1 in 136 U.S. Residents in Jail

ELIZABETH WHITE, Associated Press Writer

Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates.

Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons.

Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Beck, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.

"The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," Beck said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial."

The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report's other author.

The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, which supports alternatives to prison, said the incarceration rates for blacks were troubling.

"It's not a sign of a healthy community when we've come to use incarceration at such rates," he said.

Mauer also criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said remove judges' discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole violations swell prisons.

"If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing and drug policy," he said.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

Just What We Need! NOT! Now a "Pedophile Priest" Scandal in ECUSA

In a church already splintered on the 'gay bishop' matter, now comes another scandal certain to add to the controversy: 'pedophile priests' ala the Roman Catholic Church in recent years.

There is it seems, in California, a Reverend John Bennison who had such an event in his own life many years ago. Far too lengthy to reprint it all here, the original item from May 10 in Virtue Online discusses it. Apparently not content to deal with the fact that all of us -- even our priests -- are sinners, this group of congregants from the diocese there in California have also made a formal complaint in writing to our Presiding Bishop Frank Griswald and seem detirmined to make this a topic of discussion and controversy at General Convention during June.

You can read the report and the comments which follow it
Episcopal priest haunted by sexual indiscretion here.

Its not enough, I guess, that General Convention has to be spoiled by controversy over Bishop Robinson but now a priest who had an indiscretion involving a minor many years ago has to be part of the discussion. I wonder if they are going to talk about the priest who was convicted of murder a number of years ago (also from California) who later got things together and was ordained in the Diocese there. All the puritans should probably get after him also.

Episcopal Debate on Gays Heats Up

by Rachel Zoll, Associated Press

SUMMARY: Delegates must decide at June's convention whether to endorse Anglican leaders' gay rights detente or to risk a split in the global church.

Kendall Harmon has to monitor his blog these days, so he can delete insults and offensive language from the comments section.

His topic -- the Episcopal Church.
His blog -- Ken Harmon
As a critical church meeting on homosexuality nears, the debate online and in public comments has grown so intense that one publication has dubbed it "blood sport."

"I think people are dreading possible outcomes, and when you're dealing with the unknown, fear kicks in in a big way," said Harmon, a minister and conservative leader in the Diocese of South Carolina. "And I do think things are more polarized now."

The Episcopal General Convention, which begins June 13 in Columbus, Ohio, must respond to fellow Anglicans worldwide who were outraged by the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The votes will shape not only the church's future, but also its role as the U.S. representative in the Anglican Communion.

The emotion of the moment is visible in the explosion of blogs since the convention three years ago, when delegates voted to confirm Robinson's election. A quick Web search yields at least 20 dedicated to the plight of the 2.3 million-member denomination. The Living Church, an independent magazine, compared the tone of the discussion to "a wrestling cage match" in an editorial titled "Blood Sport."

Some bishops have complained of being flooded with hateful e-mails and of being personally attacked on the Web. Harmon, who runs the widely read titusonenine blog, has had to take down comments he said were "cynical, angry and alas, even petty." He now reviews all statements before they are posted. Some liberal-leaning blogs have had to do the same.

"The Internet and blogs do give megaphones to anonymous bigots, but they also allow you to organize more quickly and, in some instances, trade opinions across ideological lines," said Jim Naughton, a liberal who runs the blog for the Diocese of Washington and has had to warn people about the language they use there. "It intensifies the conversation for better and for worse."

The debate goes beyond the Internet. Episcopalians with traditional beliefs on homosexuality, a minority in the denomination, feel persecuted and silenced by the majority -- and their public statements reflect a deep anger over their circumstances.

A conservative group called Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion is pressing for a church trial of Robinson and the dozens of bishops who consecrated him. A spokesman for the advocates, James Ince, said the debate is becoming more direct and truthful, not harsh.

"You can expect the liberals not to appreciate the clear, straight language from lay organizations because they're used to this goody goody two-shoes pantywaist stuff," Ince said.

The Rev. Paul Zahl, dean of the conservative Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., said in a May 10 letter posted on the school's Web site that an "army of Brown shirts" was falsely interpreting scripture to fuel "the gay-agenda steamroller."

Some moderates and liberals have responded by accusing traditionalists of being more concerned with power than with faith. In a recent edition of the Washington Window, the newspaper of the Diocese of Washington, Naughton wrote a two-part report called "Following the Money," linking conservative Episcopal advocates to right-wing donors intent on fighting the political stands of liberal Protestants.

Perhaps the most inflammatory commentary can be found on the Web site virtueonline, where, for example, founder David Virtue refers to one of the church's first openly gay priests as the "First Sodomite." Virtue says anyone offended by his language should not read the site.

Delegates will be entering the convention in Columbus under a heavy burden. They will decide whether to fulfill a request from Anglican leaders for a moratorium on electing partnered gay Episcopal bishops and on creating blessing ceremonies for gay couples.

If Anglican leaders conclude that the General Convention has not moved far enough toward discouraging the practices, it could break apart the 77 million-member Communion.

"I definitely think the tenor of the conversation is a little stronger right now, primarily because both sides of the political issue think there's a lot to lose and there is," said Brother Karekin Yarian of Every Voice Network, which works with moderates and liberals in diocesan groups called Via Media. "Both sides are concerned about the church splitting, and no one wants to see that happen."

Copyright © 1995-2006 PlanetOut Corporation.

Australian Army Attempts to Stop Young Boys From Being Sodomized

Australian Aborigines reject calls for military to restore order

Australian Aborigines have rejected calls for military peacekeepers to protect indigenous women and children from violence, as a new report Saturday revealed high levels of sexual abuse of young indigenous males.

The Australian Medical Association on Friday urged the government to deploy military forces to some Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to protect women and children from murder, rape and assault.

It drew particular attention to one of the country's largest Aboriginal communities, Wadeye some 420 kilometres (260 miles) southwest of Darwin, where it believes some 1,300 children are at risk of abuse and neglect.

But the community council at Wadeye said bringing in the army would not fix problems brought about by chronic discrimination, substance abuse and poverty.

"That's rather ludicrous to suggest a peacekeeping role," Dale Seaniger from Wadeye's Thamarrurr Council told ABC radio.

"Just bringing in the army as a peacekeeping force is not going to resolve the issue, there needs to be quite a few sort of initiatives put in place."

But Seaniger said soldiers would be welcomed if they came to improve infrastructure such as roads and housing in Wadeye, where there is no high school and homes are dramatically overcrowded.

The government has dismissed the idea of sending the army to Wadeye despite calls from the Northern Territory branch of the Australian Medical Association that it do so.

"It seems to me that one of the only ways this community is going to get a chance to catch its breath... is for the forces to be there primarily as peacekeepers," Northern Territory branch president Paul Bauert said.

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough this week called for a summit to discuss conditions in Aboriginal communities following reports of widespread sexual abuse and violence against women and children.

But a report published by The Weekend Australian on Saturday found that the problem of sexual abuse also extends to young men, with Aboriginal boys 10 times more likely to be raped than other Australian males.

The 18-month study by the Queensland University of Technology, in which 301 indigenous men in the Northern Territory and Queensland were interviewed, found that one in 10 had been raped before the age of 16 -- 10 times the rate in the rest of Australia.

Researchers said that the abuse had largely remained a secret because victims were too ashamed or scared to seek help.

"It becomes a mirrored thing: if you abuse people and get away it, then you continue with it and then others learn from you," head researcher Mick Adams told the paper.

"We are appalled by the abuse against women and girls but there is also men and boys being raped and sexually abused. It needs to be looked at."

Aboriginal Australians are the most disadvantaged group in the country and have life expectancy rates well below that of other Australians.

Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.

Should DNA Be Collected From All Criminals?

from the May 19, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0519/p01s02-usju.html

Should DNA be collected from all criminals?
By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

ALBANY, N.Y. - In most cities and states, vandalism, shoplifting, and loitering are misdemeanors - possibly involving community service, not jail time. But those who commit such low-level crimes in New York State may soon be required to give DNA samples to authorities - just as convicted rapists or murderers do.

If the Legislature passes the proposal, which is currently being debated, New York would be the first state in the nation to require DNA samples for all convicted offenders.

Gov. George Pataki (R), who is asking the Legislature to expand DNA collection, argues that a larger database will help solve more crimes. Supporters add it will help solve future crimes because criminals who start off committing petty crimes sometimes graduate to more serious offenses.

The Empire State's move comes as DNA work in criminal investigations is under closer scrutiny. Complaints are rising about mistakes - some inadvertent, others fraudulent - at DNA labs around the country. Groups that have championed the use of DNA to verify the guilt or innocence of convicts are now campaigning against large-scale expansion of the practice, saying it would overwhelm labs. Others cite concerns about the increasing number of innocent people whose DNA is stored in a databank without their knowledge or approval.

"People have come to appreciate the power of DNA to solve crimes. They now need to respect the care that is required to maximize its potential and avoid its abuse," says Stephen Saloom, policy director for the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to free 176 prisoners wrongfully convicted.

Twenty-eight states now collect samples for some misdemeanors, according to DNAResource.com, a website that tracks DNA policies. A week ago, Kansas joined California and five other states in going one step further: taking the DNA samples of some people arrested, but not necessarily charged, with a crime.

"They all tend to be violent felony and burglary arrestees," says Lisa Hurst, a government-affairs consultant with Smith Alling Lane, which represents Applied Biosystems, a maker of DNA testing equipment. Smith Alling Lane also runs DNAResource.com.

New York's proposal, however, would go the furthest, requiring DNA collection for all convicted of misdemeanors. This would add about 80,000 additional DNA profiles per year to the DNA bank, say researchers at the state's Division of Criminal Justice.

It would be well worth the effort, says Chauncey Parker, director of criminal justice for the state. "Whenever we get DNA from a convicted offender, we run it against the 18,000 unsolved crimes, mostly rapes, and we have 2,400 hits so far. When we look at those hits, we find on average when [an arrestee] is convicted, it's [his or her] 12th conviction."

He cites the example of Raymon McGill arrested July 25 for attempted robbery. DNA testing linked Mr. McGill to two earlier murders and a rape, says Mr. Parker. He also notes that McGill had been arrested in 1999 for a misdemeanor.

"Had we required DNA fingerprinting back then, he would have been linked to the rape and the case solved," says Parker.

On Monday, critics of the New York proposal publicly complained that the backlog of cases is already large. Tom Duane (D), the only state senator to vote against the New York measure, worries about the cost of expansion, as well as how to ensure proper training of personnel and storage of the samples. "What good will it do if it's not done right?" he asked.

Such concerns go well beyond New York. In February, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in their magazine, published an article detailing mistakes that have cropped up at DNA labs around the country. "Many of the mistakes arise from cross-contamination or mislabeling of DNA samples," wrote William Thompson, a professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Thompson's concerns arise just as states and cities are expanding their use of DNA testing. Los Angeles County is preparing to open a new crime lab in 2007. A proposed county budget included funding not only for the lab, but also for prosecutors and public defenders training in DNA technology. Nebraska recently passed a bill to include felony robbery and burglary convictions among those requiring DNA samples. Wisconsin is considering a bill to add some misdemeanor-related sex crimes to its DNA-collection requirements.

But with such expansions come concerns. Mr. Saloom of the Innocence Project objects to law-enforcement agencies holding the DNA of innocent people, especially those who merely cooperated with an investigation. These samples should be destroyed, he says. "The fundamental values of government accountability and personal privacy are at stake," he says.

Some of these arguments resonate with Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D), chairman of the Assembly Codes Committee, which deals with criminal sanctions. "We are asking [DNA labs] to destroy the DNA of an innocent party," says Mr. Lentol. "This is a privacy issue."

Parker, the director of criminal justice for the state, says cooperating individuals can ask a judge to order their samples to be returned. "The burden is on the police to always demonstrate to a judge that whatever evidence they are collecting, whether it's a DNA fingerprint or a photograph or a handwriting sample, that it has been collected lawfully and that it's being used for a lawful purpose," he says.

In addition, Assemblyman Lentol also worries that private labs will use DNA information for commercial gain. "There is an almost limitless possibility of ID theft," he worries.

That concern is addressed in the pending legislation, Parker says, by increasing the penalty for unlawful use of a DNA sample.

The governor and lawmakers have until the end of the legislative session, June 22, to come to terms on the proposal.

www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2006 The Christian Science Monitor.

Soldier in Gay Porn Case Sentenced

May 17, 2006

Soldier in gay porn case sentenced
Associated Press

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — A soldier pleaded guilty Tuesday to having sex on a military-themed Web site for money and was sentenced to three months in prison.

Pfc. Wesley K. Mitten, 21, pleaded guilty to sodomy, conduct detrimental to the Army and cocaine use. He will be discharged from the service.

“I am sorry for disgracing my family name and my unit,” he said, according to The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer.

Mitten is one of seven soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division accused of appearing on the Web site. Two others, Pvt. Kagen B. Mullen and Pfc. Richard Ashley, have also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.

In court, Mitten said the Web site’s producer contacted him through the Internet in 2005 and offered him $2,000 to perform in a gay pornography video.

Mitten also made another film, posed for pictures and appeared before a camera for Internet broadcasts, he said. He earned $6,000 in three months.

Army prosecutors said Mitten helped recruit other men in his division.

Four other soldiers were punished outside of the military court system. All four were reduced in rank to private, forfeited half a month’s pay for two months, performed extra work and were restricted to Fort Bragg for 45 days. The Army has discharged one paratrooper and has recommended discharges for the other three, division officials said.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

Hold the Phone: Spying on Your Calls

MSNBC.com
Hold the Phone
Big Brother knows whom you call. Is that legal, and will it help catch the bad guys?

By Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas
Newsweek

May 22, 2006 issue - In the difficult days after 9/11, White House officials quietly passed the word through Washington's alphabet soup of intelligence agencies: tell us which weapons you need to stop another attack. At the supersecretive NSA, the National Security Agency (also known as No Such Agency), the request came back: give us permission to collect information on people inside the United States. The NSA had been struggling, without much success, to listen in on terrorists who use cheap and easily available encrypted phones, and officials eagerly drew up a wish list, according to a participant in the discussions. This source, who declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters, said NSA officials did not really expect the White House to say yes to domestic spying. After scandals over wiretapping erupt-ed in the 1970s, the code breakers and electronic sleuths at the NSA had been essentially restricted to eavesdrop-ping on conversations between foreigners abroad. American residents and even most foreign visitors to the United States were off-limits to "Big Noddy," as NSA insiders call their giant "Ear in the Sky" surveillance capability.

But after 9/11, president George W. Bush wanted fast action. He believed that most Americans thought their government should do whatever was necessary to catch terrorists before they struck again. Though the details remain highly classified, the "National Security Presidential Directives" issued by Bush called for an all-out war on terrorism, including, it is generally believed, expanded electronic surveillance. Out went the old rules—a 1980 document called "U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18," which sharply limited domestic surveillance; in came a new, still dimly understood regimen of domestic spying.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In times of war, open societies have been willing to accept the need for secret spy services. Americans now spend upwards of $40 billion a year on intelligence. Given a hard choice between security and privacy, most Americans would probably choose to sacrifice some of the latter to get more of the former. The harder question is whether the techno wizards at the NSA, overwhelmed by tidal waves of digital data, searching for tiny poisonous fish in a giant sea, can provide true security from another 9/11.

There can be no doubt that Bush correctly read the public mood in the days and weeks following the 2001 attacks. And had the president sent a bill up to Capitol Hill giving the NSA broad powers to wiretap and eavesdrop inside the United States, in all likelihood, the lawmakers would have shouted it through. But the president did not ask for public support. Instead, like most chief executives charged with running the modern national-security state, he chose the path of secrecy. True, the administration's spymasters confidentially briefed congressional leaders on the new eavesdropping program. But some of the lawmakers now claim they were confused, or misled, or somehow did not fully understand what the spooks were telling them. Perhaps the legislators weren't fully informed. Or perhaps they didn't really want to hear what they were told.

In any case, the story eventually, and inevitably, leaked. Last December, The New York Times revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on thousands of phone calls between people in the United States and foreign countries without first obtaining warrants. Then, last week, USA Today reported that the NSA had amassed a vast database of billions of calls inside the United States—not the content of the calls themselves, but a record of when and to which phone numbers the calls were made and for how long. (The government did not ask the phone companies for names and addresses, but the simplest Internet search of a phone number can divulge that information.) The revelation was another blow to Bush, whose approval rating in the new NEWSWEEK Poll dipped to 35 percent, his record low in the survey, and it may slow the administration's plan to find a CIA director who can restore morale at the beleaguered intelligence agency. The brewing scandal is likely to entangle the government and the phone companies that helped in a legal morass.

Administration officials have always insisted that any eavesdropping or "data collection" had been narrowly focused on Al Qaeda terror suspects. It is hard to determine if the NSA goes on fishing expeditions. A senior administration of-ficial, who declined to be identified discussing classified matters, acknowledged to NEWSWEEK that the NSA had crunched through vast databases to help identify suspects who may have then been subjected to electronic eavesdropping, either without a warrant or under court order. This official claimed that the NSA program had helped gather evidence that had foiled terrorist operations, though the official would not be more specific. If the program "leads to one disruption of another 9/11, then it would be worth it," said the official. But other administration officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK questioned whether the fruits of the NSA program—which they doubted, though not publicly at the risk of losing their jobs—have been worth the cost to privacy. And many Americans naturally wondered whether Big Brother was watching or listening in ways that are still unknown. There are hints, for instance, that the government has been fishing the Internet as well as the phone lines.

In San Francisco, a privacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit based in part on the testimony of Mark Klein, an AT&T technician for 22 years who claims he witnessed the construction of a "secret room" for the NSA at AT&T's San Francisco headquarters in early 2003. Later that year, Klein says, he discovered that cables from the secret room were tapping into massive volumes of Internet communication. Klein says he discovered similar operations in other cities on the West Coast, and now concludes that the NSA had created the capability of "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of all data crossing the Internet. AT&T says it has always obeyed the law and worked to safeguard the privacy of its customers. The federal government has mostly remained mum, though at a Dec. 19 White House briefing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales somewhat cryptically referred to "many operational aspects" of the eavesdropping program "that have still not been disclosed." After the USA Today story, President Bush told reporters, "We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

Whether that is strictly true will likely be on the agenda this week as lawmakers on the Senate intelligence committee grill Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Bush's choice to take over the troubled CIA. Hayden ran the NSA before and after 9/11, when the agency was expanding its surveillance programs. "I have substantial questions about his credibility," Senate intelligence committee member Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told NEWSWEEK. He points to Hayden's public statements that the NSA monitored only international calls. "There was never any mention of establishing a domestic database," says Wyden.

Republicans defending Hayden's nomination can counter with some early polls showing that most Americans support expanded electronic surveillance to catch terrorists, even if it intrudes on their privacy. (Much depends on the wording of a poll question, of course, and later polls showed more skepticism. The NEWSWEEK survey found 53 percent agreed with the statement that NSA data collection "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while only 41 percent agreed that the collection program is "a necessary tool to combat terrorism.") Most legal experts seemed to agree that the government could collect a huge database of phone records without violating the Constitution's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures." Still, the phone companies that cooperated with the NSA—AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth—will be hauled into court, accused by their customers of violating the arcane and murky restrictions of various federal communications laws. All of them have protested that they were complying with the law, though it has been noted that they were paid for their cooperation, and lawyers suing the phone companies will undoubtedly want to know if they were pressured by threats to withhold valuable federal contracts. One much smaller phone company—Qwest, based in the Rocky Mountain states—refused to turn over its call records, arguing that the NSA never satisfied the company's legal doubts about the agency's request.

Americans are not naive about the need to snoop at home and overseas. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down a secret code-breaking operation called the Black Chamber by saying, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." But America's enemies are apt to play dirty, and during World War II and the cold war, the federal government decided, in effect, to play dirty, too—to steal secrets and eavesdrop, at home as well as abroad.

Washington spun a huge web of intelligence agencies with acronyms familiar (like CIA and FBI) and obscure (like NRO—for National Reconnaissance Office—to operate spy satellites). The attitude toward secret or "black" operations was, at first, rather "stiff upper lip" and British. Policymakers did not want to know too much about what the spooks were up to. Presidents were protected by the doctrine of plausible deniability. They were supposed to be able to say, plausibly, that they really didn't know how that secret was stolen—or that a journalist's phone was tapped or that a foreign government was overthrown. If caught, American spymasters were supposed to fall on their swords and take responsibility.

Of course, blametaking didn't quite work so stoically in practice. During the Watergate scandal, it emerged that the Feds had been carrying on a program of domestic spying, tapping phones and opening the mail of real and imagined enemies of the state. At the 1975 Church Committee hearings, intelligence officials squirmed and pointed fingers. New laws were enacted, including the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the Feds to get a warrant from a secret court before eavesdropping on foreign calls in and out of the United States.

The NSA was banned from any domestic espionage. At those 1975 hearings, Sen. Frank Church, the chairman of the committee appointed to investigate intelligence abuses, made a statement that today seems ominous and possibly prescient. The Idaho senator said he was most worried about the NSA. The secret agency's capabilities were so great they "could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

The NSA does have vast capabilities. One senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject, told NEWSWEEK that the heat generated by the NSA's secret supercomputers has been so great that officials have been talking about carting in snow and ice to mask the machines from the prying sensors of foreign spy satellites.

But increasingly, there has been talk of the agency's "going deaf." The NSA had its best luck monitoring Soviet lines of communication—for example, a microwave transmission from Moscow to a missile base in Siberia. But the new enemy is more shadowy and elusive. In 2002, General Hayden told NEWSWEEK, "We've gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an Al Qaeda member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had to make no investment for development."

According to most accounts, the NSA remains behind the telecommunications curve. A December 2002 report by the Senate intelligence committee noted that only a "tiny fraction" of the NSA's 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data." Hayden told NEWSEEK that year that the NSA had been slow to catch up to new technology, and that he was obsessed with turning the enemy's "beeps and squeaks into something intelligible."

One of Hayden's most ambitious initiatives was called Trailblazer. It was a program aimed at helping the NSA make sense of its many databases—to put them to use. By more efficiently locating and retrieving messages, Trailblazer could help the NSA "data-mine," to find patterns in the huge volume of electronic traffic that might help lead sleuths to a terror suspect. Instead, the program has produced nearly a billion dollars' worth of junk hardware and software. "It's a complete and abject failure," says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program. Adds Ed Giorgio, who was the chief code breaker for the NSA for 30 years: "Everybody's eyes rolled when you mentioned Trailblazer."

What went wrong? The NSA apparently tried a clunky top-down approach, trying to satisfy too many requirements with one grand solution, rather than taking a more Silicon Valley-like tack of letting small entrepreneurs compete for ideas. John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, Calif., a renowned "network" intelligence expert, says: "The real problem Big Brother is having is he's not making enough use of the Little Brothers"—the corporations that have become expert at manipulating databases for commercial use.

"Data mining" has been a boon to credit-card companies that can match customers and products. It has also helped the Feds track drug dealers who constantly buy and throw away cell phones (the technology can monitor frequent phone-number changes). Identifying and tracking terrorists may be a taller order. For one thing, terrorists have learned not to even use phones. A computer disk or message between, say, Osama bin Laden and Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is hand-delivered. Some terrorists have learned to leave messages hidden in Web sites. Others are given passwords to go on the Web sites and find the messages. Since that process involves no electronic communication—no e-mail or phone call—the NSA is kept in the dark.

Effective data mining might have averted 9/11, notes Philip Bobbitt, who served as a National Security staffer in the Clinton administration. On Sept. 10, 2001, the NSA, monitoring pay phones in Qaeda-controlled Afghanistan, intercepted two messages, "The match begins tomorrow" and "Tomorrow is zero hour." No one knew what to make of these messages, which in any event weren't translated until Sept. 12. But the CIA and FBI had the identities of two of the hijackers, who had been linked to earlier Qaeda plotting, in the agencies' computers. "Had we at the time cross-referenced credit-card accounts, frequent-flier programs and a cell- phone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day and at the same time on four flights," Bobbitt recently wrote in The New York Times.

There are doubts within the upper levels of the U.S. government that the NSA, four-and-a-half years after 9/11, is any better equipped and run to piece together the next "Tomorrow is zero hour" intercept. NEWSWEEK has learned that some top government lawyers were troubled by the NSA data collection and search program—not on legal grounds so much, but because they doubted its efficacy. A senior administration official who was involved in legally vetting the NSA program but declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters says that a crude cost-benefit analysis left him uneasy. The NSA program ran a risk of intruding on the privacy of Americans. There are always "false positives." National Journal's Shane Harris conjured up the example of a book agent who represents a journalist who once interviewed Osama bin Laden. A faulty pattern analysis could make him a terror suspect. To justify the risk of dragging such innocents into government investigations, there needs to be evidence showing a high probability of return on the investment—the prospect of actually catching a terrorist.

So far, the best catch the Feds have offered up is a truckdriver named Iyman Faris, who conceived a rather farfetched plot to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. (Faris was apparently identified by a captured Qaeda leader; it's not clear the NSA played any role.) Of course, intelligence services do not always brag about their successes, and one U.S. official privy to the intelligence tells NEWSWEEK that another attack on an urban area in the United States was averted as well. The official would not discuss the plot for fear of revealing NSA listening methods.

There has been at least some debate inside the administration over how much license to give the NSA. In the spring of 2004, senior Justice Department lawyers objected to warrantless eavesdropping. For several months, until new rules to safeguard privacy were adopted, the program was suspended. It is not clear whether the NSA's data-collection program was also put on hold or altered in some way.

The administration is not eager to air its internal debates. At the Justice Department, an internal watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, began an investigation into whether DOJ lawyers had behaved unethically by interpreting the law too aggressively—by giving a legal green light to coercive interrogations and warrantless eavesdropping. But the OPR lawyers had to drop their investigation last week when the administration refused to give them the necessary security clearances.

Catching Al Qaeda or some shadowy terrorist offshoot before it strikes again will take all the tools of spy tradecraft—old-fashioned human intelligence (HUMINT) as well as signals intelligence (SIGINT) like electronic eavesdropping. It is frustrating to think how close the CIA and FBI came to stopping 9/11. After Al Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, local police managed to catch one of the would-be bombers who had decided not to commit suicide in the blast. The conspirator was turned over to American intelligence officials, who persuaded the man to give up the phone number of a Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA began listening in on the phone line of the safe house. American agents were tipped to a Qaeda terror summit in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. Two of the 9/11 hijackers—Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar—were at that summit. Somehow, the CIA failed to hand over the identities of these two terrorists to the FBI in time for the slow-moving bureau to track them before they flew into buildings on 9/11.

That was a human error, but it was caused in part by the culture of secrecy that permeates the national-security state. The CIA and FBI are renowned for their turf wars and unwillingness to share secrets. It's hoped that intelligence reform and the shame of failure have prodded the intelligence agencies to share a little more. As the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, during the cold war excessive secrecy did more to hurt national security than to help it. In an overly secretive world, assumptions go untested and rigorous thinking is stifled. The CIA, for instance, failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, in part because agency analysts refused to reach out to outside economists and experts.

It is true, as the old World War II saying goes, that "loose lips sink ships." But by refusing to tolerate an open discussion of new rules post-9/11, the Bush team lost a chance to gain public support for the necessary trade-off between security and privacy. Figuring out how to track and find Internet-savvy terrorists is a daunting task. Government officials—even the superspooks of the NSA—need all the help they can get.

With Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey and John Barry

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12779087/site/newsweek

General Convention 2006: Stepping Back Toward Revisionist Victory?

Report/Analysis
By Auburn Traycik, Editor
The Christian Challenge (Washington DC)
http://www.challengeonline.org

THE FUTURE of the U.S. Episcopal Church (ECUSA) and its standing within the Anglican Communion now appears set to be determined chiefly by the June General Convention's decisions on compliant-sounding resolutions that, as presently written, would nonetheless leave ECUSA "pointing in the same direction."

This, after the Diocese of California averted a second major convention struggle-and probable schism in the Communion-by passing up the chance to elect another actively gay bishop on May 6.

The election of a second such prelate would have presented an opportunity for considerable drama: Some claimed-and some did not believe-that the House of Bishops would this time narrowly refuse to back a non-celibate homosexual, and if so, that gay activists and their supporters would gather willing bishops to consecrate the candidate illegally.

The California diocese, however, chose a liberal, pro-gay, but married man with two grown children-Alabama Suffragan Bishop Mark Handley Andrus-to succeed Bishop William Swing. In so doing, delegates bypassed by a wide margin six other candidates, three of them partnered homosexuals, and one of those a lesbian. Placing second, and more favored among the laity, was the Rev. Canon Eugene Taylor Sutton, a black cleric serving at Washington National Cathedral, who also was not among the gay nominees.

The election of any one of the homosexuals would have forced the June 13-21 General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, to register a stark up or down vote on the consecration of the candidate, one that either failed the church's pro-gay stand or handed Anglican primates (provincial leaders) a clear-cut means of declaring that ECUSA is "walking apart" from the Communion.

That would have been a lose-lose situation for more moderate liberals, those deputies or bishops who likely want continue support for homosexuals, but also want to try to, or feign trying to, patch things up with the wider Communion for unity's or expediency's sake.

These include bishops-there are said to be some-who want to "maintain unity" because they are "genuinely sorry" that the Communion was so disrupted by General Convention 2003 decisions approving same-sex blessings and the church's first openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson (now a recovering alcoholic), even if they supported those decisions. But moderate liberals also appear to include those prelates prepared to slow their pro-gay agenda in a bid to retain Communion credentials and secure invitations to the 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, in anticipation of further revisionist gains in the decade between Lambeth '08 and '18.

ON THE SURFACE, the election of Andrus, 49, which aided the moderates, may seem to suggest that the diocese yielded to pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury and others not to widen the Communion's conflict, and thereby handed a defeat to radical liberals who want ECUSA to be honest about its stand and accept the consequences (as evidenced by their efforts to pack the California slate with homosexuals).

Remarkably, such pressure came even from Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold-the same man who agreed with fellow primates in 2003 that Gene Robinson's consecration would have devastating consequences for the Communion, and then acted as Robinson's chief consecrator, setting those consequences in train. In the run-up to California's election, however, he said the diocese "needs to respect the sensibilities of the larger Communion." When it makes its "wise" decision, it "will then be up to the House of Bishops to give or withhold their consent"-a thinly veiled warning that the House might this time nix another homosexual bishop.

However, such official "encouragement" looks unlikely to have been determinative in California, given the level of support Andrus received (on the third and final ballot, he garnered the backing of over 72 percent of the clergy and 54 percent of laity). None of the gay nominees received more than a handful of votes. Reportedly, some members of the diocese felt that Andrus significantly outshone homosexual nominees at the episcopal candidates' "walkabouts" before the election. As well, church gay activists know that there will be other opportunities to put forward their candidates for the episcopate: although it has not announced its nominees yet, the Diocese of Newark's episcopal election in September is one to watch.

NEVERTHELESS, the California election seems to have put more moderate liberals in the driver's seat for General Convention. Their "vehicle" for getting where they want to go looks to be the report and recommended resolutions of a special ECUSA commission which go a bit farther than some predicted-but not nearly far enough, conservatives say-in trying to meet the expectations of the 2004 Windsor Report and Anglican primates.

Recent press reports that ECUSA was preparing to step back from its pro-homosexual policies-a claim that dismayed some liberals and gay activists-were soon declared unfounded by conservative leaders, particularly as the resolutions do not urge the moratorium on non-celibate homosexual bishops sought by the Windsor Report, only the exercise of "very considerable caution" in putting them forward. (More on the resolutions in a bit.) The convention could act to strengthen the resolutions in Columbus, but that remains to be seen. As things stand, though, the "step back" seems a largely tactical and illusory one actually designed to enable liberals to go forward with their Communion status and their revisionist agenda.

As well, moderate liberals seeking to appear compliant with Communion expectations are still likely to get a hard run for their money in Columbus from homosexuals in the church. To be sure, the longstanding gay group Integrity welcomed the special commission report and proposed resolutions, saying that the panel had made a "strong statement that this church will not scapegoat its lesbian and gay members." But Integrity and other "lesbitransgay" advocacy groups also plan a big presence and ambitious legislative program at General Convention, under the umbrella of "Claiming the Blessing." Integrity says it wants to "keep the momentum it has gained through 30 years of respected, successful advocacy and witness." What perhaps said it all, though, was the title of an article by John Clinton Bradley in Integrity's spring magazine: "No Turning Back."

At this writing, too, the church's left wing had begun "massive media campaigns of disinformation, half-truths and spin" aimed at conservatives, painting them as schismatic, destabilizers of ECUSA, and bankrolled with millions of dollars from right wing foundations, reported Episcopal e-journalist David Virtue. A centerpiece of the initiative was a two-part series by Washington (D.C.) Window Editor, James Naughton, titled "Follow the Money." The accuracy of "bankrolling" claims aside, Virtue wondered why it would be "wrong for the orthodox to have serious financial backers when liberals have professional bagmen like George Soros who have poured billions of dollars into liberal organizations."

ALL THINGS (at the moment) considered, U.S. conservatives see little chance that the convention will adequately meet the minimal requests made of it, and-more importantly-no chance that it will answer the call underlying them, which is for real repentance and a broad return to scriptural fidelity and orthodoxy.

"Anybody with any sense knows that ECUSA is not going to repent," said Canon Bill Atwood of the Ekklesia Society. He recalled a survey in 2000 which showed that 42 (out of some 110) Episcopal dioceses had practicing homosexual clergy serving, 32 dioceses would ordain active homosexuals, and 22 dioceses were performing same-sex blessings. "They're not going to stop that," he maintained. "If Nineveh comes to us in Columbus, God will be glorified and we can rejoice and be reconciled. But I'm not holding my breath."

"Slowing down is not stopping," said Cynthia Brust, Communications Director for the American Anglican Council (AAC). She thought that the resolutions as proposed could create a perception that ECUSA is conforming, but said "the key...is, are there moratoria?" Clarity could be gleaned, she said, by examining whether the convention really agreed to the two types of restraint asked of it.

Still, some conservatives are worried that General Convention, bolstered by California's internationally-watched election, may do well in appearing accommodating and obscuring areas in which it falls short of expectations-thereby creating the kind of post-convention confusion and muddle in which liberals thrive, and conservatives flounder.

"The battle going into Columbus is obfuscation versus truth, and generalities versus specifics," said Canon Kendall Harmon of the Diocese of South Carolina.

Some sources said the impression of compliance could be augmented if the convention opts for a more conservative-leaning candidate for presiding bishop, though on the whole most do not expect the choice of successors to Bishop Griswold to make much difference for ECUSA.

Whatever happens, many will look to Communion leaders for clarity. But perhaps surprisingly, there are mixed opinions among those consulted by TCC on whether the conservative majority of Anglican primates and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams would be able or willing to identify the inadequacies of ECUSA's position and judge the U.S. Church's status in the Communion accordingly. Pressure One would not conclude this from recent developments, however. Indeed, as liberals and gay activists prepared to head determinedly into General Convention, international pressure on them was ratcheted up by Archbishop Williams.

Though he is known to have some liberal sympathies, Dr. Williams has lately issued some significant warnings and statements upholding Communion policy, and begun a series of private consultations with senior Church of England bishops and advisors to consider potential fallout from ECUSA's General Convention.

In his series of utterances, the Archbishop stated, for example, that the Communion is in danger of a "visible rupture" that could take decades to heal. Responding with "deep unease" to the list of nominees for Bishop of California, he also called on ECUSA to uphold a moratorium on the consecration of non-celibate homosexuals, reiterating that the mind of the Communion on sexuality matters cannot be changed by one province alone.

Williams' series of private consultations with senior English bishops and others, including representatives of the conservative Anglican Mainstream, began at Lambeth Palace on April 24, with discussions reportedly including how to deal with a range of possible outcomes of General Convention, how the international Anglican "instruments of unity" should respond, and what impact there would be on the C of E. One report said Williams was believed to be taking advice on whether he indeed has the power to "disinvite" bishops to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, though he has long been recognized as having authority to decide who to invite to Anglican meetings.

The issues at stake in these "next critical months" in the Communion's life are "too important...to allow events to overtake us," said a leaked letter of invitation to the April 24 consultation from Dr. Williams' head of staff, Chris Smith.

"The wording of the invitation makes it fairly clear that Lambeth [Palace] is expecting no backtrack from ECUSA and is therefore working out how to manage the oncoming schism," wrote The Times of London.

One source with a line into the consultations claimed, however, that participating bishops have agreed that whatever effort ECUSA makes to comply with the Windsor Report will be acceptable (a position that would seem to relieve Williams of having to "disinvite" Episcopal bishops to Lambeth).

But Dr. Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream said: "We are very concerned that a fudge isn't good enough. What we're looking for is repentance and the rescinding of decisions of the General Convention 2003."

And, it is Anglican primates who look to be the primary determinants of whether or not ECUSA has separated from the Communion. (There are, of course, disagreements over whether they have "authority" to do this, though it would seem that there is likewise no "authority" preventing them from declaring an opinion about ECUSA's Communion standing and governing their future actions accordingly.)

Bishop Griswold also revealed that he had a private meeting with Dr. Williams in Canterbury to discuss measures that ECUSA proposes to defuse the current crisis. Meanwhile, however, Williams has declined an invitation to make an appearance at the eight-day General Convention, citing pre-existing obligations. And in March, he sent the Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, to deliver some sobering words to the Episcopal House of Bishops meeting (on which more in a minute).

And, in a signal move, Williams recently dashed hopes that liberals evidently had of overturning or undermining the 1998 Lambeth Conference's sexuality resolution (1.10) when the Conference meets again in 2008. He said in March that, while provinces will offer reflections at Lambeth '08 stemming from the process of listening to homosexuals called for in 1.10, he saw no "enthusiasm" or reason for reopening debate on the resoundingly-adopted resolution, which deems homosexual behavior "incompatible with Scripture." He stated that, despite "bitter controversy" over the issue, it remains clear that Lambeth 1.10 represents the mind of the Communion on sexuality.

The AAC said this left ECUSA with an "even more strongly defined choice." It must not only uphold Lambeth 1.10 but "abandon its agenda to revise Scripture and 2,000 years of teaching and practice on human sexuality, and...affirm the foundational tenets of Christian faith... Any other course represents a decision to walk apart." The Proposed Resolutions

It has been three tumultuous years since ECUSA's General Convention consented to the consecration of New Hampshire's gay bishop-elect and agreed that rites for the blessing of same-sex unions are within the bounds of church life. It was, said the AAC, the culmination of a "revolution in stages" against the apostolic faith; notably, the same convention defeated a resolution (B001) affirming the authority of Scripture and basic tenets of Christian faith. The convention actions and the subsequent consecration of Gene Robinson (along with the implementation of same-sex blessings in the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster) plunged the Communion into turmoil.

And to the obvious surprise of ECUSA liberals-who were indulged by Communion leaders in pioneering earlier innovations that also lacked broad consensus, the ordination of women priests and bishops-the crisis has not blown over. Among other things, 22 of 38 Anglican provinces have reduced or broken communion with ECUSA. Additionally, the realignment of conservative North American Anglicans has quickened and become more organized, notably with the formation of the Canterbury-recognized Anglican Communion Network (ACN), consisting mostly of faithful still in ECUSA, and its links to various faithful associations and extramural Anglican bodies. The realignment also has taken some unprecedented turns, as more congregations have fled ECUSA and come under the oversight of foreign Communion bishops.

In 2004, the Lambeth Commission issued the Windsor Report, which-as Commission member, the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, put it-"was about how the...Communion can continue to operate when a province or diocese acts directly against the stated mind of the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), the Primates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury" (the Communion's four advisory "instruments of unity"). The Report called (among other things) for ECUSA to express its "regret that the proper constraints of the bonds of affection were breached in the events surrounding the election and consecration of [Gene Robinson] and for the consequences which followed"; it also called for a moratorium on the "election and consent to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate who is living in a same-gender union until some new consensus in the Anglican Communion emerges"; and a moratorium on all public rites of blessing same-sex unions.

The 2005 the Primates' Meeting held at the Dromantine Center in Northern Ireland, and subsequently the ACC meeting in Nottingham, England-where U.S. and Canadian representatives defended their homosexuality policies-gave a general welcome to the Windsor Report and reaffirmed Lambeth Resolution 1.10. And both bodies asked ECUSA (and the Anglican Church of Canada) to withdraw its members from the ACC in the run-up to Lambeth '08, and respond through its legislative body to questions posed to it in the Windsor Report, while considering its "place within the Anglican Communion." In other words, ECUSA was effectively suspended from the global church, and asked to choose between its support for homosexual practice and its Communion membership.

ECUSA leaders have so far expressed regret only for causing pain to the wider Communion, not for the unbiblical action of consecrating Robinson. And, in a move widely seen as vindictive, Episcopal bishops agreed to a temporary halt on the consecration of any bishop, gay or straight, and to authorizing public same-sex union rites (though the ban is not binding on clergy in all cases, or on private ceremonies). A final answer, however, is still expected from ECUSA's General Convention.

NOW, IN A REPORT titled "One Baptism, One Hope In God's Call," released April 10, the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion proposes to make what initially looks like a conciliatory response to the wider Communion.

Appointed by Bishop Griswold and House of Deputies President, the Rev. George Werner, the mostly liberal special commission was charged with "[preparing] the way for a consideration by the 75th General Convention of recent developments" in ECUSA and the Communion "with a view to maintaining the highest degree of communion possible." Griswold and Werner said the commission's document is first and foremost "theological," and secondarily "a beginning" and not the end point for conversation and legislative decisions.

The report includes six sections covering topics arising out of the current feud, plus a brief conclusion, and offers 11 recommended resolutions. The resolutions could undergo revision as they are prepared for debate in Columbus by an 18-member special legislative committee.

But among the resolutions as they stand now are some deferential-sounding calls for the convention to: commit to "interdependence" in the Anglican Communion and to the "fellowship of churches that constitute" it; commit to the Windsor process as it relates to communion and discerning "the nature and unity of the Church," and to the (Lambeth 1.10) listening process; commit to the process of developing an Anglican "covenant," recommended by the Windsor Report as a way to help ensure unity among provinces that adopt it ; endorse "effective and appropriate pastoral care for all"; demonstrate support for Anglicans around the world by supporting the Millennium Development Goals, including regular giving to support international development work; and approve a curious canonical amendment that seems intended, in part, to ensure, after many long years, the end to discrimination against orthodox clergy and aspirants to ordination.

But while there are several significant caveats to be noted in those first motions, the rubber really meets the road in some of the few remaining ones.

Over the course of two proposed resolutions, ECUSA would express "regret" for pain caused by the actions of General Convention 2003, for contributing to the "strains on communion," and causing "deep offense" to many faithful Anglicans; it would also apologize and repent for breaching the "bonds of affection" in the Communion "by any failure to consult adequately with Anglican partners before taking these actions." But this appears to miss the mark again. According to Bishop Wright, the Windsor Report's reference to breaching the bonds of affection equates not with a failure to consult but with "going against the stated mind of the instruments of unity."

The commission's offerings include "no rejection of the decisions of the 2003 General Convention," the official Episcopal Life admitted.

More significantly, as earlier noted, one resolution urges merely that "very considerable caution" be exercised in "the nomination, election, consent to, and consecration of bishops whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church" and will further strain communion. (Reportedly, some commission members had wanted to use "refrain from" in the advice on future episcopal consents, but obviously they did not prevail.) The resolution also makes no promises about not ordaining gay deacons or priests-because the Windsor Report did not ask for any, and the primates did not expand on its requests.

Another resolution concurs with the Windsor Report request that the convention not authorize public rites of blessing for same-sex unions. But the same resolution allows "a breadth of private responses to situations of individual pastoral care for gay and lesbian" church members; in other words, private same-sex blessings could continue. But some say there is a loophole that would allow public rites to continue as well.

As proposed, the resolution on same-sex blessings appears to be in compliance with the Windsor Report, which sought only to proscribe public ceremonies. However, the commission's claim that General Convention has never yet authorized public gay blessing rites is disingenuous, as, in 2003, it gave a blanket okay to whatever liturgies that "local faith communities" wish to use for same-sex blessings: such communities "are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions," the convention said. AAC's Mrs. Brust maintained that these local rites are still being used publicly.

"It's happening all the time," she said, pointing, for example, to the recent lesbian union ceremony involving the head of Claiming the Blessing, the Rev. Susan Russell, and her partner.

Remaining resolutions would have the convention reassert positions the church has already taken in support of homosexuals, with which few would argue, e.g. that they are entitled to equal protection under the law, and "are by baptism full members of the Body of Christ" and ECUSA. But one clause would ask the church to commit to the communion of all the baptized "despite our diversity of opinion and, among dioceses, a diversity of pastoral practice with the gay men and lesbians among us." Brake, But Keep Going ECUSA "should slow but not halt its push for gay bishops and blessings," was one conservative writer's summation of the commission's recommendations.

Mr. Virtue called the 11 proposals "a carefully nuanced fudge that, when examined closely, offer nothing about returning to 'the faith once delivered to the saints' and therefore pose no threat to ongoing revisionism of the Episcopal Church. It also offers nothing to orthodox Episcopalians who had hoped [for] some relief or reprieve in...the church's 11th hour."

Writing on standfirminfaith.com, Fr. Matt Kennedy marveled that the "truly moderate" Windsor Report requests are still "far too stringent for the rebellious and schismatic Episcopal Church."

"What is being...proposed by ECUSA is not truly sufficient to show that [it] is intent on being a biblically-based, orthodox province," said the Rev. Dr. Peter Toon of the U.S. Prayer Book Society.

Even the moderate Living Church magazine was under-whelmed. "At first glance, the proposed resolutions included with the report seem to be in concert" with the Windsor recommendations, it said, "but instead it looks as though the commission was determined to change the words of these proposals to suit their own needs."

THAT WHAT U.S. CRITICS ARE SAYING is what Communion leaders might say as well was the clear message of the Church of England's Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, to the March 17-22 House of Bishops (HOB) meeting at North Carolina's Kanuga Conference Center, where the prelates were given preliminary information on the commission's report and resolutions.

Langrish basically "told the U.S. bishops that the language of the special commission is not adequate," and "that if they consecrate another gay bishop or authorize same-sex relations, the Anglican Communion will break apart," and dialogue with Roman Catholics and Muslims will be finished, said The Times religion reporter Ruth Gledhill.

Significantly, Langrish spoke at the episcopal retreat as a representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which strongly suggests that the views he stated are those of Dr. Williams. As well, he was among bishops invited to the private Lambeth Palace consultations in April. And, he has, from past experience, some knowledge of the wider Communion, particularly the global South.

In his remarks to the HOB, Langrish noted the pivotal importance of the convention's response to the Communion. But he said that for starters, he had, and the wider Communion was likely to have, "real anxieties" about the call for "very considerable caution" in electing actively gay bishops. It is not clear what that means, "how it would be judged, and who would decide," he said. "Can you exercise extreme caution and still act in a way that injects further difficulty into the life of the Communion?"

Langrish also effectively said that regrets expressed for "pain" caused are insufficient. At issue, he said, was the creation of a bishop for the Church Catholic "who was in a relationship not liturgically sanctioned by the Church" and without seeking the assent of the wider Church.

He warned that, while "no one can force another province or diocese either to go or remain (in the Communion)... no diocese or province can enforce its own continued membership simply or largely on its own terms. There has to be engagement. There is no communion without a shared vision of life in communion."

Concluding with a flourish, Langrish said: "So it does seem to me, as I listen to those other parts of the Communion that I know best, that any further consecration of those in a same-sex relationship, any authorization of any person to undertake same-sex blessings, any stated intention not to seriously engage with the Windsor Report, will be read very widely as a declaration not to stay with the Communion."

How well did the U.S. prelates listen?

After the HOB meeting, Arizona Bishop Kirk Stevan Smith still seemed to think the proposed resolutions offered a way forward. That, because they signal ECUSA's pledge to "work to conform" to the Windsor expectations, "[w]ithout backing away from decisions we have made."

California's Bishop Swing said "we are fighting over freedom, among other issues," and that there is "a mad dash to create a worldwide final arbiter-a Windsor Report or an archbishop or instruments of unity-which would...put an end to all of the mischief caused by freedom."

Conservative Central Florida Bishop John Howe noted that some of his colleagues at the meeting immediately sought to clarify that the resolutions were not "forbidding" sexually active gay bishops. He added that, while "many...bishops would not vote to authorize same-sex blessings at this moment...they will not forbid them...And we all know they are being performed all over this country. Not to forbid is to authorize."

As shown by a recent survey of Episcopal bishops (see more in "Focus"), some bishops are prepared to say that they would vote differently than they did three years ago. "But (I believe) that is because of the consequences of that vote, not because they have actually changed their minds on the substance of the question," Howe said.

Most ECUSA bishops are "genuinely sorry" for having damaged the Communion and "do not want to see [it] destroyed," he said, but are "not repentant for the decision to confirm Gene Robinson's election...for they do not believe it was wrong."

And this, he predicted, will not be "enough to satisfy the primates and the Archbishop of Canterbury."

"If General Convention fails to adopt a stance of genuine compliance with the Windsor recommendations (which I am certain it will not do), I don't see how the Archbishop has any alternative but to declare that the majority of ECUSA has decided to 'walk apart' from the Anglican Communion." The Primates And U.S. Conservatives

But that, according to some sources, remains to be seen.

One well-placed conservative leader says there are varying views among the conservative majority of primates on the resolutions as they stand, and that some could by swayed by the perception of compliance that ECUSA wishes to give, or are looking for any excuse to get past the conflict. He thought that, while 12-15 primates will not be satisfied with anything but orthodoxy, others would be willing to accept something less.

His lack of confidence about solidarity among the primates extends to Archbishop Williams, whose actions he believes have had the net effect of supporting the liberals-as shown, for example, by the dilatory Panel of Reference charged with helping embattled faithful clergy and laity, which the Archbishop appointed and put under the leadership of a primate hostile to orthodox views. Williams has "killed" the Panel, and thereby encouraged liberal bishops to continue oppressing the faithful, by allowing his staff to filter information to it, the leader told TCC.

Further, he said there is a "big fight" underway over whether or not the primates should meet within a few months after General Convention, rather than wait until their scheduled meeting in February, as he claims Archbishop Williams wants the leaders to do.

The Archbishop of the Southern Cone (of South America), Gregory Venables, also contended that Dr. Williams and some other officials do not wish the primates to meet early, an idea he thought ridiculous. "If one of my children fell down a hole I wouldn't say I'll deal with it next Tuesday," he remarked.

Venables maintained, however, that if such a meeting can be managed (though it may require private funding) and there is opportunity for the primates to freely discuss the ECUSA response, they would likely reach "solid" consensus on U.S. Church's status in the Communion.

For his part, Venables sees ECUSA's resolutions as "a very elaborate U-turn which leaves ECUSA pointing in the same direction it was before. It doesn't change anything at all. It's an attempt at conciliatory language that doesn't change the underlying intention of ECUSA to keep on doing the same thing. It's just trying to gain time..."

Venables sees a post-convention muddle as likely. Everyone will want to "pretend that things will be all right...Nobody wants to face the truth, but we have to," he said. The only possible hope, the only means of "shining a light into the cellar," is for the primates to step in, he said.

HOW SOON THE PRIMATES can shine such a light will be critical to conservatives in ECUSA, and especially to the movement led by the Anglican Communion Network. It seeks a united, biblical, orthodox American Anglicanism, one that, ideally and ultimately, would be expressed in an institutionally-distinct, Communion-recognized body.

The Network's progress toward its objective will be especially hindered if the convention fails to produce clarity about ECUSA's position-perhaps because it has done a good job of selling the idea that it is conforming, or because legislative machinery or timing prevents a vote on a key matter by the whole convention.

But even in a clearer situation-wherein Anglican primates determine that ECUSA has quit the Communion, but continue recognition to its faithful remnant-Network-aligned bishops feel that they face heavy choices on how best to lead a mass of people to the promised land through uncharted ecclesiastical territory.

In a recent commentary, Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker contended that either leaving or staying in ECUSA could incur serious costs and consequences that should be considered. Indeed, at this writing, Network bishops were still not agreed on a unified, post-convention strategy, though there were plans for them to meet with the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, at Nashotah House Seminary on May 17, to try to decide among different proposals. Even so, it may be that Network affiliates in different situations may wish to or have to pursue their common objective by different routes.

Among apparent possibilities, though, is that, if ECUSA is deemed out of the Communion, the Network may not spearhead a separation from ECUSA as part of the push toward a separate province, as many expected. Rather, some or all of the ten ACN-aligned Episcopal dioceses could sit tight, taking the position that they have not gone anywhere, but ECUSA has.

Contacted by TCC, ACN Chancellor Wicks Stephens stressed that this approach would just be the start of response, but might be a "smart place to begin." He noted that, even as things stand now, if a diocese said it was leaving, ECUSA seems to lack "a good legal argument that the property of a diocese belongs" to the national church. But if that same diocese said ECUSA left it, "no one has ever litigated that question," Stephens told TCC. In such a case, he believes, a court considering the disposition of property would have to weigh the burden placed on a diocese that had not changed. Add to that the fact that ECUSA's separation from the Communion would be a violation of its constitution, and one may find significant changes in the legal perspective that has obtained in a number of past church property cases.

Some conservatives have already scored the "stay put" approach as a strategy for slow but sure death, a loss of credibility and integrity as orthodox Christians, and a plan that -though conservatives agree that ECUSA's injustice in this area should be redressed-is still entirely too wedded to property and money. One bishop among the ACN-linked Common Cause Partners told TCC he gets the impression that most Network bishops are "trying to hold on until retirement and protect their dioceses and then it will be up to somebody else. "

Several conservative leaders TCC consulted maintained that people are "fed up with waiting," and that if the Network does not move en masse soon, or has no plan for joint movement, such movement will happen in pieces.

The exact flow of people and parishes leaving ECUSA after June remains to be seen, though some predict "chaos and hemorrhaging." While most are likely to seek oversight from a foreign Communion bishop, some could opt for one of the leading orthodox Anglican bodies outside ECUSA: the Anglican Mission in America, Reformed Episcopal Church, Anglican Church in America, Anglican Province of America, Anglican Province of Christ the King, or the Anglican Catholic Church.

One can appreciate, then, the great weight that Network bishops feel. Whatever they decide will have a big impact on the future of the conservative movement.

Equally so, however, it is crunch time for ECUSA leaders, from whom many in the Communion are seeking signs of real transformation and reformation, both of which look to be in decidedly short supply in Columbus.

Sources: Global South Anglican website, The Guardian, The Living Church, VirtueOnline, The Church of England Newspaper, Christian Today, Episcopal News Service, Church Times, The Associated Press, The Washington Times.

http://www.challengeonline.org

Saving Secular Society

By Michelle Goldberg May 16, 2006
Whenever I talk about the growing power of the evangelical right with friends, they always ask the same question: What can we do? Usually I reply with a joke: Keep a bag packed and your passport current. I don't really mean it, but my anxiety is genuine. It's one thing to have a government that shows contempt for civil liberties; America has survived such men before. It's quite another to have a mass movement--the largest and most powerful mass movement in the nation--rise up in opposition to the rights of its fellow citizens. The Constitution protects minorities, but that protection is not absolute; with a sufficiently sympathetic or apathetic majority, a tightly organized faction can get around it.

The mass movement I've described aims to supplant Enlightenment rationalism with what it calls the "Christian worldview." The phrase is based on the conviction that true Christianity must govern every aspect of public and private life, and that all--government, science, history and culture--must be understood according to the dictates of scripture. There are biblically correct positions on every issue, from gay marriage to income tax rates, and only those with the right worldview can discern them. This is Christianity as a total ideology--I call it Christian nationalism. It's an ideology adhered to by millions of Americans, some of whom are very powerful. It's what drives a great many of the fights over religion, science, sex and pluralism now dividing communities all over the country.

I am not suggesting that religious tyranny is imminent in the United States. Our democracy is eroding and some of our rights are disappearing, but for most people, including those most opposed to the Christian nationalist agenda, life will most likely go on pretty much as normal for the foreseeable future. Thus for those who value secular society, apprehending the threat of Christian nationalism is tricky. It's like being a lobster in a pot, with the water heating up so slowly that you don't notice the moment at which it starts to kill you.

If current trends continue, we will see ever-increasing division and acrimony in our politics. That's partly because, as Christian nationalism spreads, secularism is spreading as well, while moderate Christianity is in decline. According to the City University of New York Graduate Center's comprehensive American religious identification survey, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians has actually fallen in recent years, from 86 percent in 1990 to 77 percent in 2001. The survey found that the largest growth, in both absolute and percentage terms, was among those who don't subscribe to any religion. Their numbers more than doubled, from 14.3 million in 1990,when they constituted 8 percent of the population, to 29.4 million in 2001,when they made up 14 percent. "The top three 'gainers' in America's vast religious marketplace appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion," the survey found. (The percentage of other religious minorities remained small, totaling less than 4 percent of the population).

This is a recipe for polarization. As Christian nationalism becomes more militant, secularists and religious minorities will mobilize in opposition, ratcheting up the hostility. Thus we're likely to see a shrinking middle ground, with both camps increasingly viewing each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension and contempt.

In the coming years, we will probably see the curtailment of the civil rights that gay people, women and religious minorities have won in the last few decades. With two Bush appointees on the Supreme Court, abortion rights will be narrowed; if the president gets a third, it could mean the end of Roe v. Wade. Expect increasing drives to ban gay people from being adoptive or foster parents, as well as attempts to fire gay schoolteachers. Evangelical leaders are encouraging their flocks to be alert to signs of homosexuality in their kids, which will lead to a growing number of gay teenagers forced into "reparative therapy" designed to turn them straight. (Focus on the Family urges parents to consider seeking help for boys as young as five if they show a "tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.")

Christian nationalist symbolism and ideology will increasingly pervade public life. In addition to the war on evolution, there will be campaigns to teach Christian nationalist history in public schools. An elective course developed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a right-wing evangelical group, is already being offered by more than 300 school districts in 36 states. The influence of Christian nationalism in public schools, colleges, courts, social services and doctors' offices will deform American life, rendering it ever more pinched, mean, and divided.

There's still a long way, though, between this damaged version of democracy and real theocracy. Tremendous crises would have to shred what's left of the American consensus before religious fascism becomes a possibility. That means that secularists and liberals shouldn't get hysterical, but they also shouldn't be complacent.

Christian nationalism is still constrained by the Constitution, the courts, and by a passionate democratic (and occasionally Democratic) opposition. It's also limited by capitalism. Many corporations are happy to see their political allies harness the rage and passion of the Christian right's foot soldiers, but the culture industry is averse to government censorship. Nor is homophobia good for business, since many companies need to both recruit qualified gay employees and market to gay customers. Biotech firms are not going to want to hire graduates without a thorough understanding of evolution, so economic pressure will militate against creationism's invading a critical mass of the public schools.

It would take a national disaster, or several of them, for all these bulwarks to crumble and for Christian nationalists to truly "take the land," as Michael Farris, president of the evangelical Patrick Henry College, put it. Historically, totalitarian movements have been able to seize state power only when existing authorities prove unable to deal with catastrophic challenges--economic meltdown, security failures, military defeat--and people lose their faith in the legitimacy of the system.

Such calamities are certainly conceivable in America--Hurricane Katrina's aftermath offered a terrifying glimpse of how quickly order can collapse. If terrorists successfully strike again, we'd probably see significant curtailment of liberal dissenters' free speech rights, coupled with mounting right-wing belligerence, both religious and secular.

The breakdown in the system could also be subtler. Many experts have warned that America's debt is unsustainable and that economic crisis could be on the horizon. If there is a hard landing--due to an oil shock, a burst housing bubble, a sharp decline in the value of the dollar, or some other crisis--interest rates would shoot up, leaving many people unable to pay their floating-rate mortgages and credit card bills. Repossessions and bankruptcies would follow. The resulting anger could fuel radical populist movements of either the left or the right--more likely the right, since it has a far stronger ideological infrastructure in place in most of America.

Military disaster may also exacerbate such disaffection. America's war in Iraq seems nearly certain to come to an ignominious end. The real victims of failure there will be Iraqi, but many Americans will feel embittered, humiliated and sympathetic to the stab-in-the-back rhetoric peddled by the right to explain how Bush's venture has gone so horribly wrong. It was the defeat in World War I, after all, that created the conditions for fascism to grow in Germany.

Perhaps America will be lucky, however, and muddle through its looming problems. In that case, Christian nationalism will continue to be a powerful and growing influence in American politics, although its expansion will happen more fitfully and gradually.

The country's demographics are on the movement's side. Megachurch culture is spreading. The exurbs where religious conservatism thrives are the fastest growing parts of America; in 2004, 97 of the country's 100 fastest-growing counties voted Republican. The disconnection of the exurbs is a large part of what makes the spread of Christian nationalism's fictitious reality possible, because there is very little to conflict with it.

A movement that constitutes its members' entire social world has a grip that's hard to break. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt put it this way: "Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movements which, much more easily and earlier than they did the sociable, non-individualistic members of the traditional parties, attracted the completely unorganized, the typical 'nonjoiners' who for individualistic reasons always had refused to recognize social links or obligations."

Those who want to fight Christian nationalism will need a long-term and multifaceted strategy. I see it as having three parts--electoral reform to give urban areas fair representation in the federal government, grassroots organizing to help people fight Christian nationalism on the ground and a media campaign to raise public awareness about the movement's real agenda.

My ideas are not about reconciliation or healing. It would be good if a leader stepped forward who could recognize the grievances of both sides, broker some sort of truce, and mend America's ragged divides. The anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism's appeal--fears about social breakdown, marital instability and cultural decline--are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.

And while I support liberal struggles for economic justice--higher wages, universal health care, affordable education, and retirement security--I don't think economic populism will do much to neutralize the religious right. Cultural interests are real interests, and many drives are stronger than material ones. As Arendt pointed out, totalitarian movements have always confounded observers who try to analyze them in terms of class.

Ultimately, a fight against Christian nationalist rule has to be a fight against the anti-urban bias built into the structure of our democracy. Because each state has two senators, the 7 percent of the population that live in the 17 least-populous states control more than a third of Congress's upper house. Conservative states are also overrepresented in the Electoral College. According to Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska equal that of New York and Massachusetts, but the former states have a total of nine more votes in the Electoral College (as well as over five times the votes in the Senate). In America, conservatives literally count for more.

Liberals should work to abolish the Electoral College and to even out the composition of the Senate, perhaps by splitting some of the country's larger states.(A campaign for statehood for New York City might be a place to start.) It will be a grueling, Herculean job. With conservatives already indulging in fantasies of victimization at the hands of a maniacal Northeastern elite, it will take a monumental movement to wrest power away from them. Such a movement will come into being only when enough people in the blue states stop internalizing right-wing jeers about how out of touch they are with "real Americans" and start getting angry at being ruled by reactionaries who are out of touch with them.

After all, the heartland has no claim to moral authority. The states whose voters are most obsessed with "moral values" have the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates. The country's highest murder rates are in the South and the lowest are in New England. The five states with the best-ranked public schools in the country--Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Wisconsin--are all progressive redoubts. The five states with the worst--New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi and Louisiana--all went for Bush.

The canard that the culture wars are a fight between "elites" versus "regular Americans" belies a profound split between different kinds of ordinary Americans, all feeling threatened by the others' baffling and alien values. Ironically, however, by buying into right-wing elite-baiting, liberals start thinking like out-of-touch elites. Rather than reflecting on what kind of policies would make their own lives better, what kind of country they want to live in, and who they want to represent them--and then figuring out how to win others to their vision--progressives flail about for ideas and symbols that they hope will appeal to some imaginary heartland rube. That is condescending.

One way for progressives to build a movement and fight Christian nationalism at the same time is to focus on local politics. For guidance, they need only look to the Christian Coalition: It wasn't until after Bill Clinton's election exiled the evangelical right from power in Washington that the Christian Coalition really developed its nationwide electoral apparatus.

The Christian right developed a talent for crafting state laws and amendments to serve as wedge issues, rallying their base, and forcing the other side to defend seemingly extreme positions. Campaigns to require parental consent for minors' abortions, for example, get overwhelming public support and put the pro-choice movement on the defensive while giving pro-lifers valuable political experience.

Liberals can use this strategy too. They can find issues to exploit the other side's radicalism, winning a few political victories and, just as important, marginalizing Christian nationalists in the eyes of their fellow citizens.

Progressives could work to pass local and state laws, by ballot initiative wherever possible, denying public funds to any organization that discriminates on the basis of religion. Because so much faith-based funding is distributed through the states, such laws could put an end to at least some of the taxpayer-funded bias practiced by the Salvation Army and other religious charities. Right now, very few people know that, thanks to Bush, a faith-based outfit can take tax dollars and then explicitly refuse to hire Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims. The issue needs far more publicity, and a political fight--or a series of them--would provide it. Better still, the campaign would contribute to the creation of a grassroots infrastructure--a network of people with political experience and a commitment to pluralism.

Progressives could also work on passing laws to mandate that pharmacists fill contraceptive prescriptions. (Such legislation has already been introduced in California, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, and West Virginia.) The commercials would practically write themselves. Imagine a harried couple talking with their doctor and deciding that they can't afford any more kids. The doctor writes a birth control prescription, the wife takes it to her pharmacist--and he sends her away with a religious lecture. The campaign could use one of the most successful slogans that abortion rights advocates ever devised: "Who decides--you or them?"

In conjunction with local initiatives, opponents of Christian nationalism need a new media strategy. Many people realize this. Fenton Communications, the agency that handles public relations for MoveOn, recently put together the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a MoveOn-style grassroots group devoted to raising awareness about the religious right. With nearly 3.5 million members ready to be quickly mobilized to donate money, write letters or lobby politicians on behalf of progressive causes, MoveOn is the closest thing liberals have to the Christian Coalition, but its focus tends to be on economic justice, foreign policy and the environment rather than contentious social issues. The Campaign to Defend the Constitution intends to build a similar network to counter Christian nationalism wherever it appears.

Much of what media strategists need to do simply involves public education. Americans need to learn what Christian Reconstructionism means so that they can decide whether they approve of their congressmen consorting with theocrats. They need to realize that the Republican Party has become the stronghold of men who fundamentally oppose public education because they think women should school their kids themselves. (In It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum calls public education an "aberration" and predicts that home-schooling will flourish as "one viable option among many that will open up as we eliminate the heavy hand of the village elders' top-down control of education and allow a thousand parent-nurtured flowers to bloom.")

When it comes to the public relations fight against Christian nationalism, nothing is trickier than battles concerning public religious symbolism. Fights over crèches in public squares or Christmas hymns sung by school choirs are really about which aspects of the First Amendment should prevail--its protection of free speech or its ban on the establishment of religion. In general, I think it's best to err on the side of freedom of expression. As in most First Amendment disputes, the answer to speech (or, in this case, symbolism) that makes religious minorities feel excluded or alienated is more speech--menorahs, Buddhas, Diwali lights, symbols celebrating America's polyglot spiritualism.

There are no neat lines, no way to suck the venom out of these issues without capitulating completely. But one obvious step civil libertarians should take is a much more vocal stance in defense of evangelicals' free speech rights when they are unfairly curtailed. Although far less common than the Christian nationalists pretend, on a few occasions lawsuit-fearing officials have gone overboard in defending church/state separation, silencing religious speech that is protected by the First Amendment. (In one 2005 incident that got tremendous play in the right-wing press, a principal in Tennessee wouldn't allow a ten-year-old student to hold a Bible study during recess.) Such infringements should be fought for reasons both principled, because Christians have the same right to free speech as everyone else, and political, because these abuses generate a backlash that ultimately harms the cause of church/state separation.

The ACLU already does this, but few hear about it, because secularists lack the right's propaganda apparatus. Liberals need to create their own echo chamber to refute these kind of distortions while loudly supporting everyone's freedom of speech. Committed Christian nationalists won't be won over, but some of their would-be sympathizers might be inoculated against the claim that progressives want to extirpate their faith, making it harder for the right to frame every political dispute as part of a war against Jesus.

The challenge, finally, is to make reality matter again. If progressives can do that, perhaps America can be saved.

Writing just after 9/11, Salman Rushdie eviscerated those on the left who rationalized the terrorist attacks as a regrettable explosion of understandable third world rage: "The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings," he wrote. "Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multiparty political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." Christian nationalists have no problem with beardlessness, but except for that, Rushdie could have been describing them.

It makes no sense to fight religious authoritarianism abroad while letting it take over at home. The grinding, brutal war between modern and medieval values has spread chaos, fear, and misery across our poor planet. Far worse than the conflicts we're experiencing today, however, would be a world torn between competing fundamentalisms. Our side, America's side, must be the side of freedom and Enlightenment, of liberation from stale constricting dogmas. It must be the side that elevates reason above the commands of holy books and human solidarity above religious supremacism. Otherwise, God help us all.

Reprinted from Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg. Copyright © 2006 by Michelle Goldberg. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer at Salon, where she has reported extensively on both sides of America’s ever-seething culture war.