Brain Food (Amazingthing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed...)

The most amazing thing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed into its pages.

Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
(Crown Forum, 310 pages, $27.95)

What's most amazing about Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson's modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism, to which the last eighty pages of text are devoted, are analyzed in even greater detail.

As one would expect from an author with a legal background, Supreme Court cases are high on Coulter's hit-list -- especially the idea of a "living Constitution." Citing various cases-in-point, Coulter shows that this popular doctrine is nothing more than a paralegal pretext for making the Constitution say whatever liberal judges want it to say. Though such a philosophy grants to the nation's founding document all the integrity of a bound and gagged assault victim, it at least has the virtue of mirroring liberals' self-referential view of morality.

Another dogma that Coulter skewers is the liberal commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp." This counterintuitive principle not only rejects the link between incarceration and lower crime rates, it also permits benevolent judges (like Clinton federal court nominee Frederica Massiah-Jackson) to shorten the sentence of child rapists so that other innocent children can pay the price for society's sins.

An unexpected bonus in this chapter is the author's extended sidebar on Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of Boston who, as his own correspondence shows, knew Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty but chose, for ideological and financial reasons, to portray them as innocent victims. In a related chapter, "The Martyr: Willie Horton," Coulter provides detailed information about Horton's crimes, Michael Dukakis' furlough program, and the precise nature of the Horton ads aired in the 1988 presidential campaign

CONTINUING THE RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, Coulter asserts in chapter five that abortion is the "holiest sacrament" of the "church of liberalism." For women this sacrament secures their "right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with." A corollary of this less-than-exalted principle is the right to suck the brains out of partially born infants. How far liberal politicians will go to safeguard this sacrament whose name must not be spoken (euphemisms are "choice," "reproductive freedom," and "family planning") is shown by an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer that would exclude anti-abortion protestors from bankruptcy protection. How low these same pols will go is illustrated by the character assassination of Judge Charles Pickering -- a man honored by the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers but slimed by liberals at his confirmation hearing as racially insensitive. Coulter notes that the unspoken reason for this "Borking" of Pickering was the judge's prior criticism of Roe v. Wade.

The single chapter that Coulter's critics have honed in on is the one that exposes the liberal "Doctrine of Infallibility." This religiously resonant phrase applies to individuals who promote the Left's partisan agenda while immunizing themselves from criticism by touting their victim-status. In addition to the 9/11 "Jersey Girls," Coulter identifies Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and John Murtha as persons who possess, at least by Maureen Dowd's lights, "absolute moral authority." Curiously, this exalted status isn't accorded victims who don't push liberal agendas. Perhaps the fact that Republican veterans outnumber their Democrat counterparts in Congress, 87 to 62, has something to do with this inconsistency.

Coulter's next chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," focuses on the partisanship, compensation, and incompetence level of American teachers. A crucial statistic in these pages concerns the "correlation [that exists] between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools." In this regard, comments by Thomas Sowell and Al Shanker stand out. Sowell notes that college students with low SAT and ACT scores are more likely to major in education and that "teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession." From a different perspective, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers stated, with refreshing bluntness, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." The words of John Dewey, a founder of America's public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter's state-of-the-classroom address: "You can't make Socialists out of individualists -- children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." Coulter responds, "You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection."

The last third of Godless focuses on matters scientific. Chapter seven, "The Left's War on Science," serves as an appetizer for Coulter's evolutionary piece de resistance. Prior to that main course, Coulter provides a litany of examples that illustrate the left's contempt for scientific data that doesn't comport with its worldview. Exhibits include the mendacious marketing of AIDS as an equal opportunity disease, the hysterical use of anecdotal evidence to ban silicon breast implants, and the firestorm arising from Lawrence Summers's heretical speculation about male and female brain differences.

THE REMAINING CHAPTERS OF GODLESS all deal with Darwinism. Nowhere else can one find a tart-tongued compendium of information that not only presents a major argument for Intelligent Design but also exposes the blatant dishonesty of "Darwiniacs" who continue to employ evidence (such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, and the famous peppered moth experiment) that they know is outdated or fraudulent.

Within this bracing analysis, Coulter employs the observations of such biological and philosophical heavyweights as Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, and Karl Popper. The price of the whole book is worth the information contained in these chapters about the statistical improbability of random evolution, the embarrassing absence of "transitional" fossils, and the inquisitorial attitude that prevails among many scientists (and most liberals) when discussing these matters. Unlike biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admits that a prior commitment to materialism informs his allegiance to evolution, most of his colleagues (and certainly most of the liberal scribblers Coulter sets on the road to extinction) won't concede that Darwinism is a corollary, rather than a premise, of their godlessness.

Coulter's final chapter serves as a thought-provoking addendum to her searing cross-examination of evolution's star witnesses. "The Aped Crusader" displays the devastating social consequences that have thus far attended Darwinism. From German and American eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger), to Aryan racists, to the infanticidal musings of Princeton's Peter Singer, Darwinian evolution boasts a political and philosophical heritage that could only be envied by the likes of Charles Manson. Yet it is a history ignored by liberals for whom Darwin's theory provides what they want above all else -- a creation myth that sanctifies their sexual urges, sanctions abortion, and disposes of God.

Coulter's book is clearly not a systematic argument for the idea that liberalism is a godless religion. Indeed, prior to the material on evolution, the concept is treated more as a clever theme for chapter headings than as a serious intellectual proposition. In those final chapters, however, Coulter manages to present a cogent, sustained argument that actually begins to link modern liberalism (or more specifically, leftism) to an atheistic perspective. At the very least Coulter succeeds in raising an important issue -- namely, that American courts currently ignore the religious or quasi-religious character of a philosophy that pervades public institutions and is propagated with public funds. This fact, if honestly recognized, would render contemporary church-state jurisprudence untenable. A Court taking these arguments seriously would have to recognize that all philosophies, including "liberalism," swim in the same intellectual current as religion.

THUS FAR, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA have focused almost all their attention on Coulter's take-no-prisoners rhetorical style -- and particularly on the "heartless" remarks about those 9/11 widows who seem to be "enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." Clearly, diplomatic language is not Coulter's forte, as one would also gather from this representative zinger: "I don't particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven."

What undercuts the liberals' case against Coulter on this score, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton executives. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.

Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin. When liberals denounce communist tyrants as fervently as they do real Nazis, then it will be time for Coulter to cool the rhetoric. Until that time her "verbal reprisals" serve a useful function within an intellectual marketplace that resembles a commodities pit more than a debating society.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have also appeared in the American Enterprise Magazine, First Things, and Touchstone.

FWIW: I understood Ann's argument to be: The worst possible nuclear disaster created by some of the worst possible nuclear engineers on the planet didn't come close to being the disaster it was predicted to be. Therefore, we should be allowed to pursue nuclear power in the U.S., where we have the best possible nuclear engineers on the planet.

Do you realize how vapid an "argument" that is? "The disaster was incredibly devastating, but just because we were afraid it might have been even worse, nuclear power must be okay!"

Look, I have nothing against nuclear power myself, but that "argument" is just stupid.

If she wanted to just examine the actual extent of the Chernobyl accident and argue that it's an acceptable risk or one that can be eliminated through careful engineering, that's one thing, but that's not what she did. Instead, she tried to make it sound "not so bad" because worst-case projections were worse. That's bizarre, and ultimately irrelevant.

Furthermore, she misrepresents a lot of the basic facts about Chernobyl, in order to falsely make the human and economic cost look less devastating and tragic than it really is. She "forgets" to mention that 4,000 children contracted thyroid cancer from it (most survived due to immediate treatment but this is still tragic to the families and the children will have to take replacement hormones for the rest of their lives), 330,000 people lost their homes and had to be relocated, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on cleanup, recovery, compensation, etc., over 100,000 people are on permanent disability due to effects of the accident, etc. etc. And she also "forgets" to mention that the indirect death toll due to long-term radiation exposure has turned out to be unknowable (not non-existent as she implies) because the breakup of the Soviet Union has made controlled before-and-after studies impossible (because too many other factors have changed as well).

Even the things she does report are poorly treated by the "hey, it could have been worse!" treatment she gives it -- 4000 known dead due to "acute radiation exposure" is more than in 9/11. Speaking of which, how would *you* feel about anyone who tried to minimize terrorism by saying (and this is almost a word-for-word parallel to Coulter's comments on Chernobyl), "the number of dead on 9/11 did not prove as dire as had been predicted -- instead of the tens of thousands of WTC workers feared trapped in the tower, there were 2,595. Only 157 deaths were directly attributable to the plane impacts."

In short, she uses Michael Moore techniques.

You are not embarassed by the behavior of such consistent evolutionists as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Sanger?

No, because they would have done the same things with or without any findings of science to use as a cheap excuse for their policies.

Let's turn that around so you can see how slimy and pointless a tactic that is: You are not embarassed by the behavior of such consistent Christians as the KKK and the Inquisition?

Or even Hitler? People are so desperate to try to attack science by straining to blame it for Hitler and more, as if that somehow makes the science not true -- this twaddle comes up so often I can deal with your current scummy attempt by just quoting from prior posts where I had to deal with other people who think "guilt-by-association" is some kind of mature way to deal with something they don't want to think about:

Hitler didn't invent Darwinism, he just used it as an excuse to "clense" the races.
Gee, really? Then why do his private notes show that he based his idea of inferior races on the Bible? Hitler's own handwritten notes, drawing an outline of his philosophy:
Hitler divided his study into five sections:
1. The Bible
2. The Aryan
3. His Works
4. The Jew
5. His Work
Under the first section, "The Bible -- Monumental History of Mankind", he lists these topics (among others): "2 human types-- Workers and drones-- Builders and destroyers", "Race Law", "First people's history (based on) the race law-- Eternal course of History".
Hitler was actually privately basing his racial view of mankind on *Biblical* foundations.
Here's a Nazi propaganda paper -- no mention of evolution or Darwin, but references to Christ in regards to "driving the devil from the lands":
The headline reads, "Declaration of the Higher Clergy/So spoke Jesus Christ". The caption under the cartoon of the marching Hitler Youth reads, "We youth step happily forward facing the sun... With our faith we drive the devil from the land."
He just thought that "natural selection" thing needed a little boost I guess.
No, Hitler thought God needed a little boost:
"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.."
-- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
While we're on the subject, did the Ku Klux Klan subscribe to Darwin when they were trying to keep the "mongrel races" in "their place" and preventing them from "polluting" the white race through intermarriage, or were they a bunch of God-fearing Christians? Let's check, shall we?
In 1916, the oath for joining the KKK included the following questions: "Each of the following questions must be answered by (each of) you with an emphatic "yes": [...] Fourth. Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion? [...] Eighth. Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy?" Source: FBI internal document, "The Ku Klux Klan, Section 1, 1865-1944 .
And the Christian foundation of the KKK is hardly limited to 1916, in 1953 they declared that the only membership requirement was to "believe in God and the United States" (source), and even today they're still a proudly bible-thumping group (see also here).
Here's another goody from that same FBI document:
In 1922, Evans gave Stephenson the job of organizing the Klan in Indiana. Stephenson hired full-time organizers and found Indiana a fertile field for the Klan's traditional program directed against Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and foreigners, which he extended to include communists, bootleggers, pacifists, evolutionists, and all persons the Klan considered immoral.
Let's see... The KKK versus the "evolutionists"... Okay, I know which side the angels are on in *that* face-off...
Hey, mc5cents, if evolution is the root of all evil, how do you explain the Christians in the KKK despising the evolutionists instead of being inspired by them?
Meanwhile: The KKK is against the evolutionists, Ann Coulter is against the evolutionists -- so which side does that put her on?
Oh, and speaking of Coulter -- she cluelessly claims that "the first genocide in recorded history" occurred after "Darwinism gained currency" (hey, it also happened after "the New testament became popular, is she asserting cause-and-effect *there* too?), but clearly the woman's an idiot. She laughably tries to say that "the first genocide in recorded history" occurred sometime after 1859 (when Darwin published his book on evolution), but anyone with even a smidgen of knowledge (which leaves out Coulter, apparently) knows that there have been genocides for thousands of years, including several detailed in the Bible, countless throughout Asia and Africa, and notably the genocide of the aborigines in Tasmania, committed against the "savages" by good Christians quoting scriptural "justification", which ironically a number of anti-evolutionists have tried to blame on "Darwinism", despite the fact that it happened in *1847*, more than a decade BEFORE Darwin had published his first work on evolution...
So just how stupid *is* Ann Coulter, that she can say the "first genocide in recorded history" happened after 1859? The word "moron" seems woefully inadequate. And she's not very honest either.

And:

I also await you to break your silence on the fact that the KKK and other groups explicitly rested their actions firmly on religious grounds, and explicitly *attacked* evolutionists. If you and Coulter can play guilt-by-association by mentioning that Marx liked Darwin, I'll be glad to return the favor and point out that you're on the same side as the KKK with regards to being pro-Christian and anti-evolution. That means exactly as much as the Hitler/Marx/Darwin twaddle, so tell me again how much stock you put into such stuff. [...] It's one thing to note that "Darwinism" has been misused and abused -- but name me one ideology that hasn't been.
It's quite another to cluelessly argue that because it has been misused, it must be wrong, like most of the idiots who try to make the "Hitler and Darwin" association using the most tenuous connections and stretched arguments.
Evolutionary biology merely describes what happens when nature operates without intervention. It's no more a "justification" for genocide than the science of hydrology (which deals with floods, among other things) is an excuse for purposely drowning people because floods occur naturally, or epidemiology is a justification for biological warfare because epidemics happen in nature.
Science describe how things happen when nature is left to take its course -- only a moron would argue that this is how things *should* be or that humans are bound to "assist" nature in killing off the weak and drowning people who live in the paths of flash floods and infecting people who are at risk of pathogens.
Nor is there any justification in evolutionary biology for the notion of "lower races" -- according to genetics we are all "equally evolved", since we have all been subjected to an equal timespan of natural selection since our last common ancestor.
Anyone who tries to use evolutionary biology as "justification" for any kind of eugenics is, frankly, an idiot, and so are the people who attempt to make such a link.
If you or Coulter or Wiekart want to go after anyone stupid enough to misuse biology in this way, I'll be glad to cheer you on. If you want to lobby for including in schools short presentations which instruct students that to misuse biology in an attempt to justify racism or eugenics or genocide is to be evil and stupid to boot, I'll be right behind you.
But to try to slur evolutionary biology, or to try to advocate that it should be hidden under a rug, or that its science is somehow incorrect, just because there are a few maniacs around who will grasp for any thin shred of excuse to "justify" the evils they would go ahead and have done anyway for their own sick purposes, is frankly one of the most disgusting displays of cynical propaganda I've ever seen, on par with Michael Moore's demagoguery, and you and Coulter and Wiekart should be denounced as the dishonest rabble-rousers that you are who are more interested in attacking science education than you are in any feigned concern about the roots of genocide, because if you were actually concerned about the causes of genocide you'd be equally vocal about the way that belief in God itself has been endlessly perverted by Hitler, the KKK, Islamofacists, Christian Identity, the terrorists in Ireland, the Inquisition, the British monarchs who (at various times) burned Catholics and Protestants, etc. etc. etc. Oddly enough, though, I never hear you denouncing religion in general for these kinds of abuses the way you denounce "evolution" for the few times *it* has been allegedly invoked and misused as an excuse by people who would have found excuses for their bigotries and hatreds even without Darwin, which isn't the case for many religious persecutions that were fueled *purely* by religious disputes.

You do not see the connections between their thoughts and their actions?

I see connections between Hitler's rabid hatred of Jews and his actions. I see connections between Stalin's brutality and his actions. I see connections between Mao's lust for power and his actions. I don't see that a study of how species are shaped by nature suddenly turns anyone into a monster. These men would have been monsters in any age, whether Darwin had written books on biology or not. Plenty of racists through the ages have "justified" their innate racism by quoting scripture, too, but scripture didn't make them racists, it was just one of the things they used to try rationalize their behavior.

You wish to hallow the thought behind the actions, while disavowing the consequences?

What are you babbling about here? Nothing in evolutionary biology contains anything about murder or genocide or totalitarianism.

["... parroting many transparent falsehoods..."]

Which ones are you referring to?

If you had read my post for context, you'd have seen that in that post I was specifically referring to her comments painting all liberals as atheists, but I also had in mind her non-stop falsehoods concerning evolutionary biology.

Presumably by now you have actually read the book.

I read it the day after it was released.

Why then would you mischaracterize it and omit the portions where she actually makes claims about that are so far are unrefuted?

Where do you hallucinate I have done such a thing?

Please acknowledge that you have not read the book in order that I can ignore you with a certain peace of mind!

Unfortunately for your peace of mind, I have read it, and am in the process of writing a very long critique of her chapters on evolutionary biology. Literally, almost everything she says about it is wrong. If you or anyone else wants to be pinged to it, FreepMail me.

I'm not the only one to notice that, either. It's so bad that over at Pharyngula (a biology-related blog, although it veers off into politics and other topics as well) they've put up a "Coulter challenge" -- at the end of this blog entry addressing Coulter's ludicrous claim that there's no evidence for evolution, there's the following challenge:

Like I said, I'm not going to take this tripe apart sentence by sentence, even though I could, given enough time and interest. I will suggest instead that if anyone reading this thinks some particular paragraph anywhere in chapters 8-11 is at all competent or accurate in its description of science, send it to me. I couldn't find one. That's where the obligation lies: show me one supportable claim in Coulter's farrago of lies and misleading statements and out-of-context quotes, and we'll discuss it.

So far no one's taken him up on it. He did a clarification the next day stating that, among other things, "Promising to pray for me, or assuring me that I will burn in hell" does not adequately meet the challenge.

There was another followup 8 days later to mention that no one has managed to find an error-free paragraph yet.

I concur -- it's harder to find anything *right* in those chapters than it is finding ten things just mind-blowingly wrong. She even lies about her own references.

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