The tensions between Israel and the Palestinians in the neighboring West Bank and Gaza Strip, including many of the Palestinians resident in Israel, seem to grow more severe week by week, without, so far, having resulted in a gigantic explosion. Because American foreign policy in the Middle East is extremely hampered by the Israeli-Palestinian tensions, we are very uneasy about how we can handle our problems with Iraq and, indeed, with the whole Muslim-related terrorist problem. If we attack Iraq and the Iraqi government, that is to say, Saddam Hussein, decides to risk everything and attack Israel, even though Israel has not provoked him, much less given him a legitimate casus belli, Israel is virtually certain to retaliate, perhaps with nuclear weapons. The result might be a general war in the Middle East, possibly involving other Muslim nations, perhaps even India and Russia. The threat of a conflagration involving the whole world is not excluded.

How can the situation be calmed down, eventually resolved? The United States government, at last hearing, wants the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank. However, it is not at all certain that the Palestinians will be satisfied with that, that they will not consider such a development as a first big step toward throwing Israel into the sea. Is there nothing that can be done to create a stable and peaceful situation?

The middle of the last century offers an example of how an equally dangerous situation was resolved, not all that justly, but in a way that seems to have calmed what otherwise would have been festering tensions in central Europe, leading perhaps to the dreaded Third World War that we seem for the moment to have avoided. In the Yalta Conference, the United States and Great Britain acceded to Soviet demands, giving a very substantial part of eastern Poland to the USSR, compensating Poland with one-quarter of pre-war Germany. The evicted Poles evicted Germans in turn, and German minority populations in other eastern regions were also expelled, for example in the Sudetenland, where agitation by the pre-war German population group had led to the Munich agreements and set the stage for the outbreak of World War II. All in all, thirteen million Germans were forced out of their homes, many under the most appalling conditions, in 1945 and later.

This led to terrible suffering, as the expelled populations were resettled in East and West Germany (later the German Democratic Republic and the German Federal Republic, or Bundesrepublik). For more than a decade after the war’s end, the expelled populations dreamed of returning to their homes, lands that had been German for six centuries and more. Early in the postwar period, the expelled Germans constituted something called the “League of Those Driven from their Homeland and Deprived of Rights.” Members of this league, or Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten, as it was in German, rather quickly came to the conclusion that it was necessary to abjure any and all use of force, but for some time they hoped that they would eventually be able to “go home.”

In 1962, Marion Countess v. Dönhoff published a touching book, Before the Storm. Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia. Her family had lived in East Prussia for over six centuries, under diverse sovereigns—the Teutonic Knights, other Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, and Russians. Their extensive estates ultimately became part of Germany and remained so until 1945. On the last pages of her book, she describes the attitude that she eventually took, along with the bulk of the expelled Germans:

When it became increasingly clear that the implacable position of saying yes to the renunciation of force but no to the renunciation of territory was no longer acceptable because what is needed now is either a yes or a no, I realized that an unambiguous position was required of me emotionally as well. I chose the painful alternative of the positive yes because the negative no would have meant revenge and hatred. I do not believe that hating those who have taken over one’s homeland, and denouncing those who have chosen the road of conciliation necessarily demonstrates love for the homeland.

If Countess Dönhoff and the vast majority of German exiles had not made this decision, we would have had an explosive situation from the time that Germany began to recover and quite possibly would have experienced a third terrible European war. Apparently the possibility that was forced on the Germans who lost World War II, namely, giving up the hope of recovering their lost territories, has never seriously been proposed to or considered by the Palestinians, defeated in so many wars since the establishment of the State of Israel three years after the end of the World War. Thirteen million Germans were pressed into the remainder of Germany, horribly devastated by the war. Somehow they came to terms with their new situation and decided to accept it. Could not the huge Arab nations of the Middle East and North Africa receive the displaced Palestinians and offer them a new homeland for which they would not have to die in combat or by suicide? An impossibility? Perhaps so, indeed, probably so.

Nevertheless, it might be very constructive for the great shapers of the world to consider it, instead of confining themselves to asking how Israelis and Palestinians can be made to share the tiny territory of Israel and Palestine.

“The Cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be!” —or is it? This bold proclamation, made by the late Carl Sagan, has been the steady diet of millions of public school students for decades now. But a controversy is brewing in the State of Ohio that aims to shake the pure naturalistic science curriculum. Proponents of including “intelligent design” in the state’s science curriculum are making headway, asking Ohio’s board of education to allow teachers to “teach the controversy,” that is, teach that there are honest problems with the theory of evolution and it should not be taught as absolute dogma.

Creationism

Hence come the charges of religion being taught in state schools. Typically, those in opposition to this inclusion in the curriculum are arguing that anything pointing to the possibility of a Creator belongs in a class on comparative religion or social studies, not in a science classroom. Questioning the validity of evolution means you are promoting Divine creationism—only now it is cloaked in new terms.

According to some, this nascent concept being taught would undermine decades of advances in science, which continue to point to the truth of evolution. Only enemies of education and progress would promote otherwise, they say. In the words of Case Western University physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, who spoke before the board of education in favor of an evolution-only approach, “If Ohio enacts standards that erode the teaching of science in our high schools, we will be taking a giant step backward in our efforts to compete economically on the national and international playing fields of our modern, technological society.”

The arguments would not be complete, though, without a reference to the Scopes trial. Tim Hagan, the Democrat who challenged Gov. Bob Taft in the recent Ohio gubernatorial race, did just that. He said adopting intelligent design would take the state “back to the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ and not move it toward the 21st century.” Do we have here only a bunch of ignorant, Bible-thumping fundamentalists trying to impinge their dubious ideas on unsuspecting school children? Or do we have serious scholars and scientists honestly trying to improve the state’s science curriculum? Time is running out for both sides to make their case. Public hearings, panel discussions, and meetings by the state committee have been taking place over the last two years in anticipation of the final revisions due to have been approved in December of 2002. It is standard procedure for all subjects to receive revision to their standards, and this so happens to be science’s year.

Two groups have organized around their respective causes. The group in favor of “teaching the controversy” is called Science Excellence for all Ohians. Robert Lattimer, a research chemist who organized the group, says a change in the curriculum “would show Ohio has a willingness to be progressive on this issue and do something the people want. It’s public education, and the public should be involved in what’s taught in schools.” He’s right. According to a Cleveland Plain Dealer statewide poll, 59 percent of the state’s residents favor teaching evolution in tandem with intelligent design. The goals of the group are to have the standards show evidence challenging evolution, allow teachers to discuss the alternative theories, and include a definition of science that does not limit explanations about evolution and human origins to the natural world, to natural causes alone. The definition of science is a true sticking point. As Phillip Johnson once expressed, “As long as Darwinists control the definition of key terms [such as science], their system is unbeatable, regardless of the evidence.” The operating definition within the current curriculum assumes that all natural phenomena have nothing but natural causes, making Sagan’s aforementioned claim true. In a huge boost to the “teach the controversy” side, in March of this year, fifty-two Ohio scientists issued a statement supporting academic freedom to teach arguments for and against evolution. Experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines and occupations signed the statement. One-third of the signatories is employed by Ohio State University, the state’s flagship public university. Dr. Robert DiSilvestro, a professor at Ohio State and a signer of the document, believes many evolutionary scientists have not given Darwin’s theory enough thought. “As a scientist who has been following this debate closely, I think that a valid scientific challenge has been mounted to Darwinian orthodoxy on evolution. There are good scientific reasons to question many currently accepted ideas in this area,” he said.

The counter group, Ohio Citizens for Science, is also lobbying those involved in making the final decision. They want unquestioned evolution alone taught in the curriculum and are fighting tooth and nail not to allow any criticisms of evolution in the revised curriculum. In fact, they are favoring a more direct approach than the present curriculum offers, which, ironically, does not even include the term “evolution.” It heavily uses a phrase called “change over time.” Lynn E. Elfner, a member of Ohio’s Science Advisory Panel and chief executive of the Ohio Academy of Science, thinks the phrase “change over time” is a nonsense statement. “The wallpaper on the wall changes over time or my shoes change over time. It doesn’t tell you anything about evolution. So, the latest attempt under the standards writing process is to be as explicit as possible about what evolution is and the various aspects of it, “ he said.

As it now stands, those in favor of “teach the controversy” are in for a minor victory. According to preliminary drafts approved in October, the new standards would still heavily emphasize evolution, but they would also give teachers freedom to bring up criticisms to that theory. The clause that gives this freedom reads, “Describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” However, teachers will be encouraged to follow the guidelines emphasizing evolution, since the new student achievement tests will be based on them. The standards are also set for a revision of the previous definition of science given in the curriculum. The old language stated that “scientific knowledge is limited to natural explanations for natural phenomena based on evidence from our senses or technological extensions.” The new language will read, “Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, based on observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, and theory building, which leads to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.” This revised language allows for the introduction of scientific evidence that challenges Darwin’s theory.

These preliminary guidelines were approved on October 15, 2002, with an “intent to adopt.” On November 12 there was a public hearing regarding the issue. There were twenty-three witnesses, twenty in favor of “teaching the controversy” and only three against any challenge to evolutionary theory. The final vote to adopt the standards is scheduled for the 9th and 10th of December. We may be seeing in the important State of Ohio the admission that science is an “open” discipline, open to revision as new realities come to light. Many would like to keep the clamps down and assure everyone that there are no scientific problems with naturalistic evolution, continuing to claim that it will explain everything once we have enough evidence. Evidence is mounting, however, against its current claims, not to mention things that it cannot begin to explain. Proponents of an uncritical examination of evolution in Ohio’s curriculum are increasingly appearing to be more colored by ideology than the honest pursuit of truth.

Somewhere an evolutionist ought to be wondering, “wouldn’t you have thought we would have evolved past this nonsense?” —D.B.S.

Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, has now published a book entitled The Catholic Church and the Holocaust. As of this writing, we have not yet seen his actual text, so we can report only on the controversy, which a German edition has produced. According to idea-spektrum, the newsletter of the German Evangelical Alliance, Goldhagen wants to make the Catholic Church, or more broadly Christianity as a whole, responsible for the horrors perpetrated on the Jews of Europe under the tyrannical rule of Adolf Hitler. According to Inge Resch in idea, Goldhagen demands that 450 verses critical of the Jews be removed from the New Testament. It will not be possible to comment in detail on Mr. Goldhagen’s thesis until we read his text. However, if the idea report is accurate—and idea usually is quite reliable—then he is making an absolutely atrocious demand. Almost the last verse in the New Testament, Revelation 22:19, reads “If anyone takes away from the word of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city.” This refers explicitly to the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse itself, not to the whole Bible, but it is not an unfair extrapolation to read it as a warning against purging anything from the canonical Scriptures. In any event, Christians through the ages have understood it that way. With the exception of some of the radical critics who like to set their own judgment above the general canonical tradition, they will not be able to yield to Mr. Goldhagen’s demand for a politically corrected text. Surely the author himself must be aware of this.

What, then, is the purpose of his demand? Lutheran Pastor Thomas Mutschmann, a moderate voice in the German Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) Church, expressed the suspicion that demands will soon be made for financial compensation from the churches that use the New Testament. That seems a far-fetched suggestion, and we hope that no such thing will be attempted. A substantial part of the Jewish community recognizes that it is conservative Protestant Christians who are Israel’s most reliable allies in North America and Europe, and it is precisely such Protestants who will be most outraged by Goldhagen’s demands, before one even considers their possible exploitation as grounds for demanding financial “damages” from Christian churches. Israel is under tremendous pressure from the largely hostile Arab nations that surround her. Liberal circles in the nominally Christian West have increasingly tilted towards sympathy for the Palestinians and their demands that Israel surrender a measure of sovereignty and territory, or better yet, to abolish herself entirely. Hardly anything could be stupider and more malicious than to anger and alienate conservative Protestants by the unjustifiable demand that they mutilate the Scriptures on which their faith and their hope is based. Again, we have not yet seen Mr. Goldhagen’s text, and it may be that Pastor Mutschmann’s apprehension is totally unwarranted. Nevertheless, even making such a demand rhetorically, without any serious expectation that financial profit can be derived from it, has already created perplexity and resentment in precisely the circles on which the State of Israel can consistently rely for support. It is not only foolish, but malicious, and we hope that it will stop where it is, for it has already begun to do damage.

Costly Plunder

Perhaps there is money to be extracted from Western churches, as has already been demanded from Switzerland and other states. It is significant that it is not the government or the people of Israel who make these demands, but Western individuals who have already gained substantial “damages” and are taxing their imaginations to find grounds that will permit them to extract more. Attacking banks in Switzerland on largely specious grounds was not justified, but they targeted only a relatively small population group. Supported by extensive misinformation in the media, they did not arouse great indignation other than in little Switzerland, and did not seriously damage respect for the State of Israel in the West. To attack the churches, as Mutschmann predicts, may possibly produce some financial gains, but it would prove to be very costly plunder for the circles that pursue it and could easily produce very unfortunate effects for the State of Israel, despite the fact that once again Israel itself is not involved. There are, alas, those in the West who would be pleased to have a plausible excuse for turning their backs on the endangered state and people of Israel. For parts of the American Jewish community to present them with such an excuse in the hope of extracting money from the churches is not merely foolish, but evil.

“We are at war!” we have been told. And because we are at war, anything goes, or almost anything that our leaders think is necessary. If we are at war, with whom? With “terrorism,” with the “terrorists.” When Pierre Trudeau was Canadian prime minister, a band of Quebec separatists abducted the labor minister of that province, threatening to execute him if their demands were not met. They were not met, and the unfortunate government minister was killed. “This cannot be called anything but a cowardly murder,” Mr. Trudeau said. Words are powerful, and he was unwilling to dignify the crime with a word that refers to an act of justice, execution. In the aftermath of September 11, and in the context of repeated acts of murder in Israel and elsewhere, the word “terrorist,” like “execution,” may give a false and misleading impression. It is not the love of terror that inspires those who injure us, but something quite different, for which terror is but a convenient tool.

It is certainly not unreasonable to fear the sort of things that have been done and that may yet be done, but what is unreasonable and potentially dangerous is not to identify the problem and the people and causes responsible for it. Within a few weeks’ time, the shadowy organization known as Al-Queda and its mysterious evil genius, Osama bin Laden, were identified, and a major campaign was launched to eliminate them. The results were spectacular. With virtually no casualties on the American side, we toppled the government that was hosting bin Laden, the strange Taliban regime in Afghanistan. We gave the lie to the many threats and fears that Afghanistan, which proved unconquerable by the British and by the Soviet Union, would also stymie us. We did not, alas, succeed in capturing or killing the mastermind himself, Osama bin Laden. At first it was thought that he must have been killed in the caves of Tora Bora, but now it appears that he has escaped. Whatever the truth, his Taliban hosts were crushed, and Afghanistan is no longer under their sway.

The original threat is past, but the crimes have not ended: a bus in Israel, a nightclub in Indonesia, a hotel in Kenya: these are only a few of the many murderous attacks that continue to be carried out. Meanwhile, our national leadership has determined to direct its attention to Iraq, the medium-sized nation that we so roundly defeated in the Gulf War of 1991. What is the problem with Iraq? It is ruled by an evil man, one who has loosed awful slaughter on inhabitants of his own country. Other rulers have done that too, notably in Africa, and for the moment they are left unmenaced. Why Iraq? Iraq has, or seems to have, developed weapons of mass destruction. An elaborate team of inspectors has been dispatched by the United Nations to verify the presence or absence of such things. Is Iraq alone in possessing and seeking to possess such things? Surely not. The great powers, the United States, Russia, and China, all have them, as do middle-sized powers such as Britain and France, Iraq’s neighbor Pakistan, and Pakistan’s neighbor India, quite probably Israel, although little is said about that.

Will the United States go to war with Iraq? Elaborate preparations are being made, planned for in case the present inspections do not succeed in producing the desired results. Will such a war be justified? Is it a just war, in the sense of classical just war doctrines and international law? Indeed, it can and will be if it can be shown that Iraq represents a clear and immediate danger to others, especially but not only to ourselves. Can that be shown? And who will decide that it has been shown? According to the United States Constitution, it is Congress alone that has the power to declare war, but Congress has awarded to the President to do as he sees necessary and fit in the case of Iraq. Is there really, or will there be, a casus belli? The information, the facts, the suspicions and apprehensions that would cause such a determination to be made are known only in a rough form to the American people. We trust that they are known in much greater certainty and detail to those who will make the crucial decisions.

Again, False Fears

Iraq has been a danger to its neighbors, to Iran, and to Kuwait, where Iraqi aggression led to the Gulf War, won by the United States and several allied powers. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, is guilty of crimes without number, inferior only in scale to those of Adolf Hitler, although Hitler himself never personally bloodied his own hands in the way that seems true of Hussein. But a danger to the United States? That depends on certain assumptions. That leads us to the central point of these lines, namely, that our fears may be misdirected, and dangerously so. To conquer Iraq, defeat and dethrone Hussein? Surely that is within our power, as the much criticized “sole superpower.” But at what price? Not much to ourselves, we may think, for our technological superiority enables us to vanquish lesser opponents with scant losses on our part. What will Iraq do with its weapons of mass destruction if they exist, as they may well do? To launch them against the United States might seem to invite absolute and total destruction of all Iraq. Perhaps against Israel, that painful thorn in the side of the whole Middle Eastern Arab world. To do so would invite retaliation with the awful weapons Israel is presumed to possess, deserved retaliation. But would that not incite the surrounding Arab nations to war on Israel, and possibly on all those who in any way support it? The consequences cannot be foreseen: perhaps a world conflagration, a final, non-biblical Armageddon. To conquer Iraq might not be difficult for the United States; to endure worldwide madness surely would be.

As a nation, as Western civilization, as what remains of Christendom, we have reason to fear, and strong and courageous measures may be required of us. Unfortunately, Iraq is not itself and alone the great danger, and the elimination of Iraq would not free us. Terrorism and terrorists as such are not the danger; they are only the expression and tools of the real danger. Has no one noticed, is it not permissible to notice in our pluralistic, multicultural world, that there is a common feature of all the terrorist assaults on Israel, on New York, on a nightclub in Indonesia, on churches in Nigeria, on Christians and adherents of folk religions in the Sudan? It is Islam.

Surely it is not all of Islam, of Islam as a religion. Or so we say. Perhaps it is not. We do not want a “clash of civilizations,” war between the adherents of one great world religion and what remains of Christendom, which naming Islam as the enemy would bring about. Even though the churches may be all but moribund in Europe and strangely weakened in the United States, we are Christians in the eyes of the Muslims, and they do not like what they see. In a sense even the small number of Jews among us are seen as Christians with our persistent support of the small State of Israel. It is not our freedom, our democracy then, but rather our decadence, our idle wealth, our social and political corruption, the ease with which we accommodate ourselves to the most destructive trends in art, in society, in life.

And is it not our blindness? We repeatedly refer to Islam as a “religion of peace,” as President Bush did again in addressing Muslim leaders in the United States at the beginning of Ramadan. A religion of peace that suppresses Christianity and other religions when it has the power, that fosters bloody conflicts wherever it is present? May it be so; would that it were so! However, saying it will not make it so, no matter how often we repeat that pious wish. After violence erupted in Lagos, Nigeria, when a newspaper made an unwise remark about Mohammed, the leading imam accepted the apologies repeatedly offered by the writer, but he did not apologize for the death and destruction caused by his enraged fellow Muslims. “We take our religion seriously,” he said, “and you must recognize that.” Indeed we must. We do not take our own religions seriously, at least not seriously enough to think that they could really be the target of persistent and bloody hostility on the part of another.

It is not necessary that all this must end in a hideous and frightful Armageddon, the end of our twenty-first-century sensate culture. Dangers unrecognized cannot be conquered. Islam may indeed reveal itself as a religion of peace in our new century; may it be so. But it will not be made so by our repeated declarations.

Over the door of the Busch-Reisinger Germanic Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a maxim from one of the great idealistic philosophers, Du kannst, denn du sollst—“You can, because you should.” For close to three decades the national Republican Party has included an anti-abortion plank in the party platform, but for the same period, it has remained all but impotent in implementing it. Now, after modest but significant Republican gains in the 2002 legislative elections, there is a sense of expectation, that finally the party will be able to do something to fulfill those repeated pledges and work to limit abortion.

In the last days before November 5, influential Democrats such as Senator Tom Daschle and the unsuccessful North Carolina senatorial candidate Erskine Bowles, at one time an intimate of former President Clinton, warned that a Democratic defeat would spell dreadful things for women’s “right to choose.” The election defeats they feared have happened. Will their predictions—dire in their eyes, optimistic in ours—be fulfilled? Possibly, but only if the American people, not the little body of judges who rule us, comes to its senses and realizes what we are doing to ourselves under the banner of “choice.” What is needed in the country as a whole is a coming to awareness of what we are doing to our future in the society we are making for ourselves, which Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II have called the culture of death. Ours is a society in which millionfold deaths by prenatal “termination” is the accepted way of dealing with something that ought not to be happening in the first place: millions of unwanted pregnancies. Children should be wanted, not rejected. The way to deal with the unwanted is to learn to want them, not to destroy them.

Unfortunately all too much hope is placed in the possibility of nominating “pro-life” judges and Supreme Court justices and securing their confirmation from a chastened Senate. What this means is that the political elite and much of the pro-life party are placing their hopes for change in the flawed structure that caused the disaster in the first place, giving them abortion on demand, liberal access to pornography, and other such innovative interpretations of the U. S. Constitution. What must be done is finally to arouse the American people, or at least those among us who can still think logically and still count, to what abortion is doing to the country, that is, to us. Since 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade, we have “terminated,” “safely and legally,” as President Clinton used to say, but clearly not rarely, between one-quarter and one-third of all of the babies conceived in America. The total of missing persons who would-have-been U.S. citizens is now close to 45 million. President Bush, however strong his convictions on the subject, has no authority to change any laws and rulings in force. What he can do is nominate new justices to the Supreme Court, but only, of course, when a present justice, or justices, resigns. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no guarantee that a supposedly pro-life justice will live up to the expectations placed on him or her, as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy have demonstrated on occasion. What he, and others who understand what abortion is actually doing to the nation’s women, men, and children, is to ask the public, repeatedly and insistently, is “Do you think that it is good for our nation to kill one-quarter of every new generation?” If the reply, against all reason, is Yes, then go on to ask, “Do you think that the God whom we ask to bless us will not notice that we ourselves destroy each year twenty times more developing children than American soldiers perished in the Vietnam War?” Social Security? Who will pay the payroll taxes when members of an aging “boomer” class are succeeded by a generation which they themselves decimated in the quest for convenience and ease? Will two young taxpayers gladly make up the loss in revenue from the third brother or sister who died unborn, the one who would have been there alongside them if the older generation had not been willing to sacrifice him or her to the false gods of prosperity, convenience, and affluence? Perhaps most of the population can finally be aroused and can recognize what we are doing to ourselves and our future. If so, then the recognition of the self-destructive course we have charted for ourselves will do more to reverse the destruction of the unborn than the hope for different and better justices. No President, not even the terror of the terrorists, Mr. Bush, can guarantee what five, six, or more justices, invested with absolute authority and immune to removal, will do. But what he can do is talk to the people and help them to see what they now so culpably ignore, namely, that we are on a way that may seem good and harmless, but that the end thereof is death, not just of infants, but of the nation.

• European critics of America and American culture sometimes call “us” the first country that developed from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Recent events in Charlotte, North Carolina, which proudly calls itself the Queen City, illustrate that at least a segment of the African-American population, encouraged by many tolerant whites, wants to duplicate this sudden decay on a small scale. On Veterans’ Day, a high school band from a predominantly black high school greeted the observers with a variety of sexual gestures and movements. Some viewers were amused, many were shocked, and some were disgusted. There was a swell of public indignation, and demands were made to insure that in the future the participating bands refrain from such obscene and vulgar gyrations. Unfortunately—if one is to judge by letters to the editor printed in the Charlotte Observer many black people felt that any criticism was an attack on their culture. The Observer printed a photo of demonstrators carrying placards defending “our culture.” While several correspondents criticized the vulgar performance, many white writers reproached the critics as “intolerant,” “repressive,” “puritan,” and “pharisaical,” denying the participating teenagers the right of self-expression. Charlotte is a city with a large number of vigorous churches, white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, most of the members of which one can assume were not pleased by the obscenities in the parade. Nevertheless, whatever such citizens may have thought, the operative motto for the city, it seems, is what Paul mentioned in Philippians 3:19, where he speaks of those “whose glory is their shame.”

• In an unrelated incident, in a referendum last spring, the city residents voted by a margin of about 60 to 40 against building a new basketball stadium in the central city. Nothing daunted—it was a “non-binding referendum”—it was passed, and the city council approved the construction of the new arena, at a project cost approaching one-quarter of a billion dollars. As M. Upinsky wrote, majority rule means minority rule.

• The United States Supreme Court has agreed to consider the case of the Ten Commandments. Is a public display of the Commandments compatible with the United States Constitution? Immediately after the passage of the First Amendment, President George Washington called for a day of prayer and thanksgiving to almighty God for his graciousness in permitting the establishment of our free republic. It seems absurd to claim that an amendment enacted in the context of prayer and thanksgiving to God can today be interpreted to forbid all public acknowledgement of the Creator, who endowed us with our rights.

 Notes on Sources

For “Memories of a Lost Land”, see Marion Countess v. Dönhoff, Before the Storm, tr. Jean Steinberg (New York: Knopf, 1992), pp. 203-204. “Cosmos Alone or Creator and Cosmos” was written by researcher D. Blair Smith. For “More on the Holocaust,” see idea-spektrum, Nov. 13, pp. 4-5.