A moral world requires moral violence

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Pope Francis had harsh words for the arms industry on Sunday, condemning as "two-faced" those who claim to be Christian while manufacturing weapons or investing in companies that produce them. "It is hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons," the pope told an audience of young people in Turin. "Doing one thing and saying another. What hypocrisy!"

It's not the first time Francis has blasted the defense industry. In May, he denounced the arms business as an "industry of death," run by people who "don't want peace" because "they make more money from war." In February, he labeled weapons dealers "merchants of death" and blamed them for "furthering a cycle of hate, fratricide, and violence."

So sweeping a calumny would be unworthy coming from anyone; from a moral teacher as prominent as the Bishop of Rome, it is inexcusable. Of course there are hypocrites and charlatans in the arms trade, just as there are hypocrites and charlatans in all professions. But to smear everyone in the weapons business as unethical and anti-peace is sheer demagoguery.

I wouldn't presume to instruct the pope in theology, but if Francis really means to execrate any commerce in weapons, he goes farther than even Jesus did. "Let him who has a purse take it and also a bag," Jesus instructs his apostles in the Gospel of Luke, "and let him who has no sword sell his garment and buy one." In both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, Saint Adrian of Nicomedia has long been honored as the patron saint of arms dealers. There is room for good Christians, the church seems to believe, even in the weapons business.

And would the pope want it any other way? Would the world be better off if the industries that make weapons, ammunition, and military equipment didn't employ men and women who aspire to live ethically? The Vatican itself is defended by a military force — the Swiss Guard — that is well-supplied with sophisticated firepower, including assault rifles and submachine guns. When Francis slams weapons-makers and firearms-sellers as "hypocrites" and "merchants of death," does he include those who provide the guns that keep him and the papal offices safe?

In Isaiah's messianic vision of a world in which universal peace and goodness reigns, human beings will "beat their swords into plowshares / And their spears into pruning hooks." But until that utopia arrives, there is nothing moral about pacifism. In the here and now, evil exists and the decent must fight it. And unless they are to fight unarmed, they will need the tools of violence.

In both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
traditions, Saint Adrian of Nicomedia is revered
as the patron saint of arms dealers.

The pope knows only too well what happens when good people — or good nations — aren't willing to fight the world's monsters with every available weapon.

At the very same rally in Turin in which he excoriated those who make and sell munitions, Francis retroactively decried the failure of the Western democracies to do more to stop the Nazi genocide and Stalin's terror. "The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, Roma, homosexuals, everybody," he said. "Tell me, then: Why did they not bomb them?"

Does the pontiff hear his own words? He laments the failure to bomb the rail lines and save millions of lives. Who would have made those bombs? Who would have made the bombers to deliver them? Who made the guns and tanks and missiles that did, in the end, defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Who supplied the arms that ended the slave trade and eradicated piracy? Were all of them conniving merchants of death?

No, Pope Francis, it is not hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons. For if the peaceable cannot defend themselves, they will have no peace. "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," Americans sang during World War II. A moral world requires moral violence, and the wisdom to know when to use it.

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A case for Israel: Rooted in more than security

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel's new deputy foreign minister: "It is
important to say that this country is ours, all of it. We didn't
come here to apologize for that."

Noses went out of joint and knickers got in a twist when Israel's new deputy foreign minister delivered her inaugural speech to the Jewish state's diplomatic corps.

"We need to get back to the basic truth of our right to this land," said Tzipi Hotovely, who is running the foreign ministry's day-to-day operations, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retains the title of foreign minister.

The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, she declared, and their claim to it is as old as the Bible. "It's important to say this" when making Israel's case before the world, and not to focus solely on Israel's security interests.

Of course security is a profound concern, Hotovely observed, but arguments grounded in justice, morality, and deep historical rights are stronger. She even quoted the medieval Jewish sage Rashi, who wrote that Genesis opens with God's creation of the world to preempt any subsequent charge that the Jewish claim to the land was without merit.

Needless to say, Hotovely's message was scorned on the left as primitive zealotry. "Her remarks raised eyebrows among many in the audience," the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. One diplomat said his colleagues "were in shock" at the suggestion that they should cite the Torah when advocating for Israel abroad.

Diplomacy is not Bible class. Yet why should Israel and its envoys shrink from making the fullest defense of Jewish rights in what was always the Jewish homeland? Though modern Zionism didn't arise as a political movement until the 1800s, the land of Israel has always been at the core of Jews' national consciousness.

Even during 19 centuries of exile, Jewish life in Israel (renamed "Palestine" by the Romans) never ceased. In all those years, no other people ever claimed the land as their country, or built it into their own nation-state.

Jewish sovereignty wasn't regained by downplaying the historical and religious bonds linking the Jews to the land. World leaders and opinion-makers didn't regard those links with patronizing disdain; many found them intensely compelling.

In 1891, alarmed by reports of Jews being massacred in Russia, hundreds of prominent Americans signed a petition urging the restoration of Palestine to Jewish rule.

"According to God's distribution of nations it is their home, an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force," declared the petition, among whose signatories were the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the speaker of the House of Representatives, future President William McKinley, and scores of influential industrialists, bankers, educators, and journalists. (One of them was Charles H. Taylor, the first publisher of the Boston Globe).

Twenty-five years later, when Britain famously committed itself to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," its motives were not only strategic and pragmatic, but religious. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour spoke feelingly of Jewish history. "I could tell you all the kings of Israel," Lloyd George said, recalling his school days, "but I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the kings of England."

President Woodrow Wilson, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, also endorsed the Zionist cause. "To think," he later exclaimed, "that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people!" Still more enchanted with the revival of Jewish governance in the Jewish homeland was Harry Truman, whose lifelong study of the Bible strengthened his conviction that the Jews had a legitimate historical right to Palestine.

When the League of Nations set the terms of the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, it
unanimously recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with
Palestine" and the justice of "reconstituting their national home in that country."

The immemorial Jewish bond with the land is even enshrined in international law. When the League of Nations set the terms of the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, it unanimously recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the justice of "reconstituting their national home in that country."

It was essential, wrote Winston Churchill at the time, to stress that the Jews were "in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance," and that the Jewish national home there "be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection."

Israel has gained nothing from its unwillingness to vigorously assert the Jewish claim to the land as a matter of historical justice and biblical legitimacy. It has only made it easier for its enemies to promote a false narrative of Zionist aggression and illegal occupation.

Hotovely may have "raised eyebrows" in exhorting Israel's diplomats to focus unapologetically on Jewish rights and history, but the record is clear: Those are the arguments that have always gained the most traction.

To repeat: Diplomacy isn't Bible class. But the strongest case for Israel is rooted in something more transcendent than security. Even now, according to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of American adults — and 55 percent of American Christians — believe that Jews have a God-given right to the land of Israel.

A backward superstition? On the contrary. The Jewish nation's ties to its homeland are an enduring element of the human story, and an asset that Israel underrates at its peril.

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My daughter married a woman

From the files of an unhyphenated American patriot, Lloyd Marcus

An American Patriot - Meet Lloyd Marcus

All of a sudden, it is pedal-to-the-metal, full-speed-ahead, no-holds-barred promotion of homosexuality everywhere you turn. It is as if someone said, okay, now is the time to launch our all out assault on traditional principles and values; while crushing all opposition.

I can not even enjoy a non-political Saturday watching do-it-yourself home improvement TV channels without almost every show aggressively promoting homosexuality. Homosexuals are only slightly over 2% of the population.

And yet, their representation on TV shows is dramatically disproportionate to their numbers. Clearly, the networks have become political activists promoting the homosexual agenda.

My wife can not watch her bridal gown and pregnancy TV shows without the producers featuring same sex couples. We protest by changing the channel.

What really frosts me and is super scary is the Left's ever-increasing strong-arm tactics, forcing us to agree with their sin. I thought, good grief, next they will be teaching our kids, “Great Lesbians in History.” Then, I thought, oh my gosh, they are already doing that celebrating Gay Pride Month beginning in elementary school.

Think about that folks. Regardless of your religious beliefs or opinion, the Left has said screw you, we're teaching your child that homosexuality is a good thing and something they should explore. Period.

Leftists (Democrats) are passing legislation to make it illegal to assist anyone unhappy with their sexual attractions to change. Isn't that outrageous? While portraying themselves as victims who claim to only seek tolerance, Leftists are insidiously working to have their government enforcers arrest pastors, counselors and parents who help their sexually confused kids.

Folks, we are talking Sodom and Gomorrah all over again; homosexuality aggressively forced upon us. Before you call me crazy, consider this. For 200 years marriage was defined as between one man and one woman. Today, such thinking is considered nutty, extreme and hateful in the mainstream media, numerous political and social circles. Opposing their so-called “mainstream” consensus on this issue will cost you your livelihood and even jail-time.

My Christian minister dad called me to say that a family member gave him a heads up that my daughter's wedding pictures are posted on Facebook. My daughter married a woman. She wanted me to attend the wedding. I explained that while I love her and am fond of her partner, my faith does not allow me to bless their union by attending their wedding.

Her mom and I divorced when she was around 7 years old. My daughter and I were estranged until five years ago. I cherish our new found relationship. So, I was happy when my daughter said she loves me and understands my reason for not attending her wedding.

At 87 with over 50 years as a pastor, Dad remains as cool and wise as ever. He adamantly advised me to shower my daughter and her partner with love. Dad said as Christians, love is our greatest weapon.

Now do not get me wrong. Far too many Christians today believe “love” means co-signing sin; passively allowing the Left's relentless implementation of their anti-God agenda to go unchallenged. That is not what Dad meant, nor is it his definition of “loving them.” He suggests that I behave according to Romans 12:9 “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.”

I will not be manipulated by the Left's absurd claim that loving parenting means rubber-stamping all of your child's life choices. When I received my daughter's wedding invitation in the mail, Dad advised me not to attend and explain why to my daughter.

Dad was confident that she would understand. In response to my daughter's wedding pictures on Facebook, my millennial nephew and nieces congratulated her. Despite their Christian upbringing, liberal public school indoctrination and mainstream media have shaped their opinions.

Before ending our phone call (I'm in Florida, Dad is in Maryland), Dad instructed me to read Exodus 20: 1-6 and Deuteronomy 5: 1-10. These scriptures promise that if you are faithful and love God, He will bless your family for generations. Praise God. That was Dad's way of comforting and assuring me that God has everything under control.

I do not pray for God to turn my daughter straight. I pray that she and her partner will come to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, without approving their lifestyle, I will love them both to death.

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Chairman, Conservative Campaign Committee

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Silencing skeptics - conservatives - free speech

Congressional Democrats and Vatican join White House and Leftist assaults on basic rights by Paul Driessen at CFACT.org

Our scientific method and traditions of free speech and open debate are under assault as never before, by intolerant inquisitors in our media, universities, government agencies, and even Congress and the Vatican.

They threaten our most basic rights and freedoms, our political and scientific processes – and ultimately our continued innovation and invention, energy reliability and affordability, job creation and economic growth, and modern living standards, health and welfare.

Congressman Grijalva and Senators Markey, Boxer and Whitehouse sent letters to universities, think tanks and companies, demanding detailed information on skeptics’ funding and activities – in an attempt to destroy their funding, reputations and careers, while advancing “crony climate alarm science.” Equally intolerable, Democrats and the White House are blocking efforts to ensure that environmental regulations are based on honest, unbiased, transparent, replicable science that accurately reflects real-world evidence.

The Secret Science Reform Act (S. 544) and its House counterpart would require that the Environmental Protection Agency develop its regulations and the science behind them in the open, and allow experts and other interested parties to examine data, evidence and studies that supposedly support EPA standards and mandates that could cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. This should not be controversial.

But Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee wanted Chairman James Inhofe to drop the bill from a planned markup. He refused, the bill passed on a party-line vote, and a Senate vote will be set soon. President Obama says he will veto the legislation. Why this opposition?

Obama said his would be the most transparent administration in history. But transparency quickly took a back seat to his radical climate change, renewable energy and other plans to “fundamentally transform” the United States. EPA practices epitomize what goes on throughout his Executive Branch, why our economy is growing at 0.2% and what congressional Democrats are apparently determined to perpetuate.

The problem is not only EPA’s private email accounts and deleted emails, á la Hillary Clinton. It’s illegal experiments on humans – with test results ignored when they don’t support EPA’s agenda of removing the last vestige of soot from coal-fired power plants.

It’s rules for 0.5% of the mercury in U.S. air, justified with claims that they would bring a 0.00209 point improvement in IQ scores; economy and job-killing climate regulations that would reduce warming by 0.03 degrees by 2100, assuming carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change; and equally bogus health and environmental benefits of every description that ignore adverse human health and welfare impacts of the EPA regulations themselves.

The President and Democrats claim the “secret science” bill would “unduly burden” regulators. Baloney. The rules would simply require that promulgators of government edicts live according to the same rules they impose on us: Be honest and transparent. Show us your data, calculations and analyses.

Demonstrate that you have examined all relevant studies – not just what supports your agenda, while you ignore everything else. Back up your analyses and decisions with actual evidence. Answer our questions. Recognize that collusion, deceit and fraud have no place in public policy, and will no longer be tolerated.

What can possibly be wrong with those guidelines – unless the regulators have a lot to hide?

And now the Vatican is adopting the same secretive, agenda-driven, inquisition tactics.

Its Pontifical Academy of Sciences recently held a workshop on climate change and sustainability. But only religious leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and regulators who support alarmist perspectives on these issues were invited. Those with contrary views were neither invited, welcomed nor tolerated.

However, a dozen climate, health and theological experts skeptical of “dangerous manmade climate change” allegations hosted a press event the day before the workshop. Three of them managed to get into the Vatican event.

But when Climate Depot director Marc Morano tried to ask the UN Secretary General to advise Pope Francis that many Catholics and other Christians believe the papal position on global warming is ill-advised, a security guard took Morano’s microphone away and told him, “control yourself, or you will be escorted out of here.” Apostates have no rights at climate confabs, Vatican or otherwise.

Apparently, in the Vatican’s view, there is nothing to discuss – only anti-fossil fuel laws and treaties to implement. Computer model predictions and other assertions of looming disaster are all the Pope and workshop attendees seem to need to support this agenda – even though they are consistently and completely contradicted by real-world observations.

Instead of protecting Earth’s poorest people from energy deprivation, disease, poverty and death imposed in the name of preventing global warming, Pope Francis seems more devoted to newly green Liberation Theology concepts of “fairness” and “justice.”

As IPCC leaders have explained, the climate change agenda is no longer about the environment. It is now about “intentionally transforming” the global economy and negotiating the redistribution of the world’s wealth and natural resources, in the name of “social justice” and equal distribution of misery.

These developments are far too typical. Left-Liberal thought police refuse to debate their failed ideas and policies, because they have no answers to inconvenient questions and cannot stomach dissenting views.

On campuses, free expression is limited to boxing-ring-sized “free speech zones.” Conservative speakers are banned from university events, or shouted down if they do appear. The Universities of Michigan and Maryland tried to ban “American Sniper” because a couple hundred students out of 27,000 objected.

Oberlin and Georgetown students railed that Christina Hoff Sommers’ mere presence required “trigger warnings,” caused them “distress” and “discomfort,” and “constituted violence” against women.

Brandeis disinvited Ayan Hirsi Ali, because her views on women’s rights might offend some Muslim men. Scripps revoked its invitation to conservative political analyst George Will, who later observed:

“Free speech has never been … more comprehensively, aggressively and dangerously threatened than it is now. Today’s attack is … an attack on the theory of freedom of speech … on the desirability of free speech and indeed … on the very possibility of free speech….

“The Democratic Party’s leading and prohibitively favored frontrunner candidate for the presidential nomination … said she wants to change the First Amendment in order to further empower the political class to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political speech about the political class – and so far as I can tell there’s not a ripple of commentary about this on the stagnant waters of the American journalistic community.”

Meanwhile, NYU happily hosted delegates from Iran, which hangs people for the crime of being gay. President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service harasses conservative donors and organizations, keeps groups out of the political process, stonewalls investigators and lies with impunity.

His Federal Communications Commission plans to micromanage internet access, content and operations. At the behest of hyper-partisan Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, police swat teams burst into homes belonging to Governor Scott Walker supporters, ransacked them, took computers, and told families “Don’t call a lawyer – or else.”

The abuses and intolerance are becoming broader, deeper, more frightening by the day: from Christendom to Islam and Climate Orthodoxy; from universities to the Congress, Vatican, EU and United Nations.

Good people everywhere need to rise up, speak out and fight back, if they still believe in individual rights, freedom of thought and expression, and honest, transparent, trustworthy, accountable government and religious institutions.

Otherwise, these fundamental values will disappear – and with them will go modern society and living standards, and efforts to improve the lives of billions of people who still lack the lifesaving energy and technologies so many of us take for granted.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.

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Spare the blogger and lash us instead

Spare the blogger and lash us instead by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

On January 9th, the government of Saudi Arabia publicly whipped a liberal Muslim writer, Raif Badawi, flogging him 50 times outside a mosque in Jeddah.

It was the first installment of the 1,000 lashes to which Badawi had been sentenced — in addition to 10 years in prison and a fine of more than $250,000 — for the crime of "insulting Islam" on his former website, the Saudi Free Liberals Forum.

Two days later, following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Saudi ambassador to France joined in the great Paris solidarity march in defense of freedom of expression.

Such hypocrisy was more than seven members of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom could abide. The commission — an independent, bipartisan federal agency — had several times expressed concern about the persecution of Badawi; it denounced his lashing as "a cruel and barbaric act" inflicted "for nothing more than creating an online forum for diverse views to be expressed freely."

Last week, writing in their individual capacities to the Saudi embassy in Washington, the seven commissioners drew attention to the glaring inconsistency between Saudi Arabia's public show of support for civil liberties in France and its brutal denial of those very liberties in Badawi's case.

Then, in a powerful demonstration of genuine solidarity, they offered to share personally in his flogging.

"If your government will not remit the punishment of Raif Badawi, we respectfully ask that you permit each of us to take 100 of the lashes that would be given to him," they wrote. "We would rather share in his victimization than stand by and watch him being cruelly tortured."

The signatories are as intellectually distinguished as they are religiously and politically diverse. They include Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and former ambassador to the Vatican; Zuhdi Jasser, a physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy; Robert George, a notable public scholar and professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University; and Eric Schwartz, a former assistant secretary of state who is now dean of the University of Minnesota's school of public affairs.

Another commissioner, Daniel I. Mark, is a political scientist at Villanova University; Hannah Rosenthal is president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation; and Katrina Lantos Swett, the commission chairman, heads an international human-rights foundation.

Of course, the chances are nil that the Saudis will agree to administer lashes to prominent American thinkers and social activists. But that doesn't make the commissioners' willingness to share in Badawi's suffering insincere.

"If you're a serious religious person, you don't make such an offer unless you're prepared to carry it out," George told me. The same conviction was expressed by Mark, who in a blog post titled "#IAmRaif" wrote that he had been thinking hard about "what it means to sacrifice for others, to go to the Cross, as some might say, in the fight for justice."

Vocal appeals in support of Badawi have come not just from the American commissioners, but also from Nobel laureates, from Amnesty International, from members of Congress, and from PEN, the international writers' organization. But from the president of the United States there has so far been only silence.

President Obama cut short his state visit to India this week so he could travel to Saudi Arabia to pay his respects to the deceased King Abdullah. Yet "the Saudi who should be on the president's mind and heart right now," George insists emphatically, "is not Abdullah, it is Raif Badawi — the brutalized freedom advocate who has become the living symbol of the oppression practiced by Saudi Arabia's rulers."

Protesters hold a vigil for Raif Badawi outside the Saudi embassy in London. The 31-year-old
Muslim moderate has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison as
punishment for setting up a website, the Saudi Free Liberals Forum.

Obama's silence is a source of particular distress to Jasser, a faithful Muslim who since 9/11 has made opposition to radical Islam his life's mission. "Everybody asks why more moderate Muslims don't speak out against the poison of Islamism," Jasser said by phone the other day.

"Well, Badawi's ordeal is a clinic in what happens when they do." It would so hearten reformers and moderates within Islam, he says, if the president would publicly express concern for liberals like Badawi — the way Ronald Reagan made a point of mentioning Soviet refuseniks like Natan Sharansky by name.

Realpolitik may require an ongoing US relationship with the Saudis. But Americans are not obliged to pretend that Saudi Arabia — where liberals are whipped, dissidents are tortured, and jihadists are incubated — isn't one of the world's leading producers of intolerance and fanaticism.

Badawi and others like him are the antidote to those toxins. They need all the solidarity we can give them.

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Supreme Court malfeasance

Supreme Court Malfeasance from the Warning Signs by Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

Know the Warning Signs from Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

Over the course of its history the Supreme Court has made some very bad decisions and the decision to declare abortion legal ranks high among them.

On January 22, 1973, in Roe v. Wade the Court interpreted the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to extend a right of privacy to a woman’s decision to have an abortion prior to the third trimester of pregnancy.

There have been 57.5 million abortions since 1973—42 years—when the decision became the law of the land. In all the wars America has fought, going back to the Revolution, the total of those killed in combat as of September 2014 was 1,343,812.

The casualties of the Supreme Court’s decision about unborn Americans reveal the wide gap between the morality, as opposed to the legality, of the Court’s decision.

Now the Court has taken on cases that will determine the legality of same-sex marriage and here again the morality of sanctioning this definition of marriage is a world apart from the morality of marriage occurring exclusively between a man and woman as has been the norm since the earliest history of mankind.

Marriage has always been understood as the critical cornerstone of a healthy functioning society. It has always been understood that children raised by a mother and father are a benefit to society while those deprived of this union are frequently subject to problems of one sort or another.

In the United States, however, many of the traditional morals that served the interest of society have been abandoned since around the middle of the last century. The gap between liberals and conservatives has widened.

One result was recently announced in a Pew Research Center study that found that less than half of all American children now live in a two-parent household with two married heterosexual parents who are, in fact, their own parents.

The Daily Caller reported that “In addition, fully 41% of all American babies are currently born out of wedlock. By way of comparison, in 1960 73% of all American children” lived in a traditional married household.

An earlier Pew Research Center study, announced in August 2013, depicted mothers as the main provider in 40% of American households with children. Jennifer Marshall, Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, noted that 25% of “households with children under 18 are supported by a single mother.” Their median income was $23,000 and 44% are never-married moms. “More than a third of these single mothers aren’t working at all—meaning they are much more likely to depend on government welfare.”

What all these statistics add up to is a nation in which traditional marriage is under attack while living together unmarried or having children as a single mother have become accepted at an alternative lifestyle.

Now we are being told that America should abandon the concept of legal citizenship and accord it to anyone who crosses the border. This isn’t how an orderly society or sovereign state is defined. It is a definition of anarchy.

As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear the same-sex marriage case, the rest of us are wondering why a tiny minority of society should be granted a right that no society in history has ever imparted.

How small is it? In September 2014 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report that men who have sex with men (gay and bisexual) comprise about 2% of the U.S. population. When you add in lesbians the number moves up to about 3%.

The CDC tracks such things because “In 2010, among persons newly infected with HIV, 63% were men have sex with men (MSM) and among persons living with HIV, 52% were MSM.” According to the CDC it is contracted primarily through anal sex.

Despite federal spending to combat AIDS, between 2008 and 2010 “new infections increased 22% among young (aged 13-24) gay and bisexual men and 13% among gay and bisexual men overall” regardless of age.

So the nation has been experiencing a holocaust of murdered fetuses thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling and now we are supposed to abandon the ancient definition of marriage to accommodate a tiny minority of those who engage in sex with the same gender.

If justification for that can be found in the Constitution, then it can be interpreted in any manner to degrade our society and the nation.

Same-sex marriage is an issue that President Obama said was “America at its best” in his State of the Union speech. Seven years earlier, campaigning to become President, he said that marriage was “a sacred union” and was “between a man and a woman.”

I don’t care that a number of states have already extended a legal status to same-sex marriage. I don’t care that it applies to a very small number of Americans. They can have “civil unions” that resolve any legal issues, but “marriage”? No.

Just as I say no to those who want to strip the practice of religion from any public ceremony or remove the saying of prayer in our schools, I will say no to those who want to remove the moral pillars that have served our society and all societies over the millennia.

We can only hope that enough of the current Supreme Court justices feel that way too.

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Who will rest and who will wander?

Who will rest and who will wander? from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Kurdish carry the few belongings they have left after crossing
the border between Syria and Turkey near the southeastern
town of Suruc on Sept. 20, 2014.

There is a transfixing passage in the High Holy Day liturgy, recited on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which depicts God sitting in judgment of mankind, reviewing each person's deeds and deciding who will live and who will die.

Ominously, the ancient prayer enumerates the awful ways a life can end. "Who by water and who by fire; who by sword and who by beast; who of hunger and who of thirst; who by earthquake and who by plague…"

Then comes a shift. Something else is at stake: "Who will rest and who will wander."

The juxtaposition seems incongruous. Can those condemned to "wander" in the year ahead — to be exiled, displaced, to be forced to flee — be likened to those who will meet death by sword or plague? The uprooted and evacuated, after all, can always make new lives for themselves elsewhere. The dead cannot.

Of course it is true that many refugees successfully start over, and the rabbis of antiquity who composed this prayer would have been the last to deny that where there is life there is always hope. But like Jews since time immemorial, they knew only too well how terrible the fate of refugees and dispossessed migrants can be.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in June that for the first time since World War II, the number of refugees worldwide exceeds 50 million. "We are witnessing a quantum leap in forced displacement in the world," said António Guterres, who heads the UN's refugee agency. "There is no humanitarian response able to solve the problems of so many people."

This flood wave of suffering and disaster shows no sign of having crested. In just the past week, more than 150,000 Kurdish refugees from Syria have fled into Turkey, which was already reeling from an influx of 1.5 million refugees displaced by the Syrian civil war. At least as many Syrians have poured into Lebanon and Jordan.

"It is the war in Syria that most dramatically illustrates how quickly a country's fate can be upended by civil war," observes the New York Times. "In 2008, it was the world's second largest refugee-hosting country.

By 2013, it was the world's second largest refugee-producing country." Yet Syrians constitute only a fraction of the planet's desperate exiles, asylum-seekers, and expellees. Millions more have been driven — by fear or violence or hunger or persecution or natural catastrophes — from their homes in Afghanistan, Somalia, Burma and elsewhere.

The plight of certain groups of refugees — Vietnamese boat people, Sudanese migrants from Darfur, victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Cubans escaping a Communist tyranny — will sometimes touch the heart of societies fortunate enough to be blessed with domestic tranquility and prosperity. Far more commonly, they will be resented or spurned or ignored.

Or worse: Australia last Friday signed an agreement to transfer asylum-seekers to Cambodia, rather than grant them safe haven on Australian soil. When a wave of child migrants from violence-plagued Central American countries crossed into Texas earlier this year, many Americans across the political spectrum demanded that they be sent back.

Like war, refugee flows have been part of the human condition since the dawn of history. And if any people has known the anguish of being forced to "wander," it is the Jews, whose history is replete with banishment and exile.

Jews know from painful experience what it means to suffer
exile and dispersion. Above, displaced Iraqi Jews arrive
in Israel in 1951.

In the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled en masse from England and France and Spain and Austria; in the 20th century they were driven by oppression and pogroms from Egypt and Iraq and Libya and Syria.

When the Pew Research Center, in a 2012 report, analyzed the religious composition of the world's migrants, it found that one in four Jews today live in a country other than the one they were born in — far and away the highest percentage of any religious group.

Not all who migrated fled in fear or from danger. But the Jewish people know from long and painful experience that "who will rest and who will wander" can be as momentous a fate as life and death.

In the final paragraphs of A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes: "The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp?"

That lesson could hardly be more urgent. Every minute eight more people become refugees, leaving everything behind to escape war, persecution, or terror. No one can relieve all the suffering that dreadful statistic represents. But surely each of us can relieve some of it.

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