Dear Concerned Citizen,

Ahhh...very interesting. It appears that Mr. Cuomo wants to replace religious orthodoxy with an idol made by human hands, the idol of consensus. How do we know? Let's look a bit more deeply into Mr. Cuomo's proposed solution.

Mr. Cuomo offers to put Bush's "proposition...that human life exists as early as fertilization" to the test. "The best way to test that proposition would be to employ a panel of respected scientists, humanists and religious leaders to consider testimony from bioscience experts describing when consciousness first appears, when viability outside the womb usually occurs, and how other religions treat the subject. They would then provide their conclusions to the lawmakers."

At the risk of being too blunt--and one can hardly be too blunt with the likes of Mr. Cuomo--it appears that the sole purpose of such a "panel" is to arrive at Mr. Cuomo's predetermined conclusions. While "consensus" is the god before whom he would have us bow, we should keep our eyes on the beliefs of the small group of idol-makers who actually provide the predetermined conclusions as consensus. It is that hidden faith that determines how the idol is cast.

What is Mr. Cuomo's hidden faith? To ferret it out, we may begin with what should appear to be a contradiction. On the one hand, he argues that "rights...arise out of consensus, not the dictates of religious orthodoxy." An interesting assertion, indeed, and quite revealing of Mr. Cuomo's strange faith. Don't rights arise from our very nature as human beings?

Apparently not for Mr. Cuomo. To say that rights arise out of consensus, means that we have no rights before and independent of consensus. Even worse, it means that rights established by consensus can be abolished just as readily, and replaced by other quite different rights established by a later consensus. That is, according to Cuomo, we have no rights as human beings; we have no rights by nature; or more properly, we have no rights according to our nature as human beings. We have only those rights that people, or a majority of people, or a small panel of people, happen to agree upon--for as long as they happen to agree, and no longer.

A more dangerous and destructive political doctrine could not be imagined, for in abolishing rights rooted in our nature, we shall be quite soon baptizing rights that go against our nature.

"Oh no!," I can imagine Cuomo objecting. "That couldn't happen because (as he notes) it is the panel of experts that will determine when consciousness first appears, when viability outside the womb usually occurs, and how other religions treat the subject."

Really? And just exactly who will pick the panel? And just exactly how is this very small, handpicked group representing society-wide consensus? Shouldn't we be a little worried that they would be chosen to determine an answer that, through government support and coercion makes consensus, even against opposition?

Cuomo mentions the lovely success of just such a panel of consensus-makers, the "Task Force on Life and the Law...operating effectively in New York since 1985 [mid-way through his reign as Governor], devising public policy to address issues like euthanasia, the definition of death, surrogacy births, the withholding and withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment, reproductive technology and other difficult questions generated by rapid advances in medical technology."

Devising public policy?! Task Force?! Be assured the task the panel was given, was to force a Cuomo-friendly policy upon the public. Just such a task force was formed in 1968 by then Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. As he said to the well-stacked Abortion Law Reform Panel, "I am not asking whether New York's abortion law should be changed, I am asking how it should be changed."

As with Rockefeller, so with Cuomo and those like him. Cuomo wants to use human embryos for medicinal purposes, an intriguing spin on the ancient abomination of adults offering children up to their gods so that they can live just a little bit longer and a little bit more comfortably.

And now we see why Cuomo so passionately opposes religion, particularly Christianity, entering the public policy arena. He knows Christianity is opposed to what he wants. Therefore he must silence it by trivializing it.

But again, it is quite clear from Cuomo's moral positions that he is an adherent of another religion, Secularism. The secular religion places a premium on the individual's freedom to do anything without any restrictions whatsoever; it sees human life and destiny in this-worldly, merely bodily terms. Abortion causes it no anxiety, so it has even less regrets for the fate of (in Cuomo's revealingly callous phrase) "leftover embryos." The appeal to a "panel of experts" is merely a useful ruse of establishing Secularism as the religion of the land.

Rather than shrink from Cuomo's self-righteous scold, President Bush should turn the tables on Cuomo and convene a panel whose task it is to uncover the many ways in which the religion of Secularism is, against the constitution and human nature itself, trying to enthrone Disbelief as our established state religion.