We can change our foreign policy, we can feed the people who live in these desperately impoverished places, we can give more or less aid to Israel—but none of that is relevant to this particular jihad, or holy war. Those responsible for this wave of terrorist activity are fighting modernity. And there is no more important element of modernity than the secular state.
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The Culture Wars
A few years back, I read an interesting article (I think it was in The New Yorker) predicting the ultimate marginalization of the Religious Right and the victory of social liberalism and toleration. The article acknowledged a string of right-wing electoral victories, but based its prediction on the values of popular culture–precisely those values that cause apoplexy in people like Bill Bennett and John Ashcroft. The thesis of the article was that popular culture is a predictor of political change.
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A Spin Too Far
As the Bush Administration proposes to further relax the rules restricting concentration of media ownership, it seems fair to look at the current performance of the conglomerates that increasingly decide what Americans should know.
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Valuing Children
Can we really put a dollar value on the psychological well-being of children? The State of Indiana evidently thinks so, if the reported reaction to a recent decision in a lawsuit brought by the ICLU is any indication.
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The Political Usefulness of Religion
In the (turbulent) wake of the Ninth Circuit Pledge of Allegiance ruling, all I could think of was the study conducted several years ago by the Constitution Center, which concluded that Americans revered the Constitution, but had no idea what it meant.
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