Al Mohler has an excellent post on his blog today succinctly tracing the fallacious path by which courts began building a "strict wall of separation" between church and state. Mohler says:

The First Amendment does not even mention the separation of church and state. Who came up with this? As most Americans know, it was Thomas Jefferson, who in a now-famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut stated, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and state."

With one letter, Jefferson set the course for a reinterpretation of the First Amendment. His terminology of a wall of separation between church and state, once widely adopted, would become the catalyst for a legal and political revolution at the intersection of government and religion. Generations of judges came to understand their role to be the protectors of Jefferson's wall. The historical sequence that leads from Thomas Jefferson's letter to Judge Myron Thompson's order is clear and undeniable.

It's also interesting that Thomas Jefferson has become the Rosetta Stone by which judicial activists interpret the First Amendment of the Constitution. Do you know where Jefferson was during the framing and ratification of the Constitution? Thousands of miles away in Paris, where he was the U.S. ambassador to France. Thomas Jefferson did not write or ratify one word of the United States Constitution.

I had a chance to interview Herb Titus, who is one of the attorneys for Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, on a radio program here in South Florida yesterday. Titus made a wonderful statement, and while I know it has been said before by others, it bears repeating over and over again. Listen up, Richard Land and Jay Sekulow: "The rule of lawyers is not the same thing as the rule of law."

If Land, Sekulow, and others think that Moore is violating the "rule of law," I'd love to ask them a simple question: What law? What specific law has Moore broken? Answer: there is none. Judge Myron Thompson cannot point to a single law that Chief Justice Moore is (or was) in violation of.

My apologies for the slowness of things around here for the past ten days or so. I had an unusual spate of travel which took me on seperate trips to the Washington D.C. area and Philadelphia. I don't have any immediate future travel plans, though, so hopefully I'll be back to daily posting again.

One brief note on the Roy Moore affair, which has unfolded quite a bit in my absence: It's sad to see how deeply even conservative evangelical Christians have imbibed the notion that the federal government has ultimate jurisdiction in every conceivable matter. I watched Richard Land on O'Reilly last night saying that Judge Moore is "hurting the cause" by "defying" the law. Of course, Judge Moore's position all along has been that the federal court has no jurisdiction in the matter. To say that he is defying the law by ignoring the federal court order is to assume the very premise being challenged. If the federal judge is not the rightful authority in this matter, than Judge Moore is certainly not defying the law.

We've become so brainwashed by the notion that the federal government is supreme in all matters that we a priori rule out even the possibility of ever challenging its jurisdiction in any specific case. Under Land's (and those like him) reasoning, all that is now required for a federal judge to have jurisdiction in a case is for that judge to decree that he has jurisdiction. At that point, the matter is closed, because any questioning of it would be "defiance."

Okay, I know I've been a little superficial lately, since I've been travelling, and haven't had much time for in-depth reflection and punditry on the day's news.

That having been said...

More on Whoopi. What's the deal with the eyebrows? I mean, she doesn't have any! Who in the world shaves their eyebrows? When you look at her, you don't immediately notice that she has no eyebrows--it is instead just part of the overall disturbing effect. I just can't imagine her looking in the mirror and saying "Oh yeah, this is almost the look. It just needs one more thing. Hmmmmm. Wait! I've got it! Eyebrow removal!"

My hope that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's case could be a turning point in the federal judiciary's monarchial reign over the American people is fading rapidly. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court (unsuprisingly) rejected Moore's request for an emergency stay of the appellate court ruling that the Ten Commandments monument must be removed from the judicial building.

The deadline for the removal of the monument passed about 45 minutes ago (as I write this), and it appears that some prominent Christians are beginning to get cold feet about the case. Sadly, this includes Alabama attorney general Bill Pryor, of whom I wrote glowingly only a few weeks ago. Rather than taking a stand against the judicial monarchy, Pryor has apparently decided to heel.

An email newsletter from Doug Phillips' Vision Forum provided the best synopsis I've seen today, and since I can't find a link for the same piece on their website, my hope is that they won't mind my quoting at length from it. I think it's that important. Says Phillips:

This Friday, the Supreme Court of Alabama will meet to consider holding Chief Justice Roy Moore in contempt of court for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama State Judicial Building. Also to be determined is whether the other justices will invoke a procedural technicality in the law by which they can independently act to remove the monument.

We are looking at the very real possibility that the finest, most courageous, and most godly Chief Justice this nation has seen in more than one-hundred years will be routed by a man slated by President Bush to join the very same court that has declared it unconstitutional to acknowledge God as the source of our laws.

The proposed coup d’état against Chief Justice Moore was initiated and staged by Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, who has vowed to remove the monument. Pryor, who originally claimed to support Justice Moore, has been under tremendous pressure from groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State to act against the Chief Justice, or suffer severe political consequences. Pryor was recently nominated by President Bush for a spot on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Earlier today, the United States Supreme Court denied a petition by Chief Justice Moore to block the federal courts from acting to remove the Ten Commandments monument. Counsel for the Chief Justice made the case in their filings before the Supreme Court that he should be allowed to “establish justice by acknowledging the guidance and favor of Almighty God, placed upon him by his oath of office and the Constitution of Alabama.”

Unfortunately, Moore now has unneeded opposition from his Christian flank:

Among those who seek to rally behind the Chief Justice, a growing number are expressing profound disappointment with Christian commentators who have used the Ten Commandments debate to attack the Chief Justice for his strategy, including Jay Sekulow, Marvin Olasky, and Richard Land - three Christian leaders who have publicly criticized the Chief Justice before the press for his strategic stand.

Sekulow, the founder of the American Center for Law and Justice, expressed public concern that the Chief Justice was pushing a constitutional showdown. Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention described Chief Justice Moore’s actions as “deeply disturbing.” Appearing on The 700 Club, WORLD Magazine editor Marvin Olasky twice criticized Chief Justice Moore for choosing to fight on “the wrong ground.”

Those who are close to the case recognize that such criticisms are rooted in fundamental misconceptions about the constitutional issues present, as well as an implicit capitulation to the philosophy of pragmatism, a philosophy Olasky recently defended in a WORLD Magazine article.

The strength of Chief Justice Moore’s strategy is precisely that he is challenging long-held faulty premises. He is standing on the foundations. Howard Phillips, father of yours truly and founder of the Conservative Caucus, responded this way: “We should recognize that there is a division within the Christian community between Christians who take the Bible and the Constitution literally, as distinguished from those who give priority to commentaries and who rely on Supreme Court rulings which are themselves unconstitutional to the degree they disregard and set aside the plain text and precise words of the Constitution.”

Phillips then concludes with a call to action:

....your phone call to the Governor and the Supreme Court Justices might make a difference. The governor has it in his power to stop the efforts of the Attorney General. Furthermore, there are three Supreme Court seats up for office in 2004. The current Supreme Court Justices need to know the broad grassroots opposition to any decision to support the federal court’s unconstitutional and extra-jurisdictional demand that Alabama be prohibited from acknowledging God, as required by the state constitution.

Please consider calling the following numbers to urge the leaders of Alabama to stand by the Chief Justice in acknowledging God as the source of law.

Attorney General Bill Pryor: (334) 242-7300
Governor Bob Riley: (334) 242-7100
Justice Gorman Houston (Senior Associate Justice): (334) 242-4588
Justice Harold See: (334) 242-4608
Justice Champ Lyons: (334) 242-4352
Justice Jean Brown: (334) 242-4245
Justice Bernard Harwood: (334) 242-4594
Justice Tom Woodall: (334) 242-4578
Justice Lyn Stuart: (334) 242-4585
Justice Douglas Johnstone: (334) 242-4598

If Christians don't have the guts to take a stand here, they may as well never take a stand against judicial tyranny again. "Oh goodness, a Constitutional crisis! We can't have that!

I just don't get it: some further entries

* Tom Green

* Rosie O'Donnell

* Tim Allen

* Chris Tucker

* Garrison Keillor

* Rob Schneider

What can I tell you? I just don't get it.

Auto racing is not a sport. If it were, the car would be the athlete. Keeping a machine working well may require much skill and endurance, but so does brain surgery, and that's not a sport either.

Other things that, while perhaps skillful, perhaps challenging, perhaps beautiful, are not a sport:

* Horse racing (see above, but substitute "horse" for "car")

* Figure skating

* Synchronized swimming

* Skateboarding

* Weightlifting

* Anything else where the result is based on subjective judging rather than objective scoring (that means you, ballroom dancing and any boxing match where nobody is knocked unconscious....)

* Anything you can smoke a cigarette and drink a beer while doing (sorry bowling and golf....)

I'm glad we cleared that up.

Whoopi Goldberg--I just don't get it.

Though you probably wouldn't have known it by watching the news over the weekend (where there seems to have been almost a total media blackout), a crowd of thousands turned out for the rally in support of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in Montgomery on Saturday.

A constitutional crisis is brewing, and it's not just a "Christian" issue. This represents the best opportunity in recent years for taking a stand in challenging the federal government's right to interfere with the self-government of a state.

Augustine, Aquinas, Edwards, and Isaac Newton--What Retards!:

I don't even know where to begin with this op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times. Sadly, this is about as good as Christians will ever get from the Times, since Kristof is the one person at the paper who has been publicly willing to admit that the Times is totally out of touch with tens of millions of Americans. Evangelicals are as alien to the Manhattan denizens at the Times as steak sauce is to Sudanese kids.

In the piece, Kristof says that the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world is religious faith.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view.

Now to me, that fact alone ought to be proof-positive of the virtue of religious faith and the deleterious results of the neglect of God. But in reading the article, one gets the vague sense that Kristof actually sees this as some sort of negative. As if we ought to be emulating the French.

What it all seems to boil down to for Kristof is a dichotomy he perceives. There are intellectuals, you see, and then there are stupid religious people. And never the 'twain shall meet:

The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth actually rose five points in the latest poll.

My grandfather was fairly typical of his generation: A devout and active Presbyterian elder, he nonetheless believed firmly in evolution and regarded the Virgin Birth as a pious legend. Those kinds of mainline Christians are vanishing, replaced by evangelicals. Since 1960, the number of Pentecostalists has increased fourfold, while the number of Episcopalians has dropped almost in half.

The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.

On can be religious or one can be intellectual. Kristof's grandfather was evidently one of the "good ones"--the ones who disingenuously denied the tenets of the faith they had sworn to uphold. The ones who made up their own religion as they went along, denying anything the Bible said that didn't fit their own preconceived notions of what God is capable of. This denial has, of course, eviscerated the mainline denominations, which Kristof laments. As it turns out, a god who does nothing miraculous or supernatural, and instead only has a few moralistic fables to tell us, doesn't really motivate anybody to get out of bed on Sunday morning.

If only those nutty Christians would stop actually believing that God might be who He says He is, America, the most successful and powerful nation on earth, could become more like France--an embittered, impotent, also-ran. Which is what the New York Times has desired all along.


(Addendum: I see that Hugh Hewitt has an excellent--and much more eloquent--post today dealing with Kristof's column. Hewitt points out that in addition to his bias, Kristof also demonstrates extremely shoddy academic research.)

If you want to get goosebumps, take a listen (on Windows Media Player) to Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's comments today as he announced his intention to defy the federal circuit court ruling that the Ten Commandments monument must be removed from the state's judicial building.

Moore says:

Now, once again, Judge [Myron] Thompson seeks to force his will on the people of this state, afflicting the judicial system, and threatening to drain huge amounts of public funds from the state of Alabama. But this time, this time, the object is to take away our right as a state to acknowledge God. Our state motto is "We dare defend our rights." We should never allow the threat of financial penalty to deter us from the defense of an inalienable right. Alabama will never give up its right to acknowledge God....I have no intention of removing the monument of the Ten Commandments and the moral foundation of our law.

I'm telling you, this could end up being a Very Big Deal.

There is a great truth here somewhere:

The other day, our 11-year-old son asked my wife "Why are girls always so worried about who's mad at each other? I don't care about all that stuff--I'm just looking for someone to play baseball with."

As much as I hate to admit it, Fox News is dead wrong in their dopey lawsuit against Al Franken. First of all, there is (and ought to be) a pretty wide legal berth given to satire. And secondly, all they are doing is adding to Franken's cache with his target audience.

According to Drudge today, the book is now sitting at the top of Amazon.com's sales rankings a month before publication. His sources say that Fox News filed the suit at the urging of Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly and Franken have been trading barbs since an ugly incident a few months ago at a booksellers convention, where the two wound up shouting at each other (with Franken coming off as an unhinged crybaby) on C-SPAN.

As an aside, can I just say that I find Bill O'Reilly to be a pompous, opportunistic putz? His Howard Beale faux-populism strikes me as hollow and calculated, and one gets the impression that he would change his views tommorrow if he sensed such a thing would buy him greater success. It's ironic that Franken apparently attacks O'Reilly in his "Look at the Right," since O'Reilly isn't on the "right" even by so-called "neocon" standards. He has no identifiable principles--everything appears to be based on off-the-cuff gut reactions.

Fox News' suit won't even make it into court, nor should it. O'Reilly has a nightly pulpit (and a fair amount of book sales to his own credit) which ought to be the proper forum to address Franken if he's feeling defensive. But he oughtn't go running to some judge. It makes him look like a sniveling, thin-skinned whiner.

There's an article (registration required) in the newest issue of World magazine about the impending confrontation between the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. A massive rally is planned in Mongomery for this Saturday in support of Chief Justice Roy Moore, and I've been told by someone close to the situation that Judge Moore is planning to have a press conference on Thursday evening. In it, he will announce how he plans to respond to the court order to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building.

My money is on him not budging. It promises to be an interesting and crucial weekend for this case.

Badonicus goes on a field trip

Dennis Prager has written a wonderful column today on the pathology of liberalism. "How," he asks, "can decent and often very smart people hold liberal positions?"

Though Prager is not a Christian, he precisely demonstrates why one cannot be consistently Christian and politically liberal (at least as it is defined today):

..."feelings" and "compassion" are two of the most often used liberal terms. "Character" is no longer a liberal word because it implies self-restraint. "Good and evil" are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one's feelings. In assessing what position to take on moral or social questions, the liberal asks him or herself, "How do I feel about it?" or "How do I show the most compassion?" not "What is right?" or "What is wrong?" For the liberal, right and wrong are dismissed as unknowable, and every person chooses his or her own morality.

This explanation is so simply, yet so demonstrably, true. Speaking as a former flaming liberal, I can attest to the revulsion of absolutes that underlied my philosophy.

Liberals may caterwaul about Prager's characterization, but I defy them to disprove it.

All those jokes you were making in the security line at the airport about strip-searches are no longer parody, at least not in my neck of the woods. According to today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

A Miramar man says an overzealous security guard at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport ordered him to remove his pants and then fed them through an X-ray machine at a checkpoint as bystanders looked on.

Martin Holness, a 34-year-old truck driver, said he was humiliated when he was forced to stand in his gray-and-black boxer shorts before his trip to Chicago on July 17.

The airport denies it, but neither side disputes the fact that this guy was standing at the checkpoint in his underwear. According to the folks at the security checkpoint, he took off his pants by his own volition.

The guard countered that Holness pulled down his own sweat pants and handed them to the officer after two quarters in his pocket set off the metal detector. According to a written incident report, Holness lost his composure after setting off the metal detector, barked that he had "nothing to hide'' and removed his own pants without provocation.

It's difficult to know whose version is true, but this much I do know: I'm flying next week for a business trip, and I'm going to pick out my dainty unmentionables extra-carefully that morning.

I've just discovered that at 6 foot 2, I've squeaked into my own special interest group! According to columnist John Leo, the founder of the new Tall magazine is calling for "an inspirational culture of height."

I've never thought of myself as unusually tall, but according to the magazine's founder, in order to be a member of Tall Culture, one only need be a 6 foot 2 man or a 5 foot 9 woman.

And it even turns out that I've been experiencing discrimination and didn't know it! As Leo points out:

Associating tallness with menace has been a recurring theme in popular entertainment. Many 7-footers have never fully recovered from seeing those sky-high characters in "Yellow Submarine" trying to slaughter everybody with apples. You can't do this with short or handicapped people. Depicting tallness as evil may well be the last safe prejudice to have in America.

Not to mention knee-bruising airline seats and humiliating foreign car egresses. However, such discrimination is an outrage, and it cannot stand for long.

This is why activists are demanding a height-friendly college curriculum (reading "Wuthering Heights" is a must). On the agenda, too, are height-themed dormitories where tall and pro-tall students can mix their distinctive cultures. Maybe a Ph.D. could be offered in tallness studies. There is even talk that dismissive phrases like "That's a tall tale" (which sadly associates height with lying) may be declared hate speech by the Irish parliament, or even by the whole European Union.

It's about time.

I was watching the old Cary Grant movie "The Bishop's Wife" the other night, when a nauseating thought occurred to me: the bishop's wife is now a guy.

I watched the driving/nursing/child-endangering mom on O'Reilly last night, and the verdict is in: guilty of extreme creepiness. She was found innocent, however, of child-endangerment, though she was using her child as a potential airbag on the Ohio Turnpike.

Both she and her husband turned out to be hyper-verbal, high school forensics types, who also apparenly do all sorts of stupid and/or dangerous things in an effort to challenge the government's authority.

Memo to "Christian" moms (actually, not all of you--just those of you in sects/cults/fringe groups who will loudly claim to be Christians in court) who are planning to murder your children, group-marry one guy, or suckle your infant while hang-gliding: when you show up in court, would it be asking to much for you to slap on a little makeup and wear something besides the roomy burlap jumper? I'm not saying you have to change your whole way of life--I'm only talking about the public appearances in court and on Good Morning America. You'd really only have to jettison the Rapunzel-haired, Patti Smith-in-a-nursing-bra look for a couple of hours.

My wife's an actual Christian, and I don't like to see her stereotyped as a bland, hollow-cheeked Stepford drone, but some of you cult gals are making it difficult. Thanks for your consideration. Now you can go back to filling up the bathtub.