Columnist.
I'd like to offer a simple proposal that, if enacted, could generate a great deal of a most precious resource: moral clarity. It concerns the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment for murderers argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family, not only on behalf of society.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) last week. In the few words reported by the Weekly Standard magazine, he said just about everything one needs to know about Israel; about America and Israel; and about American political leadership: "America should stand by its friends and its democratic allies, even, and sometimes especially, when it's unpopular to do so." "... It may not be fashionable in some of the chancelleries, the foreign ministries, and salons around the world to talk about why America stands with Israel -- but that's no excuse not to be saying (it), and saying it loudly."
The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism. Both seek to dominate society and to use state power to do so. Both seek to eliminate the Other -- for Islamic fanatics, that means non-Muslim religions and secularism; for secular fanatics, it means Christianity and virtually any public invoking of God. The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law. The Taliban wiped out public vestiges of Buddhism in Afghanistan; the ACLU and its allies seek to wipe out public vestiges of Christianity in America -- as it did, for example, in Los Angeles County, when it successfully pressured the County Board of Supervisors to remove the tiny cross from the county seal. A city and county founded by Catholics -- hence the name "The Angels" -- was forced to stop commemorating its founders because they were religious.
As an American, a Republican, and a fiscal and social conservative -- and though I have endorsed no Republican candidate -- there is one thing that would disturb me greatly if Mitt Romney were not the Republican nominee: if Romney's Mormon faith were a factor in his defeat. Many evangelical leaders have said that if Romney is the Republican presidential candidate, they would not vote for him in the general election. What is implied -- and sometimes explicitly stated -- is that his Mormonism prevents them from voting for him in the primaries. Most evangelicals label Mormonism a cult, and many accuse Mormons of being dishonest for calling themselves Christians.
In the Republican presidential candidates' debate on Jan. 7, Congressman Ron Paul said: "I'm the only one up here ... that understands true racism in this country is in the judicial system." He said this racism has to do with "enforcing the drug laws" and then added: "They (blacks) get the death penalty way disproportionately." Two groups immediately defended Paul -- his supporters and commentators on the left. The former support anything Paul says, and the left supports anything that Paul says that portrays America as ugly (see, for example, the defense of Paul by left-wing USA Today columnist Dwayne Wickham, whose columns are regularly devoted to how much blacks suffer from American racism).
Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality -- often within our own family -- of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues. That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner. Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence. Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack -- make that mock -- the former Pennsylvania senator.
After a lifetime of studying the left, I have concluded that leftism is a form of moral poison. It causes otherwise decent and kind people who take it into their systems to say and/or do cruel and sometimes evil things. While not specifically about the left, a major new scholarly book, "Pathological Altruism" (Oxford University Press), explores this phenomenon of people wanting to do good things yet ending up doing bad. It applies to The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has a deep altruistic urge to bring peace to the Middle East. But because he sees the world through the liberal/left prism, he says morally reprehensible things -- statements that individuals associated with hate-filled, non-altruistic groups and ideologies would make.
Because the issue is so important, I have decided to respond to critics of my last column on adultery, politics and character. As any reader of my columns or books knows, I am a religious conservative, and my primary concern is morality. By morality, I mean issues of good and evil. I am also concerned with the issue of sin, but sin and evil are not identical. All evil is sin, but not all sins are evil. For example, religious people regard saying the word 'God' for no religious purpose ("taking God's name in vain") as sinful. But to regard saying, for example, "God damn it, I stubbed my toe," as evil is to trivialize evil.
With Herman Cain's announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign because of the charges of sexual harassment and of a 13-year affair, issues are raised that the country would do well to think through. The two most obvious are whether we should care about a politician's sexual life and how much the press should report about these matters. But there is a larger issue that needs to be addressed first: What does adultery tell us about a person? For many Americans, the answer is: "Pretty much all we need to know." This certainly seems to be the case with regard to presidential candidates. The view is expressed this way: "If he can't keep his vows to his wife, how can we trust him to keep his vows to his country?"
The governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, announced last week that he would not allow any more executions in his state during his time in office. Kitzhaber, a Democrat, gave five reasons for his decision. My response follows each one. 1. "I refuse to be part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer." This has become one of the most frequently offered reasons for objecting to capital punishment -- that because the system is not equitable, no murderer should be put to death.
I periodically write and regularly broadcast about male-female issues because I want to help men and women, especially husbands and wives, get along better. But I have developed a secondary reason: to elicit left-wing reactions. They reveal an enormous amount about how the left thinks. For example, one of the biggest left-wing websites (Daily Kos) wrote that "Dennis Prager advocates marital rape." Why? Because I wrote a column in which I suggested that if a woman loves her husband, and if he is a loving and good man, she might not want to be guided solely by "mood" in deciding whether and when to have sex with him.
Commentary Magazine asked 41 Americans to respond to this question: "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America's future?" The responses, including my own, appear in the current issue of Commentary. As we were limited to 500 words, I offer my response here, in edited and longer form. I am both optimistic and pessimistic regarding America's future. Here are my reasons for pessimism: First, the unique American values system -- what I call the American Trinity -- is under assault. These three values are declared on every American coin: Liberty, "E Pluribus Unum" and "In God We Trust."
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's feminist magnum opus, "The Feminine Mystique," we can have a perspective on feminism that was largely unavailable heretofore. And that perspective doesn't make feminism look good. Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women's college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes -- four in particular -- have been great, and they outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.
Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Karl W. Giberson and Randall J. Stephens, a physics professor and history professor at Eastern Nazarene College, respectively. The authors take evangelicals to task for being anti-intellectual, anti-reason and anti-science. Their evidence: -- Evangelicals doubt man-made global warming, -- Evangelicals believe that gays can "pray away" their homosexuality. -- Evangelicals believe Earth is only thousands of years old and that men lived alongside dinosaurs. -- Evangelicals oppose same-sex marriage.
The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers -- Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot -- was what groups they chose for extermination. For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other "non-Aryans" were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich -- the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists -- were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life. Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.
On a daily basis, I sit in awe at the amount of nonsense that pervades the world's media. The latest is the preoccupation with the ethnicity of Steve Jobs' birth father. Steve Jobs was adopted at birth. And until his untimely death last week, as far as almost anyone in the world knew, Steve Jobs was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jobs -- father Paul and mother Clara. In fact, as far as Steve Jobs himself was concerned, his only parents were Paul and Clara Jobs. As The New York Times reported nearly 15 years ago ("Creating Jobs," January 12, 1997), "Jobs holds a firm belief that Paul and Clara Jobs were his true parents. A mention of his 'adoptive parents' is quickly cut off. 'They were my parents,' he says emphatically."
This week, for the fourth consecutive year, I am conducting Jewish High Holiday services. Though not a rabbi, I spent 12 years studying in yeshivas and 35 years teaching and writing on Judaism. The following is a summary of the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) sermon that I gave this past Wednesday night. The purpose of the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) is moral introspection: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person can I become? So, every year, Jews meditate on the issue of becoming a better person.
About five years ago, I was invited by the Hoover Institution to lecture at Stanford University over the course of a week. Coincidentally, Israel's Independence Day fell during that week, so I was invited to speak at the celebration held by pro-Israel students. In my talk, I noted that the crux of the problem in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was that most Palestinians wanted Israel to cease to exist. After my talk, a woman walked over to me and introduced herself as a peace activist. She told me that she could not agree with me because Palestinians, in her view, were quite willing to accept Israel's existence.
Last week, David Brooks of The New York Times wrote a column on an academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral vocabulary among most American young people. Below are some excerpts from Brooks' summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. (It was led by "the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.") "Smith and company asked about the young people's moral lives, and the results are depressing ... "When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn't answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all ...
In attempting to understand 9/11, the first question asked by the world's elites -- as exemplified by leading media and academics -- was, "What did America do to provoke such hatred?" Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with "What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans?" or "What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?" As long as people keep asking what America did to incite such hate, nothing will have been learned from 9/11.
