White People

Righty: White people created Western Civilization and all its wonders. We built everything of note from the Parthenon to the personal computer. We explored the world from top to bottom, delivered most of it from ignorance and savagery, spread the Gospel, advanced the frontiers of science, discovered cures for dreaded diseases, and founded numerous great nations, including, of course, the United States. White people were designed by nature to rule. Why shouldn’t we band together and resist the steady erosion of our culture by foreign elements? Why is it OK for black people to celebrate black power when we’re not allowed to promote white power? We detect a double standard here, and we’d better do something about it before white societies are completely overrun by hostile dark-skinned immigrants who breed like mosquitoes. White people are already an endangered species, and the world won’t realize it until it’s too late. Self-hating white liberals like Lefty are probably our worst enemy. Two hundred years from now, Lefty, your coffee-colored great-great grandchildren will probably have to visit Iceland or Iowa to see actual specimens of white people.

Lefty: White racism has given us slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism and the Holocaust. Quite a legacy there! White supremacists are almost without exception moronic, malevolent, impotent psychopaths. (How could anyone believe in the notion of white superiority after watching these clowns in action?) What do white people have to celebrate other than a heritage of greed, exploitation, war, materialism and bad dancing (Fred Astaire and a few others excepted)? African Americans and other minorities are entitled to celebrate their cultures because they’ve been the victims of systematic white oppression. They must be given a chance to undo centuries of forced hypnosis that essentially told them "White is right." There has never been a white pride movement capable of divorcing itself from racism. It is a poisonous issue that must be banished from every forum of civilized discourse.

The New Moderate:

The New Moderate must acknowledge Righty’s gripe about a double standard that allows dark-skinned minorities, but not white people, to celebrate their race-based cultures. I must also support Lefty’s contention that every "white pride" movement that has ever existed seems to have been tainted with obnoxious strains of racism. Why can’t white people simply look after their interests without bashing their darker brethren? Until they can, anyone who espouses white power or even white rights will be condemned (and justifiably so) as racist. (It might be that all ethnic "pride" celebrations are essentially racist or chauvinistic, regardless of who is doing the celebrating.)

Why would The New Moderate suggest that white people might want to "look after their interests"? Aren’t we slowly sinking into the bottomless bog of racism here? Stay with me for a moment. If current demographic trends continue unchecked, whites of European ancestry will account for less than half the population in both North America and Western Europe within half a century. In other words, white people will officially be a minority group. This revolutionary shift in population will forever alter the nature of Western societies and their cultures. (Forever is a LONG time, in case you’re not convinced.) It is not unreasonable to assume that the United States will eventually be speaking Spanish as its primary language, or that minarets will be sprouting alongside the abandoned cathedrals of France and England. And there is nothing wrong -- repeat, NOTHING WRONG -- with expressing dismay at this development. In fact, it might be desirable and even heroic to prevent it from happening. We’ve become so sensitized to leftist accusations of racism, and so bankrupt as a civilization, that we’re willing to just roll over and let the forces of history have their way with us.

There is nothing racist about simple self-preservation. I’m not even of European stock (my ancestors were Armenian Christians from the Ottoman Empire), and yet I’d mourn the disappearance of blond hair, blue eyes and freckles from our midst. I’d hate to see fine old languages like Dutch and Danish frittered into extinction. As much as I love Middle Eastern food, I’d never want it to replace the meaty succulence of German cooking or the epicurean delights of French. The New Moderate loves all nationalities in their infinite variety and would be loath to see any of them go the way of the dodo. I’d be just as unhappy if Americans settled en masse in the Middle East, reproduced out of control and festooned the stark landscape with golf courses and endless rows of McMansions.

How can white people "look after their interests"? Definitely not by mobilizing into fascist brigades, spouting racist diatribes or rounding up everyone who doesn’t fit the desired mold. No, if the white residents of North America and Western Europe don’t want to see their societies changed beyond recognition, they should simply do everything in their power to reverse the internal rot that has put them in this melancholy predicament. That means encouraging their own people to work at jobs they’ve been content to assign to immigrants. It means restricting immigration and downsizing the cushy welfare systems that attract foreigners who choose not to work. It means creating a vigorous culture that shuns cheap values and empty materialism. It means daring to sacrifice a little comfort for the scary proposition of having children. You can’t expect a race to survive when it lacks the resolve to reproduce.

The gods have always favored the hardy over the refined, in nations as well as individuals. The nations of the West (and especially Western Europe) are looking dangerously anemic right now. It might be that today’s white-dominated societies won’t survive in any form unless they receive an infusion of vitality from darker-hued populations. If those populations absorb Western values along the way, the darkening of Europe and America might actually be something to celebrate. But if those alien populations continue to multiply while remaining hostile to their host societies, the entire West can look forward to joining the Hittites, Babylonians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians in history’s dustbin.

Summary: White people of European stock have a right to look after their interests, especially in light of current demographic trends in the U.S. and Western Europe. Unfortunately, virtually every "white rights" movement has been laden with racism. What to do? Western societies need to shun decadence, depend less on foreign labor, and resolve to reproduce!

Terrorists

Righty: These bloodthirsty fanatics represent the gravest threat to Western Civilization since the Turks advanced to the gates of Vienna in 1683. (Remember what religion those Turks believed in?) We’ve done nothing to deserve their hatred; they’re simply jealous because we’re living in comparative luxury while they’re still shacking up with camels. We need to do everything in our power to prevent further terrorist attacks, even if it means temporarily surrendering a little of the freedom that we take for granted. I don’t mind being searched at the airport, because I have nothing to hide. I don’t mind having my phone tapped, because I’m not talking to overseas terrorists. We need to find the people who ARE talking to them. Muslim terrorists are the most vile criminals on the planet. They kill for the sheer joy of seeing innocent people blown to bits, based on the dictates of a brutal desert religion that exhorts the faithful to shed the blood of infidels. Lefty and his crew profess shock that we humiliate captured terrorists, that we don’t grant them the full rights accorded to prisoners of war. Believe me, ordering these scumbags to form naked pyramids is a laughably mild punishment compared to what they deserve. Why should we grant them a shred of mercy when they’re utterly merciless toward their victims? I say we boil them all in oil -- Arab oil.

Lefty: Of course terrorists are a threat to innocent people; nobody disputes that much. But we need to do some serious soul-searching to uncover the reasons they hate us -- and do something about it. We’re so mind-numbingly self-righteous as a nation; we can’t even see that we bring terrorism on ourselves through our imperialistic foreign policy, our unquestioning support of Israel and our sickening materialism. I’m not justifying terrorism, of course; I’m simply explaining it. As for the treatment of captured terrorists, we can’t allow ourselves to stoop to their level. The torture of suspected terrorists (emphasis on "suspected," since we don’t allow them to be tried) flagrantly defies the Geneva Conventions. On a more human level, it should grate against every honorable instinct of a decent nation. And the suspension of our civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorists is nothing but a bogus excuse for an evil administration to steer us toward fascism. A government that curtails our freedoms in the name of freedom is perverted. It’s a scenario right out of Orwell’s 1984. We’re in desperate need of a regime change before more of our rights are eroded by this stupidly fanatical administration. By comparison, the terrorists have only the slimmest chance of affecting our lives.

The New Moderate:

You’re right, Lefty: it wouldn’t hurt us to understand why the terrorists hate us, and to use that knowledge to make them hate us less. President Bush II explained that terrorists hate us because of our freedom. (By tampering with our civil liberties, he did his best to make sure they’d resent us a little less on that score.) But come on -- let’s peel this onion and uncover the real reasons for their hatred.

Do they hate us for our excessive wealth? Sure, but not enough to kill us because of it. Do they hate us for our lewdness and lasciviousness, our liquored lifestyles and seminude womenfolk? Undoubtedly, though probably not enough to launch a jihad in our direction. Young people throughout the Islamic realm seem to regard American pop culture as a guilty pleasure.

Now let’s peel some more. Do the terrorists hate us for meddling in their corner of the world... for regarding their nations as mere spigots for the flow of fuel... for supporting Israel as a de facto fifty-first state? Now the oil is beginning to boil.

And what about their radicalized religion, which exhorts the faithful to spread Islam over the face of the world by sword and bloodshed -- and promises an eternity of orgasmic bliss to those who die in the name of Allah? Well, duh! Should we be shocked that they’re coming after us?

We can’t do anything about our freedom and wealth, despite Bush’s efforts to curtail the former and redistribute the latter to a small tribe of hereditary tycoons. We can’t do much about our increasingly degenerate culture, though we probably should for our own sakes. But we can definitely check our national impulse to bounce uninvited onto every piece of turf that represents a potential U.S. interest. We have too many interests.

Should we be Israel’s ally even at the risk of Islamic animosity? Absolutely. Should we be granting it (as we do now) over 200 times as much foreign aid per capita as we grant Africans and Latin Americans? Absolutely not. Israel is over fifty years old now; it has to learn to walk on its own sooner or later. We just need to make sure that its neighbors respect its right to walk there.

As for the fierce desert religion that has fueled terrorism on an unprecedented scale, our options are few and potentially futile. We could shut down all the madrasses that teach jihadism to new generations of the faithful within our borders. But the schools would simply regroup somewhere else and fill those young minds with more vehement fanaticism. The real solution is for Islam to reform itself from within, ASAP. If it doesn’t, the West will have to reform it by force, and that could take centuries. I have a sickening suspicion that if Islam and the West come to blows in an all-out war, we’ll eventually see crescents atop the churches of Europe and America. We might have technology on our side, but the Muslims have fanaticism. Fanatics generally get what they want.

Back to the terrorists and how we treat them. Terrorists aren’t soldiers, even though Bush II seems to be fond of describing them as "enemy combatants." Terrorists fight on behalf of no state or government; they’re simply mass murderers on self-appointed missions. I don’t believe they’re entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions or, for that matter, to the customary respect we grant legitimate military personnel. Should we subject terrorists to physical torture? No. We’re better than that. But I think we’re entitled to wear them down in captivity, interrogate them under blazing lights and even stack them in naked pyramids while silly female soldiers pose for pictures in front of them. All terrorists, simply by being terrorists, forfeit their right to civilized treatment.

One bone of contention (and it’s a major bone): for God’s sake, let’s determine whether the suspected terrorists we round up and lock away are, in fact, actual terrorists. Yes, terrorists deserve to be treated like vermin, but not while the adjective suspected is still attached to them.
Our leaders need to address this nasty issue right now. They can start by revoking the portion of the so-called Patriot Act that conveniently allows us to toss all suspected terrorists into our scattered gulags, where we leave them to rot without recourse to representation. Imagine if the Almighty were to condemn all suspected sinners to hell. That’s essentially what we’re doing under the Patriot Act. It’s unworthy of us. Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff before we condemn anyone.

Summary: Obviously we’re right to hate terrorists, but we should try to make them hate us less by modifying our meddlesome foreign policy. The ultimate solution is a major reform movement in Islam, but we can’t wait that long. In the meantime, we have a right to imprison terrorists and even torment them (within reason) -- once we’ve proven that they are in fact terrorists. All suspected terrorists have a right to legal representation.

Afrocentrism

Righty: The glorification of African culture is just a transparent attempt by disaffected black intellectuals to further discredit our European heritage and weave a web of self-aggrandizing myths and lies around their primitive culture. Let’s get real: how can you compare tribal masks to the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Afrocentrists even have the audacity to claim the ancient Egyptians as ancestors of today’s African Americans, when everyone knows the Egyptians weren’t black. Afrocentrists are clearly desperate to find some evidence of distinction in their past, but their efforts are either self-deluding or plainly dishonest. To make matters worse, they’re actually teaching this drivel in schools today. What about teaching black kids how to read and write so they don’t end up as angry, drug-dealing street thugs or unwed teenage mothers?

Lefty: Africa was the birthplace of humankind and home to the most ancient civilization on the planet. Africans built the pyramids and the Sphinx; they created brilliant works of art while Europeans huddled over peat fires to warm their sorry backsides. Systematically excluded from our racist school curricula until now, Africa has re-emerged as the cultural focal point in restoring pride and dignity to millions of African-American students -- the descendants of enslaved Africans who had been blatantly deprived of their cultural birthright for centuries.

The New Moderate:

African history and culture are worth studying, but so is everyone’s heritage. All world history courses (and world history must become a requirement in all public schools) should include a segment on Africa -- as well as on Europe, the Middle East, India, China, Latin America (you get the picture).

The Afrocentrists’ emphasis on the glories of their African heritage might boost the self-esteem of underachieving black kids, and that’s a worthy goal. But at what price? Dismissal of (and hostility toward) European history as little more than a chronicle of systematic imperialist exploitation? Further self-ghettoization of the already ghettoized African American community? The creation of a narcissistic cultural identity that clouds reality with wishful half-truths? (Yes, the ancient Egyptians were African; no, they weren’t black.)

The cultivation of a mythic Afrocentric world-view, like the invented holiday Kwanzaa, springs from noble intentions but will only dig a deeper gulf between the black community and the rest of American society. Include African history and folk traditions in every social studies curriculum, definitely -- but teach it accurately, and don’t make it the focal point of a black child’s education. With slavery and Jim Crow dead and buried, black separatism should join them in the cultural graveyard.

Should American blacks take pride in their African heritage? Absolutely. With a passion. Do they need to connect with Africa in order to feel good about themselves and their achievements? Absolutely not. What a sad idea. African Americans need no validation from another continent. A four-century history of suffering and redemption on these shores is validation enough. African Americans are, above all else, quintessentially American, and they have an abundance of American heroes to admire. In a New Moderate’s utopia, some of those heroes might even be white.

Summary: Afrocentrism is a well-intentioned but divisive influence. Include African history in social studies courses, but keep it free of dogma and don’t make it the core of a black child’s education.

Evolution

Righty: The theory of evolution (emphasis on theory) is incompatible with the account of creation handed down to us via God’s own Word in the book of Genesis. The Bible clearly states that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. That hardly leaves time for the vast parade of prehistoric creatures that supposedly romped around the Earth a hundred million years ago, according to the mythology of evolutionists and nonbelievers. Those fossils may have been deposited at the time of the Flood, or they might have been fudged by overambitious paleontologists. (Amazing, the way they can recreate an entire creature from a single neck bone!) We don’t necessarily believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old (the Bible doesn’t provide us with specific dates, after all), and it could be that a "day" at the dawn of time was considerably longer than a day is today. But we do believe in the Bible, and the Bible makes it clear that God created the fishes, the beasts, the "fowls of the air," and "every thing that creepeth upon the earth." Finally, He created man. How could anything so mindbogglingly complex as man -- or even a housefly -- be the result of mere accident? Evolutionists are asking us to take an awful lot on faith.

Lefty: Mythology has no place in science. In fact, it has been the mission of science since its ancient beginnings to lift the veil of the supernatural from the inner workings of life and matter. As hard as this may be for Righty to accept, the Book of Genesis is just one of the many creation myths fabricated by primitive tribes to explain the mysteries of the universe. The evidence for evolution is so overwhelming that only the most ignorant Bible thumpers continue to reject it. (Unfortunately, those Bible thumpers continue to hold sway in the vast hinterland between the East and West coasts... Jesusland, as one inspired cartoonist dubbed it.) How can these imbecilic rubes continue to deny what paleontologists have uncovered in layers of rock dating back hundreds of millions of years? How can they fail to notice the striking similarities between man and chimp? Righty and his obstinate brethren are in serious denial. If they still can’t admit that we’re descended from apes, the rest of the world can clearly see that they are -- and that they haven’t evolved very far from their simian origins.

The New Moderate:

Nobody with any sense still believes that the great parade of creation marched from nothingness to Adam and Eve in six days. We can give the Bible some latitude here and there; we can interpret the "days" as epochs that correspond roughly to the geological ages, or we can wonder if the Genesis account of creation was meant to be viewed as a myth all along. But the evidence for evolution is impressive. We can look at a fossilized archaeopteryx and immediately see the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. With a little imagination, we can understand how the modern horse developed from a cat-sized critter known as eohippus.

So how did primitive life diversify into the millions of astonishing forms we see around us today, all without divine assistance? Darwin’s theory of natural selection offers a brilliant (and brilliantly simple) explanation: mutations that popped up in our genes conferred advantages that enabled the lucky mutants to attract desirable mates, prosper in their native habitats, or exploit new niches that no comparable creature had exploited before. A small dinosaur born with membranes that enabled it to glide through the air might be able to evade predators (and find prey) more easily than its earthbound cousins. It would live longer and presumably raise more offspring, several of whom would share its ability to glide. Those gliding offspring would prosper, and so on down the line. Eventually some of them would produce descendants that could flap their wings and stay aloft for hours at a time. That’s progress. That’s evolution.

Natural selection is essentially free-market capitalism as practiced by plants and animals. Individuals, species and businesses that develop useful new widgets will be more likely to perpetuate themselves through time. Those that fail to adapt are destined for the compost heap. Like business, natural selection is totally amoral: it favors the opportunists.

It all makes sense, but I’ve noticed a few loose ends. How do you account for the development of new traits that don’t seem to confer any evolutionary advantages? (Wouldn’t we have survived and reproduced just as readily without eyebrows, for example?) And how do you explain the evolution of something as complex as a circulatory system? A partial circulatory system would be of no use at all; blood vessels have to reach every living cell, or clumps of tissue would start sloughing off in a disgusting and probably fatal manner. How could any creature have developed even a primitive circulatory system as the result of a single mutation? Correct me if I’m wrong, but evolution alone seems powerless to explain it.

I’m not proposing that God or even some nameless Intelligent Designer engineered the first circulatory system, though I refuse to shut the door on those possibilities. It’s just that the visible world doesn’t always fit neatly into prepackaged theories -- even one as beautiful and widely accepted as the theory of evolution. Religious skeptics probably shouldn’t take so much of their science on faith.

Summary: The theory of evolution explains most (but not all) developments in the history of life. We should be willing and able to question science as readily as we question religion.

Affirmative Action

Righty: We’re looking at reverse discrimination, plain and simple. Why should today’s white males be victimized because of so-called bias against blacks and women in the past? ("So-called" because most blacks were unqualified for professional jobs and most women left the workforce after a few years to raise kids. How was it discriminatory not to hire them?) We’re all poorer when key professional positions are filled by marginally competent individuals who got hired because they had the right skin color or gender. And who is suffering most? Just your average working-class white boys, who never enjoyed special privileges in the past and will never be given a break now that all the opportunities go to minorities and women. How could this country have sanctioned a policy that singles out white males for ill-treatment, as if they were a kind of legally designated pincushion for the grievances of irate special-interest groups? How does it help society to penalize several generations of talented individuals simply because they were born as white guys? Affirmative Action MUST be scrapped once and for all.

Lefty: Affirmative Action finally created the level playing field we needed to give minorities and women a chance to share in the American Dream. How can any decent person begrudge them the opportunities that were denied them for so long simply because they weren’t white males? Affirmative Action was instrumental in the growth of the black middle class, and it continues to rescue talented, underprivileged young people from lives of chronic poverty and frustration. Affirmative Action helped women break through the age-old prejudicial barriers that kept them out of contention for high-level jobs in business and the professions. As for the complaints of reverse discrimination, there is still so much natural bias in favor of white males that they hardly suffer under Affirmative Action. They have no idea how privileged they are simply as a result of being born with light skin and male genitals.

The New Moderate:

Discrimination seems to be as American as Velveeta, whether it’s directed at minorities, women or "overprivileged" white males. Yes, women and blacks were encumbered in the past by prejudices that kept them conveniently subservient. So naturally the U.S. corrected the old injustice by instituting a new one in its place.

The name of the program is a dead giveaway: they couldn’t call it "Reverse Discrimination," because that would have been too honest and unpalatable; it never would have played in Peoria. So they had to do what ideologues always do to push a potentially unpopular agenda: they disguised it with a candy coating of euphemism. Affirmative Action. Sounds upbeat, progressive and vague enough to whiz right by the majority of Americans without ruffling too many feathers. They didn’t even capitalize it, probably in the hope that we wouldn’t notice it. (I capitalize it here.) Were we ever allowed to vote on whether we wanted Affirmative Action? Nope, it was simply foisted on us from above by high-minded social liberals (including President Johnson) whose feel-good impulses apparently exceeded their capacity for objective fairness.

Did black Americans really need an extra boost after they finally won their full civil rights back in the 1960s? Absolutely. There was a small, aristocratic black middle class at the time, but the vast majority of African Americans had no tradition of literacy or professionalism to draw upon as they began to compete for admission to better schools and jobs. Shouldn’t we have discriminated in their favor, then? No. We should have stopped discriminating against them. We should have trained them, coached them and inspired them to compete. It would have meant creating a New Deal-style federal program to help minorities make the transition, and it wouldn’t have been cheap. But it would have been cheaper than the disastrous welfare system that inadvertently spawned a permanent black underclass in the U.S. More important, it would have been the honorable thing to do.

Instead, it was easier simply to favor blacks and other minorities, with minimal regard for their qualifications. So we admitted them to the Ivies with substandard test scores when they would have done better at good old State. Their dropout rate was alarming, and those who went on to graduate would forever be branded by many whites, consciously or subconsciously, as Affirmative Action babies: the undeserving beneficiaries of a blatantly preferential policy. Even worse, we gave preference to wealthy and middle-class blacks over working-class whites, while the poorest students of either race were simply bypassed. (If we need an Affirmative Action program at all, we should use it to benefit poor people regardless of race or gender.)

Affirmative Action has devalued the real accomplishments of blacks and other minorities who have made it by virtue of their own talents. (If I had been black and brilliant, I’d bristle at the suggestion that I succeeded only because of reverse discrimination.) Even more damaging, Affirmative Action has cast a pall of public doubt over the idea that blacks can succeed on their own. Guess what: if you treat people as if they’re handicapped, everyone -- including the beneficiaries of your largesse -- will start to assume that they are handicapped. This is not the image the black community needs or wants. In fact, many African American leaders oppose Affirmative Action for this reason.

If, after 40 years of equal rights, blacks still require Affirmative Action to compete with whites, something is seriously wrong somewhere. Lefty would blame racism while secretly harboring doubts about blacks’ abilities; Righty would probably harbor those same doubts, but not as secretly. I suspect that what’s holding blacks back isn’t primarily racism or lack of ability, but a miasma of social problems afflicting the African American community (and especially the young male African American community, which is a culture unto itself) like some virulent and endemic disease. No surprise here. We have to start attacking these problems at the elementary school level or even earlier -- not at the point of admission to college or the business world.

As for the upscale white women who have benefited from Affirmative Action at the expense of men, I’ll try to take the high road on this one. Let’s just say that if I were female and white today, I’d be mortified by the assumption that I required special consideration to compete equally with men. Yes, back in 1970 women needed to be taken seriously in the working world, and fast. It was still an era when older businessmen referred to their wives as "the little lady" and expected female employees to type, fetch coffee and occasionally "put out" for harried male executives like themselves. But those days are long gone, at least in the civilized world. So is the infamous "glass ceiling" that kept women from rising above middle-management positions. Yes, bastions of stubborn male supremacy still exist at scattered corporate and institutional outposts, but so do bastions of female supremacy (the publishing industry, corporate marketing departments, and the nonprofit sector are shining exemplars of feminine prowess).

The male establishment has transferred significant power to women in the space of a single generation. Given that we’re looking at a major realignment of the historic gender roles of our species, the pace of change has been amazingly swift. Now that women populate corporate boardrooms and significantly outnumber men at American colleges and graduate schools, no amount of feminist eloquence will persuade me that they still require a free pass. Affirmative Action for women in the job marketplace seemed fair enough back in the seventies, but it’s needlessly discriminatory today.

What about the lingering pay gap between men and women, you ask? If a disproportionate number of women still congregate in traditional "pink collar" jobs like secretarial or clerical work, discrimination isn’t the culprit. Most men abandoned those low-paying fields long ago for the chance to earn grown-up salaries (can you blame them?), and women filled the vacuum. The continuing social pressure on men to be high earners drives them to steer clear of ill-paid clerical jobs, while women are free to take them as a source of additional family income. Nobody snickers at a woman who earns only $20K for a year’s work. Men simply don’t enjoy that luxury, so they generally follow the money.

Summary: Affirmative Action may have been a necessary evil back in the 1970s, but it’s simply evil today. It’s unfair to blacks as well as whites, and women no longer need it. We could use coaching programs, not preference programs.

Separation of Church and State

Righty: America was settled by Christians, its Founding Fathers were Christians, and the vast majority of Americans today are Christians. So why should we cater to a tiny minority of vicious heathens who would trample our rights and force us to remove all signs of our faith from schools and public spaces? We must protect our religion against all those who would take it from us. You have to agree that something is seriously wrong when public schools teach our kids about homosexuality while banishing any reference to God and the Bible. You know the world has gone mad when we can’t even mention the word "Christmas" in public without incurring somebody’s wrath. ("Holiday tree," indeed! You can have your holiday tree, Lefty, but don’t you dare touch my CHRISTMAS tree! That’s CHRISTmas! Merry CHRISTmas, you goddamn atheist!) The Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves if they knew how successfully the anti-Christian forces in America have used the Bill of Rights to justify their crusade against God. We must turn the tide and take back this nation for Christ.

Lefty: The Bill of Rights guarantees the separation of church and state. The fact that Christians constitute a majority does not entitle them to impose their beliefs on the rest of the nation. That’s the beauty of the First Amendment. We must prohibit the expression of religious beliefs in all public institutions and venues. That means no Christmas carols, no menorahs, no Ten Commandments plaques on court houses, no prayers at presidential inaugurations. "In God We Trust" should come off U.S. coins out of respect for those of us who don’t trust in God, and likewise we must delete the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance -- everyone knows it was inserted there during the McCarthy hysteria. The majority of America’s Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians; they spoke of God only in the abstract sense of "Providence" and certainly didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus or the inerrancy of the Bible. We must honor their wise decision to keep religion out of the public arena. Nyah, nyah, Righty!

The New Moderate:

I've looked in vain for any phrase resembling "separation of church and state" in the U.S. Bill of Rights. With regard to religion, the First Amendment actually states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That’s it. Surprised? The wording might be a little vague, but the Founding Fathers were simply saying that when it comes to religion, Congress won’t meddle. No official state religion... no prohibition of religion. Have it your way, those noble Dead White Males were telling us. Worship Yahweh or Quetzalcoatl or nobody at all. Congress won’t tell you what to believe.

How this wise and benign concept morphed into the secularist catchphrase "separation of church and state" is a matter for serious scholars of American history to ponder. The New Moderate isn’t quite serious or scholarly enough to attempt it here. All I have going for me is a documented 99th percentile aptitude for verbal reasoning (don’t ask about my mechanical reasoning score). Based on that aptitude, I can assert with relative confidence that the public dismantling of religion is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind (remember, they refused to prohibit "the free exercise thereof").

For example, the First Amendment appears to be powerless to ban God from public schools, since those schools are run by local governments, not by Congress. Neither can it ban nativity scenes or Ten Commandments plaques from public squares, because those squares, like the schools, fall under the dominion of local governments, not Congress.

Like the Founding Fathers, The New Moderate adamantly opposes any form of theocracy. I don’t want the Holy Bible to be the law of the land (for starters, we’d have to execute people who work on the Sabbath). But I have to conclude that the left has been distorting the First Amendment to promote a secularist agenda, that the Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice, and that the rest of the country has been seriously snookered.

But that’s not the end of our argument: in a New Moderate utopia, nobody would impose religious (or irreligious) beliefs on anyone else. This is a simple matter of civility, not legality. The right-leaning Christian majority in this utopia would be considerate enough to acknowledge that not everyone submits to their creed (or needs to). They’d never force nonbelievers to participate in a Christmas pageant or expect them to intone the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. But non-Christians would be open-minded enough to participate in that Christmas pageant out of sheer good will. They’d still be non-Christians after all is said and done.

A personal note: Back in grade school, many decades ago, I stepped in for an absent Jewish friend during the Hanukkah segment of our holiday pageant. I recited a story about the Maccabees and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. Reciting those words didn’t make me Jewish, but for some reason it made me feel good to the core.

Summary: The Bill of Rights made no provision for "separation of church and state;" on the contrary, it defended the "free exercise" of religious beliefs. Secularists cannot point to the First Amendment to justify their anti-religious campaigns. The New Moderate supports the free expression of religion in a civil and non-coercive manner, but theocracy has no place in American life.

Racial Profiling

Righty: The function of law enforcement isn’t simply to round up criminals but to prevent them from acting. If statistics tell us that 55% of violent crime is committed by black males, for example, why shouldn’t police monitor that segment of the population more carefully than it does Asian females? If the black males who are stopped by police have nothing to hide, they won’t be arrested. They’re free to go. No harm done, no blots on their record. Simple as that. Profiling is even more urgent when it comes to stopping future terrorist attacks on the U.S. If young Muslim males are responsible for 95% of violent terrorist acts, why should the authorities waste their time (and ours) routinely strip-searching 70-year-old Irish-American nuns? It defies common sense. When we’re at war with Muslim terrorists, we can’t afford to let namby-pamby political correctness undermine our defenses. Which is more important: the lives of our people or the ruffled egos of a few indignant detainees?

Lefty: "Namby-pamby" political correctness? It’s so easy (isn’t it, Righty?) to dismiss the rights and feelings of an entire race or religion in a single flippant phrase. The freedom that so many right-wingers would die to defend evidently doesn’t include freedom from harassment on the basis of one’s creed or color. Here’s an example to sober you up. To date, all presidential assassins (and even failed assassins) have been white. Should the authorities make a point of screening all white people before allowing them to attend a personal appearance by the president? Our society must never cave in to the kind of quasi-fascist hysteria that places security above human rights. Our society must never condone the isolation of an entire group as the common enemy. We failed brutally in our relations with the original inhabitants of North America (and we dared call them savages!). We turned a blind eye as the Southern states trampled the rights of African Americans for an entire century after the Civil War. Even as recently as World War II, we allowed our hysteria to get the better of us as we interned loyal Japanese Americans in concentration camps. We simply can’t allow such malignant bigotry to prevail again if we are to consider ourselves a free and virtuous nation.

The New Moderate:

Both Righty and Lefty make valid and heartfelt points, but of course the solution lies in the middle. We can’t ignore the demographics of crime for the sake of political correctness: if poor urban blacks commit more street crime than whites, it makes sense for police to be more alert in poor urban black communities. Not middle class white communities. Not middle class black communities, either. In other words, police shouldn’t focus entirely on race as the identifying factor, and they should never stop drivers or pedestrians simply because they happen to be black.

The same holds true for the screening of potential terrorists. The vast majority of suicide bombers and other murderous fanatics are young Muslim men. That means you screen young Muslim men, not elderly Muslim grandmothers. It means you don’t screen Christian Arabs, either. Ethnic background shouldn’t be a primary focus at all, because fanatical Muslims can be black, white or Asian.

In short, you could say The New Moderate favors profiling, but not racial profiling. In treacherous times, we can’t afford to blind ourselves to the demographics of the people most likely to cause harm. But it should be clear that those demographics involve more than race or ethnicity, and that the individuals selected for profiling should never be treated as criminals or even as suspects until the police find incriminating evidence.

Frankly, I don’t mind when I’m pulled aside at airport security checkpoints. I look resolutely Middle Eastern, though I’m not Muslim or (alas) young. I’ve never been detained for more than half a minute; after a quick scan, I’m good to go. As long as I’m not taken into custody, I feel assured that the profiling system is working to keep us as safe as possible.

Summary: Racial profiling may be unjust, but demographic profiling is justified where certain identifiable groups commit a preponderance of the crime.