Columnist.
The president appeared at many rallies on behalf of additional gun control laws with parents of children murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. I have a question for those who agree with the president's use of these suffering souls. How would you react if a pro-death penalty president travelled across the country with parents of murdered children -- on behalf of capital punishment? After all, outside of strongly liberal locales, the great majority of parents whose children have been murdered support the death penalty for murder. And more than a few of these parents who do live in liberal areas feel similarly.
Earlier this month, the Church of Scotland issued a report titled "The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the 'Promised Land.'" The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence "promised land" is in quotation marks in the report's title -- because there is no promised land. In the report's words: "The New Testament contains a radical re-interpretation of the concepts of 'Israel,' 'temple,' 'Jerusalem' and 'land.' When the Bible mentions 'Israel,' it does not mean Israel; when it says 'temple,' the Bible does not mean the Jewish temple; 'Jerusalem' does not mean the city of Jerusalem; and 'land' does not mean land.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced last week that it will discontinue the free school breakfast plan it initiated last year. Called "Food for Thought," the plan provides school breakfasts to about 200,000 students. It was funded by the LAUSD and the nonprofit Los Angeles Fund for Public Education, whose goal is to raise the number who participate to about 450,000 students (out of a total of 645,000 in the entire district). If you go to the fund's website (lafund.org), you are greeted with these messages: "Learn to dream" (in English and in Spanish) and "Imagine your life without limits." These are essentially meaningless messages. But, as we shall see, the fund's breakfast program is not only meaningless; it is quite destructive.
It is well known that most college students engage at one time or another in what is known as a "hookup" -- an emotionless, commitment-less sexual encounter. Yesterday, I interviewed Donna Freitas, author of "The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy." In our dialogue, we agreed that her book subtitle was accurate, but we disagreed as to the cause. Freitas, who holds a Ph.D. in religious studies, blamed it on peer pressure, the sex-drenched social media of young people and the ubiquity of pornography. I blamed three other culprits: feminism, careerism and secularism.
We cannot bring back the stolen lives. We cannot bring back the lost limbs or the lost hearing. And we cannot mitigate the infinite grief of the victims' loved ones. But there is something we can and must do: We must learn all the lessons we can.
Last week, a USC student released 15 minutes of excerpts from videos he had made of his political science professor, Darry Sragow. Here is some of what the USC professor said to his students: "California Republicans [are] really stupid and racist." " ... Republicans are 82 percent white. Losers." "The Republican Party in California ... is the last vestige of angry old white people." "The Republicans are trying to prevent people of color and people of lower income from voting by requiring voter ID."
Yesterday, Jews around the world observed Holocaust Day. This day ought to be universally observed because the lessons of the Holocaust are universal. Here are some of them: 1. People are not basically good At any time in history, the belief that people are basically good was irrational and naive. To believe it after the Holocaust -- and after the Communist genocides in China, Korea, Cambodia, and the Soviet Union, the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, and the mass murders in Rwanda, the Congo, Tibet and elsewhere -- is beyond irrational and naive. It is stupid and dangerous, and therefore inexcusable.
I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American -- indeed a modern Westerner, period -- can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral. I say this because there is nothing -- not any religious or secular body of work -- that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.
Question: What is the difference between Christian seminaries and American universities? Answer: Christian seminaries announce that their purpose is to produce committed Christians. American universities do not admit that their primary purpose is to produce committed leftists. They claim that their purpose is to open students' minds. This month Florida Atlantic University provided yet another example of how universities have become left-wing seminaries. An FAU professor told his students to write "JESUS" (in bold caps) on a piece of paper and then step on it.
Last week, Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio announced that he had reversed his position on same-sex marriage. The reason was that his son had come out to him and his wife as gay. This is not the first such instance. Periodically, we hear about Republican politicians whose child announces that he or she is gay, prompting the parent to change his mind about the man-woman definition of marriage. As a parent, I understand these parents. We love our children, and we want them to love us. Nevertheless I differ with their decisions to support the redefinition of marriage.
Denver television station CBS4 reports that Colorado has seen a sharp spike in marijuana use among teenagers since Colorado voters passed Amendment 64 last November legalizing recreational use of the drug. As described in The Economist, along with a Washington State measure also legalizing marijuana, Amendment 64 is "an electoral first not only for America but for the world." That means two American states are to the left of the Scandinavian countries, Holland, and every other liberal country regarding marijuana.
"The Left Now Seems to Have Reverence for Fanatics"
Last week, Bjorn Lomborg, the widely published Danish professor and director of one of the world's leading environmental think tanks, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, published an article about the Philippines' decision, after 12 years, to allow genetically modified (GM) rice -- "golden rice" -- to be grown and consumed in that country. The reason for the delay was environmentalist opposition to GM rice; and the reason for the change in Philippine policy was that 4.4 million Filipino children suffer from vitamin A deficiency. That deficiency, Lomborg writes, "according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year."
Just when you thought you've seen it all with the Sandy Hook murders of a classroom full of children, America experiences another new low: A man named Christopher Dorner murders (as of this writing) three innocent people in order to air personal grievances. And his grievances are given serious attention by the national media, not to mention left-wing websites. To better understand this, imagine the outcry if, let us say, a white student who was certain that he was denied admission to a prestigious university because of affirmative action, murdered a university official and the daughter of the dean of admissions and her fiancé. Imagine further that this man had posted a lengthy manifesto delineating how unfairly he had been treated by that university, and that he would continue to murder admissions department officials until the university admitted he was wrongfully rejected.
Last week, the Washington Post published an opinion piece by a Marine captain titled, "I Killed People in Afghanistan. Was I Right or Wrong?" The column by Timothy Kudo, who is now a graduate student at New York University, is a fine example of the moral confusion leftism has wrought over the last half century. Captain Kudo's moral confusion may predate his graduate studies, but if so, it has surely been reinforced and strengthened at NYU. The essence of Mr. Kudo's piece is that before he served in Afghanistan he was ethically unprepared for killing, that killing is always wrong, and that war is therefore always wrong.
To understand leftism, the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, you have to understand how the left thinks. The 2013 inaugural address of President Barack Obama provides one such opportunity. --"What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" What American does not resonate to a president reaffirming this magnificent statement from our Declaration of Independence?
For some years now, we have been told about a major division within American conservatism: fiscal conservatives vs. social conservatives. This division is hurting conservatism and hurting America -- because the survival of American values depends on both fiscal and social conservatism. Furthermore, the division is logically and morally untenable. A conservative conserves all American values, not just economic ones. By "social conservatism," I am referring to the second and third components of what I call the American Trinity -- liberty, "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum."
Last week the New York Times published an opinion piece that offered atheism's response to the evil/tragedy in which 20 children and six adults were murdered at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut. What prompted Susan Jacoby to write her piece was a colleague telling her that atheism "has nothing to offer when people are suffering." She wrote the piece, "The Blessings of Atheism" ("It is Here and It is Now!" screams the subhead) to prove her colleague wrong by offering a consoling atheist alternative to religion's consoling belief in an afterlife. Atheists cannot believe that there is any existence other than this life. But, Jacoby insists, atheists can still offer consolation to people who lose loved ones, such as the parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook.
On the last day of 2012, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen inadvertently clarified two huge matters regarding the left. The first was the ignorance about conservatives and conservatism that permeates the left. The second was the primary reason decent people identify with the left: the effective caricaturing and demonizing of the right. Were it not for caricature and demonization, most otherwise intelligent and decent people would not be on the left.
When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred. What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family -- after all, I hadn't been with family or friends for the previous three months. And it wasn't about being alone -- I had gotten used to traveling alone. This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.
