Perhaps it’s my naturally laissez-faire attitude combined with a Western tolerance for others, but I simply cannot imagine anything that a church, of any size, in Afghanistan could do that would cause me wake up 5 minutes earlier on a Saturday, much less march in the streets. Or make a sign. Or burn another religion’s book. I might toast their ill health and eternal damnation, but only if I was drinking anyhow.

Still, this Terry Jones character is being burned in effigy in a country where not one person in a million has a clue what he looks like. C’est fantastique!  We should all aspire to be so despised by the enemies of religious liberty, if only we could do so without being total jerks who need to be denounced by the greatest American general in 60 years.

One of the reasons I’ve come to utterly despise the left is that they hold their countrymen in the lowest of esteem and believe that their motives are always suspect. Here were people taking at face value the words of this imam that he was building a mosque, near a location where Muslims killed a bunch of people in the name of Islam, in order to enhance dialogue. But those same people who were so credulous regarding the imam’s motives simply presumed that those who opposed the mosque did so out of abject bigotry. Their countrymen, they seemed to believe, needed nothing so much as to be lectured that not every Muslim is a terrorist.

Standing up to bigotry is generally a worthwhile activity and a noble impulse. Being so anxious to denounce bigotry that you ignorantly label the well-intentioned as bigots is an epic failure of self-awareness.

Mr. Petersen’s wife, Jan, suffers from early onset Alzheimer’s disease.  She’s only in her mid fifties and can no longer recognize him when he comes to visit.  He has since moved in with a widow who helps care for Jan.

Most of the commentators over at the Anchoress seem infuriated about Mr. Petersen, while Rod Dreher’s seem more understanding.  I’ve no idea what I’d do in if in Mr. Petersen’s shoes.  But if I ever become crippled with Alzheimer’s, my future spouse has my permission to move on.  When seeing me causes those who love me pain, they are free to stop seeing me.  With improvements in technology, Jan Petersen could well be alive for another three decades.  That’s a long time to be such a cross to bear.  Were I in her shoes, I would not wish to be such a burden on somebody.

So if I’m correctly reading the various tributes to Sen. Robert Byrd floating around the web this morning, I’m supposed to celebrate how the man atoned for his bigotry earlier in life by devoting the rest of his life to public service . . . where he used other people’s money to build monuments to himself.

I take that back.  There’s the following quote from George Mason University Professor Don Boudreaux on Rep. Jack Murtha’s death which — surprise, surprise — I also found on Balko’s site:

If Mr. Murtha on his own had traveled the country picking pockets, robbing banks, and burgling houses, only to bring the booty back to western PA and share it with his friends, he would have been rightly despised as a common criminal.  But because Mr. Murtha joined forces with persons having similarly questionable morals, who together pass off their thievery as “lawmaking,” he’s celebrated in your pages – celebrated for doing, save on a grander scale, exactly what common thieves do.

Ouch.

The Provincetown school system will revisit its controversial policy of making condoms available to all students, with no age restriction, after Governor Deval Patrick expressed concern yesterday that very young children would have access to them.

A day after the new policy caused a media firestorm, School Committee chairman Peter Grosso said that Provincetown would probably limit condoms to fifth-graders and older. His stance stemmed from a conversation he had with Superintendent Beth Singer, author of the rule set to take effect this fall.

“She said the School Committee is going to have to revisit the policy and definitely reword it so it’s self-explaining, and possibly wording it so that maybe there would be an exclusion of the real young grades,’’ Grosso said.

Provincetown is, of course, somewhat what Massachusetts is to the rest of the country.  But still…

Around the same time Ms. Kagan was campaigning to exclude military recruiters—citing what she saw as the evils of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—Harvard University accepted $20 million from a member of the Saudi Royal family to establish a center for Islamic Studies in his honor.

A recent Obama State Department report concerning Saudi Arabia and Islamic Shari’a law noted that:

“Under Shari’a as interpreted in [Saudi Arabia] sexual activity between two persons of the same gender is punishable by death or flogging.”

Ms. Kagan was perfectly willing to obstruct the U.S. military—which has liberated countless Muslims from the hate and tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

But it seems she sat on the sidelines as Harvard created an Islamic Studies Center funded by—and dedicated to—foreign leaders presiding over a legal system that violates what would appear to be her position.

Perhaps she would have let military recruiters on campus if they gave her $20 million?

If the game is “Asian Culture Mashups,” I’d like to play. After the suicides, the executives’ wives should be burnt, and their children should study very hard and become doctors. That’s how Asians would roll.

Gay rights groups, obviously, feel the need to differentiate what perverted priests do from what your average gay man does. I sincerely hope this isn’t their best answer:

“This is a scientific absurdity. The World Health Organization calls  homosexuality a variation of human behaviour. It is paedopholia that is a pathology, a crime, not homosexuality,” said Franco Grillini, a former parliamentarian who was at the vanguard of Italy’s gay rights movement.

Of course, 40 years ago homosexuality was considered a pathology, and in large parts of the civilized world was a crime (it’s still a crime in vast swaths of the globe). If the difference between right and wrong hinges on the definitions provided by some politically influenced international agency, humanity is doomed.

Even if the need for an age of consent is objectively obvious, any particular age of consent is going to be arbitrary. 12? 14? 16? 18? 20? – one could make a case for each of those; one could also find a society in the world that adhered to each, or to another. In contrast, legal definitions that divide the genders are (with very rare exceptions) objectively correct. If this were a line-drawing competition, there’s not question of which side would win. The difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality is obvious and concrete. The difference between pedophilia and consensual sex is one that varies significantly across cultures and times periods, and, at the margins, at the individual level.

I’m not here to equivocate between homosexuality and pedophilia. Obviously, one, by definition, hurts an innocent party, while the other does not. But no thinking person can, as Mr. Grillani does, simply point out that one is illegal in some Western countries and the other isn’t and say that the difference, therefore, is obvious.

The gay rights movement’s obsession with normalizing homosexuality doesn’t help things. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for one to observe that, obviously, heterosexual intercourse between post-pubescent males and females of child-bearing age is the norm, while also observing that some individuals have impulses, of varying strength, toward other types of sexual behavior. We don’t have to expand the definition of the norm, or destroy it altogether, to allow that there is some natural variance, and that those who vary should be tolerated. And it is obvious that certain kinds of variances are harmful to the innocent, while other variances seem to harm no one.

But how far can these variances go before they cross the line between moral and immoral? The Catholic Church has offered a coherent answer (one that I don’t necessarily agree with), that any non-procreative sex is a sin. It’s a shame that their critics don’t put as much thought into the matter.

Almost every week, I go and debate with spokesmen of religious faith. Invariably and without exception, they inform me that without a belief in supernatural authority I would have no basis for my morality. Yet here is an ancient Christian church that deals in awful certainties when it comes to outright condemnation of sins like divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality between consenting adults. For these offenses there is no forgiveness, and moral absolutism is invoked. Yet let the subject be the rape and torture of defenseless children, and at once every kind of wiggle room and excuse-making is invoked. What can one say of a church that finds so much latitude for a crime so ghastly that no morally normal person can even think of it without shuddering?

It’s interesting, too, that the same church did its best to hide the rape and torture from the secular authorities, even forcing child victims (as in the disgusting case of Cardinal Sean Brady, the spiritual chieftain of the Catholics of Ireland) to sign secrecy oaths that prevented them from testifying against their rapists and torturers. Why were they so afraid of secular justice? Did they think it would be less indifferent and pliable than private priestly investigations? In that case, what is left of the shabby half-baked argument that people can’t understand elementary morality without a divine warrant?

For the record, I believe that the Catholic Church is one of the great forces for good in the world, but unless it cleans house, whether it will so remain is an open question.  I realize that Hitchens is hardly a friend of religion, but some things are true about the church even if he says them.