Democracy? We don't need no stinking Democracy.

Bush wants to re-up the Patriot Act, some bits of which are due to expire soon.

Some of us out are have real problems with that act, always have had real problems with that act -- and, in that regard, the House thought it might be a good idea to hold hearings, discussing those concerns before renewing it. (Unlike when it was passed, when, as you know, it was passed without many of our Representatives even reading it, apparently.)

What was the reaction to the House Republicans to these hearings?

(1) They refused to let witnesses speak that they did not want to hear from (because, as you know, dissent is, after all, treason).

(2) They shut the microphones of the Democrats off.

(3) They walked out.

No doubt waving their blue fingers in the air as they went.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=838557&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/06/republicans-abruptly-shut-down-patriot.html

Democracy? Well, you know. That's for Iraqis.

(Via Atrios: http://atrios.blogspot.com/)

What DED Space Said

I am tired of seeing women scream at and hit their babies in public. If we had half the uproar over that as we do over breast-feeding, we might be able to do something about this country's epidemic of child abuse and subsequent violence.

http://www.dedspace.blogspot.com/

Yeah.

Love your babies in public? That's disgusting.

Smack them in public? That's being a good parent.

Welcome to America.

Makes My Head Hurt

All sorts of Anti-Breast-Feeding posts on the Winger blogs -- like this one

http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2005_06_05.PHP#003961

And women objecting to Walters' comment, as here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3813579

but it's the comments that are really making me weary.

I thought -- or I had hoped, I guess -- that by now we would be past this.

But all these comments, and women are making them as well as men, are saying all the same stupid things I heard when I was nursing the kid, five years ago:

"You wouldn't take defecate in public, so why would you do that in public?" (Conservatives are reluctant to name the act of nursing. It's just so, well, specific.)

Oh, yes. Shitting and feeding a child. They're exactly the same thing.

"Why can't you go sit in the woman's room if you have to do that?"

Right. And why don't you go eat your lunch in the men's room? Bet your ham sandwich will taste lovely basted in the smell of shit.

"Can't you, ah, you know, pump before hand? And then use a bottle? Considerate women do that."

Good for them. (1) Bottles don't stay sterile. (2) Not all women are good at pumping. (3) Not all babies take bottles. (4) Why the hell should I? Because the sight of a baby sucking at an actual nipple offends you? That makes you an idiot, not right.

"Women should just stay home if they're nursing."

I love this one. I nursed my child for two and a half years. I should STAY HOME if I'm nursing? Well, yes. I suppose Conservative Christian wives would.

"Isn't that child a little old to be nursing?"

I love this one too. It shows how ignorant the commenter is. Babies, apparently, should, like puppies, be weaned at six weeks. What fucktards.

"It's just disgusting. I don't want to look at that."

Uh. Okay. Don't. Your head is on this thing? Called a neck? It turns? Check it out, son.

"Liberals want to force all of us to live by their rules..."

I don't even get this one. It was on VoxDay's site. (A) How does me nursing my child force him to, well, do anything? And (B) Wow, you want to talk about projection.

"People don't have a right to breast-feed in public. And I don't like watching it. It makes me uncomfortable. So, since it makes me uncomfortable, they should stop." (I'm paraphrasing this one, and combining several different comments.)

Okay. Let's substitute "pray" for "breastfeed" here. How would you feel about that one, Right-Wing Christian? Because, you know what? Watching a bunch of you sit down at the mall and pray -- which you keep doing around here -- does, in fact, make me uncomfortable. I have to start wondering, at that point, how soon it will be before you and yours rise up and start marching me and mine off to the camps. (No, seriously. This is actually a thing I actually do have to worry about. The last pogroms weren't that long ago.) So I do get a little itchy when Leviticans start holding their hands in the air and calling on the blood of LORD JESUS to cast the demons out of the sinners in the area, yeah, I do.

But do I go whining about it? Nah. You know what I do? I take a deep breath and remind myself that I live in a free society and that part of the price I pay for living in a free society is that I have to live among people that, from time to time, bug the living shit out of me.

Like that dope in Indiana a while back. Mr. American Fries. Ai. That boy.

Anyway.

If someone is so appallingly upset by the sight of a woman feeding her child that he just can't bear it, first of all, he's a titty baby, and he should grow up; second, you know what? He should move to another chair, so he doesn't have to look. Third, he should thank his lucky stars that he lives here, in America, where people like him, and that woman with the baby, and yep, me, the eee-eee-vil liberal, are all free to make our own choices about how we want to live our lives.

I'm just saying.

Being Unique in the Conservative Christian World

I think what bothers me about Dobson’s essay here

http://www.family.org/married/comm/a0009661.cfm

is what bothers me about all the Christian Conservative/ Levitican Christian attempts to support or “prove” that men and women “really are” different*.

They do it by trying to prove that all men are exactly alike, and all women are exactly alike.

In order for Mr. Dobson’s thesis to be true, every man has to be exactly like Mr. Dobson (Good Heavens, please no) and every woman has to be exactly like his wife.

In order for Mr. Dobson’s thesis to hold true, every man must be a white fundamentalist Christian male who lives in North America and holds a full-time job, and has a wife who likes the house at 85 degrees and is obsessed about remembering anniversaries.

And every woman has to be a full-time homemaker who knows that “[c]ompetition is so fierce in the workplace today, and the stresses of pleasing a boss and surviving professionally are so severe, that the home needs to be a haven to which a man can return."

And we all have to be Fundamentalist Christians who buy the story that God created woman out of man’s rib – that this isn’t a myth, that it actually happened – and that Eve was given to Adam to be his help-meet and that, even though God designed woman to be man’s life-long companion, he messed up and designed her so badly that men and women don’t even like houses at the same temperature, or live the same number of years, or want the same sorts of things out of life. (Hmm. Not a very smart God you have there, James.)

And we all have to be the sort of reader who won’t notice, much less blink at, these contradictions.

Or the one, at the very end, where, after Dobson has told us that all men and all women are exactly like this – men are different from women, yes, that’s true, but all men are just like all other men and all women are just like all other women—right after he’s spent an entire essay telling us that, he says we should celebrate our “uniqueness!”

Right. So long as we act exactly like James Dobson, and his wife, we can be as unique as we want to be.

That’s the world the Conservative Christians want for us.


*Oh, and by the way? No liberal is saying men and women are exactly alike. No liberal has ever said that. Liberals believe men and women should be treated equally under the law, and should be given equal access to the goods of society. Liberals believe -- hey, get this, James -- that women, like men, are human beings, and should be treated like human beings. But exactly alike? What gave you the impression that the party of diversity was interested in making people exactly alike? That would be your side of the aisle, bud. The "liberals believe men and women are exactly alike" is a typical winger strawman, and can we please shut up about it?

Wanker

That idiot Voxday (I know, I know, penalty points for wordiness) says breastfeeding is just like shitting and should not be done is public.

What a wanker.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2005/06/defecation-is-natural-too.html

Check out the comments, if you can stand it. His readers are as clueless as he is.

Huh

Look at this. I honestly thought the Prager thing was old news.

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/06/its-health-issue.html

(Via Atrios: http://atrios.blogspot.com/)

But apparently folks are still fighting the nip battle.

I do understand this fuss -- some folks want women's breasts to be solely sexual features, and solely the property of the husband* and so believe women ought not to use them in the feeding of infants, because, obviously, infants ought not to be doing sexual things like messing with breasts; not to mention, if infants are using the breasts, daddy can't -- or, you know, maybe, daddy feels weird about using the breasts if the infant has just been using it -- I get that, I do.

But daddy ought to be an adult, is my opinion.

Daddy ought to be able to get over it.

(And? While I'm on the subject? mr. delagar was, could, and did. Just fine. For the record.)

And, here's the important bit: it matters whether children are breast-fed.

It matters substantially.

This is not to say that, if for some reason, you can't breast feed yours, he's doomed. Heavens no. Science is a great thing and we have excellent formulae available now, much better than we did when Prager was a child. Your child, I am sure, if you have to use the bottle, will turn out much better than Prager has. Don't worry.

Nor is it the bonding issue that primarily matters. It's really possible, no kidding, to bond with the kid without breast-feeding it.

But do some research -- yes, I know, Prager doesn't believe in doing research. Conservatives in general don't believe in doing research. Conservatives in general, apparently, make decisions based on -- My Word, I don't know, how do these folks decide things? Flip coins? Oh, wait. I forgot. They pray. A mythical Sky Being speaks in their HEAD and tells them what to do.

That's so much better than actually studying and doing research and figuring out what might actually be the best option based on how the real world actually works. I don't know what I could have been thinking.

Anyway. If you did do the research, instead of just believing what Prager's common sense told him, you'd find that children who were breastfed have fewer allergies (not more, as Prager claims), a lower rate of obesity (not a higher rate, as Prager claims), fewer ear infections (the kid has never had an ear infection), and about a bazillion other benefits. One other benefit is a lower rate of certain childhood cancers**. You know, I think I'd do it for that one right there.

Prager writes in his very funny anti-breast-feeding column:

And if breast-feeding is indispensable to optimum bonding, why not breast-feed for a few years? Isn't more bonding better?

What a clueless dwank.

Do you think anyone ever dropped him an email, pointing out that (gasp) some people actually do breast-feed past the first few weeks?

(AAP recommends breast-feeding for at least the first year; for the first two years if possible. In H/G cultures, children are breast-fed until they are four or five. I breast-fed the kid until she was two and a half and I often wish we hadn't weaned her so young. I'm just saying.)




*My favorite literary reference re this is a line in John Cheever's journals where he wants to look at his wife's breasts while she's in the bath tub, and they've been having a fight, so she's like, no, you cannot look at my tits, and he's furious, how dare she deny me the right to look at her breasts, and he sulks and stomps in the bedroom for a time, and finally he storms into the bathroom, rips open the shower curtain that she has pulled over the bathtub, and "feasts his eyes" on her breasts. In a sense, he writes, "they were my breasts. I had fed them, housed them, clothed, taken them to Europe, bought them taxis." (I'm writing from memory here, so I'm sure I'm not getting it exactly right.) "I had a right to look at them." Well, that's the attitude of many in this culture, both men and women. Women's breasts belong to the men who own the women -- they don't belong to the women whose bodies they are on, for heaven's sake, and they certainly don't exist for the feeding of children. Here's Prager on that, if you're interested: If the sole purpose of the breast was to feed infants, women, like all mammals, would only have breasts when nursing their young. But the female human always has breasts.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20031118.shtml


**Not that your kid is doomed to cancer if you bottle-feed. Really not. Not anymore than if he rides unbuckled now and then he'd going to go right through the windshield. These are all just relative risks. But all things being equal, if people can breast-feed, they ought to. That's all we're saying. Really, Mr. Prager? That is all we're saying.

At least that's all I'm saying. I know other folks do get nuts about it.

I also liked breast-feeding, and it was cheap, and it was so much easier than that bottle, plus, my kid? She wouldn't take the bottle. What a picky kid I have. So it was a good thing I decided to breast-feed, that's all.

Lordy, Lordy

Look at this.

Prager was even more whacked in the old days than he is now.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20031111.shtml

Summer I -- our first semester of summer school -- has now begun, which means I am teaching two (count'em, two) classes per day, every single day, five days a week, each class lasting two hours each, so that's four solid hours of teaching, back to fucking back, first class being Chaucer and second class being Comp II, I'm teaching until 2:00 p.m. and prepping until 9:00 p.m. every single night, exhausting? I can't even spell the word anymore.

Where was I?

(And did I mention that's Chaucer in the Middle English? Oh, yes, my Beloved.)

Anyway.

I need, for Comp II, because it is that point in the semester, an example (I'm having a hard time not typing in Middle English, I've been reading so much Chaucer, ensample, he would say, with a French en, where was I?) I needed an example of a Really Stupid Argumentative Essay, and, as you might expect, Dennis Prager leapt at once into my mind.

So I popped over to TownHall.com, Home of the Really Stupid Argumentative Essay, click on Dennis Prager, and Voila, I'm in Stupid Essay Heaven.

Oh, how to choose, how to choose --

Why women who marry become wingers? (Because it's in their GENES, my dear!)

Why people are atheists? (They're intellectually dishonest. Or they believe in monkeys. Or something. That one's not very clear, alas.)

Or -- my old favorite -- why young women dress in scanty clothing? Because -- this is rich -- otherwise they have no way to prove they're girls! (Because eee-eee-eevil feminists (that would be me) have denied them the chance to marry and have babies, remember. And they can't wear modest dresses because they get mocked for doing so. So they have to dress like sluts. Or something. The leaps in logic are A-m-azing!)

But finally I decided on this one:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20031111.shtml

Here, Dennis explains to us that he believes that "breast-feeding is a religion."

(Hey! Where did I hear this? Who plagiarized from whom? Huh?)

Prager, unlike Michael Crichton, admits upfront that he has no actual evidence for his belief.

I acknowledge having no scientific basis on which to challenge the many scientific studies that point to the health benefits of breast-feeding -- such as fewer infant infections, fewer early allergies, getting the mother's antibodies, and so on.

But, being a man of God, Prager never lets a little thing like a lack of actual evidence stop him from believing anything.

On what grounds do I believe this? Common sense -- our built-in defense against nonsense -- suggests it.
Virtually my entire generation of baby boomers was bottle-fed. Yet we are the healthiest generation in human history. Moreover, it is among today's young people -- most of whom were breast-fed -- that we constantly hear about the far greater incidence of obesity, juvenile diabetes and children with asthma


Where he gets the data that his generation is "the healthiest in human history" I would like to know. That's one thing.

Where he gets the evidence that "most" of today's generation is breast-fed, that's the other thing I would like to know.

I believe that stats on the % of Americans currently being breast-fed for more than six months is less than 15% -- hard to call that most Americans even now, in anyone's book; and the percentage was lower, not higher, in the past. Here's the link,

http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/NIS_data/.

in case Dennis wants to do research -- though I know that's against his religion -- not his Jewish religion. Jews actually believe in doing research, which he seems to have forgotten. His Conservative religion.

Where was I, again?

Oh, yes. Dennis goes on to say,

So the question remains: Why do all these healthy parents who had been bottle-fed now wage war against bottle-feeding?

One answer goes well beyond the issue of breast-feeding. It has to do with education.

In much of the West, the well educated have been taught to believe that they can know nothing and that they can draw no independent conclusions about truth, unless they cite a study and "experts" have affirmed it.

"Studies show" is to the modern secular college graduate what "Scripture says" is to the religious fundamentalist.

This is why I say Dennis has left his true religion behind and embraced the religion Conservativism.

I can't imagine an actual Jew speaking this way of education. And yet Dennis does, all the time.

See, Dennis, there is a reason we eee-ee-eevil liberals embrace science, and studies, and well, yes, experts. Want to know what it is? Experts have studied their field. Studies look at the evidence that exists on a subject. Then the experts draw conclusions based, oddly enough, on the freaking evidence. If you can imagine such a whacked idea.


What is the matter with this guy?

Way Cool

If you haven't seen South Knox Bubba's photos of his West Coast Trip,

go see

http://southknoxbubba.net/skblog/

Makes me miss the west.

This is Whacked.

Here's why repealing Roe v Wade would not be a good plan.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=825860

I'm just saying.

And what about this trial makes sense, can I ask?

If I remember the circumstances, this girl did not want to go through with the pregnancy -- her right to choose was abrogated by her mother (hey, there's that parental notification thing in action, yay team!) -- but was compelled to. At four months, she persuaded her boyfriend, who also did not want to go through with the pregnancy, to do something stupid and desperate.

It was also legal -- for her.

How, please, if it was legal, for her, can it possibly be a capital crime for him?

(Thanks to my intrepid reporter in the field.)

No Blastocyte Left Behind

Here's how the rhetoric is being shaped lately, what with "Snowflake" adoptions and DeLay ranting about "dismembering" infants (when what he's actually talking about is a blastocyte, a ball of eight (8) cells with the potential to become an embryo):

"Bush says "there is no such thing as a spare embryo." He buys the pro-life argument that the terms "spare" and "surplus" are misleading. If you and your spouse make two dozen embryos and implant only a few, the rest are spares to you. But they aren't spares to another couple who wants them. From a pro-life standpoint, you've "abandoned the child."

http://slate.com/id/2120222/

There's more. The rhetoric being reported on is just as rich.

Here's my question -- or, okay, questions.

(1) You "adopt" 24 "snowflake" "embryo" "infants" -- they're actually blastocytes, but whatever. We thaw them for you, implant them, the whole works. You realize, cause we've done warned you about this, that the survival rate is Not Good with our Present Technology. All but one "infant" dies. Haven't you just slaughtered 23 innocents? Aren't you a murderer, just as much as any eee-eee-eevil aborting liberal slut? Would it not have been better to leave those "snowflake" babies frozen until the technology improved?

(2) The cost of attempting to implant these "infants" runs about $750,000.00. Or so I understand. For a run of 24 embryos. Sorry. Infants. Do the folks "adopting" these "snowflake" "infants" realize that actual human infants who already exist on this actual planet are actually dying for want of relatively cheap medical supplies, clean food, and water? Do you know how much food, water, and medicine $750,000.00 could buy? How many lives you could save with that money? Hmmm. Wonder What Jesus Would Do?

(3) If these blastocytes are actually infants, as Mr. Delay and Our President is arguing, if you believe they are right, I mean, then all forms of birth control other than barrier methods are indeed abortion. I think you can see where this chain of "logic" ends. I further add that this is precisely where the folks making this argument mean it to end. Call me paranoid if you like: I admit I'm getting pretty nervous, boy.

Indeed

The General Speaks:

http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2005_05_29_patriotboy_archive.html#111788057116390910

What Do We Call This Again?

There's a word for what Fields is doing here:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/sf20050606.shtml

It's called lying.

First she says this

Wallace Nobrainer, the attorney for the Artichoke school system, explained that the Homeric text 'should be looked upon in the same light as the reading of the Book of Psalms in a public school.' This sentiment is echoed by Debra Klewless, who chairs the Board of Education: 'We don't want taxpayer dollars being spent in order to proselyte children into praying to Zeus and Apollo.

is an "authentically Swiftian" passage, making Swift rise from his grave and come shrieking down the centuries to smite her in righteous wrath for speaking such a big honking whopper; then she says this:

Satire aside, the only thing that saves the Greeks as fit for the public schools is the fact that we regard their stories as myths.

Uh...no, Ms. Fields. Actually? We study the Greek myths, and Greek literature, because they're good stuff. As you might know if you had actually read any. Which I'm guess you haven't. That one's not actually a lie, though, just ignorance. This one is another lie: No one proposes teaching the Bible as a sacred text or to promote religious faith in public schools.

Oh, come on. What stupe does she think she's talking to?

Okay. Let's speak slowly here.

No one -- and let's make it clear that we're pronouncing that N-O O-N-E -- objects to the teaching of the Bible as LITERATURE in the public schools. Go ahead and teach the Bible as LITERATURE all you what, Ms. Fields.

The problem is, Ms. Fields, you and yours will not be content to do that.

The problem is, you and yours want to teach it as sacred text.

The problem is, when me and mine go in there and actually teach it as LITERATURE -- i.e. start speaking about myth and character and narrative and aporia and problems in the TEXT, Ms. Fields -- you and yours are going to have a three-carat hissy fit and whine about how you're being PERSECTUTED all over the planet, oh, dear, oh, woe, I know, because I do it, every three or four semesters when I get my strength up again.

So don't be feeding me your lies, Ms. Fields. I am wise to your game.

What? MORE Christian Bias?

Just back from New Orleans, where we left the kid. Also ate crawfish (not mr. delagar, due to the kosher thing) and drank a great deal of beer, and went to see Kingdom of Heaven.

I did not (no, really, I didn't) know I was committing yet another Evil Liberal Act by doing so, but apparently I was. Who knew this movie was yet another act of Christian Persecution?

We just wanted to go to a movie. Since we don't do baby-sitters (not out of any conviction, exactly -- a combination of poverty and lack of connections and lack of time), we don't get to go to movies except on the rare occasions when we're at the grandparents' house and can leave the kid with them. So we were in New Orleans, and I was only slightly stoned on Sam Adams, and mr. delagar really wanted to go see a movie, and what was actually playing that was worth seeing on the wide screen?

Because, really. What are they doing out there in Hollywood these days? Not making movies anyone wants to see, that's what. Serenity ain't opening until, what, September? (Don't even say Star Wars to me. Please.)

So, okay. Kingdom of Heaven. Wide Screen action. Boom boom boom.

I believe I have mentioned to you that I have Winger relations. They expressed disapproval.

"Why?" mr. delagar asked.

The reply: "The Muslims win."

This makes it a Bad Movie.

We went anyway.

I report, in case you have not seen it, that the Muslims only sort of win. And it is not exactly what I would call a good movie. Though it had some nice bits. Some pretty scenes. Not to mention some pretty men.

Some giant plot holes. Some very stupid bits. Here's an actual historian to cover them all for you:

http://hnn.us/articles/11933.html

But that's not what's upsetting the Wingers.

No. It's (a) the Muslims are not being shown as Eee-eee-vil.

And (b) some [not all] of the Christians are, indeed, being shown as not good guys -- guess which ones? Oh, yes. The fanatics. The Fundies. The ones who say we must follow God's will blindly. The ones who say kill-all-the-Muslims, because God wants only Christians on this planet. Hmmm. Why would that upset them?

And (c) the blatant and ahistorical (says the historian above) message of the movie is that we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, whatnot) are all human beings, and taking care of human beings is more important than protecting religion.

Hey. What a whacky idea.

So you can see that this must be an ee-ee-vil movie.

But what it wasn't was an anti-Christian movie -- our main character, Balian, is a Christian, and a serious one. (Granted, also a murderer -- but hey, Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven, right?) He takes the Crusade because he's seeking forgiveness. His first act on reaching Jerusalem is to climb the hill where Christ was crucified and spend the night in prayer. He spends his life doing, as Christ preached, protecting the helpless, feeding the hungry, aiding the poor. He's just opposed to the sort of Christian, the Templar Knights, who are spending their lives slaughtering (as they see it) for God.

Yet, as I was standing outside the theater, waiting for mr. delagar, what do I hear as I am passed by three burly guys in football jerseys? "That was so anti-Christian."

Here's another Winger who thinks so:

http://treyjackson.typepad.com/junction/2005/05/kingdom_of_heav.html

I'm Off --

To take the kid to visit her grandparents for a few days, so there won't be blogging.

If you miss me too much, go visit DED Space

http://www.dedspace.blogspot.com/

Or Infinite Stitch

http://stitch.blogs.com/the_infinite_stitch/

Or Geeky Mom

http://geekymom.blogspot.com/

Or Little Professor

http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/

Or even Conservative Christian, who's doing that thing where he's interviews a liberal and posting the response

http://christianconservative.blogspot.com/

It's kind of fun, though the commenters are making me gloomy. Things like "But this guy's an atheist -- he must be evil! Why did you talk to someone who is evil?" and "Why didn't you interview a conservative? Huh? Huh?" Yet not all of them are like that: many (both on right and left) work hard to be rational, to bridge the gap.

Prager Says We're the Best

Prager's making the usual argument here.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20050531.shtml

I've heard it before, and it's still wrong. Though I want to give him points for trying (he says he wants to practice "genuine humility") the fact is, when you claim superiority for your value system -- that is, when you preach that your value system is the only truly correct one, the only good one, which is, in fact, what Prager is arguing we should believe -- the logical extension of that is, in fact, crusades: progroms: death camps.

Sorry, son. It is.

And, Mr. Prager? If you think the Christians are going to stop with the Muslims?

Not.


Now: to specifics:

This part of his argument is true:

All people are equal, but that does not mean that all values are equal. The statement, "All people are equal," is itself a value, one which holds that human equality is superior to any value that demeans or denies the intrinsic worth of other human beings.

But many of the best educated (and therefore least intellectually clear) will counter, why can't people hold that their values are superior only for themselves?

The answer is that it is not only a misuse of the term "value," it betrays a complete misunderstanding of the concept. To return to the examples offered above, do those who believe that freedom is superior to tyranny believe that freedom is only superior for them? Can you imagine someone arguing: "I happen to value the ability to speak, write, worship and assemble freely as a value for me, but I do not believe that such freedom is better for anyone else"?

Leaving aside the dig at the best-educated people being the least intellectually clear, which is, frankly, stupid -- and typical of the Right-Wing's anti-intellectualism (yes, educating people makes them stupid -- sure it does. In Bizarro World, it does), this is not a bad argument.

Unfortunately, that argument doesn't, as Prager wants it to, support this:

The very implication of a "value" is that it is superior to any other. If you value monogamy, you are saying it is superior to polygamy. If you value tolerance, you are saying that tolerance is superior to intolerance.

In fact, just as I can value George Eliot and also Shakespeare, just as I can value the wisdom of Christ and also the Tao, so I can value monogamy and also see the value of polygamy (which, by the way, I can: I've often thought how handy another wife would be around here) -- or, for instance, the value of not getting married at all. (I was, after all, single for over 30 years.)

I can value tolerance, but also see that Prager -- to take an example -- might, in his own religion, that I myself don't want to live in, not want to tolerate certain sorts of ways of living. I don't want, myself, heaven knows, to become like Prager. I also (hey, imagine this) don't want to force Prager to become like me.

No, really. I honestly don't.

See that, Prager? That's how America is SUPPOSED to work.

That's why we have that thing called the First Amendment. You get to have your way of life. I get to have mine. The Amish in PA get to have theirs. The Wiccans in Indiana get to have theirs.

What's wrong with your essay -- and here's the problem with your thesis -- is you seem to think it's okay for one group, which assumes its value system is the best one, to then, since its value system is, obviously, the best, to enforce that belief.

You seem to think that's not going to cause any problems, so long as you act with humility -- whatever that means -- and caution.

Read some history.

And keep in mind: there's a reason those Christians are sticking JUDEO in front of that Christian, and it ain't cause they love the Jews, Mr. Prager.