Re: Submissions

Jesse-

I understand that you're starting a publication here in Brooklyn. If you'd like, you're welcome to use either of the pieces below; just let me know if you do use them.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

Sex, Marriage, and Other Wastes of Time

In October of 2006, the wonderfully-named Family Research Council held a televised event entitled Liberty Sunday which, although vague in its billing, was supposed to have something to do with homosexuality, and which was consequently expected to draw some high level of attention. As FRC President Tony Perkins put it, with characteristic exactitude, "We've got thousands, literally millions of people with us tonight."

Those thousands, literally millions of people were first treated to a suitably campy video-and-voice-over presentation in which Mr. Perkins waxed nostalgic on the virtues of John Winthrop, the original governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and an apparently fond subject of the Christian dominionist imagination. Perkins quoted Winthrop as having warned his fellow Puritans that "the eyes of all the people are upon us so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world." Winthrop's prescience is truly stunning; the early Puritan colony of Salem did indeed become a "byword" for several things.

But an obvious gift for prophecy notwithstanding, Winthrop is perhaps not the most judicious choice of historical figure upon which to perform rhetorical fellatio at the front end of an event billed as a celebration of popular rule. "If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy," Winthrop once wrote, "first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel." Right he was. He went on to add that "a democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government," which was certainly true at the time. Furthermore, to allow such a thing would be a "manifest breach" of the Fifth Commandment, which charges us to honor our fathers and mothers, all of whom are presumably monarchists.

Solid as these age-old talking points may have been from a Biblical standpoint and they seemed solid enough to Biblical literalists ranging from King David to King George to King Saud it wasn't the intention of Perkins to discuss his buddy Winthrop's anti-democratic sensibilities (of which Perkins is probably unaware anyway, not being a historian or even properly educated); rather, this was meant to establish a narrative of contrasts. On the other side of the Massachusetts time line from Winthrop and his gang of roving Puritan theocrats, as Perkins tells us in slightly different words, we have the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court of the early 21^st century. This far more modern, considerably less blessed body had recently handed down a majority ruling to the effect that the state could not deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as to do so would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Massachusetts constitution. "These four judges discarded 5,000 years of human history when they imposed a new definition of marriage," Perkins said, "not only upon this state, but potentially upon the entire nation." Note that Perkins is here criticizing the judiciary for not giving due consideration to the laws and customs of the ancient Hebrews when interpreting United States law; this will be a useful thing to keep in mind on the dozen or so occasions recorded in this book when Perkins and James Dobson criticize the judiciary for giving due consideration to the laws and customs of other nations that exist right now. It's also worth mentioning that the Founding Fathers discarded those very same "5,000 years of human history" when they broke away from the British crown in order establish a constitutional republic, thus committing that "manifest breach" of the Fifth Commandment which so worried John Winthrop.

But the mangling of history had only just begun; still in voice-over mode, Perkins was now on about Paul Revere. When Revere made his "ride for liberty," the lanterns indicating the manner of British approach ("one if by land, two if by sea") were placed in the belfry of the Old North Church by what Perkins described as a "church employee." This, Perkins pronounced, was an early example of "the church [giving] direction at critical moments in the life of our nation." And here, in the present day, we have the homosexuals laying siege to American life with the public policy equivalent of muskets, ships-o-the-line, and archaic infantry formations. "Once again, people are looking to the church for direction." Because back in 1776, you see, people were literally looking at this particular church for guidance. That's where the signal lanterns were kept. The actual soldiers were kept in whorehouses.

The video clip ended. First up among the live speakers was Dr. Ray Pendleton, senior pastor of the Tremont Temple Baptist Church, Liberty Sunday's storied venue. The good doctor acknowledged that the evening's events had garnered some degree of controversy they were, after all, holding a hard-right, Evangelical-led gay bashing event in downtown Boston, of all places but, as Perkins noted, "This church is not foreign to controversy."

"No, indeed we're not," Pendleton agreed, very much in the manner of a Ronco pitchman who's just been prompted to confirm the utility of a juicer. "From the very beginning, we've been part of concerns for liberty and freedom. We were part of the Underground Railroad, the first integrated church in America." Wild applause. "I think the abolitionist's message is pretty clear." Actually, it was pretty clearly in opposition to the Bible. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, was aware of this, even if Dr. Pendleton is not, and once noted that the peculiar institution of slavery was not peculiar at all, and had in fact had been "established by decree of Almighty God" and furthermore "sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation." Davis was right, of course; and not only is slavery justified in the New Testament book of Ephesians as well as within several books of the Old Testament, but the proper methodology of slave beating is even spelled out in Exodus 21:20-21: "And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall surely be punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his property." Which is to say that one may beat his slave without punishment, assuming that the slave in question does not die from his wounds within the next couple of days. Tough but fair. Never mind all that, though; Pendleton's point was that this church had been opposed to slavery 150 years ago, that it was now opposed to gays with equal vigor, and that we should draw some sort of conclusion from this. My own conclusion was that they were right the first time purely by accident.

Next up was yet another prerecorded video segment, this time featuring some fellow named Peter Marshall who was standing next to Plymouth Rock. "All of us were taught in America that the Pilgrims came here as religious refugees running away from persecution in Europe," Marshall tells us. "That really isn't true; they had no persecution in Holland where they'd spent 12 years before they came here." Marshall is correct; by the Pilgrims' own account, they left Holland not due to persecution directed towards themselves, but rather because they found the free-wheeling and numerous Dutchmen to be difficult targets upon which to direct their own brand of persecution. "The truth," Marshall continues, "is that they" - the Pilgrims, not the fortunate Dutch, who appear to have dodged a bullet - "had a much deeper and broader vision. The Lord Jesus had called them here, as their great chronicler and governor, William Bradford, put it, 'because they had a great hope and an inward zeal of advancing the cause of the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the earth.'" And from this it is clear that the United States was indeed founded upon Christian dominionist rule, particularly if one sets the founding of the United States not in 1776 when the United States was actually founded, but rather in 1620, when a bunch of people suddenly showed up in the general area.

Of course, if the founding of a nation really occurs when people arrive on a parcel of land, as Marshall seems to be implying, and if the characteristics of a nation are really determined by what said arrivals happen to be doing at the time, as Marshall is certainly implying, then the United States was actually founded a few thousand years earlier when Asiatic wanderers crossed the Bering Strait in search of mammoth herds or whatever it is that induces Asiatic types to wander around. By this reckoning, the U.S. was meant to have been characterized by the "Indian" practices of anthropomorphism and the cultivation of maize, rather than the "Pilgrim" practices of Christianity and nearly starving to death because you're a stupid Pilgrim and you don't know how to farm properly.

But there does exist a more profound defense of the Pilgrims and their claim to American authorship, one which Marshall neglects to mention but which I will provide for you in his stead simply because the Pilgrims need all the help they can get. In the early stages of the relationship between saint and savage, God seems to have signaled his displeasure at the practices of the latter, while simultaneously signaling his approval of those of the former. At least, Tony Perkins' boyfriend John Winthrop seems to have thought so. "But for the natives in these parts," Winthrop wrote in regards to what was left of his heathen neighbors, "God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection." Of course, God didn't get around to doing all of this until a group of European colonists brought smallpox to Massachusetts in the first place. Timing is everything.

Back in the present day, our new friend Peter Marshall continued to elucidate on the motivations of our blessed Pilgrim overlords: "The vision was that if they could put the biblical principles of self-government into practice, they could create a Bible-based commonwealth where there would truly be liberty and justice for every soul." Except for the witches among them, who had no souls. "That was the vision that founded America. Morally and spiritually speaking, our nation was really founded here by the Pilgrims and the Puritans who came to Boston about 30 miles up the road."

Next up was a series of taped interviews with various American theocrats ranging from the notable to the obscure. C.J. Doyle of the Massachusetts Catholic Action League tells us that "when religious freedom is imperiled, it never begins with a direct frontal assault on the liberty of worship. It always begins with attempts to marginalize the church and to narrow the parameters of the church's educational and charitable activities." The Catholics would be the ones to ask; the "parameters of the church's educational and charitable activities" have indeed been narrowed quite a bit since the days when said parameters encompassed the globe and included the enslavement of the indigenous population of South America, the theocratic dictatorship of as much as Europe as could effectively be controlled, the burning of heretical texts and heretics along with them, several Crusades, scattered Inquisitions, whatever it was that the Jesuits were up to for all those years, and the wholesale persecution of those Protestant religious denominations whose modern-day adherents were now assembled at Liberty Sunday, nodding in sympathy at the plight of Mr. C.J. Doyle and his Church. Of course, Protestants can now afford to let bygones be bygones, as the temporal ambitions of Rome have since been relegated to the feeding, clothing, and molestation of children. Sic transit gloria mundi, indeed.

After a few more brief interview clips with other Catholic hierarchy types, the Popery finally gave way once again to Decent American Protestantism in the person of good ol' Gary Bauer, who related via video clip that "[t]here are two diametrically opposed world views in America. On one side, there are people who think that America is all about just doing whatever you want; different strokes for different folks; if it feels good, do it. On the other side, there are millions of Americans who believe that our country was built on ordered liberty under God." Bauer is basically correct in his contention that his side advocates Democracy with Puritan Characteristics, as Deng Xiaoping might have put it, whereas the opposing side advocates actual human liberty without reference to the degenerate totalitarian customs of the ancient Hebrews. The reader will also note how the "doing whatever you want" crowd is simply made up of "people," whereas Bauer's own Ordered Liberty faction consists of "millions of Americans." Millions, I say! And Americans to boot! This may seem like a cheap rhetorical trick to you or I, but, hey, "if it feels good, do it" has always been my motto, apparently.

This latest round of video clips now thankfully at an end, it was back to the Tremont Temple Baptist Church telecast for Liberty Sunday's unofficial keynote speaker, outgoing Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Mr. Romney would very much like to be president of our Greater Imperial Pilgrim Republic, and so has seen fit slum it with the Evangelicals. He was introduced by his lovely wife, Ann. Incidentally, Mitt Romney has only one wife. And so that we might understand why Romney has only one wife and not a dozen of them, a brief history lesson is probably in order.

***

In 1820, Joseph Smith met Jesus Christ in New York. Smith was a resident; Christ was presumably just passing through. Smith was duly impressed with Christ, and Smith's associates were duly impressed with Smith for having met Him.

Christ is a busy fellow, though, and so Smith's next few supernatural encounters were with His subordinate, the angel Moroni. Before graduating to the rank of angel, Moroni had been a general in the army of the Nephites, one of three Hebrew tribes that had wandered into North America after the Tower of Babylon was knocked over by Elohim (alias Yahweh, alias God, no known tattoos or other identifying marks). Quite a bit had happened before and since that hadn't been recorded by the Ur-Jews of the Middle East, nor by the Byzantines, nor by the Romans, nor even by the Methodists, who are usually up on all the latest gossip. In fact, it would seem that a good chunk of crucial Christian theology had simply not made it into the texts and traditions of Christendom for some reason or another, and so it fell upon Joseph Smith, New Yorker, to record it. To this end, Moroni provided Smith with a pair of golden plates inscribed with the language of the Nephites, and which Smith would be able to translate by use of a magical stone. Of course, no one else would be allowed to see the plates at first, and only a trustworthy select were allowed to see them later. Eventually, Moroni took them back, perhaps because he needed them for something.

Years later, after Smith had attracted a following, it was determined that the State of Missouri was actually Zion, that Jackson Country, Missouri in particular had been given to Smith by divine decree, and that it would be rather neat if everyone were to go there and await the Second Coming. The natives of Missouri disagreed, and, after a series of incidents, Smith changed his mind, apparently right around the time that he and his followers were thrown out of the state. Next it was on to Illinois, where Smith and friends established the town of Nauvoo, with Smith himself as mayor. This proved to be a convenient setup for a nascent religious movement, as Smith could now preach his revelatory vision of polygamy, baptism for the dead, and revisionist North American history without being hassled by The Man. After all, he had become The Man.

Things were going swimmingly until a group of disgruntled ex-followers set up a newspaper whose editorial stance was in opposition to Smith's teachings in general and to Smith's person in particular. After the first issue, Smith and his city council had the paper shut down and its printing press destroyed. This didn't go over well in the county seat (which is called Carthage, amusingly enough), where Smith was charged with wholesale tomfoolery and unconstitutional hanky-panky. Smith surrendered to the authorities and was held in the second floor of the county prison for his own protection. The precaution proved inadequate; a mob of angry Illinoisans stormed the prison and fired on him and his friends one of whom, John Taylor, later described what happened next: "Joseph leaped from the window, and was shot dead in the attempt, exclaiming: O Lord my God!"

In a purely romantic sense, Smith's martyrdom by gunfire and window-leaping ranks pretty low on the prophet-death totem poll, sitting below not only Jesus Christ (crucifixion) but also David Koresh (misunderstanding with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) and even Marshall Applewhite (applesauce with phenobarbital).

Unlike those of Koresh and Applewhite, though, Smith's vision lived on; Brigham Young, head of the Quorum of the Twelve, became the Mormon movement's second prophet, and prudently moved the flock westward to Mexican territory. Here, in the Salt Lake Valley, Young and his cohorts were free to live Mormon life to its fullest none more so than Young, who eventually took on a total of 52 wives. Even Joseph Smith himself had married no more than 33.

It wasn't long before the Mormon communities were absorbed into the United States by way of one of our nation's celebrated real estate grabs, and it wasn't long after that before the Mormons started to go all political. Young himself began to lobby Washington for the creation of the State of Deseret, as the Mormons had taken to calling their holdings; instead, a smaller state called Utah was formed with Young as its governor. It was a rough transition, and at one point, federal officials sent an expeditionary force to replace Young after a difference of opinion over the exact nature of American federalism; the Mormon army held the Yankees off for a while, but eventually Young decided it would be more prudent to just step down, and he did so, but was eventually pardoned.

Treason, theocracy, and militarized resistance against the federal government was one thing, but a more serious problem had also been in the making. It seemed that the folks back east didn't much care for polygamy, whereas the Mormons cared for it quite a bit and even considered it a sacred duty. In 1882, when a Mormon leader was consequently prevented from taking his seat in the House of Representatives, the issue was suddenly nationalized. A number of bills were passed in the wake of the controversy, including one which made it a crime not only to practice polygamy, but even to profess one's belief in it. This was clearly unconstitutional, though not so clearly unconstitutional that anyone seemed to notice or care (aside from the Mormons, of course). Then, in 1887, the Edwards-Tucker Act provided for federal seizure of all church property.

And so the Mormon belief in polygamy had been beaten in the political arena, and three years later, the then-leader of the Mormons was suddenly informed by God Himself that plural marriage had never been that big of a deal anyway and that the church should render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, so to speak. In 1890, the Mormons decided that the sacred and inviolable practice of plural marriage consisting of a single man and several women was not so sacred and inviolable after all.

***

Back at Liberty Sunday, former Mormon bishop Mitt Romney, a graduate of Brigham Young University, was introduced by his Mormon wife Ann, another graduate of Brigham Young University. Romney, of course, was here to speak about why traditional marriage is a sacred and inviolable practice consisting of a single man and a single woman.

After Ann Romney had announced to wild applause that she herself was a direct descendant of the splendid William Bradford, Mitt Romney took the podium to say his piece. The nation's values, he said, were under attack. "Today there are some people who are trying to establish one religion: the religion of secularism." Unfortunately, the religion of secularism's operations have yet to be declared tax exempt, which is why I can't write off all of my Gore Vidal novels, tweed jackets, and imported coffee.

A bit into his speech, Romney went off-message when he noted that "our fight for children, then, should focus on the needs of children, not the rights of adults," thus admitting that the point of all of this was to limit rights, rather than to protect them. But if our Mormon friend went on to elaborate regarding his advocacy of federalized social engineering, I wasn't able to catch it, and neither were the "thousands, literally millions" of others watching via the telecast; the transmission broke up in mid-sentence, and didn't resume until after Romney had finished speaking. Apparently, Yahweh does not approve of his True Church being rendered unclean by the presence of Mormons, who believe, among other things, that Jesus and Satan are actually brothers. A message from the Family Research Council came up asking me to "click stop on my media player. Then restart it," and to repeat this. Not a word about prayer. Later on, after the transmission had been fixed, Tony Perkins took the stage and said something about someone having pulled a power cord. Never fret, though: "We know where the real power comes from!" Then there was applause, presumably for the engineer who plugged the cord back in.

If it was indeed Yahweh who knocked Romney off the air in the first place, then He was simply anticipating the views of a large portion of Americans and an even larger portion of Evangelicals. According to a Rasmussen poll released a month after Liberty Sunday, 43 percent of those polled would refrain from voting for a Mormon presidential candidate. Among Evangelicals, that number was 53 percent. As a participant in religious bigotry, Romney is hit-or-miss, but as its victim, he's a real success.

James Dobson appeared via a recorded tape. He was in Tennessee on that particular evening. "Tennessee has an open senate seat," he explained. Fair enough. Dobson cited some scripture, as well he might. "'For this cause,'" he quoted, referring to the cause of matrimony, "'a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.'" It certainly sounds as if Yahweh has stated His opposition to letting the in-laws move in. Judeo-Christianity is not without its charms.

"More than 1,000 scientific studies conducted in secular universities and research centers have demonstrated conclusively that children do best when they're raised by a mother and father who are committed to each other," Dobson noted. In his 2004 book Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle, Dobson had written something similar: "More than ten thousand studies have concluded that kids do best when they are raised by loving and committed mothers and fathers." How that figure managed to shrink from ten thousand to one thousand in the space of two years would be an interesting question for a theoretical mathematician or quantum theorist. How do 9,000 things go from existing to not having ever existed at all? Actually, this is a trick question. The trick answer is that those 9,000 things never existed in the first place, and it's doubtful that even 1,000 did, either. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America once tried to figure out exactly how Dobson had arrived at his oft-stated "more than ten thousand" figure, which has since been cited by a couple of politicos on the lesser cable news programs. It seems that Dobson was referencing some books and articles to the effect that children are at a disadvantage when raised by a single mother, although none of the studies cited dealt with the question of whether or not "mothers and fathers" were necessarily preferable to two mothers, two fathers, or a mother and a grandmother (I myself was mostly raised in this last fashion, and I don't believe I'm the worse for it, but, then again, I'd never thought to ask James Dobson). But even aside from Dobson's slight misrepresentations regarding the nature of the studies that actually do exist, the 10,000 figure is ludicrous anyway; as Media Matters put it, such a number could only be possible "if a new study reaching that conclusion had been released every day for the past 27 years." This does not appear to be the case. Nonetheless, Dobson was back to citing the 10,000 figure just a few months later.

Eventually, Dobson was called out on this particular instance of nonsense by two researchers whose work he referenced in a December 2006 essay that was published in Time and cutely entitled "Two Mommies is Too Many." Until this point, neither of the researchers in question had been aware that Dobson was running around citing their work in support of his contention that gay marriage was the pits; they had, in fact, no reason to expect this, as their work supported no such contention. New York University educational psychologist Carol Gilligan requested that Dobson "cease and desist" from referencing her work, and Professor Kyle Pruett of the Yale School of Medicine wrote him the following letter which was reprinted on the gay advocacy website Truth Wins Out:

Dr. Dobson,

I was startled and disappointed to see my work referenced in the current Time Magazine piece in which you opined that social science, such as mine, supports your convictions opposing lesbian and gay parenthood. I write now to insist that you not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission.

You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions. On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, "What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex."

Kyle Pruett, M.D.
Yale School of Medicine

To its credit, Time later published a response to Dobson's essay, entitled (almost as cutely) "Two Mommies or Two Daddies Will Do Just Fine, Thanks."

Back at Liberty Sunday, Dobson had more concrete matters about which to be livid. It seems that there's a book called King and King floating around the nation's public schools. The plot concerns "a prince who decides to marry another man," Dobson tells us, and then, visibly disgusted, adds, "It ends with a celebration and a kiss." Dobson thinks this to be very bad form, and, for once, I agree with him. I wouldn't want my children being taught that the institution of hereditary monarchy is some sort of acceptable "alternative lifestyle," either. If I caught my kid reading any of that smut by John Winthrop, for instance, I'd beat him with a sack of oranges until my arm got tired. I'm just kidding. I don't have any kids. Yet.

Dobson's list of grievances went on. A school in Lexington, Massachusetts, had sent students home with a "diversity bag" which included some materials to the effect that homosexuals exist and are people. In response to the inevitable parental complaint, the district superintendent had said, "We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed." Dobson read the quote and then delivered the following pithy retort: "Well, maybe, sir, you have no business running a school system in the first place!"

Tony Perkins had gone into some more depth regarding the Lexington Diversity Bag Heresy in a recent e-mail newsletter. "You may remember us reporting last year on David Parker, the Lexington, Massachusetts father who was arrested because of insistence on being notified by school officials anytime homosexual topics were discussed in his son's classroom," Perkins wrote at the time. "He made this reasonable request after his six-year-old kindergartener came home from school with a 'diversity' book bag and a book discussing homosexual relationships." Obviously, Mr. Parker wasn't arrested because of his "insistence" on anything; he was arrested on a charge of trespassing after refusing to leave the school office, even after having been asked several times by the principal as well as by police. And Mr. Parker had indeed been "notified" about the bags, along with all of the other parents, twice. A sample had even been displayed at a PTA meeting at the beginning of the year, where it was made clear that children were not required to accept them. But, hey, whatever.

Dobson had another one. "And did you hear two weeks ago that a 13-year-old girl at Prince George's County Middle School was silently reading her Bible at lunch time, when a vice principal told her she was violating school policy and would be suspended if she didn't stop?" This actually did happen; the vice principal apparently didn't understand school policy, which clearly states that students may read religious texts. They can also start religious clubs. The problem seemed to be that the vice principal in question mistakenly believed otherwise, perhaps because Evangelicals like James Dobson (and Catholics like William Bennett) are always running around claiming that it's illegal to pray in public schools.

Then, all of a sudden and apropos of nothing, Dobson warned us that "our country is in great danger from the radical Islamic fundamentalism, which is telling us now that they plan to destroy the United States and Israel, and I'm convinced they mean it." Really puts that diversity book bag thing into perspective, huh?

The video ended and it was back to the Liberty Sunday live feed. Perkins noted that the DVD version of the event could be ordered from the FRC website, and that it included bonus material.

A bit later, Massachusetts Family Institute president Kris Mineau came on. "The leadership of this state is beholden to the homosexual lobbyists," he said. "Homosexual money is flooding into this state to deny the citizens the right to vote, to deny our freedom of speech." The homosexual money in question was apparently too limp-wristed and faggy to actually accomplish any of this, though, seeing as how Mineau was exercising his freedom of speech at that very moment and the 2006 mid-terms had yet to be canceled by the Homosexual Agenda Electoral Commission.

Wellington Boone took the stage. This made me very happy. Boone is a black Charismatic preacher with a penchant for shooting his mouth off about "faggots" and "sissies," as he had done at the recent Values Voter summit, explaining at that event that he is "from the ghetto, so sometimes it does come out a little bit." The crackers in attendance had eaten this up with a spoon.

Like most Charismatic types, Boone comes from the Arbitrary Implementation of Vague Biblical Terminology school of ministerial presentation, whereby a preacher selects an apparently random verse or even just a phrase of the Old Testament and then ascribes to it some sort of special significance, mystical as well as practical. The most popular item of fodder for such a sermon is "the sowing of seeds," which invariably entails that the sermon-goer should give the preacher a hundred bucks, because God will totally pay back him or her (usually her) at a rate of return that makes a Reagan-era share of Apple look like a Roosevelt-era Victory Bond. In a way, "the sowing of seeds" was also the subject of tonight's presentation, insomuch as that everyone had gathered to advocate the supremacy of vaginal intercourse over its lesser, non-child-yielding counterparts.

Boone was right out of the gate, noting that "God does not play concerning righteousness" and that "the prophets of Baal" have to be stopped. Baal was a Carthaginian deity who reached the height of his popularity 3,000 years ago among people who believed in gods and whose past worship is now apparently to be laid at the feet of people who do not believe in any gods at all, as well at the more stylishly-clad feet of the nation's gays and the considerably less-stylishly clad feet of its lesbians. Baal was also associated with a myriad of fertility rituals, and is thus sort of an odd deity to bring up in the context of homosexuality, which had yet to be slandered as being too heavily concerned with fertility until Wellington Boone came along to do this.

"We know what a family is," continued Boone. "My wife said to me this morning, she said, 'Well, okay, then. It's sodomites because they're not gays; it's a misnomer. They're sodomites.'" That's a pretty clever thing to say, and thus it's understandable why Boone would be sure to relate this to everyone.

"There were sodomy laws in this country all over from [the] 1600s and it was [at] one time a capital offense," he went on. "How could we make it a capital offense? Because most lawyers studied from William Blackstone, who was the foundation of it was a foundation book that helped those lawyers get a clue as to how they should govern and how they should practice law. Where did he get it from? The Bible. The Bible was the book." It sure was. It was a foundation book.

Then came what I consider to be the best moment of the evening. "So if this is just a small matter, I'll tell you what let two women go on an island and a whole bunch of all women, if you're sodomites, go on an island, stay by yourself, all women, put all the men on another island this is my wife talking to me this morning let them stay. I'll tell you what: 'We'll come back and see you in a hundred years.'" There was total silence in the auditorium, as opposed to the approving laughter that Boone had no doubt come to expect from his wife's anecdotes. The problem, he seemed to have thought, was that the subtlety of the joke had gone over the audience's collective head, and so, like any good comedian, he explained the punchline: "Do you get it? Because a man and a man and a woman and a woman will not make a child."

Though a failure at comedy, Boone's real function for the evening was to provide cover for the event's anti-homosexual sentiment by showing everyone that he himself, as a member of a group that has been persecuted, was more than willing to lend his support to the persecution of yet another group, and that this modern-day persecution was, ipso facto, hardly akin to the earlier persecution of blacks to which he himself had obviously been opposed and to which most of the crackers assembled were pretending to be opposed as well. To this end, Boone noted the various ways in which blacks had been persecuted over the years. "Now, if you tell me your issue is the same as that issue," he said, addressing any gays who might have been watching the anti-gay event, "I'll say you better get a clue. Get out of here. You're not getting over here." There was wild applause. "And you're not getting on that. You're not getting any of that. No sir." Perhaps Boone has a point. If so, he refrained from making it. If I was making a speech about gays, and if I was planning to spend the fifth minute of said speech claiming that gays have no license to compare their struggles to that of the blacks, I would probably have refrained from spending the third minute pointing out that gays used to be executed on the basis of Biblical law and that I thought this was a swell thing, as Boone had done, nor would I have menacingly added, "If you're in the closet, come out of the closet and let God deal with you and let the nation deal with you and don't hide out," as Boone also did. If you're a homosexual, don't listen to Boone. It sounds like a trap. Stay in the closet with a shotgun.

Boone was also upset that Condoleeza Rice and Laura Bush had recently presided over the induction ceremony of the new, gay Global AIDS Initiative director Dr. Mark S. Dybul, was particularly peeved that Dybul was sworn in with his hand on a Bible held by his homosexual partner, and was quite unhappy indeed that Rice had referred to Dybul's partner's mother as Dybul's "mother-in-law" during the ceremony. Boone had "a real problem with that." As he explained a bit later, "That ain't no family!"

The incident had riled up a good portion of the Evangelical hornet's nest for a variety of reasons; a few days before Liberty Sunday, an FRC spokesman had told the media that "[w]e have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the hen house," because, I suppose, gay people like to eat AIDS, presumably for brunch.

This is not to say that each and every homosexual AIDS-eater is beyond salvation; quite the contrary. And to drive the point home, Liberty Sunday's final speaker was Alan Chambers, founder and president of the ex-gay reform organization Exodus International. Chambers is notable in that he's managed to put aside his past enthusiasm for homosexual activity in favor of his current enthusiasm for heterosexual activity. He got a big round of applause for this, which is more than I've ever gotten for getting up in front of a group of strangers and explaining that I like to fuck chicks.

Things could have been different for Mr. Chambers, though. "If it wasn't for the outstretched arms of a little church in Orlando, Florida called Discovery Church," Chambers told the crowd, "and people there who called sin, sin, and didn't look at my sin as worse than theirs, I wouldn't be here tonight." This was kind of an odd thing to say. Neither the Family Research Council nor Focus on the Family nor Mitt Romney nor Wellington Boone nor Gary Bauer nor the Massachusetts Catholic Action League had ever before taken part in a major event dedicated to stamping out the practice of neighbor-object-coveting or the violation of Sabbath labor restrictions (in fact, Perkins had arguably failed to keep the Sabbath holy when he got up on stage to pitch DVDs). The whole point of the evening's activities had seemed to be that the Biblical sin of homosexuality was really the only thing worth worrying about.

Is it possible that Alan Chambers was being sarcastic, or at least trying to make the night's only subtle point? Could he have realized that, whatever the virtues of the Florida church that had refrained from looking upon his sin "as worse than theirs," the assembled delegates at this particular church had instead spent the evening doing very much the opposite, and in some cases even advocating the age-old death penalty for the act of sodomy? Could Chambers have made this obvious connection?

If not, then the salvation of Alan Chambers so many years ago has been a complete success. Truly, he was now an Evangelical leader.

***

Alan Chambers claims to have been converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality by way of the same methods now implemented by his Exodus International group. If this is truly the case, he may be the only person in human history who has managed to do this. Exodus doesn't seem to keep records concerning its success rate, much less publish them, and even if it did, these would likely be about as kosher as James Dobson's Incredible Shrinking Ten Thousand Studies. And besides the fact that Exodus is basically a referral organization which delegates the actual work of gay-straightening to smaller, associate churches and would thus not be in much of a position to collect useful records anyway, the business of keeping tabs on the fags has always been an unreliable one; closeted gay men are notoriously reluctant to admit that they've been secretly hitting the warehouse district, particularly if they've been doing it behind the back of the new wife.

Like any movement that can't seem to get methodology on its side, Exodus has been forced to rely on anecdotal evidence, such as the fact that Alan Chambers has managed to impregnate his wife several times and has yet to be caught hanging out by the docks or even eating sushi. Unfortunately, the anecdotal evidence has never been good to Exodus, either. Within three years of the organization's founding by five men in 1976, one of these founders had already run off with a volunteer; the two of them eventually underwent a commitment ceremony and were still together years later.

Then there was John Paulk, a gay man who had worked as a drag queen named "Candi" (note the "i" at the end), a male escort, a restaurant manager and a chef. After his conversion process (half of which, I'd imagine, was spent convincing him to stop replacing y's with i's), Paulk became a literal poster boy of Exodus in particular and the ex-gay movement in general, serving as head of Focus on the Family's "Love Won Out" conference, acting as chairman of the board for Exodus International North America, and appearing on the cover of Newsweek as well as on a series of full-page newspaper ads. Paul had gone from the stereotypical gay career to the stereotypical ex-gay career. The only thing left was to go the way of the stereotypical ex-ex-gay, which he promptly did.

In 2000, Paulk was seen at a Washington D.C. gay bar, where he used a false name and introduced himself to other patrons as a gay man. When these reports made it back to his various new Christian friends, Paulk denied them. Then photos surfaced; it seemed that at least one patron had recognized him and then called up the Human Rights Campaign, which sent some staffers over to get some photos. When the photos surfaced, Paulk admitted that he had indeed gone to the gay bar, but only to use the bathroom (depending on the nature of the gay bar, this might not have been much of a defense). Then it was shown that Paulk had actually been at the bar for at least 40 minutes (again, this doesn't necessarily mean he was lying about having been in the bathroom the whole time). Today, Paulk is back to being a chef.

Other, lower-profile cases abound. The head of Homosexuals Anonymous was forced out after it was discovered that he'd been sleeping with clients, and an ex-gay ministry called Desert Stream opted to settle out of court with a minor who reported that one of the staffers had empathized with his temptations a little too thoroughly. Beyond the world of the ex-gay ministry, of course, you've got Paul Crouch, Sr., head honcho of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, who the Los Angeles Times says paid a former employee almost half a million dollars to keep him mouth shut about a gay affair, among other things. And then there's the Catholic Church. Tee hee.

This is an incomplete list, and includes only those prominent individuals who have managed to get caught. Unlike Paulk, for instance, most ex-gay ministry honchos don't have their faces plastered all over the country to the extent that they might be recognized. And, also unlike Paulk, most would probably have the good sense to avoid gay bars in Washington D.C., of all places, where one is exceedingly likely to run into a hostile gay activist, a hostile gay activist's significant other, a hostile gay activist's overweight heterosexual female friend, or one of many other such stereotypical homosexual hangers-on. So it's hard to say how many among even the movement's leadership, to say nothing of its clientele, are truly "cured" of homosexuality.

Let's pretend for a moment that homosexuality really is an affliction of the Devil (or "the adversary," as the Exodus website charmingly calls him on occasion). What would be the cure? Exodus recommends prayer. Prayer is sort of like the penicillin of Christendom, except that penicillin always works, whereas prayer seems to be hit-or-miss, much like sitting still for a minute and not doing anything. Perhaps prayer is more like the placebo of Christendom. See the chapter on prayer for other moderately witty observations along these lines.

Let's go back to penicillin. Prayer is a cure-all. And so if a bit of prayer is effective, one might logically assume that a lot of prayer would be even more effective (and the Evangelicals do indeed assume this). One might also assume, just as logically, that actually leading the weekly prayers of some 14,000 people would be even more effective still, as this would presumably put one at the apex of prayer power, where one might thus absorb a sizable portion of the peripheral prayer-energy runoff or what have you (I'm a bit foggy on the details). And one might also assume that making regular trips to the Holy Land, writing a dozen or so books on the subject of Evangelical Christianity, and leading the largest Evangelical organization in the world might also help stave off the adversary's subversive urges.

One would apparently be wrong. On November 1^st of 2006, when a male prostitute by the name of Mike Jones went public with claims that National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard had been a client of his for several years and had also used him to obtain meth, Haggard told a local news affiliate that he'd never met him.

"What'd you say his name was?" asked Haggard.

"Mike," replied the interviewer.

"Mike," repeated Haggard.

A bit later:

"Have you ever done drugs?" asked the interviewer.

"Never, I have never done drugs," replied Haggard, who later added that he "is not a drug man."

Meanwhile, James Dobson was furious that anyone would ask Haggard questions about things. "It is unconscionable that the legitimate news media would report a rumor like this based on nothing but one man's accusation," he said in a statement released the next day. "Ted Haggard is a friend of mine and it appears someone is trying to damage his reputation as a way of influencing the outcome of Tuesday's election - especially the vote on Colorado's marriage-protection amendment - which Ted strongly supports."

By the time Dobson had released the statement, Jones had already acknowledged the existence of voice mails and a letter which would confirm his story. One of the voice mails, quickly validated by voice analysts as being from Haggard, went as follows: "Hi Mike, this is Art. Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply. And I could pick it up really anytime. I could get it tomorrow or we could wait till next week sometime and so I also wanted to get your address. I could send you some money for inventory but that's probably not working, so if you have it then go ahead and get what you can and I may buzz up there later today, but I doubt your schedule would allow that unless you have some in the house. Okay, I'll check in with you later. Thanks a lot, bye."

The release of the voice mail had a wholesome effect on Haggard. By the end of the day, he had admitted to senior officials at his New Life Church that some of the charges were indeed true, promptly resigning his leadership of the NEA and putting himself on "administrative leave" from the church. He wasn't quite done lying, yet. During an impromptu interview on the 3rd, Haggard admitted to buying the meth but claimed that he had immediately thrown it away because "it was wrong," that he had indeed known Jones but had only gone to him for massages, that he had found Jones through a Denver hotel, and that he had only met with Jones at the hotel and never at Jones' apartment. All of this turned out to be moderately untrue.

By the 4th, Haggard had finally admitted to "sexually immoral conduct." A crack team of three Evangelical leaders, including James Dobson, was assembled to "perform a thorough analysis of Haggard's mental, spiritual, emotional and physical life." The chairman of the overseer board at New Life noted that a polygraph would be used, which is pretty funny.

A few days after the announcement, Dobson dropped out of the rehabilitation project, explaining that he was busy.

***

What should we make of the fact that a national Evangelical leader regularly solicited a gay prostitute, bought and used meth, and then lied about it? Were there any negative implications for the Evangelical movement and its leadership? According to the leadership of the Evangelical movement, the answer is no. Ted Haggard, after all, was merely the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and could thus hardly be said to have been a national Evangelical leader.

On the 700 Club, Pat Robertson led the anti-NAE charge. "We can't get their financial data. I think it's because they have very little money and very little influence," he said, adding that it "just isn't true" that the NAE really represents 30 million Evangelicals, as the organization claims. Which is to say, Robertson was essentially accusing the NAE leadership of being composed of liars. Elsewhere, Jerry Falwell appeared on CNN to assert that Haggard "doesn't really lead the movement. He's president of an association that's very loose-knit... and no one has looked to them for leadership," which is a pretty mean thing to say.

It's also inaccurate. Though indeed "loose-knit," the NAE is hardly a mom-and-pop operation of "very little influence" to which "no one" has looked to for leadership. The NAE has been around since 1942, when it was formed by a group of 147 Americans who apparently couldn't think of anything more pressing to do in 1942 than to found associations of things. By 1945, its member churches comprised 500,000 people. And aside from providing a degree of unity to an otherwise disparate array of minor denominations, the NAE went on to set up a number of spin-off organizations like the National Religious Broadcasters, which scored an early success when it managed to pressure CBS and NBC to resume the practice of selling air time to religious organizations. By the 21^st century, the NAE had acquired such a degree of significance that then-president Haggard was a regular participant in Bush's weekly Evangelical conference calls, had met with Bush in person a number of times, and was deemed important enough to receive a call from him upon the nomination of John Roberts for chief justice of the Supreme Court (during the Haggard scandal, White House spokesman Tony Fratto downplayed Haggard's importance, telling reporters that "he has been on a couple of calls. He's been to the White House one or two times." I seem to recall that the White House had a similar line about Ahmad Chalabi). He'd also met with Tony Blair for reasons that aren't immediately obvious, and with Ariel Sharon for reasons that are.

Haggard himself had been ranked among Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America" and had recently been the subject of a lengthy article in Harper's, of all things. The Oral Roberts Alumni Foundation, which used to count Haggard among its most successful graduates, still notes on its website that "[Wallbuilders founder David] Barton and Haggard are both becoming more visible and are in positions of influence, especially in the political realm." Fellow OSU grad Derek Vreeland, who had ironically once had a discussion with Haggard regarding "sexual sin," wrote during the scandal that "Ted was not as well known as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swagart [sic], but he is probably more influential than these two guys were in their hay day. Ted has political power and influence in both the Evangelical world and in the Pentecostal/charismatic world." Haggard also appeared in the notorious documentary Jesus Camp, in which he bashed homosexuality during a scene that several Evangelical groups claimed was taken out of context (and looking back, it seems that they were right). He also showed up in Richard Dawkins' 2005 documentary on religion, Root of All Evil?, in which Haggard follows Dawkins into the parking lot after a debate over evolution and threatens to have him arrested. All in all, Haggard was "a powerful influence in the Christian community," as James Dobson put it a few weeks after the scandal.

Haggard is also the author of a dozen or so books, including Descending Like a Dove: The Truth About the Holy Spirit, in which he no doubt addresses the question of what it sounds like when doves cry. In The Jerusalem Diet: The One Day Approach to Reach Your Ideal Weight And Stay There, Haggard spends 208 pages holding forth on the virtues of fruits and nuts. And then there's From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime, co-written with his wife, Gayle. Okay, I'm done.

***

When not criticizing homosexuals, the nation's Evangelical leadership is making excuses for them. It could use a little more practice in this. The Evangelical reaction to the Mark Foley scandal, for instance, was so bad as to make its haphazard reaction to the Haggard scandal look like something written by Wittgenstein. When James Dobson, the National Association of Evangelicals and Oral Roberts University are being disputed on a yes-or-no issue by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, as was the case during the Haggard scandal, it may at least be said that one group is correct, which is pretty good for a bunch of Evangelicals. On the other hand, the Foley affair appeared to have been composed by Wittgenstein if Wittgenstein had been a schizophrenic, which Wittgenstein may well have been for all I know (I guess I don't know very much about Wittgenstein).

The Evangelical response to the Foley scandal was so bad that it was still being bad long after the Foley scandal was over. A few weeks after Foley had escaped into rehab, when the Haggard scandal arrived to help break up the monotony, Tony Perkins apparently decided that it would be of sudden and marginal convenience to attack Foley. "The media is attempting to politicize the incident by comparing Ted with Mark Foley," he wrote. "On MSNBC yesterday I said that there is no comparison. After Foley was caught sexually pursuing minors, he publicly declared his homosexuality as if it were a potential defense. Ted did not try to change the rules of conduct to match his behavior and submitted to the decision of the overseers to remove him from the church he started," at least after he'd been caught lying five or six times.

But just a few weeks before, Perkins' good buddy Dobson had decided that Foley had instead handled everything well and that everyone should have thus shut up about it. "A representative who has been a closet homosexual for years, apparently, was finally caught doing something terribly wrong and when the news broke, he packed up his things and went home," he wrote. Having been merely a gay political sex scandal occurring on the cusp of an election, Dobson was saying, the story certainly had no legs of its own and thus shouldn't have been reported. Nonetheless, "the media and the Democrats saw an opportunity to make much, much more out of it, impugning the morals and character, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress."

Whereas the media and Democrats wanted to make much, much more out of it and impugn the morals and characters, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress, Tony Perkins wanted to make much, much more out of it and impugn the morals and characters, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress in a fun, paranoid way that might have helped to raise funds. It seems that Perkins had unraveled a high-level homosexual conspiracy in which the GOP was complicit. "The ricochets of the Foley scandal continued to whistle overhead this weekend," Perkins wrote in one of the delightful e-mail newsletters to which I subscribe. "As a guest on Fox News Sunday I again raised last week's report by CBS's Gloria Borger about anger on Capitol Hill that 'a network of gay staffers and gay members protect[ed] each other and did the Speaker a disservice' in the Foley scandal. On Friday, an internet site quoted a 'gay politico' observing that '[m]aybe now the social conservatives will realize one reason why their agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.' Sunday's New York Times revealed that a homosexual former Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, was 'among the first to learn of Mr. Foley's' messages to pages. The Clerk's job is described as a 'powerful post with oversight of hundreds of staffers and the page program.' This raises yet another plausible question for values voters: has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder. This was the first House to pass a pro-homosexual hate crimes bill. The marriage protection amendment was considered very late in the term with no progress toward passage. Despite overwhelming popular approval, the party seldom campaigns as the defender of marriage. The GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be the party that defends the traditional moral and family values that our nation was built upon and directed by for two centuries. Put another way, does the party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?"

That's an interesting question, but Dobson had already decided that no such questions should be asked. And he was still asking why everyone was still asking about things. "What Mark Foley did was unconscionable. It was terrible," he noted. "Thankfully he's gone. But tell me now that he's gone, why is it still with us? Why are they still talking about it? Why are they trying to blame somebody for it? It is because they are using that to suppress values voters."

Actually, it was because then-Speaker Dennis Hastert himself had ordered a House ethics committee investigation into the matter. And Tony Perkins wouldn't shut up about it, either. "I would like to see all the facts," he said on CNN. "I hope they're forthright and forthcoming in the next 48 hours and present this information to the American public." Why Perkins was apparently trying to "suppress values voters" is a mystery. But when he wasn't apparently trying to "suppress values voters," Perkins was also agreeing with Dobson that the media was trying to "suppress values voters," too. "Story after story on the elections seem to repeat the same spin that conservatives are too turned off to turn out the vote," he wrote. And when Perkins wasn't agreeing with Dobson that the media was trying to "suppress values voters" by claiming that conservatives would be "too turned off to turn out the vote," Perkins was elsewhere claiming that conservatives would be too turned off to turn out the vote. As he told the country, again on CNN, "I think this is a real problem for Republicans... This is going to be, I think, very harmful for Republican turnout across the country because it's inconsistent with the values that the Republicans say that they represent."

If there was such a lack of coordination between Dobson and Perkins that neither could make a statement on the issue without contradicting the other (and if Perkins couldn't even make a statement on the issue without contradicting himself), it should hardly be surprising to find a lack of coordination between Dobson and Perkins and the larger social conservative pundit battalion. "Those truly interested in protecting children from online predators," Dobson stated, "should spend less time calling for Speaker Hastert to step down, and more time demanding that the Justice Department enforce existing laws that would limit the proliferation of the kind of filth that leads grown men to think it's perfectly OK to send lurid e-mails to 16-year-old boys." At this point, those calling for Hastert to step down as Speaker included the ultraconservative, Evangelical-friendly Washington Times, the ultra-conservative, Evangelical-friendly Bay Buchanan, and the ultra-conservative, Evangelical-friendly Paul Weyrich (who eventually changed his mind after a phone conversation with Hastert, who explained to Weyrich that he didn't feel like stepping down), among others. And it's not entirely clear what sort of "filth" Dobson was talking about, unless he was referring to the Catechisms or something; when Foley, who is Catholic, released a statement to the effect that he had been molested by a priest as a young man, Catholic League president and occasional Dobson ally William Donohue wondered aloud, "As for the alleged abuse, it's time to ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it, Mr. Foley? Second, why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys won't allow themselves to be molested." Whether or not Donohue knows this from experience is left unspecified. Nonetheless, these are all good questions, and I certainly agree with Donohue that any young boy who expects to find himself alone with a priest should be prepared to fight when the priest inevitably tries to molest him. But, again, Dobson had already decided that to continue to talk about Foley was tantamount to trying to "suppress values voters."

In a way, the Evangelical punditry is admirable in its decentralized nature; if everything that every Evangelical leader says contradicts everything else that every other Evangelical leader says, one can hardly accuse the Evangelicals of toeing a single party line. Instead, they decentralize their disingenuousness so that each particular disingenuous assertion can compete in the marketplace of disingenuous ideas until one eventually proves viable and may then be generally agreed upon. This is sort of like how capitalism works, except that capitalism works, whereas the decentralized nature of the Evangelical punditry simply reveals a rhetorical opportunism that is too incompetent to properly disguise itself as collective moral clarity. Or, as Focus on the Family Vice President of Public Policy Tom Minnery put it to James Dobson during an October radio broadcast, "I fear that we're in a society in which you will be held to the standards which you claim." Perish the thought.

***

If neither Evangelicalism nor Republicanism can put a stop to homosexuality, perhaps the Pink Hordes may at least be staved off in the political sphere. This has been the traditional approach, as Wellington Boone reminded us on Liberty Sunday. And though homosexuals may no longer be executed or even imprisoned in the United States for the crime of being homosexual, they may at least be forbidden to enter into private contracts with each other, which is not quite as fun as killing them or putting them in prison but still counts for something.

For the most part, this has worked. Social conservatives have managed to score constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in 19 of the 20 states in which such amendments were put to the ballot, Arizona being the sole exception for some reason or another. These amendments are not just an excuse for social conservatives to be assholes but are in fact practical necessities in many states; some state constitutions make declarations of equality under the law for all citizens, and if American history teaches us anything, it's that such declarations are occasionally taken seriously.

One of these occasions occurred in New Jersey at the tail end of 2006. Having been asked to decide whether or not existing state marriage laws were unconstitutional in barring same-sex couples from obtaining marriages or civil unions, the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided that they were, and gave the legislature 180 days to rewrite the law.

This made a lot of people unhappy, particularly at the offices of the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial board didn't seem to have any real arguments spelling out why the Supreme Court of New Jersey had decided the case wrongly but apparently did have access to old Weathermen Underground manifestos and hard liquor. Calling the move "a judicial diktat," the WSJ gang criticized the court for having used the term "we have decided" in the text of their, uh, decision, before going on to describe the court as being made up of "judicial overlords" who seek to "impose" New Jersey's recognition of same-sex couples on other states by way of the full faith and credit clause, an important article of the constitution which the WSJ denounced here as an agent of "cross-state social imperialism." I'm not making this up. This is actually how the folks at the Wall Street Journal editorial board write when they're upset about something.

The court had also noted in its decision that with the unconstitutional status of the marriage laws having now been determined, it fell upon the legislature to in turn decide what nature of revisions needed to be made, as was the legislature's proper role. The state's constitution, after all, is "not simply an empty receptacle into which judges may pour their own conceptions of evolving social mores," as was noted in the text of the court's decision. But this, the WSJ decided - or perhaps we should avoid the term "decided," since the WSJ has already decided that the word "decided" should not be used - the WSJ humbly suggested that the court had added this "perhaps out of a troubled conscience about judicial overreach." In its magnanimosity, the WSJ editorial board is willing to allow for the possibility that the justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court have the human capacity to feel shame for their knowingly evil deeds.

Though a bit more elegant, the mainstream Wall Street Journal's language was no less colorful than that of the core Evangelicals. The court had "made the legislature their henchmen," wrote Tony Perkins, who also argued that "the legislature should ignore the court's ruling and follow the lead of 20 other states that have already passed amendments to protect this sacred institution."

Aside from constituting treason, Perkins' advice also constitutes silliness in that no such amendment would pass in New Jersey; polls consistently show that residents are in favor of same-sex marriage legalization by a small margin and in favor of civil-union legalization by a huge one. Which is to say, if the people of New Jersey were given the chance to vote down the court's decision, they wouldn't do it. And the legislature, voted in by the people of New Jersey, had in 1991 adopted language to the effect that sexual orientation could not be used as a basis for discrimination in matters of public accommodation. New Jersey is no more bothered by homosexuals than homosexuals are bothered by New Jersey.

But James Dobson is bothered by homosexuals, and he's even more bothered by the prospect of homosexual marriage, which has already wreaked such social havoc on northern Europe. "[I]n the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get married," Dobson told a typically credulous Larry King in November of 2006. "It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater numbers," he continued, although obviously homosexuals are indeed marrying in greater numbers since that number used to be zero and is now something higher than zero, "it's that when you confuse what marriage is, young people just don't get married."

If what James Dobson says is true, New Jersey is going to be in huge trouble, and Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must already be. Of course, James Dobson is wrong. But whereas James Dobson generally contents himself with simply being wrong in his priorities, sensibilities, instincts, historical perspective, theology, and manners which is to say, wrong in a mystical, cloudy sort of way he has here managed to be wrong in such a blatant sense that his wrongness can be demonstrated with mathematical exactitude. In fact, we should go ahead and do that. It'll be like an adventure - a math adventure.

First, let's prepare our variables. X is any country "where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," as Dobson manages to term these nations with just a little clarification from us. Y is the all-important marriage rate among heterosexuals before country X has "tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," and Z is the all-important and allegedly damning heterosexual marriage rate that exists after ten years of gay civil unions. Now, the Dobson Theorem, as we shall call it, plainly states that "if X, then Y must be greater than Z." Or, to re-translate it into English, "if a nation allows for civil unions, the marriage rate among heterosexuals at the time that this occurs will be higher than it is ten years later," because the marriage rate among heterosexuals will of course decline for some reason.

Let us now test this Grand Unified Dobson Theorem, as I re-named it just a second ago when you weren't looking. Now, like most things with variables, the Grand Unified Christological Dobson Super-Theorem of Niftiness (which needed more pizazz) requires that X be substituted for various things that meet the parameters of X  in this case, northern European countries. Luckily, Dr. Dobson himself has provided us with some. During the Larry King interview, Dobson mentioned Norway and "other Scandinavian countries" as fitting the description. We'll also need values to punch in for Y and Z. These may be obtained from all of the countries in question, which have famously nosy, busy-body governments.

Conveniently enough, these numbers may also be obtained from the October 26^th edition of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, in a column that appeared just a few inches away from the editorial board's calm and measured denunciation of the Supreme Court of New Jersey's imperialistic diktat-making described above. It seems that William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver professor of jurisprudence at Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York investment banker, had recently written a book called Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned From the Evidence, and had chosen to present the thrust of their findings in op-ed form.

Denmark, the authors noted, began allowing for gay civil unions in 1989. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 10.7 percent. Norway did the same in 1993. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 12.7 percent. Sweden followed suite in 1995. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 28.7 percent. And these marriages were actually lasting. During the same time frame, the divorce rate dropped 13.9 percent in Denmark, 6 percent in Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden.

As the Reader will no doubt have determined at this point, the Dobson Theorem or whatever it is that we've decided to call it is obviously bunk, since it stated that countries which allow gay civil unions will see a decline in the marriage rate among homosexuals, when in fact the opposite is true. But since we've already gone to the trouble of expressing Dobson's goofy utterances in the form of a theorem (or rather, since I've gone to the trouble you were no help at all), we might as well punch in these figures just to make absolutely sure:

if X, then Y will be greater than Z

We punch in Denmark for X, Denmark's marriage rate in 1989 (n) for Y, and Denmark's marriage rate in 1999 (n + n(10.7)) for Z:

If Denmark, then n will be greater than n + n(10.7)

Holy shit! That's obviously wrong, since n is not a greater number than n plus any other positive number. It is, in fact, a smaller number. If Denmark's policies reduce marriage, the residents of Denmark have yet to realize this and act accordingly.

Where is Dobson getting his information from this time? The culprit in this case may be Weekly Standard and National Review gadfly Stanley Kurtz, who took issue with Garver and Eskridge's preliminary findings back in 2004, before they were published (in fact, Kurtz weirdly dismisses them as "unpublished" not once but twice in the course of his article; now that they have appeared more formally, Kurtz will no doubt praise them as "published"). Confronted with statistics indicating that marriage in Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed that "Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to."

Brushing aside numbers showing that Danish marriage was up ten percent from 1990 to 1996, Kurtz countered that "just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark." He failed to note that they were down in 2001 for quite a few places, including the United States, which of course had no civil unions anywhere in 2001. And having not yet had access to the figures, he couldn't have known that both American and Scandinavian rates went back up in 2002. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate "has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples 'catching up.'" It's unclear exactly how old these "older couples" may be, but at any rate, Kurtz thinks their marriages simply don't count, and in fact constitute a sign of "the institution's decline." So Kurtz's position is that Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are younger people getting married at a higher rate, but older people are as well. I don't know what Kurtz's salary is, but I'm sure it would piss me off to find out.

Kurtz also wanted us to take divorce. "Take divorce," Kurtz wrote. "It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married." This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a much lower divorce rate than the United States as a percentage of married couples, a method of calculation that makes the size of the married people pool irrelevant. Denmark's percentage is 44.5, while the United States is at 54.8. Incidentally, those numbers come from the Heritage Foundation, which also sponsors reports on the danger that gay marriage poses to the heterosexual marriage rate.

Still, Kurtz is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of wedlock. "About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents," he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of second-born children who have unmarried parents, because that percentage is lower and would thus indicate that Scandinavian parents often marry after having their first child, as Kurtz himself later notes in the course of predicting that this will no longer be the case as gay civil unions continue to take their non-existent toll on Scandinavian marriage.

Since the rate by which Scandinavian couples have children before getting married has been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do with gay marriage unless, of course, you happen to be Stanley Kurtz. "Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing." Of course it was more disturbing to Kurtz. By the mid-'90s, the Scandinavians had all instituted civil unions, and thus even the clear, long-established trajectory of such a trend as premature baby-bearing can be laid at the feet of the homos simply by establishing some arbitrary numerical benchmark that was obviously going to be reached anyway, calling this milestone "in many ways more disturbing," and hinting that all of this is somehow the fault of the gays. By the same token, I can prove that the establishment of the Weekly Standard in 1995 has contributed to rampant world population growth. Sure, that population growth has been increasing steadily for decades, but the push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was "in many ways more disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down. Of course, this is faulty reasoning by virtue of its unparalleled support for the invasion of Iraq, the Weekly Standard has actually done its part to keep world population down.

Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United States. Kurtz doesn't seem to feel this way, though, as it isn't convenient to feel this way at this particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells us, having babies without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork with the proper federal agencies. What will become of the babies? Perhaps they'll all die. Or perhaps they'll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math and science, as they've been doing for quite a while.

***

I have spent several hours pouring over Scandinavian marriage statistics. So have a number of other people. This tells me that Scandinavian marriage statistics are very important things over which to pour. These other people seem to agree. The pro-gay marriage folks say that because the institution of Scandinavian marriage doesn't seem to have collapsed in the wake of gay civil unions, the United States shouldn't fret about gay civil unions, either. The anti-gay marriage folks say that because the institution of Scandinavian marriage doesn't seem to have collapsed in the wake gay civil unions, we just aren't looking hard enough or interpreting the results with adequate degrees of intellectual dishonesty, and that anyway we shouldn't allow gay civil unions because our gods do not care for them. The general consensus, though, is that the manner in which adult American citizens choose to conduct their personal lives is the government's business, and that such things as divorce rates are so important that they must be kept down even by excluding some groups from participating in the institution of marriage.

Well, so be it. If there is some sort of War on Marriage to be fought, let us fight it. But because you and I lack an army or even political power (I'm assuming you don't chair any significant Senate committees, seeing as how you're reading a book), we will instead have to settle for what is called a "war game." A war game is a make-believe exercise of the sort that is often conducted by the Navy and the editors of The Atlantic for the purpose of testing various scenarios, most of which seem to involve the invasion of Iran. Since I've never been invited to one of these, I'm not entirely sure how they work, so we'll just have to improvise a bit.

***

It is the year 2012, and I have seized control of the United States, declaring myself God Emperor. All engines of the State are at my command. Wherever power flows, it flows first from my personage. I have cybernetic arms.

"Pardon me, God Emperor Brown..."

"What is it, High Priest Dobson? Can't you see that I'm oiling my cybernetic arms?"

"My apologies," Dobson mutters, his eyes downcast lest the sun shine off of my shiny cybernetic arms and blind him. "It's just that the people, sir. They are discontented."

"Well, that's understandable. They've all been put into forced labor camps."

"No, my liege. They're worried about the state of American marriage."

"Why would they be? I married two hundred slave girls just last week."

"Oh, snap!" interjects Court Jester Wellington Boone. "That reminds me of something funny my wife said to me this morning..."

"Too many people are getting divorced," Dobson interrupts. "The American people would like to see lower divorce rates."

"Hmm," I say to myself, stroking my chin with my long, cybernetic fingers. "High Priest, bring me the following records from the days of the Old Republic..."

A bit later, Dobson and I are looking over U.S. Census Bureau statistics from 2003.

"The key here is to identify the root of America's high divorce rates," I explain to Dobson, who is sitting next to me, and to Boone, who is sitting next to me and beating a gay man to death with a hammer. "This is actually quite simple, as the numbers indicate marked regional variances. For instance, notice how the Northeastern states have exceptionally low divorce rates. Also observe that Massachusetts, the most gay-friendly state in the Union and the first to allow for gay marriage, has the lowest divorce rate of all."

"But it is impossible!" cries out Dobson. "There are ten thousand... er, forty million studies that indicate otherwise!"

"And just as you'll find the lowest divorce rates in the relatively secular Northeast, you shall find the highest divorce rates in the relatively religious Bible Belt. Notice how Texas, for instance, has one of the highest in the country. Now, what does the Bible Belt have more of than does the Northeast, aside from illiteracy and exorcisms? Bibles! And possibly belts."

"But the Bible strengthens marriage," says Dobson. "It says so in the Bible."

"Apparently not. Here's a major study done in 2000 that shows the rate of divorce among born-again Christians to be 27 percent second only to Baptists, with 29 percent. The lowest divorce rate is found among atheists and agnostics, with 21 percent. This is in accordance with other studies."

At that moment, Stanley Kurtz arrives. He had been off in Sweden again, trying to rescue the Swedes from the Swedes.

"Perhaps these divorces are occurring partly among older people," says Kurtz. "Then they wouldn't count for some reason known only to me, Stanley Kurtz."

"But in any case," says Dobson, "these married couples were probably getting divorced before they accepted Christ."

"Actually," I point out in my wisdom, "it says here that the vast majority are getting divorced afterwards. And thus we have only one option. In order that we might have a lower the divorce rate, the State will no longer grant marriage licenses to Baptists and Evangelicals. So it is written; so it shall be done. Dobson!"

"Yes, my liege?"

"Bring me Slave Girl #146. I shall receive her in my... private quarters."

"Y-yes, God Emperor. It shall be as you say."

And with that, I crush my solid gold goblet and raise my cybernetic fist into the sky.

"All hail to Baal, fertility deity of the Carthaginians!" I shout. "All hail to Baal! Bwa, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"Be sure to check me out at National Review Online," says Stanley Kurtz.

***

Sorry about that. Anyway, those are the numbers. Evangelicals are simply bad at marriage.

A Review of William Bennett's The De-Valuing of America and of William Bennett Himself

Occasionally, a book is best reviewed more than a decade after it's been written. William Bennett's The De-Valuing of America, published in the otherwise uneventful year of 1992, is such a book.

To judge from the dust jacket review blurbs, Bennett's first foray into the literary genre of the ex-politico memoir traditionally a haphazard mash-up of policy suggestions, political narrative, and personal musings - appears to have been a well-received one. Rush Limbaugh calls the book "inspiring." Beverly LaHaye, president of Concerned Women for America (and, tellingly, wife of Tim LaHaye, brainchild of the Left Behind empire) gushes that "[h]is keen strategies help equip all of us involved in the accelerated warfare for the very heart and soul of America's children." And the Wall Street Journal refers to Bennett as "Washington's most interesting public figure," apparently intending this as a compliment.

But praise from allies is like a mother's love. More surprising is the dust jacket quote from The New York Times, of all things, informing us that Bennett "brings refreshing intelligence and common sense to a debate long dominated by ignorance and confusion." This strikes me as a nice way of saying that Bennett is better educated than most of the people who believe the things that he believes.

Whether or not this is what the Times meant, it's certainly the case. Bennett is fairly unusual among cultural conservatives in that his background is in academia in general and liberal arts in particular, a status that's somewhat comparable to being a cultural liberal whose background is in truck driving in general and the transport of veal calves in particular. And just as our hypothetical cultural liberal might have a few choice words for the veal calf industry, Bennett is none too fond of modern American academia, certain members of which he groups together with a cadre of unspecified media heavies and then categories under the designation of "elites." These elites, as Bennett informs us early on, derive particular satisfaction from criticizing the beliefs and practices of "the American people," a term he uses throughout the course of the book and which, from the context in which it invariably comes up, appears to mean "people who agree with William Bennett." Now, the elites are motivated in their criticisms not by any legitimate concerns they may have with "the American people," who are presumably beyond criticism by virtue of being people who live in America, but rather by a desire for status. The liberal elites "hope to achieve reputations, among other elites especially, for being original, deep, thoughtful, and unconventional," we're told by Bennett, who, being a spirit entity from Neptune and composed of pure energy, lacks the sort of universal mammalian regard for one's own reputation with which the rest of are unfortunately cursed.

Bennett summarizes the elites thusly: "Odi profanum vulgus ('I hate the vulgar crowd') is a fitting slogan." It's an expansive sort of hypocrisy that can criticize others for desiring to be considered "deep" and then, in the very next sentence, throw out an unnecessary Latin phrase so that it may then be explained to the reader what the phrase means. But then, Bennett is an expansive fellow. We must give him that.

Bennett is so disdainful of the elite mentality that, in a show of solidarity with the common man, he limits his writing style to that of an awkward seventh grader who's still getting the hang of sentence parsing. "At a gathering of the elite, an often performed ritual is to mention a derided object or individual, followed by a superior laugh and roll of the eyes," he explains to us with some effort.

The "derisive" nature of those incorrigible elites seems to be a sticking point. In the course of his overarching indictment, Bennett denounces them chiefly as "critics of American practices." This is an odd enough thing to take issue with in and of itself; surely any society has practices that are worthy of criticism, even if that society happens to be one's own. But such a denunciation is doubly odd when one remembers that Bennett himself has spent a good portion of his own career as a "critic of American practices." The use of drugs, for instance, is certainly an "American practice," this being a pursuit that Americans practice on a regular basis. And Bennett has been quite famously critical of this "American practice." But whereas the "elites" are content to simply study and sneer when they find something about the American character of which they don't particularly approve, Bennett goes a step further and actually seeks out political appointments that will allow him to take an active role in putting "American practice" practitioners in prison.

In 1988, a few months after resigning from his position as secretary of education under Reagan, Bennett lobbied for the newly-created position of drug czar under incoming President Bush. In the fourth chapter of De-Valuing, entitled "The Battle to Save Our Kids from Drugs," the reader is treated to both the behind-the-scenes jockeying and subsequent birth pains, all in excruciating detail.

"Things got off to a rocky start," Bennett notes, "at least as far as some outside observers were concerned." Actually, things got off to a rocky start by Bennett's own admission; the "outside observers" remark is simply an excuse to attack the press by implying that the media narrative of the time was somehow inaccurate. But it plainly was not; Bennett himself has just spent an entire page describing how Bush was reluctant to take him on, and in the very next sentence after the "rocky start" comment, he points out that he wasn't invited to the nascent administration's first cabinet meeting, further noting that Bush refused to include Bennett in the cabinet at all. Thus Bennett is essentially saying, "A is true, but the press wrongly reported A, and also, A is true." An odd duck, that Bennett. An odd, disingenuous duck.

Bennett claims not to have been fazed by the cabinet snubbing. "I was not particularly distressed at this turn of events; I had my fill of cabinet sessions while I was secretary of education." Bennett had never wanted that sort of prestige, and besides, he'd already had it.

After going to great lengths to show the reader how nonchalant he'd been about his lack of cabinet-level status and how unconcerned he was regarding what everyone might say about this, Bennett goes on to relate what everyone was saying about this, treating us to several old media blurbs on the subject including one from U.S. News and World Report indicating that he might "slowly sink into bureaucratic quicksand and be rendered irrelevant." On the contrary, Bennett tells us, "Sinking into bureaucratic quicksand and being rendered irrelevant was, frankly, never much of a concern of mine." He then goes on to explain why it was a concern of his that he might sink into bureaucratic quicksand and be rendered irrelevant: "Here I had little direct authority, no ability to dispense government grants, a 100-person staff (infinitesimal by Washington standards)... There were some inherent, potentially debilitating, institutional weaknesses that I had to overcome." Many people contradict themselves now and again, but William Bennett manages to do so in perfect ABAB stanza.

Bennett was so innately drawn to the role of drug czar that he began practicing for it well before the position even existed. In De-Valuing, Bennett describes his first big bust, pulled off in his capacity as a dorm administrator while studying at Harvard and which involved two students caught selling drugs out of their room. Bennett triumphantly details how the two pushers feared that Bennett might physically harm them, though he reports having been equally disappointed that Harvard failed to punish the students to his own specifications which is to say, expulsion and criminal prosecution.

This slash-and-burn approach to illegal drug use would become a familiar theme. Upon taking over as secretary of education under Reagan, one of Bennett's first tasks seems to have been getting rid of all those excess teachers that had for so long been plaguing the nation's educational system. "Early in my tenure," he writes, "I contacted the heads of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, urging them to adopt a policy of requiring teachers using drugs to resign." This was more than just a clever attempt to cut art and music programs out of the local school budgets; in a 1986 speech given in Tennessee, Bennett explained his reasoning: "They should be drug-free, not for reasons of national security, but for reasons of setting an example." It's not entirely clear what he meant by this; presumably, there were already policies in place that would have led to the firing of any teacher caught lighting up a spliff in fourth period English. What Bennett seemed to be calling for was a policy that would have either required the unprecedented monitoring of adult private lives, or instead be totally meaningless and thus it would have served as a great metaphor for U.S. anti-drug policy in general, and thus also as a great teaching aide for our hypothetical fourth period English class when it came time to cover poetic constructs.

The president of the Metro Nashville Education Association wasn't buying. "Teachers should be careful of their actions in front of the student, but teachers are still part of society," he responded in a statement. "It's unrealistic for teachers to be so different. Substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such. No group is going to be 100 percent clean, be it chiefs of police, ministers or teachers." Bennett's aside to us: "Here again was an example of the teachers' union getting in the way of sound reform, this time because of a startling lack of moral clarity or moral courage," which is to say that the teacher's union didn't want teachers to automatically lose their jobs for issues unrelated to their teaching.

But the nation's educational ills wouldn't be solved just by getting rid of teachers, of course; the kids would have to be gotten rid of, too. Upon becoming drug czar, Bennett fought to implement a national policy whereby any student found to have come in contact with any drugs in any manner whatsoever would be automatically expelled from school. Between the crusade against teachers and the crusade against students, Bennett may have really hit upon something here. After all, most problems that a school faces can be easily solved by just getting rid of all the people associated with it, and thus this would be a fantastic set of policies if the purpose of a school is to simply exist as a pretty building, rather than to educate children, a good portion of whom would have been eligible for expulsion if Bennett had gotten his way.

Luckily for those students, he didn't. Testifying before the House Committee on Idiotic Policy Implementations (or something like that), Bennett came up against some resistance from the always energetic New York Representative Charlie Rangel. During a contentious back-and-forth over Bennett's proposed mandatory expulsion policy, Rangel expressed some reservations about the idea of denying education to students caught with drugs. Though Rangel's preferred policy is here unreported and thus left to our imagination, Bennett summarizes it for us thusly: "I think what Rangel hoped for from us was something less severe; a course of instruction, a drug-education program, lectures, slides, and tapes in short, a magic bullet that would inoculate the young from ever using drugs." Which is to say that Rangel wanted a series of measures in place that would seek to discourage and reduce drug use among students, whereas Bennett wanted a single, forceful measure that would allegedly solve the problem in one fell swoop in short, a magic bullet. Wait a second.

Okay, so Bennett doesn't seem to know what the term "magic bullet" means. That's understandable; I myself used to have trouble with the term "ruled out." When it was said that "police have ruled out the possibility of foul play," I wasn't sure if that meant that the police had spread the possibility out on the table to get a better look at it, or rather that they'd thrown it out so that it wasn't really something they were still considering as a possibility. But that was when I was, like, twelve.

Luckily, Bennett does a slightly better job of explaining the "moral clarity" of his position in a down-paragraph metaphor. "Of course we want to teach children not to play with matches. But if a house is burning, we've got to put out the fire and we've got to grab matches out of some hands before they start any more fires." Actually, this is a terrible metaphor, unless, of course, he meant to add, "and then we've got to throw the little bastards out on the street." He is, after all, talking about a mandatory expulsion policy, not a "taking drugs out of some hands before they use any more drugs" policy, which is what the schools have always had.

If Bennett's use of metaphors and common English terminology leaves something to be desired, his use of supporting evidence is atrocious. Having just firmly established his position that zero-tolerance, one-strike-you're-out policies are totally the way to go, he attempts to illustrate the point with an anecdote. This is a reasonable enough thing to do; anecdotal evidence is a kind of evidence, after all, even if it's often countered by contrary anecdotal evidence, and is thus not all that useful as a policymaking tool. But whereas you or I might try to use a piece of anecdotal evidence that lends weight to our position, Bennett does something quite a bit more unconventional - he uses a piece of anecdotal evidence that runs contrary to his own position, apparently without even realizing it.

In discussing a Miami school that appears to have steered clear of the drug menace and which he describes as an example of his "principle in action," Bennett notes the school's drug policy: "The first time a student is caught using drugs, he must enroll in a drug-intervention or private rehabilitation program or, depending on the severity of the infraction, he may face suspension. Subsequent infractions lead to suspension and possible expulsion from school. If a student is caught dealing drugs, he is turned over to a police agency and faces either suspension or expulsion from school." Which is to say that, in this particular high school, students caught with drugs aren't necessarily suspended from school, much less expelled (and are in fact enrolled in what sounds very much like one of Charlie Rangel's strangely multifaceted "magic bullet" programs of the sort to which Bennett was opposed just fifteen seconds ago, back when it was convenient for Bennett to feel that way), and the possibility of expulsion doesn't even arise unless the student is caught several times, while even those found to be actually dealing drugs aren't automatically expelled, either. This is the example that Bennett has chosen to use in order to illustrate for us how his preferred policy of automatic expulsion for all levels of drug use could be used to improve the nation's public schools. Again, just to be clear, here's what Bennett is saying: "I think schools should do A. Here's a great school that does B. Isn't it swell how doing A helped that school become great?"

In addition to mass expulsions, bad metaphors, the misuse of anecdotal evidence, and the butchering of English idioms, Bennett's inherent sense of moral clarity also called for large, theatrical explosions. During the Reagan administration, the U.S. military was already doing plenty of this by way of its air bombing campaign in Bolivia, but it takes more than a few bombs to please Bennett. After being told that nine planes were currently being used for this purpose, and that a minimum of 15 would be needed to eradicate Bolivian coca production for a year, Bennett wanted to know how many planes were available. A Defense Department official told him that this was classified information, which we can imagine probably pissed Bennett off quite a bit. Then he was told that an increase in American military planes dropping an increase in American bombs on an increase of Latin American peasants might lead to an increase in anti-American sentiment in an already volatile region, particularly if those American planes were clearly marked as being American.

"Then paint the face of Daniel Ortega [the head of the communist government in Nicaragua] on them," Bennett claims to have replied, once again exhibiting his moral clarity. After all, why just kill Bolivians when you can lie to them, too? To be fair, though, Bennett probably didn't mean this as a serious proposal; rather, it appears that he includes the exchange here simply in order to give the reader a taste of the gruff, take-no-prisoners wit to which his colleagues were no doubt treated on a daily basis.

Bennett's unusually hands-on approach to the drug war wasn't just limited to sitting around in Washington and second-guessing the military; Bennett writes extensively about his drug czar-era experience on the "front lines" of major urban areas, where he undertook nifty tours of crack house raids and was thus in a position to second-guess the police, too. In Detroit, Bennett encounters a beat cop whose forays into the drug war are presumably more professional than touristy, and who at some point summarized the problem by asking Bennett, "Why should a kid earn four bucks an hour at McDonald's when he can make two or three hundred dollars a night working drugs?"

"For a lot of reasons," Bennett replies. Instead of listing those reasons, though, Bennett goes on to explain to the reader how the beat cop in question had been unwittingly brainwashed: "The police officer had picked up this line of reasoning from the media." A bit later: "Not surprisingly, a lot of youngsters picked up on this argument." The implication, made on the basis not of evidence but rather of inane conjecture fueled by convenient media hatred, is that the desirability of illegal, high-profit activities over legal, low-profit activities is something that "the media" had to come up with, after which it was duly "picked up on" by hapless Americans (of whom Bennett famously hates to be critical unless it suddenly becomes convenient to do so). This is why smuggling had never occurred in human history until 1851, when the New York Times came into existence, shortly after which the term "smuggling" had to be invented, presumably by the New York Times.

According to Bennett, "the media" came up with all of this due to some sort of inherent racism; in the course of building on his argument, he claims that the four-bucks-at-McDonalds versus three-hundred-bucks-selling-drugs meme is some sort of slur against American blacks. "If people think poor black children aren't capable of moral responsibility, they should say so," Bennett writes in response to his unspecified adversaries. "I think otherwise. I know they are capable of it."

This would be a very lovely sentiment if it wasn't an outright lie, intended to paint those who sympathize with (or excuse) black Americans as racial determinists, while at the same time depicting Bennett himself as a champion of colorblindness. Nor do we need to simply assume this on the basis of the drug czar's overall taste for the disingenuous turn of phrase; Bennett made his position quite clear during a 2006 broadcast of his syndicated radio program.

In the course of a general discussion on demographic arguments put forth in the influential book Freakonomics, Bennett took a call from a fellow who noted that the practice of abortion had probably robbed the federal government of some large chunk of taxable income in the years since Roe v. Wade. Bennett countered by noting that this particular argument wasn't necessarily a useful criticism of abortion, and further explained, "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

Unsurprisingly, this particular incident led to criticism from some quarters, and so Bennett released the following statement in his own defense: "A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has. Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialog I engaged in this week. Such distortions from 'leaders' of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment." The funny thing about this or, rather, one of the funny things is that one of these "'leaders'" who had allegedly become a "disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment" as well, was none other than President George W. Bush, who had released a statement calling Bennett's comments "not appropriate." And thus it was that, by simply criticizing something that Bennett had said, the president had finally managed to do something to attract his moral outrage.

In Bennett's defense, his comments had indeed been "a thought experiment about public policy," and not a serious proposal to abort black fetuses. Bennett is not only a staunch opponent of abortion, but is also, in his own, confused way, a humane sort of guy. On the other hand, "in Bennett's defense" might be a poor choice of words on my part, because no serious commentator was claiming that this was the case, and thus Bennett need not be defended from charges that never existed. Bennett chose to take issue with a largely non-existent, red herring set of criticisms in order to avoid having to defend his unambiguous statement to the effect that aborting the fetuses of the nation's black population would result in a decrease in the crime rate.

Aside from illustrating Bennett's tendency towards intellectual dishonesty when defending himself, the aborting black babies comment also illustrates Bennett's similar rate of intellectual dishonesty when attacking others. A man capable of criticizing his opponents for supposedly operating under the assumption that "poor black children aren't capable of moral responsibility" while simultaneously believing that "you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down" is a man who is clearly not debating in good faith, but rather in an effort to score cheap points. Whereas many of Bennett's obvious intellectual contradictions may be written off as the accidental collisions of a disorganized and mediocre mind, this particular fender-bender can be considered nothing less than intentional, malicious dishonesty, in apparent service to some higher Truth for which lesser, mundane, run-of-the-mill truths are only accessories, to be discarded when inconveniently cumbersome. One might even be tempted to adopt a melancholy attitude regarding the fellow, wondering why a citizen who might otherwise have contributed to his nation's public life has instead seen fit to make himself into yet another partisan hack. On the other hand, the guy doesn't even know what a "magic bullet" is, so to hell with him.

***

This is not to imply that Bennett is entirely useless, of course. I did learn a few things from his book. Did you know that Prohibition was a resounding success? Neither did I. Actually, I still don't, because it's not true. So, I guess what I really learned is that some people still think that Prohibition was a resounding success, and that at least one of these people has gone on to help shape American drug policy.

During a wider discussion on the merits of federal fiddlin', Bennett drops the following bombshell, almost as an aside: "One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less public drunkenness. And, contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime."

This is a pretty incredible statement to just throw into a book without any supporting evidence. Bennett hasn't just expressed an opinion on an ambiguous topic, like, "Gee, the old days sure were swell" or "Today's Japanese role-playing games are all flash and no substance" or something like that. Rather, Bennett has made several statements of alleged fact which can be easily verified or shot down by a few minutes of research. But Bennett didn't bother to research it, and I know this because the federal government has a tendency to keep records, and the records prove Bennett wrong.

Less "alcohol-related disease?" In 1926, a number of witnesses testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the ongoing effects of Prohibition; several New York State asylum officials noted that the number of patients suffering from alcohol-related dementia had increased by 1000 percent since 1920, the year after Prohibition had gone into effect. Also in 1920, deaths from undiluted alcohol consumption in New York City stood at 84. In 1927, with Prohibition in full swing, that number had swelled to 719.

But those are just snapshots in time. A look at the larger picture shows Bennett to be not just kind of wrong, but entirely and unambiguously wrong about every single thing he's just said.

In 1991 the Cato Institute commissioned a retroactive Prohibition study by Mark Thornton, the O.P. Alford III Assistant Professor of Economics at Auburn University. Citing hard data gleaned mostly from governmental records, Thornton concluded that Prohibition "was a miserable failure on all counts."

Despite Bennett's assertion that "when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol [italics his]," a cursory glance at the federal government's own data shows that there was not [italics mine, thank you very much]. Now, per capita consumption did indeed fall dramatically from 1919 to 1920, but then increased far more dramatically from 1920 to 1922 after which it continued to increase well beyond pre-Prohibition levels. So, when Bennett says that "there was less consumption of alcohol," he's right about a single one-year period, but wrong about the next dozen or so years or, to put it another way, he's entirely wrong. If I decided to reduce my drinking for a week, and I drank quite a bit less than usual on Monday but then drank the same amount I usually do on Tuesday and then drank more than I usually do on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if the average alcohol consumption on my part during that week was much higher than my average alcohol consumption on the previous week, then one could hardly say that "there was less consumption of alcohol" in my apartment that week. Or, rather, one could say that, but one would be wrong. In this case, though, one could be excused for being wrong, because I don't usually keep exact records on my alcohol consumption, and neither does the federal government (I think). But in the case of Prohibition, there is no excuse for ignorance, and even less for spreading it around.

Not only did alcohol consumption not decrease during Prohibition, but the American taxpayer was now paying quite a bit of extra coin to enforce the decrease in alcohol consumption that they were now not getting. From 1919 to 1922 a period which, as mentioned above, saw an overall increase in alcohol consumption - the budget for the Bureau of Prohibition was tripled. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard was now spending 13 million dollars a year, Customs was blowing all kinds of cash, and the state and local governments which had been stuck with the majority of enforcement issues were throwing away untold amounts of money to boot.

Beyond the easily calculable nickel-and-dime costs of running an unsuccessful nanny state boondoggle, the American citizen was being screwed on other fronts, too. Unlike those umbrella-twirling, petticoat-clad temperance harpies of the time (and their equally insufferable apologists of the present day), Thornton considers other social costs of a massive government ban on non-coercive behavior. Of the alcohol consumed under Prohibition, hard liquor made a jump as a percentage of total alcohol sales that had not been seen before, that has not been seen since, and that will probably never be seen again. The sudden ascendancy of whiskey over beer can be easily explained (and could have easily been predicted): if one is smuggling something above the law or consuming it on the sly, it makes more sense to smuggle or consume concentrated versions of the product in question than to deal with larger, more diluted concoctions. A similar phenomenon occurred in the cocaine trade under William Bennett's watch as drug czar.

So alcohol consumption was up, and the alcohol being drunk was now of the harder, more brawl-inducing variety. But what about the savings? The aforementioned busybodies in the petticoats had predicted great social gains for Americans money spent on alcohol would now go to milk for babies, life insurance, and, presumably, magical unicorns that grant you three wishes. Of course, this didn't turn out to be the case. Not only was alcohol consumption up, but records show that people were now paying more for it, too. Of course, they were also paying higher taxes to aid in the government's all-out attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand. And don't even think about approaching one of those unicorns to wish for more wishes. That's against the rules.

What about crime? Apparently, there are some wacky rumors going around to the effect that crime actually went up during Prohibition. But Bennett clearly told us that "contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime."

Pardon my French, but le gros homme possède la sottise d'un enfant humain et la teneur en graisse d'un bébé d'éléphant. And if you'll indulge me further by pardoning my harsh language, Bennett is so full of horse shit on this one that he could fertilize every bombed-out coca field from the Yucatan to Bolivia. The idea that "Prohibition caused big increases in crime" is not so much a myth as it is a verifiable fact. Again, believe it or not, the feds tend to keep records on such things, and again, believe it or totally believe it, Bennett has failed to consult these records before providing his sage commentary on the subject.

In large cities, for instance, the homicide rate jumped from 5.6 per 100,000 residents in the first decade of the 20^th century to 8.4 in the second, during which time 25 states passed their own localized Prohibition laws in addition to the federal government's implementation of the Harris Narcotics Act, which in turn paved the way for the then-nascent drug war. And in the third decade, during which Prohibition was the law of the land not just in rural states governed by puritanical yahoos but in every state of the union, that number jumped to 10 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the rates for other serious crimes increased on a per capita basis by similar leaps and bounds. This, despite an environment of booming prosperity for which the twenties are known to this day.

Now, a particularly stubborn statist of the William Bennett school of disingenuous argumentation might try to counter by claiming that this increase in serious crime could have been attributable to other factors, such as increased immigration; Bennett himself might be tempted to remark that things would have been different if only we had aborted every Italian baby in the country or something like that. But this hypothetical counter-argument would not hold up, because the crime rate continued to soar until 1933, when it saw a sudden and dramatic decline.

1933, of course, was the year when Prohibition was repealed.

So, William Bennett to the contrary, Prohibition did indeed lead to "big increases in crime." But Bennett is incapable of recognizing this, because he's already made up his mind. After all, Bennett advocates the federalization of private conduct, and, as the nation's first drug czar, acted to implement this vision. And because Bennett is a possessor of both "moral clarity" and "moral courage," his views must be both morally clear and morally courageous. And because America's failed experiment with Prohibition was an early and dramatic example of the federalization of private conduct, and thus an early version of Bennett's chosen ideology, Prohibition must have logically been a success, rather than a failure.

Indeed, Bennett was enthusiastic about the possibility of replicating the glorious Cultural Revolution of Prohibition. "This is one issue, Mr. President, where I, a conservative Republican, feel comfortable in advocating a strong federal role," Bennett reports telling Bush senior in 1988. Putting aside the question of whether or not this is how Bennett really talks and if so, he's certainly more eloquent in private than he is in public this is a telling remark, and it's unfortunate that Bennett doesn't explain why a strong federal role would be merited here and not elsewhere. Something about the criminalization of private conduct scratches an itch that social assistance programs just can't seem to reach.

"Often it seems that any idea that fits the zeitgeist, that can be linked to a 'need' - anyone's need, anywhere, anytime is funded," he writes at one point. "Frequently, it is funded at the costs of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars without the slightest regard to whether the program will work, whether it will be held accountable, whether it is appropriate for the federal government to fund it, or whether it is something people can or ought to do for themselves." It does not occur to Bennett that he has just described the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Elsewhere: "I know of no other group in America that is more cocksure of its right to full entitlement to the United States Treasury than the leadership of higher education." Bennett must believe the drug war to be funded by voluntary subscription and perhaps further offset by vouchers, and seems to have seen nothing "cocksure" in demanding that the military bomb more of Bolivia at his command. And during his no doubt Marcus Aurelius-inspired treatise on the education of children found elsewhere in the book, he tells us that if "we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: 'No, I submit to the decree of Athens.'" Perhaps they should also understand why Socrates was sentenced to death by the mob in the first place. The answer, of course, is that he was found guilty of "corrupting the youth."

Like the Athenian mob, Bennett is also opposed to the corruption of the youth by way of such things as marijuana and favors the death penalty for those found guilty of it. At one point in the book, he recalls an appearance on Larry King Live when a caller suggested that drug dealers be beheaded. The moral clarity of the proposal seems to have excited Bennett. "What the caller suggests is morally plausible. Legally, it's difficult... morally, I don't have any problem with it." But the moral plausibility of this was, as usual, lost on the nation's intellectuals while being perfectly understood by the common folk, who adore their drug czar (and it is also understood by the totalitarian Chinese, who have been executing drug dealers for quite a while, no doubt due to the inherent moral clarity of its communist dictatorship). "Many of the elites ridiculed my opinion. But it resonated with the American people because they knew what drugs were doing, and they wanted a morally proportional response." Bennett's evidence of this, seriously, is that then-chairman of the Republican National Committee Lee Atwater called him from South Carolina and reported that the people he had spoken to there seemed very keen on the idea. Meanwhile, as Bennett points out, the elites had the audacity to run headlines like "Drug Czar: Beheading Fitting" to describe an incident in which the drug czar had said that beheading is fitting. "The reaction was illustrative," he writes.

Indeed, much of the book (and much of Bennett's public career since) follows a familiar pattern. Bennett says something wacky, the "elites" criticize him for it, and then Bennett either sticks to his guns or pretends he didn't mean what he obviously meant. Weirdly, he sometimes manages to do both at the same time. Speaking to a Baptist group during his tenure as drug czar, Bennett told attendees the following: "I continue to be amazed how often people I talked to in drug treatment centers talk about drugs as the great lie, the great deception indeed a product, one could argue, of the great deceiver, the great deceiver everyone knows. 'A lie' is what people call drugs, and many, many people in treatment have described to me their version of crack, simply calling it 'the devil.' This has come up too often, it has occurred too much, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored."

This time, the reaction was not simply "illustrative," as had been the case with the beheading thing. Rather, "The reaction was absurd but illustrative." I should have pointed out that the Bennett Pattern described above invariably ends with Bennett describing the situation as "illustrative." Anyway, the reaction was illustrative of the media's tendency to report things that government officials say when they say something unusual, a practice to which Bennett seems to be opposed, no doubt on moral grounds. The San Francisco Chronicle story was headlined "Bennett Blames Satan for Drug Abuse." Bennett reminds us that he was simply "reporting what I had heard from people in drug treatment and speaking of drugs in a moral context," but then immediately goes on to refer to this as "my view." Nor would he have been very likely to report all of this and describe it as having "come up too often, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored" if he didn't believe it had some sort of merit. If Bennett had, for instance, gone to a number of drug treatment centers and been told that crack was invented by the CIA under the direction of George Bush Sr. in order to exterminate the black population, which is another popular piece of theology among certain drug addicts, Bennett probably would not have gotten up in front of several hundred people and began "reporting what I had heard from people in drug treatment" and then noted that Bush Sr.'s alleged black-op narco-genocide "has come up too often, it has occurred too much, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored," because Bennett would not have agreed with such a sentiment, or, if he did agree, he would not have said it because he would have known all of this to be true as he had in fact helped to launder the drug money by way of his casino mobster connections, and at any rate he would not find it prudent to talk about all of these things in public.

Occasionally a member of the media goes so far as to directly confront Bennett about his silly utterances. In 2006, John Roberts the CNN anchor and thus a member of "the elite," rather than the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, who is presumably not a member of "the elite" asked Bennett about something he had recently said to the effect that certain reporters should have been thrown in prison.

ROBERTS: Let's talk about your comments earlier this week about James Risen, Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times and Dana Priest of The Washington Post who won Pulitzer Prizes for their work uncovering CIA secret prisons in Europe and, as well, the NSA spying scandal. What were your listeners saying about that this morning?

BENNETT: Well, we had a lot of people weigh in. I said that I wondered whether they deserved the Pulitzer more, or actually more deserving was a subpoena or perhaps going to jail. Look, [former New York Times reporter] Judy Miller went to jail, and I don't know why we should treat these folks differently than Judy Miller, particularly, when this is --

ROBERTS: Yeah, but Judy Miller went to -- Judy Miller went to jail for contempt of court.

BENNETT: Right, well, let's see if these guys are asked --

ROBERTS: These people haven't been charged with contempt of court.

BENNETT: Well, if James Risen is asked, right, or Dana Priest is asked, "Who are your sources?" the people who gave them this information committed a crime, leaked classified information. If they are asked, and they do the same thing Judy Miller does, which I expect they would, don't you?

ROBERTS: Right.

BENNETT: Then, they -- then, they would go to jail. Also, there's the Espionage Act.

ROBERTS: But, they -- but, they -- but they haven't been asked yet. You know, they haven't been asked yet, though.

BENNETT: We -- I don't know. If they haven't been asked yet, I assume they will. Then, you can change the tense of my remarks, but not the substance of them.

Which is to say that Bennett was asking why three people had not yet been imprisoned for crimes they might potentially commit in the future. This is a very interesting question. Similarly, one wonders why it is that Bennett has yet to be imprisoned for the triple homicide he will pull off in 2014 at the behest of a Russian mobster to whom he owes three million dollars in gambling debts, and for whom Bennett will also have been acquiring legislative favors for by way of a network of friendly congressional staffers who are mixed up in the Southeast Asian slave trade. I myself have made repeated calls about this to the FBI, where I was hung up on, and to MI5, where I was listened to politely for a few minutes and then hung up on in a very charming and understated manner.

Even while proposing more executions for drug dealers, more bombs for Bolivia, and more prison time for reporters, Bennett means well. "I always speak with good will that is, with the hope of arriving at a conclusion we can all share," he writes. And if his style is blunt, perhaps the times demand it. "The modern age and the bearers of some of the modern age's sentiments pushed hard against me. I pushed back." Bennett will not compromise with these modern age sentiments. He is, like his church, uncompromising until compromise becomes convenient, which it often does.

There is something to be said for the holding of strict moral standards, but there is also something to be said for taking a break from this every once in a while, such as during the tail end of the Reagan administration. "I was appalled, when the Iran-Contra crisis broke out," Bennett recalls, unable to bring himself to refer to it as a scandal, "to witness how silent many people in the Reagan administration, including the cabinet, were in defense of the president. They headed for the tall grass and waited out events. The first impulse in this kind of situation should be to rally to the defense of the president." Bennett has some sort of secret reason for why this is the case which he does not choose to share with us. At any rate, the portion of the book in which he glosses over Iran-Contra is one of the very few in which he does not call for firings, expulsions, more jail time, executions, "moral clarity," "moral outrage," "moral courage," "moral plausibility," or for children to be taught why Socrates told Crito that he submits to the rule of Athens, the government of which must also have had a law against secretly selling weapons to Iran back when Iran was Persia (one could, in fact, be executed for even displaying warm feelings towards Persia at this time in the history of Athens). When Bennett takes his break from morality, we are spared from much.

Bennett does not take his break for long. "Washington at its worst can be a viscous, sick city. Nothing so captivates the Washington mind as the anticipation of a scandal or that a person in power is about to fall from grace." These words, of course, were written just before the Clinton years; otherwise they would not have been written. There was a period between 1992 and 2001 in which the viscous sickness of Washington underwent divine transubstantiation back into "moral clarity." I do not know why this is because I am neither a chemist nor a theologian, but at any rate, Clinton had been involved, not in an affair or a crisis, but in a "scandal," as Bennett accurately called it in 1998, although suddenly no longer associating its "anticipation" with "viscous sickness." "Through his tawdry, reckless, irresponsible conduct, he has plowed salt in America's civil soil," Bennett wrote of Clinton in that year. "For that, and for much else, he has rightfully earned our obloquy." I am unclear on the meaning of this last word but from context I assume that it means "moral outrage." It is, however, a shame about the salt in America's civic soil, from which neither the wheat of virtue nor the barley of justice was ever to be yielded again; the harvest was now tyranny. "We know that Mr. Clinton has invoked claims of executive privilege that are even broader than Richard Nixon's - claims few legal scholars defend."

Mr. Bennett has since taken another break from his vigilance on the subject of executive privilege, and has anyway expanded the pool of legal scholars who may be found to defend broad claims of same; January 2001 brought on another transubstantiation, a miracle of the sort upon which both Catholic and Evangelical may agree.