Columnist.
For the past year, Christians in northern Nigeria have been the victims of murder and ethnic cleansing by an al Qaeda-affiliated group named Boko Haram. The group, whose name means "book learning is forbidden," has pledged to kill every Nigerian Christian in its effort to impose Sharia on Africa's most populous nation. Recent attacks on the group by Nigerian security forces dealt Boko Haram a deadly setback, but not before more than 500 Christians were killed by the group. These Christians joined countless of the brethren worldwide as victims of radical Islamic intolerance -- an intolerance Western media seems uninterested in.
How supremely ironic is it that at the same time the Obama Administration is seeking to force religious organizations to offer insurance coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, a federal district court in Washington State has ruled that the state cannot force pharmacies to dispense those very same drugs? That's right. And this comes close on the heels of what amounted to a 9-0 smack-down of the Administration by the Supreme Court, which insisted in the Hosanna-Tabor case that even in hiring, the First Amendment gives "special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations."
On March 2, James Q. Wilson, one of America's pre-eminent social scientists and conservative thinkers, died at the age of eighty. It's hard to think of anyone who had a greater impact on the way Americans think about crime and punishment than Wilson. I know he shaped my thinking on the subject and, thus, helped refine the vision for Prison Fellowship. Wilson is probably best known for a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article he co-authored with George L. Kelling, entitled "Broken Windows."
Thirty-five years ago, my friend Ron Sider published Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, a very influential book at the time. While I haven't always agreed with Ron, in fact, we're poles apart politically, I have no doubt of his integrity, his wisdom and his desire to bring biblical truth to all aspects of life. That's why so I'm happy that Ron has turned his attention to one of the most pressing issues of our time: our national debt.
Radio host Rush Limbaugh had a bad week last week. And thanks to his imprudent, unkind, and rude outburst against a female Georgetown University law student, so did the cause of religious freedom. The student, Sandra Fluke, told democratic lawmakers that Georgetown University, a Catholic institution, did not provide insurance coverage for contraception. This, she said, meant that Georgetown law students would have to spend $3,000 of their own money for contraceptives over the course of their law-school tenure.
Last Thursday, the Senate rejected by a 51-48 vote a bill that would have permitted religious employers to refuse to cover medical services that violated their moral and religious convictions. Have they even read the Bill of Rights? Now strange things happen when issues are politicized, I know that. That's not shocking. What is shocking -- and downright shameful -- is the deceitful way supporters of the Administration's mandate have framed the issue.
You've heard me talk almost non-stop over the last two weeks about this huge threat to religious liberty from this administration, requiring employers to provide contraception and abortion-inducing medication for their employers. But what makes this fight all the more difficult is the culture-wide misunderstanding about what sex is about and what it's for. For example, Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania made headlines recently when it was learned that students could buy a morning-after pill, known as Plan B, from a vending machine in the student health center.
For some time I have been warning you that the Obama administration has elevated so-called "gay rights" at the expense of religious liberty. That may sound like an extreme statement, until you remember that Secretary of State Clinton has said "gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights." And she and other officials repeatedly use the term "freedom of worship" (a private act) versus "freedom of religion," (which the Constitution protects, which is the freedom to live out one's faith in public).
How is it that the American people want smaller government and less government spending, but the government is growing and spending faster than ever? That's one of the questions pollster Scott Rasmussen is asking in his new book, The Peoples' Money. Or take health care. As a Weekly Standard review of Rasmussen's book points out, Americans believe the solution to the health care problem "is to shift power away from politicians and bureaucrats so that individuals can have more control over their own lives."
In Hamlet, Polonius, the Chamberlain to the King, gives his son what is probably the most famous piece of fatherly counsel in all of literature: "This above all: to thine own self be true." Polonius's exhortation is one that Americans should take to heart -- and his famous words came to mind while reading a recent New York Times article. The article was about the residents of Chisago County, Minnesota, who, according to the Times, "describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess."
I suppose there may be a village in Kazakhstan whose inhabitants don't know who Jeremy Lin is, although I doubt it. I am sure there are very few Americans who aren't familiar with what the Wall Street Journal called Lin's "quintessential underdog story." It has something for almost everyone: Lin's off-the-bench heroics with the NBA's New York Knicks, his Asian-American roots, Christian faith, and Ivy League background.
If the past decade taught Americans anything, it is that there is no getting around the law of unintended consequences, especially in foreign policy. No matter how good our intentions might be or how carefully we plan, once we "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" we no longer control events, they control us.
Yesterday on BreakPoint, I talked about Charles Murray's controversial new book Coming Apart. Murray makes the convincing case that since the 1960s, there has been a growing and frightening cultural divide between middle-to-upper class communities and working-class communities. Where marriage rates and religious attendance in the upper-class communities have slid a little over the past four decades, they've absolutely plummeted in working-class communities.
Charles Murray, whose book Losing Ground redefined the debate about welfare and the underclass thirty years ago, has a new book, Coming Apart. The book is about the increasingly cultural divide among white Americans. Coming Apart is controversial and has many critics, both on the left and on the right. But it has ignited a long-overdue discussion about the link between cultural decline and the American Dream.
It's no secret that Christianity has been unwelcome in public schools for a long time. But recently New York City's government took an unprecedented step by forcing around 60 churches to vacate sanctuaries they pay to use. Why? Because Monday through Friday, those sanctuaries also happen to be classrooms. This deadline was set back in December, when the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the 2nd Circuit's decision upholding the City's crass discrimination against communities of faith. New York at this time is the only major city in the nation to ban religious services in its school buildings. But this precedent does not bode well for what may happen in other cities.
According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, only 13 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress is doing its job. Apart from wondering what that 13 percent was thinking, you also have to wonder if Congress could possibly make matters worse. Last week, they did. One reason Americans are so dissatisfied is the sense that Congress doesn't play by the same rules it imposes on the rest of us. Take, for instance, the matter of Congressional insider trading -- the trading of stocks and other securities by people who have access to non-public information.
I've been talking a lot lately about the Obama Administration's relentless attempts to restrict religious freedom. You know by now that the Catholic bishops have strongly rejected the president's so-called "accommodation" to exempt religious organizations from paying for abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization. Good for the bishops. What the president outlined changed nothing: religious organizations will still have to provide insurance that covers services that violate their religious beliefs, even if they don't have to pay for them directly.
A recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has concluded that men who are nice (or "agreeable" as the study describes them) make as much as $7,000 less a year than those who are more ruthless. According to the study, "disagreeable" men are those who "aggressively advocate for their position during conflicts." In contrast, "agreeable" men are those who are known as "trustworthy, straightforward, compliant, altruistic, modest, and tender-minded."
Make no mistake. The raging controversy over the Obama Administration's refusal to exempt religious organizations from onerous health care mandates is a big deal. A very big deal. But why? What's really at issue here? Despite what the media and the Obama Administration are telling you, it's not just a battle between the so-called "archaic beliefs" of the Catholic Church on the one hand and advocates of women's health on the other. It's not just about access to abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization, bad as that is.
