LEARNING FROM A 'CHURCH' OF HATE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     Belief in God is no guarantee of goodness. Piety without ethics -- religious fanaticism -- can be a prescription for great evil, as centuries of religious brutality and bloodshed make all too clear. A millennium ago, Crusaders massacred their victims to the cry of "Deus lo volt!" - "God wills it!" Islamist radicals exclaim "Allahu Akbar" -- "God is great" -- as they behead innocent hostages and crash airliners into the World Trade Center.

     But you don't have to look back into history or to the global jihad for evidence that zealots who care more about God than about goodness bring cruelty and pain into the world. Consider instead the Westboro Baptist Church.

     A self-described "Primitive Baptist" congregation led by Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas is a fringe hate group obsessed with homosexuality. (It is not affiliated with any official Baptist convention.) It numbers only several dozen followers, most of whom are related to each other and who travel the country with picket signs insisting that America has been cursed because of its tolerance for gays.

     The essence of what the Westboro members call their "picketing ministry" is mockery of the victims of tragedy, and the cheering of deadly disasters as God’s vengeance against the wicked. They claim that they "used to pray for the good of America" but decided that the nation is beyond redemption. Accordingly, they now "pray daily for more outpourings of God's justice and wrath on this evil, hateful nation" and celebrate "hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, IEDs, collapsing mines, and more" as instruments of divine wrath.

     What the Westboro Church lacks in numbers, it more than makes up in rhetorical poison. Among the messages featured on its pickets are "God Hates Fags," "Thank God for Katrina," "God Hates Your Tears," and "Thank God for the California Fires." The group's websites proclaim gleefully that the "Utah miners are in hell," as are "the Amish children in Pennsylvania" and "Coretta Scott King . . . with her husband."

     Westboro has become especially notorious in recent years for demonstrating at the funerals of US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. "These turkeys are not heroes," one of the group’s websites sneers. "They are lazy, incompetent idiots looking for jobs because they're not qualified for honest work. They were raised on a steady diet of fag propaganda in the home, on TV, in church, in school, in mass media. . . .  They voluntarily joined a fag-infested army to fight for a fag-run country now utterly and finally forsaken by God who Himself is fighting against that country."

A Westboro Baptist Church member protested at a funeral in California. (Newscom)

     As a legal matter, it is not easy to silence such contemptible spewings. The First Amendment, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, safeguards not just "free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate." Several Legislatures have passed laws restricting protests in the vicinity of funerals, but such laws may be vulnerable on constitutional grounds. They would also have little effect on most Westboro picketing.

     A federal jury in Baltimore this week is weighing a different kind of legal challenge. The father of Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, a 20-year-old Marine killed in Iraq, is suing the Westboro church for picketing his son's funeral last year with signs reading "God Hates You" and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers." Albert Snyder argues that the picketers' unwanted presence and naked cruelty should be punished as an unlawful invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. (Full details, and a fund to help defray the Snyder family's legal costs, are at matthewsnyder.org.)

     But even if it isn't legally possible to stop the Westboro hatemongers, it is possible to learn from them. They offer a vivid demonstration of why belief in God is dangerous if it doesn't include the belief that God's foremost demand is that human beings act with kindness and decency. Fred Phelps and his followers appear to believe fervently in God. Their literature is replete with quotations from the Bible. But the only passages that appear to interest them are those that warn of God's punishment for wicked behavior. Glaringly absent from their signs, websites, and press releases is the central teaching of ethical monotheism -- not just that there is a God, but that God wants men and women to be good to each other. God does not smile on those who taunt victims instead of helping them.

     Does the Bible condemn homosexuality? Yes -- but not nearly as often as it condemns those who treat others with cruelty and injustice. Consider, for example, the message of Exodus 22 to those, like the Westboro funeral picketers, who add to the grief of widows and children:

     "You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to Me, I will surely hear their cry, and My wrath will become hot." That passage, for some reason, doesn’t seem to be included in the Westboro websites.

    To the fanatics from Topeka, no calling is higher than hating homosexuals and anyone who doesn't share that hatred. But the Bible they thump so intolerantly actually teaches something quite different:

     "He has shown you, O man, what is good," the prophet Micah said, in words that echo through the ages. "What does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" It is a shining mark in America's favor that the Westboro Baptist Church is so small.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

WILL NEWSPAPERS SURVIVE?

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 28, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     I began working for newspapers 20 years ago this week, when the Boston Herald hired me as its chief editorial writer, a job I enjoyed for six years before moving to The Boston Globe as a columnist in 1994. A career in journalism was not something I had ever envisioned: When I was in second grade I announced that I was going to be a judge when I grew up. In time I earned a law degree, passed the bar exam, and joined a large law firm -- only to discover that lawyering wasn't my cup of tea, after all. But even though I never became a judge, I have had the good fortune of being paid to render opinions, and the even better fortune of doing so in the pages of a newspaper.

     One of the first things I learned in this business was how eager some people are to express their disdain for it. When I was at the Herald, people regularly told me that it was a paper they refused to read; in the years since, plenty of others have made sure to tell me the same thing about the Globe. As I write these words, the newest e-mail in my inbox announces irately: "I won't use the NY Times to wrap fish in any more (stinks up the fish)."

     Well, sneering at the daily fishwrap is a venerable American tradition. The first newspaper published in the colonies -- Publick Occurrences -- appeared in Boston on Sept. 25, 1690, and was promptly suppressed by the authorities, who denounced its "sundry doubtful and uncertain reports." More than a century later, Thomas Jefferson declared that "the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

     Today's legions of press critics say nothing that hasn't been said before -- including by members of the press. (In 1919, H. L. Mencken described "the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort" as "ignorant . . . unfair and tyrannical . . . devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd, and dishonest.") Newspapers have always drawn fire, often deservedly. But they have also always drawn readers. Now, increasingly, they don't.

     Like most Americans over 40, I grew up in a home in which a newspaper was read every day. When my brother and sister shared a paper route in the 1970s, they delivered to virtually every house in the neighborhood. That is no longer the norm. The percentage of Americans who read a paper every day has fallen from around 70 percent in 1972 to 35 percent today. Among younger adults -- those under 30 -- newspaper-reading has become almost an eccentricity: Just 16 percent read a paper daily. Industrywide, newspaper circulation has been dropping for 20 years. What's worse, the rate of decline seems to be speeding up.

     Nobody thinks this is just a temporary setback. The disappearance of traditional newspapers is increasingly regarded as inevitable, if not already a fait accompli. "Who Killed the Newspaper?" asked The Economist in a cover story last year. Note the past tense.

     The conventional answer, of course, is that the Internet is the culprit. Readers by the millions have migrated to the Web, where news and information are typically supplied for free. In their wake, newspaper subscriptions have evaporated, advertisers have decamped, and print revenues have plummeted.

     But is the rise of the Internet really the cause of the exodus from newspapers? When I signed on 20 years ago, the slide in readership was already underway. Daily circulation was already falling. The absence of a newspaper habit among younger readers was already prompting concern. Today the crisis may be more acute, but the symptoms appeared before the World Wide Web did.

     So if the Internet isn't at the root of newspapers' woes, what is? I nominate not the computer screen, but the TV screen.

     Newspapers have been undone by the rise of television, which emphasizes stimulation over substance and fast-paced imagery over focused thought. A generation raised on TV mindlessness is a generation less equipped to read a newspaper -- and consequently less interested in doing so. It has always struck me as crazy that newspapers devote so much ink to television, tempting readers to put down the paper and turn on the tube, from which so many of them don't return.

     Then again, who knows? "I have been in the newspaper business since 1964," the celebrated political columnist Molly Ivins said at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government last fall, shortly before her death in January, "and during that entire time I have been told it's a dying industry."

     Is it possible that, against all odds and expectations, the reports of the death of American newspapers will turn out to have been greatly exaggerated? Ask me again in 20 years.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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Other than the pit bull it sounds like one of my old family get togethers.  I've gotta say, this is ignorance gone to seed.

http://www.bakersfield.com/...

ESPN 2.  Half time.  Fresno 14 - Boise 17.

http://www.militarytimes.co...

Here's my contribution to the weekly debate.  Some of the Liberals just might agree with some of this column.

_________________________________________________ ________________

THE SCOPE OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     "Do we really want presidents who sign laws that they think are unconstitutional?"

     It was a debate over the Bush administration's conduct in the war on terrorism. The discussion had turned to the president's heavy reliance on "signing statements" -- written interpretations by President Bush of bills he has signed into law, frequently including the claim that one or more sections of the new law are unconstitutional and can therefore be ignored. One of the speakers, a critic of the administration's aggressive efforts since Sept. 11, 2001, to expand presidential power, was scornful.

     "This notion that presidents in our system of government don't have to carry out laws authorized by Congress is absolutely preposterous," the speaker said. "If that were the case -- if Congress's laws are merely advisory -- why would you need a veto?" A president who disapproves of a bill should say so in a veto message -- that's why the Constitution gives him veto power in the first place. Bush's hundreds of signing statements are an "open power grab" that Americans should find intolerable. "We ought to be adamantly opposed to any claim that the president doesn't have to abide by laws that Congress has passed and he has signed."

     That may sound like Senator Hillary Clinton, who denounces the Bush administration's "concerted effort . . . to create a more powerful executive at the expense of both branches of government and of the American people" and promises to sharply roll back the use of signing statements if she becomes president.

     But the speaker wasn't Clinton, nor any other liberal or Democrat. It was former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, a staunch conservative best known for his leading role in the 1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton. An outspoken defender of privacy rights and other civil liberties, Barr has long decried what he calls the "frightening erosion" of constitutional protections under Bush. At a forum hosted by the Boston chapter of the Federalist Society, he was debating another staunch conservative: John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official whose thinking strongly influenced the administration's claims of presidential power after Sept. 11.

     In a vivid illustration of the clash of ideas roiling the right these days, the two had come to tangle over the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the National Security Agency's warrantless interception of phone calls and e-mails into and out of the United States as part of the effort to defeat Al-Qaeda. Yoo acknowledged that the eavesdropping seems inconsistent with the federal statute that ordinarily requires a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before such domestic spying can occur.

     But these aren't ordinary times, Yoo emphasized. The purpose of the Terrorist Surveillance Program is "to protect national security in wartime -- and historically warrants haven't been required to conduct electronic surveillance of the enemy during wartime." Moreover, a president is not obliged to blindly obey every act of Congress -- especially not one that impinges on his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief.

     Covert intelligence falls well within that authority, he argued, and presidents have long ordered electronic surveillance without regard to congressional or judicial strictures. Long before Pearl Harbor, for example, President Franklin Roosevelt "ordered the electronic surveillance of every communication in the country, regardless of whether it was international or not, so that the FBI could try to find Nazi saboteurs." FDR's order went far beyond anything Bush has done, and did so "even though a Supreme Court decision and a federal statute on the books at the time prohibited electronic surveillance of any kind without a judicial warrant." In fact, Roosevelt’s wiretapping continued even after House and Senate leaders made it clear that Congress would not pass legislation to authorize it.

     Barr was having none of it. Yoo's argument, he said, amounts to a claim that the three branches of the federal government are equal, but one is more equal than others -- and that way lies the loss of freedom. "Do we want to live in a society where we know that any time we pick up the phone and call somebody overseas . . . the government may be listening in? That's the fundamental problem -- what kind of society do we want to live in?"

     No, said Yoo -- the fundamental dynamic is the tradeoff made necessary by the terrorists' deadly war against us. On the one hand, "yes, you might lose your expectation of privacy in international communications," he said. "But that’s only one side. The other side is: Would you be willing to trade some of that loss of privacy to be better protected from terrorist attacks?"

     The bottom line, of course, is that there is no bottom line. Disputes over the proper scope of federal power, and the deference to which each branch is entitled, and the balance between national security and civil liberty, have been a feature of American life from the start. The struggle for political equilibrium is built into our democratic architecture.

     These debates began long before Bush arrived; they'll continue after he leaves. We should welcome them as signs not just of factiousness, but of strength: Americans argue about fundamental freedoms because Americans are fundamentally free.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

WARNING:  Explicit language.  Not appropriate for all viewers

I started to put the link here but thought it might not be appropriate.  If you want to see it you can go to youtube and find it there.  If you can't locate it email me and I'll send you the link.

Chanddi...This should be right up your alley politically speaking.  Are you sure this wasn't you?

Live TV can be risky at times.   Pretty funny stuff.

Have you folks seen this?  It's amazing, and so funny.

http://birdloversonly.blogs...

DEMONIZING THE JEWISH STATE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 21, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     In civilized circles it is considered boorish to speak of Jews as Christ-killers, or to use language evoking the venomous old teaching that Jews are forever cursed for the death of Jesus. Those circles apparently don't include the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an anti-Israel "peace" organization based in Jerusalem, or its founder, the Anglican cleric Naim Ateek.

     Sabeel and Ateek are highly regarded on the hard-line Christian left, and regularly organize American conferences at which Israel is extravagantly denounced by numerous critics. So far this year, such conferences have been held in Cleveland, Berkeley, Calif., and Birmingham, Ala.; another begins Friday at Boston's Old South Church.

     Just as critics of the United States are not necessarily anti-American bigots, critics of Israel are not necessarily biased against Jews. But Sabeel and Ateek's denunciations of Israel have included imagery explicitly linking the modern Jewish state to the terrible charge of deicide that for centuries fueled so much anti-Jewish hatred and bloodshed.

     "In this season of Lent, it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him," Ateek has written, envisioning "hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge Golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily."

     In a sermon titled "The Massacre of the Innocents" Ateek similarly condemned the "modern-day Herods" in Israel's government -- a reference to the evil king who the New Testament says slaughtered the babies of Bethlehem in an attempt to murder the newborn Jesus. In another sermon, Ateek portrays Israelis as having "shut off the Palestinians in a tomb ... similar to the stone placed on the entrance of Jesus' tomb."

     In Ateek's metaphorical telling, in other words, Israel is guilty of trying to murder Jesus as an infant, of killing Jesus on the cross, and of seeking to prevent his resurrection. To use "this imagery in reference to the Jewish state is inexcusable," says Dexter Van Zile, a layman in the United Church of Christ who serves on the executive committee of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East. Millions of Christians would doubtless agree.

     Writing in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies in 2004, Adam Gregerman observed that "liberation theologians" like Ateek and others whose work has been published by Sabeel "perpetuate some of the most unsavory and vicious images of the Jews as malevolent, antisocial, hostile to non-Jews.... These critiques lead to a demonization of the Jews.... As such, liberation theology impedes rather than fosters any serious attempt at understanding or ending the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians."

     Exemplifying Sabeel's grotesque demonization of the Jewish state is the theme of its Boston conference: "The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel." It is hard to imagine an uglier slander.

     Apartheid was the racist and dictatorial system through which South Africa's white minority government ruthlessly repressed the country's large black majority, systematically denying them political rights and relegating them to third-class education, housing, and employment.

     Israel, by contrast, is a flourishing democracy based on tolerance, individual liberty, and the rule of law. Israeli citizens of every race, ethnicity, and religion -- and both sexes -- exercise the right to vote and enjoy identical civil and political liberties. Within Israel's parliament, about 1 member in 10 is Arab; there is even a mosque within the Knesset for the benefit of Muslim parliamentarians.

     Arabs and other non-Jews serve in Israel's government ministries and foreign service, on its courts, and in the military. From the Arab beauty who was crowned Miss Israel to the country's Arab soccer stars, from Israel's lively Arabic-language media to the Arab students in Israeli universities, the evidence of Israel's democratic equality is overwhelming and ubiquitous.

     It is true that in response to deadly terrorist attacks by Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has been forced to adopt stringent security measures, such as the protective fence between the West Bank and Israel proper, or the checkpoints at border crossings. These are unpopular and inconvenient, but they have saved many Israelis -- Arab and Jew alike -- from being murdered or maimed. Checkpoints and fences can always be removed when the bombings and incitement end, but lives lost to suicide bombings can never be replaced.

     None of this is to say that apartheid doesn't exist in the Middle East. In some Arab and Muslim countries, harsh discrimination against non-Muslims, women, or homosexuals is enshrined in law.

     But rather than explore such all-too-real apartheid, Sabeel's conferees instead denounce the freest nation in the Middle East. As they gather in Boston this week, they might reflect on the words of Martin Luther King:

     "I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world," King declared in 1968, less than two weeks before his death, "and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy."

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Here's one you folks might actually agree with considering the flap about Vega lately.

BIG BROTHER AT SCHOOL

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     "Freedom of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty . . . must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever," the party's national platform declared. "We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government."

     Now which political party said that? The Libertarians? The Barry Goldwater Republicans of 1964? Some minor party on the right-wing fringe?

     Actually, that ringing endorsement of parental supremacy in education was adopted by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1892, which just goes to show what was possible before the Democratic Party was taken hostage by the teachers unions. (The same platform also warned that "the tendency to centralize all power at the federal capital has become a menace," blasted barriers to free trade as "robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few," and pledged "relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure.")

     Today, on education as on so much else, the Democrats sing from a different hymnal. When the party's presidential candidates debated at Dartmouth College recently, they were asked about a controversial incident in Lexington, Mass., where a second-grade teacher, to the dismay of several parents, had read her young students a story celebrating same-sex marriage. Were the candidates "comfortable" with that?

     "Yes, absolutely," former senator John Edwards promptly replied. "I want my children . . . to be exposed to all the information . . . even in second grade . . . because I don't want to impose my view. Nobody made me God. I don't get to decide on behalf of my family or my children. . . . I don't get to impose on them what it is that I believe is right." None of the other candidates disagreed, even though most of them say they oppose same-sex marriage.

     Thus in a little over 100 years, the Democratic Party -- and, for that matter, much of the Republican Party -- has been transformed from a champion of "parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" to a party whose leaders believe that parents "don't get to impose" their views and values on what their kids are taught in school. Do American parents see anything wrong with that? Apparently not: The overwhelming majority of them dutifully enroll their children in government-operated schools, where the only views and values permitted are the ones prescribed by the state.

     But controversies like the one in Lexington are reminders that Big Brother's ideas about what and how children should be taught are not always those of mom and dad.

     Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others are devout believers. Some place great emphasis on math and science; others stress history and foreign languages. Americans hold disparate opinions on everything from the truth of the Bible to the meaning of the First Amendment, from the usefulness of rote memorization to the significance of music and art. With parents so often in boisterous disagreement, why should children be locked into a one-size-fits-all, government-knows-best model of education?

     Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation's entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Nobody believes that health care would be improved if the government operated 90 percent of all hospitals, pharmacies, and doctors’ offices. Yet the government's control of 90 percent of the nation's schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned.

     But we should be concerned. Not just because the quality of government schooling is frequently so poor or its costs so high. Not just because public schools are constantly roiled by political storms. Not just because schools backed by the power of the state are not accountable to parents and can ride roughshod over their concerns. And not just because the public-school monopoly, like virtually all monopolies, resists change, innovation, and excellence.

     All of that is true, but a more fundamental truth is this: In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools should have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children's minds and character. As we wouldn't trust the state to feed our kids, or to clothe them, or to get them to bed on time, neither should we trust the state to teach them.

     What Americans in an earlier era knew in their bones, many in the 21st century need to relearn: Education is too important to be left to the government.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) 

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THE MITT-AND-RUDY SMACKDOWN

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

Sunday, October 14, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/...

     During an interview at The Boston Globe last week, Senator Hillary Clinton was asked about a vote she had cast in 2005 against raising automobile mileage standards -- a vote seemingly at odds with her stand on the issue. She answered that it had been a largely "symbolic" vote: Everyone knew the bill in question "would never pass," Clinton