a widening divide? Politics today

Working from home today because two children have the flu, or at least something that caused them to participate in undesirable activity requiring buckets. They're better now. I should send them back to bed but since they can't go out for physical activity at least they can play Wii.

Working from home has it's advantages, most notably you can read First Things when it arrives in the mail as you wait for your production servers to come back on-line. Reading on-line is ok but not the same as holding and bending and folding the printed word.

Richard John Neuhaus details in the Public Square section a very serious topic that I've been thinking about, but he thinks about it so much better than I do. Actually, he's got some quotes that are very pertinent to the election this year, specifically from a Mr. Angelo M. Codevilla writing in the Claremont Review, that indifferent to religion is one source of America's problems in Iraq and elsewhere. "Because the U.S. foreign policy establishment is religiously illiterate, because none of it's members can imagine serious people taking God seriously, it cannot understand a world that is overwhelmingly religious. " To which Newhaus adds a quote from Steven Pinker of Harvard, where the inclusion of any required religion topics for undergraduates is being debated. "For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism, I think, in an era in which the rest of the west is moving beyond it".

This was a debate I had with teachers and parents at a local St. Paul charter school. How can we discuss the United States, it's formation, the great cultural battles, without including the religious underpinnings of those debates and actions ? Regardless of how well we've acted on them, we and Europe have a Christian pedigree. It's undeniable and the only way around it is historical revisionism.

To say we are moving beyond is to voice the hope of atheists everywhere and ignoring the historical fact of a society that has not abandoned it's roots, but is growing in the realization those fundamental rights are being threatened by a vocal activist minority. And even if the West does move past it, Codevilla tries to remind us the world has East, North and South along with the West and our arrogance as a superpower engenders anger and resentment among even our allies. Per Codevilla, how can we propose solutions when we don't understand the fundamentals?
In the U.S., I think we are clearly not moving beyond but in fact the culture clash is growing more intense. This is an old complaint but still relevant. Media, and generally speaking University education in the U.S. is not disposed to neutrality but indoctrination and obscuration.

How many people would support Obama if they new that he supports shelving live, aborted babies to die because it would otherwise be burdensome to mothers? That should be posted in every Church in the United States.

I suppose we could support Clinton, who's husband Bill received this advise:

"Expressing the eugenics principles behind abortion, Weddington told Clinton he should "start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of the country. … Our survival depends upon our developing a population where everyone contributes," he wrote. "We don’t need more cannon fodder. We don’t need more parishioners. We don’t need more cheap labor. We don’t need more babies."

I don't know very many people who advocate this position, even those who are pro-abortion. And yet Clinton consistently receives the black vote.

No, I think we are far from being "beyond" religion. What we aren't beyond is the turmoil and upheaval that this sharpening clash is bringing. We've barely entered the storm. What Codevilla observers for foreign policy rings true for domestic as well. We cannot hope to create domestic policy without regards for those who actually practice what they believe. It's historical and most importantly, constitutional