent off to Kosovo and Iraq. "We didn't know each other that well. That's part of the problem," Mrs. Bermudez said.
    Sgt. Bermudez is 26, and his wife is 25. Their second child was born while Sgt. Bermudez was in Iraq, and Mrs. Bermudez became pregnant with the third while he was home on a two-week leave.
    Mrs. Bermudez said part of the problem with their marriage was that Sgt. Bermudez had trouble adjusting to the routine she had established for herself while he was in Iraq.
    Col. Egert said the Army's effort doesn't just make for stronger families, it makes for better soldiers.
    "Soldiers will come apart in Afghanistan and Iraq. They'll absolutely collapse if they think their wife is going to leave them or their husband is going to leave them," he said.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041230   Backing Congress
    The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) announced yesterday that it has filed an amicus brief on behalf of 31 members of Congress that asks a federal appeals court in San Francisco to overturn a lower court ruling that found the national ban on partial-birth abortion unconstitutional.
    The brief was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and supports the Justice Department's position that the ban is constitutional.
    "We are privileged to represent members of Congress to bring an end to what can only be described as infanticide," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the ACLJ, which specializes in constitutional law.
    The decision by a federal judge in San Francisco that the ACLJ and 31 Republicans in the House are seeking to overturn was among three rulings by federal judges in different judicial districts that found the national ban on partial-birth abortion unlawful. ACLJ has filed amicus briefs with appellate courts in two of the circuits and will file one in the third next month.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

M041230   Hollywood drag
    "When millions get TV news from Jon Stewart, Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary is boffo box office and Bruce Springsteen rocks through battleground states, the days when vote-seeking via MTV or Arsenio Hall seemed novel are long gone," John Harwood writes in the Wall Street Journal.
    "Yet Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ,' a conservative favorite, took in triple the revenue of Mr. Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' and Bush ally Toby Keith appears closer to the center of political gravity than Mr. Springsteen. The mileage Republicans now gain by contrasting themselves with Hollywood liberals almost certainly exceeds the cachet — and the cash — Democrats gain from them," Mr. Harwood said.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

H041230   ARKANSAS  Judge strikes downgay foster parent ban
    LITTLE ROCK — An Arkansas judge yesterday declared unconstitutional a state ban on placing foster children in any household with a homosexual member.
    Ruling in a case brought by the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox said the state Child Welfare Agency Review board had overstepped its authority by trying to regulate "public morality."
    At issue was a 1999 board regulation that said homosexuals cannot become foster parents, and foster children cannot be placed in any home with a homosexual member under its roof.
    The ACLU had argued that the regulation violates the equal-protection rights of homosexuals. But the judge's ruling did not turn on that argument.
    Instead, he said that the Arkansas legislature gave the child-welfare board the power to "promote the health, safety and welfare of children," and that the ban does not accomplish that. He said that the regulation instead seeks to regulate "public morality" — something the board was not given the authority to do.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041231   PENNSYLVANIA   Leaders say gay issue threatens church unity
    VALLEY FORGE — The 25 regional executives of the 1.5 million-member American Baptist Churches USA jointly announced that the denomination's ongoing controversy over homosexuality "threatens to break us apart."
    A pastoral statement to "preserve unity," released after a meeting of denomination leaders, said they agreed to "voluntarily refrain from" naming sexually active homosexuals to national and regional positions. The church leaders also said they would not participate in same-sex "marriage" ceremonies, but pledged to shun "homophobic behavior."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

E041229   WASHINGTON   Five Christian schools join to create system
    EVERETT — Five Christian schools are combining to create a new school system in Snohomish County and north Seattle. The schools have more than 1,200 students.
    By combining resources, school officials hope to offer more specialized classes, such as advanced placement courses for college-bound students.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

M041230C   You go to war with the press you have
 

By Helmut Sonnenfeldt/Ron Nessen

"You go to war with the press coverage you have. It's not the press coverage you might want or wish to have."
    Perhaps Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have said that in response to Spec. Thomas "Jerry" Wilson's famous question about scavenging for scrap metal to armor his unit's Humvees. Actually, the episode's press coverage could have used armor plating. A careful examination suggests the media uproar was shot full of holes.
    First, it turns out the question did not originate with Spec. Wilson, of the Army's 278th Regimental Combat Team. He was prompted to ask Mr. Rumsfeld about armor plating by a reporter, Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press. The reporter's role was rarely mentioned in subsequent coverage, although on a few occasions Mr. Pitts was praised for using a soldier to get information from Mr. Rumsfeld that he didn't think he could get directly.
    Second, press coverage — particularly on television — provided a misleadingly truncated version of Mr. Rumsfeld's full answer to the Pitts/Wilson question during a "Town Hall Meeting" in Kuwait as the soldier's unit was about to ship out to Iraq.
    This is the only portion of Mr. Rumsfeld's answer that was — and is still being — quoted endlessly in newspapers and broadcast on television and radio:
    "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
    Mr. Rumsfeld's response has been repeatedly characterized as an insensitive, brusque, disrespectful, insulting putdown. And that description might be fitting if that was all the secretary said in response to the Pitts/Wilson question.
    Actually, here's Mr. Rumsfeld's full answer:
     "I talked to the general coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed, to a place where they are needed. I'm told that they are being ... I think it's something like 400 a month are being done. And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter, on the part of the Army, of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it.
    "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate they believe ... it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.
    "I can assure you that Gen. Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly Gen. Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip." And so on for another 117 words.
    The full quote gives quite a different impression of Mr. Rumsfeld's attitude than the oft-repeated mini-quote, "You go to war with the army you have," doesn't it?
    But the worst shortcoming of media coverage of this controversy was failure to report virtually all the unit's combat vehicles had already been up-armored by the Army and the rest were completed the day after Mr. Rumsfeld's Town Meeting comments to the troops in Kuwait.
    Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes was asked about the armoring controversy at an hourlong media briefing at the Pentagon on Dec. 15. He said: "When the question [to Rumsfeld] was asked, 20 vehicles remained to be up-armored at that point. We completed those 20 vehicles in the next day. And so over 800 vehicles from the 278th were up-armored, and they are part now of their total force that is operating up in Iraq."
    A reporter asked, "When you say they're 100 percent up-armored does that mean 100 percent of their requirement or 100 of their vehicles?"
    The general responded, "[A]t this point the vehicles that they're operating, that they're driving, are all up-armored."
    Did you see that quote on TV? Hear it on the radio? Read it in most newspapers? Me neither.
    Why did the media, except for The Washington Times and a few other papers, ignore the readily-available information?
    Perhaps, we would guess, it reflected the critical attitude toward conduct of the war among many reporters. No doubt it reflected anti-Rumsfeld sentiment among much of the media.
    And it may also have reflected that staple of journalism that reporters, editors and producers don't like to talk about in public — a story that's Too Good to Check.
    Reporters then, and since, have ignored Mr. Rumsfeld's full quote. And the media generally suppressed the Pentagon's detailed explanation that the 278th's Humvees were virtually all up-armored at the time. Why?
    As the saying goes, you go to press with the story you have. And you don't want a good story ruined by the facts.
    Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, is a former official at the State Department and the National Security Council. Ron Nessen, journalist in residence at Brookings, was press secretary to President Gerald R. Ford.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041230C   Democrats try to backtrack
 

By Cal Thomas

For Republicans, Social Security has been the untouchable third rail, at least until President Bush promised reformation by transformation.
    For Democrats, the third rail has been abortion — no exceptions, no restrictions, no compromise. Now some Democrats sound perhaps willing to alter their fundamentalist position on abortion to stop their electoral hemorrhaging and start winning elections again. Could they be serious?
    In a Dec. 23 New York Times story headlined "Democrats weigh de-emphasizing abortion as an issue," several prominent Democrats suggest their party should at least open its doors to abortion opponents and make abortion less central in future party campaigns.
    Some party leaders said Democrats might embrace at least one restriction, such as parental notification before a minor girl can get an abortion. Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, said, "Even I have trouble explaining to my family that we are not about killing babies."
    Maybe she is having trouble because that is precisely what is happening. More than 40 million children have been killed legally in America since the Supreme Court imposed Roe vs. Wade on the nation 32 years ago next month.
    Democrats seem unconcerned so many discarded members of the human family are not with us. These were 40 million taxpayers for new Democrat programs; at least 20 million women, some of whom might have become feminists and Democrat voters; 40 million people, one of whom might have discovered a cure for cancer or other dread diseases; 40 million once regarded as "inconvenient," but surely not if they would have been allowed to be born; 40 million branches of family trees who will, themselves, never bear fruit and whose lines have been cut off.
    Comments by Democrats trying to get back into the "moral issues" game are revealing. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, said Republicans had "been successful at painting the view of the pro-choice movement as abortion on demand — and nothing can be farther from the truth." Perhaps the senator might explain her voting record, which to a fair reader might prove abortion on demand is precisely what she favors.
    Mrs. Feinstein voted no on a criminal penalty for harming an unborn fetus during a crime (March 2004), voted no on banning partial-birth abortions except when necessary to save the mother's life (March 2003, October 1999) and voted no on maintaining the ban on military abortions (June 2000). Mrs. Feinstein was recommended by the liberal EMILY's List of pro-choice women (April 2001). She received a 100 percent rating by NARAL for her pro-choice voting record (December 2003).
    If the public perceives the Democratic Party favors abortion on demand, it is because of senators (and many other Democrats in Congress) like Dianne Feinstein who done nothing to curtail abortion.
    There is but one reason to restrict abortion: What is being killed is a human being. Any other "reason" seeks to invoke a moral standard one has just denied.
    There is a way Democrats can do something about their image and still remain "pro-choice." They can back laws requiring women to receive full disclosure before having an abortion. We do this with automobiles, food and bank loans. Consumers increasingly benefit from laws designed to give them information so their choices will be educated. Why do so many pregnant women lack information about the procedure and alternatives?
    Over the last 30 years, I have spoken to hundreds of post-abortive women. They say they would not have had abortions if they had known more about the procedure, such as sonograms, and about adoption and pregnancy help centers that care for the woman and baby before and after birth.
    What would be wrong with laws that empower women with additional information, even while abortion remains legal?
    If Democrats won't back empowerment by informing women seeking an abortion — at least giving them as much basic information as they receive before the state issues a license to drive — one can only conclude the party's reported interest in changing its image is based not on convictions but on political pragmatism. If that is their game, they will deservedly continue losing elections.
    Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

H041231E  Homosexual 'marriage' debacle

With much still to be decided, the homosexual "marriage" debate reached new heights in 2004, starting with President Bush's State of the Union Address. "Activist judges ... have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will he people and their eqqqlected representatives," he said. "On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard." A few weeks later, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that homosexuals have a state constitutional right to "marry." Shortly thereafter, the mayor of San Francisco, in a particularly disturbing display of civil disobedience, began "marrying" homosexuals, an act a mayor in upstate New York quickly copied. As Mr. Bush forewarned, the public backlash against such reckless disregard for the legal process has been swift and politically brutal.
    At this stage, it is worth asking what antagonizes the American people more: Is it the notion that homosexuals can get "married," or the way in which public officials have allowed them to do so? Advocates of homosexual "marriage" would prefer the debate to focus on the former. If it's simply a matter of old-fashioned thinking, then public officials have a "moral" duty to act as righteously as they please. Clearly, this helps explain why they chose to run roughshod over any legal impediments, believing their cause to reside on the same pedestal as the abolitionists' and civil-rights activists' of America's past. It has proven to be a tactical blunder and a conceit, to say nothing of a moral misjudgment.
    The fact is that a majority of Americans, red- and blue-staters alike, disapprove of homosexual "marriage." Yet Mr. Bush's call for a Federal Marriage Amendment in February was in response to the activists' illegal tactics, as were the 11 state constitutional amendments banning homosexual "marriage" that passed in the election. Advocates of homosexual "marriage" underestimated public support for traditional marriage. Perhaps they will learn the right lessons from it.
    It also could be too late. With the institution of marriage under threat, the people's voice has been heard. Heading into the new year, we urge policy-makers to continue seeking practical policy solutions to preserve and protect marriage as the union between a man and a woman.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

O041230E   Three wise men 'get it'?
 

By Gary J. Andres

National Democrats continue to wander in the wilderness, searching for the path to the Promised Land. Along the way, the debate is heated and emotional because it's not only a squabble about tactics, but a battle for the soul of the party.
    While the intraparty chatter will continue, there are early signs that some Democrats are beginning to find a voice more resonant with Middle America. The question is: Will the rest of its leadership listen?
    Political campaigns write a narrative about parties. And this year's story about the Democrats created a troubling caricature — a party that preached unrestrained lifestyle freedom of choice, without concomitant personal responsibility. And it was not John Kerry that frightened voters, but the image of his most visible and vocal supporters. Post-drug culture rock and rollers, posing as political advisors, so-called civil-rights activists who are really lobbyists and fundraisers for the race-baiting industry and Hollywood entertainers, so bored with their own nihilism they needed to export it to others. These faces and voices troubled many Americans, particularly those with kids, trying to navigate through an increasingly coarse and dangerous culture.
    But recently we see somewelcome strands of moderation. Three separate individuals in the news recently all point to the same conclusion: Democrats are beginning to talk more openly and are taking steps to reject a "one size fits all" ideological relativism and its cultural purveyors. In this holiday season, let's call them the Three Wise Men, all on the same pilgrimage, with slightly different gifts, talents and missions, but trying to find the same political Promised Land.
    The first Wise Man is Al From, CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council. In an essay titled "The Road Back," (co-authored with Bruce Reed and published in Blueprint on Dec. 13, 2004). Mr. From has a literary "Sister Souljah moment" with the cultural left that Mr. Kerry should have had. "We must leave no doubt that Michael Moore neither represents nor defines our party," Mr. From writes. "We need to lead, not follow, in the family values debate, by pressing our own ideas to give parents more tools to protect their children from a coarsening culture."
    Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the second Wise Man, attempting to implement some of Mr. From's suggestions. The Democratic Illinois governor made news recently by announcing a push for state legislation making it harder for kids under 18 to purchase violent or sexually explicit videos.
    Games like "Grand Theft Auto" are the target of Mr. Blagojevich's efforts. They allow players to visit a prostitute and then "kill her if you don't want to pay her," according to Joanne Cantor, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, in a Dec. 16 Washington Post article.
    Whether Mr. Blagojevich's efforts will genuinely change cultural coarseness is debatable. Yet there is another motive behind his actions. He is doing something else the Kerry campaign refused to do: impose his personal values in the political arena. Voters may disagree with the effectiveness of his tactics, but they will likely admire his resolve to address the problem.
    The final Wise Man is Tim Roemer, who may run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Roemer, a middle-of-the-road former congressman from red-state Indiana, had a strong pro-life voting record in the House and most recently served as a member of the September 11 commission. That he could be a viable candidate for the post, as evidenced by the endorsements he received from the Democrats' two top congressional leaders, Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, signals another possible pragmatic shift on the part of the Democrats.
    A new party chair cannot alone remake the party's image with voters who believe Democrats have lost their way. Yet it is clear that a pro-life former lawmaker from Indiana would probably not have been Mr. Kerry's pick for the party had he won the presidency. "Something's changing," a House GOP leadership aide told me. "I think these are all signs that the Democrats are starting to get it."
    Perhaps. It's too early to tell what impact the Three Wise Men will have on the Democrats. Will the party leaders follow their lead and signal a renewed openness to more moderate-to-conservative social views? Or will they pursue a path to political oblivion, led by other priests who dogmatically insist the party worship at the altar of the cultural left? Stay tuned.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041230L   Stop obstructing nominees
    When the 109th Congress convenes Tuesday, President Bush will courageously and justifiably resubmit 20 qualified people for federal judgeships ("Bush resends 20 court nominees," Page 1, Friday) whose nominations were either held in committee or threatened with a filibuster by Democrats on the Senate floor. But to Democrats, qualifications don't matter, only ideology.
    Opposition to the nomination of Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, for example, was supposedly due to his deeply held personal beliefs on abortion. But how is it that senators can claim to be "personally opposed" to abortion while defending a women's "right to choose," but not judges?
    The "crime" of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, President Bush's nominee to the 5th Circuit, who graduated in the top of her class from Baylor Law School and earned the highest score on the Texas bar exam, was to be called "anti-choice" because she once upheld Texas' parental-notification law, a view supported by more than two-thirds of the American people and the U.S. Supreme Court. Former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, Vermont Democrat, cited it as an example of "her extremism."
    California Supreme Court Associate Justice Janice Rogers Brown, the daughter of black Alabama sharecroppers and Mr. Bush's nominee for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been denounced as another Clarence Thomas, primarily for writing the majority opinion upholding Proposition 209, which dramatically changed affirmative action in California.
    The filibusters by Senate Democrats had nothing to do with qualifications. It was about their desire to keep the courts at all levels in the hands of those who believe in a "living Constitution" that should be interpreted by liberal judges who legislate from the bench based on the agenda and passions of the moment, not as written by the Founding Fathers.
    I hope the defeat of Sen. Tom Daschle will be a reminder to them that while "advise and consent" is fine with voters, "block and obstruct" is not.

    DANIEL JOHN SOBIESKI
    Chicago
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041229L   Government, faith and Christmas
    The attempts around the country to eliminate the term Christmas are being perpetrated largely in the name of political correctness — to avoid offending anyone whose beliefs would exclude them from Christmas celebrations ("Revival rescues Christmas, McCarrick says," Page 1, Monday).
    These efforts represent not secularism but the standard liberal, subjectivist philosophy of multiculturalism, which seeks to prohibit any "offensive" actions and words — and it is a philosophy that should be denounced.
    Christmas can be celebrated as an entirely secular holiday, and public schools should be permitted to do so. The prohibition against the endorsement of religion by government entities, however, is a different matter: It is a constitutional issue of separation of church and state. Though public schools may celebrate Christmas, they have no right to make it into a religious observance by featuring explicitly religious themes such as the Nativity.
    The essential point that needs to be emphasized in this issue is that the separation of church and state is a principle that is not synonymous with the politically correct notion of showing "sensitivity" to everyone's beliefs.
    The government may — and should — engage in actions that offend certain viewpoints, such as the viewpoints that are hostile to freedom and individual rights; government must, however — in order to preserve freedom and individual rights — refrain from supporting religion.

    YARON BROOK
    President
    Ayn Rand Institute
    Irvine, Calif.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

R041229L   Democracts need new 'old' ideas?
    The Democrats' devotion to secular rationalism has been devastating to both itself and, more important, the country ("Liberalism's classical roots," Op-Ed, yesterday).
    Their belief in only the here and now is not a courageous way of thinking. Socrates pointed out 2,400 years ago that such a haughty belief in the power of man's ideas and not in something superior to man is really a fear of thinking about the beyond. It is being afraid of death, which is the kind of thinking that misleads man into thinking he is wise when he is not wise.
    Unfortunately, the other party is not much different. It professes a more open allegiance to a superior being, yet still believes as much as the Democrats in man's power to control his own destiny with a sense of knowledge about the world that none of us truly possesses.
    Thus, the world view of most politicians is to rely on the secular notions of democracy, freedom, economic development and market forces as if they have a consciousness that will guide our world toward a better place. We believe these wonderful ideas alone will bring us wealth and prosperity, and thus we will be good and live happily ever after.
    Yet who among us would be willing to consider something else Socrates said — that wealth does not create goodness; goodness creates wealth? Man's ideas must be subservient to our Creator's purpose, not just our own. Ideas that are not linked to something beyond our own wants and wishes will be only fraudulent wisdom. Perhaps both our parties need to return to the real classical definition of liberalism — I know that I do not know, and thus my deliberation of ideas should always be done with a real sense of humility.
    We are living in a terrible age. The threat of terrorism and the push to eliminate the very idea of a superior being are realities that will not do any of us any good. Unless we return to the roots of Western thought and to the Judeo-Christian belief in a kind and just God who has a purpose for all of mankind, we will continue to unravel within a world of our own undoing.

    ANDREW MCCARTHY
    Leesburg, Va.
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

L041239E   The Democrats' filibuster

Two days after he won re-election by more than three million votes and helped to increase the Republican Senate majority from 51 members to 55, President Bush told reporters that he had earned "political capital" in the campaign, adding: "[N]ow I intend to spend it." It should hardly be surprising, therefore, that one of his first actions following his solid victory will be the renomination of 20 federal judges whom the Senate failed to confirm during the president's first term.
    It is worth recalling that Mr. Bush campaigned throughout 2004 against the Democrats' obstructionism in the Senate, which was most clearly epitomized by the unprecedented filibuster campaign the minority party waged against 10 judicial nominees to the nation's circuit courts of appeal. Indeed, the president's coattails played an indispensable role in ousting Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the leader of the filibuster campaign whose judicial obstructionism played a major role in his electoral defeat.
    Arguing that "the Senate has a constitutional obligation to vote up or down on a president's judicial nominees," the White House announced last week that "the president intends to nominate" 20 individuals "who did not receive up or down votes in the president's first term." Sixteen of those individuals were nominated more than a year ago, including five appellate-court nominees who were first nominated in 2001.
    During the 108th Congress, in a campaign of unprecedented scope and breadth, Democratic senators successfully voted 20 times to deny cloture on judicial nominees. Invoking cloture would have ended the Democratic filibusters being waged to prevent an up or down vote for the 10 nominees to the appellate courts.
    Indicative of their viciousness, consider the campaign Democrats waged against Miguel Estrada, whom President Bush nominated in 2001 and 2003 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, widely considered to be the most powerful federal court below the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Estrada arrived in the United States from Honduras at the age of 17; taught himself English; graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia; and worked as an editor of the Harvard Law Review before graduating magna cum laude; and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Mr. Estrada later argued 15 cases (and won 10) before the U.S. Supreme Court. Nevertheless, De