Did you hear the dumb blonde joke about a girl who was so stupid she got half of America to buy her books and talk about what she thinks nonstop on network and cable TV, in most of the print media including the New York Times and the Washington Post, at countless cocktail parties and coffee klatches, and headlining just about every blog on the internet?

Pretty dumb, huh?!

Seems like everyone is talking about Ann Coulter and the outrageous things she says in Godless, the Church of Liberalism.

Coulter attacks the Jersey Girls as “the Witches of East Brunswick” and comments that “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.” The Jersey Girls are four 9/11 widows who gained notoriety for shaming the government until it established the 9/11 commission. Ann won’t be winning Miss Congeniality any time soon.

This week on MSNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutche, Tim Russert was on to pitch his newest book, Our Father’s Wisdom. Deutche is miffed that Russert’s book ranks below Coulter’s on the New York Time’s Bestseller List. As soon as Coulter’s name is mentioned Deutche flinched in revulsion and snarled, “Vile!” as Russert drawled out, “Wroooooooong!”

Russert and Deutche conclude that instead of Coulter, American politics needs someone “spontaneous” and “authentic”. Here’s the bad news, boys. Coulter is perhaps the most spontaneous and authentic person in American politics today. She understands that pundits, to be successful in the media, must also be comedians in dark blue suits (or leather mini-skirts) who say whatever is on their mind as soon as it crosses their mind regardless of how off –putting it might sound. In fact, they say it precisely because it is off- putting.

It’s survival of the most outrageous for comedians and pundits alike.

Come to think of it, pundits and comedians are often one and the same. Consider Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jeaneane Garafolo, Al Franken, Jerry Springer and Dennis Miller. This is Coulter’s crowd. She is just more outrageous, funny and clever than they are, so she sells more books and gets more press.

But Coulter makes a bigger mistake in Godless than being nasty to the Jersey Girls.

The Jersey Girls have a history of saying some pretty nasty things as well. Group leader, Kristen Breitweiser, tells audiences that “Three thousand people were murdered on George Bush’s watch.” “President Bush and his workers were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 people that day." Many 9/11 families are furious with the Jersey Girls’ grandstanding. Political pundits, even on the left, agree with Coulter that the Jersey Girls’ suffering should not immunize them from criticism.

Coulter’s mistake in Godless runs deeper than her “look at me” antics. The big idea is wrong.

Coulter’s premise in Godless, the Church of Liberalism, is pretty straight forward. She thinks that liberalism is America’s established religion, with its own doctrines, dogma, cosmology, gods and clergy. Liberals reject God but have they embraced atheism religiously. Coulter equates liberalism with religious atheism, much like Buddhism or Shintoism.

Coulter warns in Godless that liberals will deny this charge, fearing official recognition of liberalism as a “religion” will jeopardize tax payer funding of their religious institutions including public schools, the universities, and most of the judiciary. “The separation of church and state means separation of your church from the state” so that the Church of Liberalism can maintain its complete control over our governmental institutions.

Coulter is wrong to confuse liberalism, which is a political philosophy, with sectarian Secularism that is Godless by definition. There are many liberals who are devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Coulter knows this. She twisted her premise to politicize it so she would sell more books and buttress up the Republican Christian base.

Classical liberalism holds that an individual’s liberty is the primary political value. This liberty must be protected from the tendency of power to accumulate around heads of state, hereditary status, and established religion. Liberalism’s patron saint is William of Ockham. A 13th century Franciscan monk and Oxford academic, Ockham based his notions of natural and inalienable rights on the perfect liberty of the gospels. He believed that institutional authority must be limited to in order to protect these rights.

Agree with him or not, it would be wrong to call Okham Godless. There have been millions of God fearing liberals who have worked tirelessly to build our common moral ground. There are many aspects of classical liberalism that are founded on biblical principles and are worth fighting for.

The American constitution was written using classical liberal ink on biblical parchment. To one degree or another, all Americans are liberals. Only a fraction of us, thank God, are Secularists.

Coulter's real target is Secularism whose advocates are a vocal minority within this liberal tradition. Their goal is to radicalize classical liberalism.

Secularism is liberalism’s prodigal son. It rejects its sacred roots for placing too many demands on the individual. Often they pit the individual’s desire for autonomy against these traditional sources of faith and family. tothesource has run many articles challenging the reasoning of these Secularists and the dangerous consequences of their beliefs.

Secularism claims to be anti-authoritarian. In reality, it’s tyrannical!

Secularism must not become the exclusive source of moral authority for our culture. As a sectarian belief, Secularism’s adherents should be free to express it, but the state should not establish it, either by actively excluding other religious beliefs from the public square or disproportionately financing it. (See articles below)

Coulter’s substitution of liberalism for Secularism is intentional. She shows her hand by using “secular” a handful of times in the book, including the second to the last sentence, when her commitment to truth outweighs her political ambition. Most of the book is a defense of her politics more than a reasoned defense of her faith.

Godless is pretty Godless. There are entire chapters with no reference to God whatsoever.

There is an edit feature in Microsoft’s Word. Coulter simply needed to click Find from the Edit drop menu. In the field next to Find she should have typed liberalism. In the field next to Replace she should have typed Secularism. Within seconds the fix would have been in.

Coulter knows if she would have replaced Secularism for liberalism she would have sold a fraction of the books she is selling now.

But the warning behind her rhetoric is worth heeding. The Democratic Party must curtail the influence of their sectarian Secularist wing. This is so obvious that even the libertarian magazine The Economist questioned the wisdom of the Democratic Party’s stance against traditional faith in “American Theocracy. Is God Ambidextrous?” The May 25th, 2006 article claims that the secular elite within the party are not only indifferent to religion; they remain “positively hostile to it.” “The last thing (the secular elite) want is a religious left to counterbalance the religious right.”

This is bad news not only for Jim Wallis, Michael Lerner and Jimmy Carter, it’s bad news for all of America. On this point, Coulter is right. The Democratic Party would be emboldened if they would listen to the people of faith within their own party regarding their party’s positions on cultural issues, from justice to abortion.

But Coulter is playing an even more dangerous game. Most of her book is concise, well written and a fearless defense of traditional Christian morality. Her chapter on abortion alone is worth the price of the book. However, the logic of her attack on liberalism leads the reader to conclude that only conservatism is theistic, and that God is a Republican. This outrageous assertion borders on blasphemy, and the people of American know it. No one owns God, least of all a political philosophy or party.

Sean Penn loves his Ann Coulter action figure.

He keeps it on his desk and puts his cigarettes out on it.

Push a button and it quips “Why not go to war for oil? We need oil. What do Hollywood celebrities imagine fuels their private jets? How do they think their cocaine is delivered to them?"
Ann Coulter

The biggest problem for the religious left is that it is badly outgunned by the secular left. The Democratic Party's elites—from interest-groups to funders to activists—are determinedly secular. So are many of its most loyal voters. John Kerry won 62% of the vote of people who never go to church; and that group is the fastest-growing single “religious” group in the country. These secular voters don't just feel indifferent to religion. They are positively hostile to it, regarding it as a embodiment of irrationality and a threat to liberal values such as the right to choose. These crusading secularists are in a particularly militant mood at the moment, as the sales of Kevin Phillips's Bush-bashing book, “American Theocracy”, testify. The last thing they want is a religious left to counterbalance the religious right.

The Economist

New head of the U.S. Episcopal Church supports gay ordination

The US Episcopal Church has chosen a woman as its next leader - making it the first church anywhere in the Anglican denomination to do so.

Katharine Jefferts Schori narrowly won a vote among her fellow bishops at a governing General Convention meeting. The choice must still be approved by delegates at the convention, where the bishops' vote is normally backed.

The choice could prove controversial - most other Anglican Churches around the world do not allow women to be bishops.

BBC

The Beginning of the End of the PCUSA?

This is a blog post I was hoping and praying I wouldn't have to write.

It looks like my denomination, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., felt envious over the recent attention given to the Episcopal Church as it faces the possibility of schism. Thus we decided to get our fair share of the spotlight by acting rather like the Episcopalians. Even as recent actions by the national leadership of the Episcopal Church has brought that denomination to the brink of division, so have recent actions of the General Assembly of the PCUSA.

Today's General Assembly cast two historic votes. The combination of these votes looks almost schizophrenic to anyone not familiar with the peculiar dysfunctionality of the PCUSA. On the one hand, the General Assembly voted by a strong majority (405-92) to leave the so-called "fidelity and chastity" section of our constitution intact. In plain language, the Book of Order of the PCUSA states that all ordained officers in the church must practice "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness" (G-6.0106b). This is a standard that, until today, every leadership body in the church was expected to apply without exception to every leader and potential leader. Period. This is what the General Assembly reaffirmed with a resoundingly favorable vote.

Mark D. Roberts

Wesley Smith Quote Added to Starbucks "The Way I See It" campaign

Frequent tothesource contributor, Wesley Smith submitted a quote that will be one of dozens of quotations printed on thousands of Starbucks coffee cups around the country. The campaign is reportedly not designed to score political points but to encourage old-fashioned coffee-house conversations

"The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest."

Weeding out embryos with genetic problems seems to be accepted de facto as a valid use of the newest genetic preimplantation screening technology.

This week UK researchers announced a controversial new preimplantation genetic screening procedure that allows parents using in vitro fertilization to select "healthy" embryos for implantation thus avoiding the risk of giving birth to a child carrying a known hereditary genetic defect.

However, using the test (PGH) to select embryos free of any known genetic problem is not what is making most of the headlines. Judging from most reports it seems that the ethical challenge only arises from the side "benefit" of gender identification. Apparently wealthy families from around the world are traveling to UK to have the testing done in order to select the gender of their future progeny.

Those who have disabilities are the first to sound the ethical alarm regarding the danger of technologies that disregard the value of their lives.

Upon hearing news this week that the screening procedure may be used to screen for embryos with autism, the timesonline reports Simone Aspis, from the Council of Disabled People, warning against the use of PGH, “Screening out autism would breed a fear that anyone who is different in any way will not be accepted. Screening for autism would create a society where only perfection is valued.”

Perhaps alarm will spread as people realize who else will be candidates for destruction. Reportedly some hope to screen out the healthy embryos who are merely carriers of the genetic problems PGH can identify.

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