Free Republic

Does the Angry Left really want to launch a culture war over Sarah Palin? Fine. Lock and load. That's the feeling of many conservatives who until last week were lukewarm at best about the prospect of a John McCain presidency. The unhinged malice of the cultural left's assault on the Alaska governor's personal life has focused their minds and stirred their hearts. Ms. Palin's astonishingly poised and confident performance in her convention speech proves that this Iron Lady is not about to quail before the judgment of her would-be betters. Neither will conservatives. If they were indifferent or hostile to...

Does the Angry Left really want to launch a culture war over Sarah Palin? Fine. Lock and load. That's the feeling of many conservatives who until last week were lukewarm at best about the prospect of a John McCain presidency. The unhinged malice of the cultural left's assault on the Alaska governor's personal life has focused their minds and stirred their hearts. Ms. Palin's astonishingly poised and confident performance in her convention speech proves that this Iron Lady is not about to quail before the judgment of her would-be betters. Neither will conservatives. If they were indifferent or hostile to...

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family. That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can't explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears. The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic "Family and Civilization," which has just been republished in an edited version by...

The Washington Post recently carried out an unusual experiment. It hired Joshua Bell, one of the world's most famous classical musicians, to dress like a common street busker and play his Stradivarius in a D.C. metro station during rush hour. The anonymous Mr. Bell played Bach, he played Schubert, he played some of the most beautiful music ever to emerge from the minds of mortals. And virtually nobody stopped to notice. The point was not that most people are uncultured clods. The point, rather, is that we are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we fail...

Found out this morning that a National Guard officer who is personally very close to me is being deployed to Baghdad for a year, leaving behind his wife and little kids. Tens of thousands of men and women have had to do the same, but this is as close as the war has gotten to me, and I'm having a tough time dealing with it. N. will be sent there into the middle of a civil war, to implement a policy few in Washington believe will work, and in which two-thirds of the American people disbelieve. Meanwhile, here is the...

Fundamentalism in public schools This is making the blogosphere rounds. It's a list of definitions of racism taken from the Seattle public schools website. Presumable it defines school policy. It's bizarre, and more than a little scary. For example, according to the Seattle Public Schools, only white people can be racist. Seriously, look it up. So what do they do when a black, Latino or Asian kid picks on a white kid using racial slurs? Or non-white kids use racial epithets against each other? According to the Seattle Public Schools, if you are white and you insist that you have...

That crunching noise George W. Bush and the Republicans hear is not ice in the White House bird feeder, where those of us taking in the sun here at the southernmost tip of America imagine ice must be. It may be the faint sound of the conservative coalition cracking at the edges. A few tiny cracks don't constitute a trend, of course, and strange and unexpected noises in the night aren't necessarily trends. Nevertheless, Rod Dreher may be an outrider of the new counterculture. He's a columnist for the Dallas Morning News with impeccable credentials in Hillary Clinton's celebrated "vast...

DALLAS, Texas- Some people love organic food, are environmentalists, and do not think much of unbridled capitalism, yet they still insist they are hard-core conservatives. Can this be true? Now there is a new subset of conservatives known as “crunchy cons.” Crunchy cons is a term coined by journalist Rod Dreher, who realized after he and his wife got hooked on the superior taste of organic foods, that he himself might be a crunchy con -- or crunchy conservative. Dreher said, "My wife had cooked these amazing vegetables. They were delicious. I said, 'Where did you get these?' She goes,...

William F. Buckley, American conservatism's gray eminence, was recently asked by a writer for The New Yorker what he thought about the state of the movement he helped found 50 years ago. Said Mr. Buckley, "I'm not happy about it." More and more of us on the right feel his pain. Conservatism, said Buckley, is "to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal." He was talking about President Bush's grandiose wish to frog-march liberal democracy around the globe, but he could have been speaking of any number of unconservative things foisted upon the country by an...

..."The things you Americans are facing today, Holland faced ten or fifteen years ago," says Rob Hondsmerk, a child psychologist who directs Focus on the Family-Netherlands. "I see America going down the same path, and if things keep going at the present rate, it's not going to take you fifteen years to get there." ...It has been remarked that no society on earth was more thoroughly transformed by the Sixties than Holland's. James Kennedy, a history professor at Hope College in Michigan, wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the Netherlands went from being one of the most religious, socially conservative...

Are the news media giving Americans an accurate picture of what's really going on in Iraq? Not according to the American people, who say they've seen too many photos of Abu Ghraib prison abuses. A CBS News poll released on May 24 revealed that 61 percent of those polled believe the news media are spending too much time on the Abu Ghraib story. This jibes with what some of us on the editorial board have been hearing more and more: that average Americans believe the news media are obsessed with bad news from Iraq and aren't paying enough attention...

o Posted at 11:00 AM DMN PUBLISHES BERG PIC [Rod Dreher]The lead editorial in the Dallas Morning News today features a doctored photo of the Islamist terrorist brandishing the severed head of Nick Berg. We blacked out the head itself out of respect for the dead man's family and the sensitivities of our readers, but we thought it extremely important that the public see this photo. Why? As I wrote in the editorial: Publishing this photo in no way justifies what happened in Abu Ghraib, nor does it lessen America's responsibility to bring those responsible for perpetrating those acts to...

Gibson was right to shout By ROD DREHER / The Dallas Morning News It opens in Gethsemane, with Jesus Christ praying in palpable agony. You shudder. You've said this Sorrowful Mystery on your rosary beads countless times, but here, in The Passion of the Christ, it is as if you're encountering it for the first time. Soon there is Jesus before the Sanhedrin, overseen by Caiaphas, the chief temple priest. Jesus calls himself Messiah. It strikes you that from the point of view of a Jew like Caiaphas, Jesus is a blasphemer. You think: Had I been a pious first-century...

Church of the Peaceniks Religious leaders who oppose the Iraq war. I was emailing with an Episcopal priest friend in the military's chaplain corps, asking him how the soldiers he serves are bearing up these days, on the march to war with Iraq. He replied that most are going to the Middle East with "a resigned determination.""Our men and women in uniform understand that we can defang this evil monster now, and take our licks," the chaplain said. "Or, we can defang him later, at a cost which is significantly higher. The odds in our favor decrease the longer we...

We name George W. Bush, the president of the United States, Texan of the Year. You may be thinking: yep, saw that coming. Any Lone Star native sitting in the White House can't help being the most consequential Texan of the year. We initially thought the same thing, and began our deliberations determined to avoid the obvious choice. As we debated, though, we found that the most plausible candidates for the distinction – the Texas-based soldiers who helped liberate Iraq, for example – would not have accomplished the deeds that recommended them to our consideration without Mr. Bush. Like it...

"The Pentagon has barred French, German and Russian companies from competing for $18.6 billion in contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, saying it was acting to protect "the essential security interests of the United States."– The Dallas Morning News, Dec. 10 Once upon a time, four friends shared the forest. When an evil dictator threatened the peace and security of them all, one of the friends concluded that the bad man had to be driven out of the forest. "Who will help me disarm and depose this dictator?" asked the American Eagle. "Not I!" said the French Cock. "Not I!"...

Nazi? Moi? All I had done was ask a simple question of Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed, the general secretary of the Islamic Society of North America, who recently met with The Dallas Morning News' editorial board. Dr. Syeed's revealing reaction – he said that my query reminded him of "Nazism" and that I would have to "repent" – tells us a great deal about American Islam's extremist problem ... and ours. ISNA is the largest Islamic organization in the country, serving as an umbrella group for 300 or so mosques, cultural centers and affiliated groups. The North American Islamic Trust,...

Several years ago, a newspaper colleague paid me what for her was a sincere compliment: "For a right-winger, you're actually OK." What do you say to a patronizing comment like that? "Thanks, hon, and for a fat girl, you don't sweat much"? Actually, I took it in the spirit it was offered: as a fellow reporter's admission that she had been wrong to prejudge my character and abilities based on my politics. My writing and my professional conduct had won her over. I tell that story to conservative journalism students as an example of the kind of prejudice they will...

How the media's reporting on the Religious Right keeps it from seeing the story of the Secular Left As a practicing Christian, a political conservative and a professional journalist, I've long been amazed at how ignorant and uncurious my mostly intelligent and urbane colleagues are about conservatives, especially religious conservatives. Many have looked at me--their friend, despite my Catholicism and Republican Party registration--with the same slack-jawed incomprehension as elderly Southerners when they step off the tour bus in London and hear a black man speaking with a crisp British accent (I’ve seen this, and it’s a hoot). People like me--religious...

A French Jewish friend e-mailed the other day from Paris, hours after an Islamist fanatic blew up himself and 15 Israelis on a Jerusalem bus. "When I heard of the new suicide bombing, I asked myself if maybe all Jews should turn into pianists in order to be safe," he wrote. "If you're a World War II Polish Jewish pianist fighting for his life in a movie, people will give you an Oscar and rush to theaters to watch your story unfold. If you're an Israeli Jew fighting for his life for real, people will call you a murderer." A...

The Left has an ugly habit of trying to shut down debate by imputing bigotry to its opponents. Don't like what someone has to say critical of affirmative action? Call them racist. It's a great rhetorical move, because if you can get people to believe it, you've discredited your opponent – because nobody has to take the views of a racist seriously – without ever having engaged his argument. This is what has happened to Sen. Rick Santorum, who was sandbagged by the media and the Democrats over statements he made regarding the Texas sodomy law case now before the...

As a practicing Christian, a political conservative and a professional journalist, I often find myself explaining how newsrooms work to my fellow believers, and trying to disabuse them of the notion that reporters and editors begin their days thinking, "How can we trash Christianity and/or conservatism today?" Even at this late date, over a year into the Catholic sex-abuse scandal, it is possible to find stalwart Roman Catholics-not only bishops, believe it or not-who are convinced that the whole thing is a put-up job by the Godless Liberal Media. Look, I say, of course the media are prejudiced against political...

DAVID BLOOM'S LAST E-MAIL [Rod Dreher] NBC reporter David Bloom, who died last week in Iraq, sent a final e-mail to his wife on the eve of his death. It was eerily prescient, almost an epitaph. David was a born-again Christian; a friend of mine who was in a men's prayer and Bible-study group with him says David was passionately devoted to his family and his God. That friend told me David's last e-mail was read aloud in a deeply moving Friday meeting with his prayer partners, at which a number of David's NBC colleagues were present. It was no...

As a practicing Christian, a political conservative and a professional journalist, I often find myself explaining how newsrooms work to my fellow believers, and trying to disabuse them of the notion that reporters and editors begin their days thinking, "How can we trash Christianity and/or conservatism today?" Even at this late date, over a year into the Catholic sex-abuse scandal, it is possible to find stalwart Roman Catholics—not only bishops, believe it or not—who are convinced that the whole thing is a put-up job by the Godless Liberal Media. Look, I say, of course the media are prejudiced against political...