Columnist.
Next week, the film "Noah" opens. Having taught the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) from the Hebrew for more than 40 years (hundreds of hours are available by download through my website), I consider the biblical flood story one of the world's most profound moral teachings. As I will show, it means that God cares about goodness more than anything else. Let me explain by answering the most frequent challenges to the story.
I am writing this column from Cameroon during my sixth trip to Africa. Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather I am referring to the African peoples. Here, then, are some observations. First and foremost, just as when I visited Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia, when I visited places here in West Africa from which Africans were sent as slaves to the New World -- and places in East Africa from which Africans were sent as slaves to the Middle East -- I was overwhelmed by the amount of cruelty human beings have inflicted on other human beings. There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old.
If there were as many "fiscal conservatives" as there are people who claim to be, it is hard to see how Republicans would lose as many elections as they do. One frequently hears this political self-identification: "I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative." Or, "If the Republicans weren't conservative on so many social issues, I would vote Republican." Or, "It's too bad the Christian Right dominates the Republican Party. I would vote for the Republicans on fiscal issues, but I can't stand the religious right."
On March 31, 2011, the opening day of baseball at Dodger Stadium, four San Francisco Giants fans, all paramedics, were there to cheer on their team. As they left the stadium, in the parking lot, one of them, Bryan Stow, was attacked by a Dodger fan, who hit him so suddenly and with such force that Stow hit his head on the ground without being able to break his fall, which fractured his skull. But the attack didn't end there. Once on the ground, Stow was repeatedly kicked in the head and ribs. As reported by CBS Los Angeles, "Stow's friend said he saw the assailant -- whom he described as a Hispanic man between 20 and 30 years old -- repeatedly kick Stow in the head with 'full wind-up' kicks after knocking him to the pavement with a 'haymaker punch' to the left side of his head."
In 2006, 57 percent of Virginia's voters voted to amend their state's constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Last week, U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen ruled the amendment unconstitutional. In 2004, 76 percent of Oklahoma's voters voted to amend their state's constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. On Jan. 14, 2014, U.S. District Judge Terence Kern ruled the amendment unconstitutional. In 2004, 66 percent of Utah's electorate voted to amend their state's constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. On Dec. 20, 2013, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby ruled the amendment unconstitutional.
Federal prosecutors have announced they are seeking the death penalty for Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, murdered three people and wounded more than 260. In addition, they shot a Boston police officer to death. In keeping with what the citizens of progressive Massachusetts consider to be progressive values, the great majority of them oppose the death penalty for Tsarnaev. Only one out of three citizens supports his execution.
In his State of the Union address, on four occasions, President Barack Obama mentioned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq coming to an end: 1. "And in tight-knit communities across America, fathers and mothers will tuck in their kids, put an arm around their spouse, remember fallen comrades, and give thanks for being home from a war that, after twelve long years, is finally coming to an end." 2. "When I took office, nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq. More than 60,000 of our troops have already come home from Afghanistan. With Afghan forces now in the lead for their own security, our troops have moved to a support role. Together with our allies, we will complete our mission there by the end of this year, and America's longest war will finally be over."
In both personal and public life, you can know a great deal about a person or a group if you know what most bothers them -- and what doesn't bother them. A news item this past week made this point with glaring clarity. It reported a meeting that the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights had on Friday. Before revealing the subject of that meeting, let's review for a moment what is happening in the world regarding human rights.
On every level and from every perspective -- from pure national interest to the purely moral -- the decision by the Obama administration and the Democratic Party to withdraw American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan is indefensible. Let's begin with Iraq. Here is how the front-page article in yesterday's edition of USA Today began: "When the last U.S. combat troops departed Iraq in December 2011, they left behind a defeated al-Qaida and an Iraq where traditional rivals Sunni and Shiite Muslims were sharing power in the world's only Arab democracy.
Last week the International Business Times reported: "In their annual End of Year poll, researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that the United States 'is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.' Pakistan and China fell significantly behind the United States on the poll, with 8 and 6 percent, respectively. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea all tied for fourth place with 4 percent."
As a Jew, and a religious one at that, I want to wish my fellow Americans a Merry Christmas. Not "Happy Holidays." Merry Christmas. I write, "my fellow Americans" because, as reported by the Pew Research poll released just last Wednesday, nine in 10 Americans say they celebrate Christmas.
Jack Phillips owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., about 10 miles from downtown Denver. In July 2012, two gay men, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, asked Phillips to provide the cake for their wedding celebration. Though same-sex marriage is not allowed in Colorado -- the Colorado Constitution states that "Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state" -- the two men had been married in Massachusetts.
The only way to understand what is happening to America in our time -- and for that matter, in Europe since World War II -- is to understand the left. And one way to understand the left -- and its enormous appeal to many decent people -- is to understand what it learned from World War II and the Nazi experience. The lessons people draw from history go a long way toward explaining how they view the world and how they behave. Unfortunately, virtually everything the left learned from the unique evil known as Nazism has been wrong.
Remember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 -- tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die because he was gay? The American people were led from the outset to believe that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because of his sexual orientation. And that is how virtually every American still views the story.
There are individual haters on the right and individual haters on the left. But there is no large-scale hatred in the United States of America today that compares with the hatred of the left for the right. Whereas the right regards the left as wrong -- even destructively wrong -- the left regards all those on the right as evil. Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted -- these are typical descriptions of the right made by the most respected names on the left. This hatred is what enabled MSNBC's Martin Bashir to broadcast -- reading from a teleprompter, meaning that it was not spontaneous -- that Sarah Palin deserves to have someone defecate into her mouth. (He later offered a serious apology.)
The Midas touch is named for the mythological Greek King Midas who is said to have been able to turn everything he touched into gold. The left has the opposite ability: to turn virtually everything it touches into rubble. Sometimes it happens quickly; sometimes it takes generations. But it is inevitable. Almost the only time this is not true is when the left takes a position that is shared by non-leftists. But whatever the left transforms in its direction is damaged, and often destroyed.
In my last column, I proposed some explanations for why many conservative parents have left-wing children. In a nutshell, American parents who hold traditional American values -- such as belief in small government as the basis of liberty, in a God-based moral code, that American military strength is the greatest contributor to world peace and stability, or in American exceptionalism, not to mention in the man-woman definition of marriage or in the worth of a human fetus -- are at war with almost every influence on their children's lives. This includes, most importantly, the media and the schools.
There is a phenomenon that is rarely commented on but which is as common as it is significant. For at least two generations, countless conservative parents have seen their adult children reject their core values. I have met these parents throughout America. I have spoken with them in person and on my radio show. Many have confided to me -- usually with a resigned sadness -- that one or more of their children has adopted left-wing social, moral and political beliefs.
I have been broadcasting for 31 years and writing for longer than that. I do not recall ever saying on radio or in print that a president is doing lasting damage to our country. I did not like the presidencies of Jimmy Carter (the last Democrat I voted for) or Bill Clinton. Nor did I care for the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush. In modern political parlance "compassionate" is a euphemism for ever-expanding government.
There is a question that all of us need to ask. How we respond makes all the difference in what type of life we lead and what type of world we make. That question is: Does an action feel good or do good? Let me give three areas of examples -- personal life, the left and most recently, unfortunately, the right.
