Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 11

Selective Amnesia and the Rogue Elephant

The symbol of the Grand Old Party is the mighty elephant, a representation of strength and wisdom. But that flattering imagery is not why the pachyderm is the party’s icon. No, that came about as a result of a satirical political cartoon drawn by Thomas Nast in 1874 in Harper’s Weekly in which a donkey (which Nast earlier had associated with Democrats) was dressed in a lion’s skin, frightening all the other animals in a zoo. One of the scattering animals was an elephant, which Nast labeled “the Republican Vote.” Nast was disillusioned with corruption in the GOP and felt the Party was in decline under President Hayes. He may have used the elephant because Lincoln, the first Republican president, used the image of an elephant in some of his campaign material. As a consequence, by 1872 the elephant was at least sometimes associated with the Party. Nast’s cartoon sealed the deal and forever thereafter the elephant came to represent the GOP.

As an historic aside, and one completely unrelated to the point of this blog, Nast was disappointed in Hayes, who suffered from problems of legitimacy. Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Nor did he have enough Electoral College votes to be elected. He assumed office only after a congressional commission awarded him 20 disputed electoral votes. At least that election was decided by elected officials and not the Supreme Court.

Elephants are known for their long memories, so only with great irony does the GOP demonstrate colossal forgetfulness. So let us help by recalling past events and Republican claims about Obama.

During the campaign and for the duration of his presidency, the GOP has tarnished Obama with the label of socialist. With his big spending ways he would drive the U.S. economy into the ground, crushed by an enormous debt. The stock market would crash in fear of his socialist policies. Don’t remember? Here is a reminder (keeping in mind that Obama took office in January 2009):

“Obama Bear Market Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps.” In this article the author claims, “President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bear market.” Bloomberg.com (March 6, 2009)

“Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow.” Author Michael Boskin prognosticates that, “It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.” Wall Street Journal (March 6, 2009)

Perhaps most astonishing of all, John Tanny of Real Clear Markets, wrote on November 25, 2008, an article entitled, “This Is Obama’s Market, Good and Bad.” Obama was not yet president! That did not stop Tanny from writing that, “Lacking clarity, investors can only guess about what’s ahead based on Obama’s decidedly anti-business rhetoric used during the campaign. Whatever direction he takes, it should be clear that today’s stock market is the Obama stock market, so it’s up to him to decide its basic direction.” Even though Obama was not yet president.

He was not the only one. Rush Limbaugh on November 6, 2008, claimed that “The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen. Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession.” He actually blamed the state of the economy in long decline, at the time losing 700,000 jobs per month, on a president elected just a few days earlier.

When George W. Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, the Dow was at 7,949, a decline of 25 percent over the eight years Bush was president. By March the DJIA had completed its tumble to bottom out with a 12-year low at just over 6500. Now let us look at the headline from May 1, 2012, well into Obama’s fourth year in office:

U.S. Stocks-Dow hits more than 4-year high. On that day here is what the Wall Street Journal had to say: “The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 65.69 points to 13279.32, closing at its highest level in more than four years. With the day’s gains, the blue-chip benchmark is now just 6.2 percent from the all-time high it reached in October 2007.”

What? How can that be? The GOP claimed with confident fury that Obama’s radicalism is killing the Dow. That Obama’s bear market punishes investors as Dows slumps. Remember? Cat got your tongue? The elephant has become forgetful? How else to explain the roaring sound of silence from the far right as Obama ends his first term with the Dow reaching historic highs? I guess this really is Obama’s market “good and bad” as Tanny absurdly claimed even before Obama took office. What does Limbaugh have to say about this? Nothing. Nothing but silence from that quarter. Note that Bloomberg.com has not come out to revise its earlier estimate; nor has Real Clear Markets adjusted its projections. Just silence, forgetful silence, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Obama’s success. They must be silent, because the far right can hardly claim Obama gets no credit when they so willingly blamed him for an economic decline within days of being elected. Silence is their only refuge from the facts.

The glaring lack of contrition by the far right in the face of being so wrong has the sickly sweet smell of pathological hypocrisy. We are sensing the rotting decay of a party bankrupt by ideological extremism in which facts and reality no longer have any more validity than fantasy and falsehood. Their mantra has been reduced to: blame Obama for all things bad but give no credit for anything good, no matter how that might conflict with rational thought. Unfortunately for the GOP the human brain has the ability to remember past events, and with the miracle of modern technology we can record with great fidelity all that the GOP has claimed. Reality does not threat them well.

But the stock market is only one indication of the disastrous economic policies of a socialist president bent on financial ruin. Perhaps the GOP claim that Obama is destroying the economy can be seen elsewhere. Newsweek in the May 7 issue excerpts salient figures from a forthcoming book by Daniel Gross demonstrating the strength of the American economy. Here are just a few of the facts about how the economy has fared under Obama:

• U.S. exports in2011 are up 34 percent from 2009 to $2.1 trillion

• The private sector has created 4.05 million jobs since February 2010 (1.4 million jobs were lost during the last two months of the Bush presidency)

• The S&P 500 has increased 104 percent since March 2009 (the market declined 25 percent in Bush’s eight years)

• Foreign direct investment rose to $194.5 billion in 2010, up from $135 billion in 2009

• The U.S. economy is now growing at an annual rate of 3 percent, more rapidly than any other developed country

The expansion of the U.S. economy began in July 2009, about seven months into Obama’s presidency. Surely, since according to the far right Obama was to blame for the declining economy prior to taking office (“The Obama recession is in full swing… “), he must also then be credited with the growing economy seven months after taking office. No amount of twisted logic and ideological contortion can get around that conundrum for a party so consumed by hatred for the president. If his success is due to policies put in place by his predecessor, then he would have inherited a growing economy, not one on the verge of complete collapse. If a Republican Congress is responsible, that same body would have put in place the appropriate laws when their party also had the White House. Instead they presided over policies leading to economic ruin. No, since they boxed themselves in with their absurd claims that Obama owned the recession he inherited they have nowhere to go four years later in an economy fueled by a near-record high stock market, growing job creation, increased exports and expanding foreign investments. This is Obama’s market, and folks, the Obama recovery is in full swing. But you’ll never hear those words from Limbaugh or his sulking colleagues.

What is good for America and American workers is bad for the GOP, so the far right will ignore the recovery and try to distract us from our growing prosperity with divisive social issues and foreign policy scare tactics. But even there the GOP’s hands are tied. Remember that we were told only Bush could keep us safe from terrorists because there “have been no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil under Bush’s watch.” That claim of course ignored the obvious that 9/11 happened under Bush’s watch. To revise that little oversight, Rudy Giuliani said, “I usually say we had no domestic attacks, no major domestic attack under President Bush since September 11.” But in any case, notice that the same argument is no longer being used by the GOP since in fact there has been no terrorist attack on U.S. soil under President Obama. Obama, not Bush, killed bin Laden. By their own logic, should we not then reelect Obama because he has proven he can keep us safe? The elephant has forgotten again.

Dick Cheney recently said that President Obama has been “an unmitigated disaster to the country.” He is almost right: Obama is a disaster, but not for the country — for the GOP. Let’s celebrate that the American worker and the U.S. economy are winning in spite of the far right’s best efforts to the contrary.

A False Claim to Divine Morality: Sex, Lies and Pedophiles

Over dinner with a group of good friends awhile ago, I was taken aback when during one of the many lively discussions someone offered a defense of the Catholic Church in the now-old-news sex abuse scandal. I had previously operated under the assumption that even the biggest Church apologist would hesitate to venture in that direction in any public debate in a mixed crowd no matter what justifications one might conjure up in private. Yes, my friend is a practicing Catholic who attends church every week, but I had assumed that her association would increase rather than diminish her outrage. Not so.

Her defense did not attempt to dismiss the facts of the case or diminish the horror of the crimes. Rather my friend offered a defense of relativity: the Church is a human institution and the number of sex abusers is no greater proportionally than in the general population. There was the tangential argument that the media unfairly targeted the Church and so gave the impression of a larger problem than really exists. Finally, coming soon after the Sandusky scandal at Penn State, she argued that the problem of pedophilia is perhaps even more prevalent in the world of sports, or at a minimum at least as bad. She posited that, as with the Church, in the case of Penn State plenty of people in a position of authority chose to turn a blind eye.

I had largely forgotten the discussion until yesterday. I was talking to the owner of an Indian restaurant who was lamenting her problems with vendors. She then made a comment that caught my attention: “I now try to deal mainly with Christian sellers.” She herself is Buddhist. The implication clearly is that Christians bring to the table a higher degree of morality and therefore honesty. This assumption is so deeply embedded that no further explanation was offered in the statement — it was considered self-evident.

My first reaction to that unquestioned assumption was to think of the more than 10,000 children alleged to have been violated by Catholic priests, and in contrast to that ugly reality, the dissonant claim to a higher morality. In that grating contradiction lays a central problem with the Church, and more generally, with religion: any embarrassing challenges to divine claims can be dismissed as the consequence of human frailties. The Church can claim simultaneously to be the arbiter of a morality inspired by god while offering the excuse that they can be expected to be no better than the general population when it comes to abusing children because it is a “human institution.”

Rather than holding itself to a higher standard based on its own claims to divine insight, the Church offers the rather sad defense that other institutions suffer the same problem. Pope Benedict XVI said, “just as the church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards.” That is a clear statement that the Church should not be held to any standard higher than any secular institution, but precisely to the same standard. He willingly surrendered any claim to a higher moral standing, an astonishing admission for the head of the Church.

In March 2010, Pope Benedict XVI said in response to the damaging stream of breaking news stories about pedophilia in the Church that, “From God comes the courage not to be intimidated by petty gossip.” Petty gossip. Factual news accounts of this horror are reduced to petty gossip. But the Vatican did not stop there. The attack on the media was in fact two-pronged: beyond spreading unsubstantiated rumors and gossip, the media was also said to have exaggerated the extent and depth of the problem as a means of persecuting the Church.

The second idea of unfair coverage plays into the argument my friend made that the Church is no worse than any other institution, just under greater scrutiny. But coverage of the Sandusky scandal proves that idea a bit silly. Can anybody claim the media did not cover Penn State with great zeal and excess to the point of obsession? In fact, that wall-to-wall coverage could be considered disproportionate since Penn State has a few tens of thousands of interested enthusiasts while the Church as over one billion. The media are not the problem; they are equal opportunity sensationalists. Nor is such lurid coverage new; during the 1980s the news was salivating for the McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California. The claim that the media unfairly targets the Catholic Church, or exaggerates the extent of the problem through excessive or overzealous coverage, is simply not substantiated by the facts.

Perhaps knowing the argument was weak, blaming the media for exaggeration or printing gossip was just one arrow in the quiver. Next up: society is to blame for encouraging a sexual revolution. A five-year, $1.8 million study, initiated in 2006 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s, concluded that an all-male celibate priesthood, or homosexuality, were not to blame for the sex scandal. Instead, the report concluded that priests preyed upon children because the sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s put priests unprepared for the cultural shift “under stress.” Society, not the Church, was to blame.

At one point the Vatican floated the idea that the Church was the victim, equating the uproar over the sex scandal to the persecution of the Jews. I’ll let that one speak for itself, other than to note that such a claim reeks of desperation. The logic behind that claim is evidence of a moral compass spinning out of control.

More damning for the Church than disingenuous misdirection and wild claims of victimhood is the revelation of a secret Vatican edict that rejected an Irish Catholic Church proposal to report pedophile priests to local authorities. Most of us would consider the proposal reasonable and self-evidently the right course of action. Not the Vatican, which in rejecting the proposal created, according to an Irish bishop, “a mandate to conceal reported crimes of a priest.” The Vatican’s take on this goes back to a 1999 meeting in Rome where bishops were admonished to remember that they were “bishops first, not policemen.” Official doctrine to look the other way. The Church tried to explain away this embarrassing document by noting sex solicited in confessionals had to be dealt with in secret according to church law.

Well, while no institution is above the law, let us take for a moment that argument as valid. How well did the Church police its own according to its own laws? With an amazing and callous disregard for its innocent victims. As with many crimes, the coverup became a crime in many ways as bad as the original transgression.

The great crime here is not the existence of pedophiles within its ranks of priests, although that is bad enough, but the fact that the Church as a matter of policy transferred known pedophiles to unsuspecting parishes. Allow me to list just a few cases. Father John J. Geoghan was accused in the mid-1990s of abusing 130 grammar school boys, one who was just 4-years-old. Horrifying in its own right — but worse is that Cardinal Bernard F. Law knew about Geoghan’s predatory sexual habits in 1984, yet approved his transfer to St. Julia’s parish. Archdiocesan records reveal that the archdiocese did not view as “serious” the repeated abuse of seven boys in one extended family. Not surprisingly the transfer to St. Juilia’s did not go well, resulting in yet more complaints of sexual abuse.

The problem is not isolated to a few rogue priests. Here is what the Boston Globe concluded in 2002:

Church documents, official testimony, and victim interviews gathered over the past year paint an extraordinary picture of secrecy and deception in the Boston Archdiocese; a culture in which top church officials coddled abusive priests and permitted them to molest again, while stonewalling or paying off the victims of that abuse.

Nor is the problem confined to Boston. The scandal spread to Canada, Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland and Germany; and continues to spread around the world to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Tanzania, the Philippines and Australia.

Let us look at one more specific case. Father Peter Hullerman was a known pedophile, sent to therapy by the Vatican in 1980 to treat his disease. He was returned to pastoral work within a few days of beginning his psychiatric treatment. It is hard to be shocked to learn that Father Hullerman was later convicted for molesting boys in another parish. I end with this particular example because the case has broader implications. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the Pope, was copied on a memo that approved this specific course of action for Father Hullerman. The Vatican denies that Ratzinger ever saw the memo… Perhaps, but at a minimum the memo establishes there was in place an ugly and indefensible Vatican policy of putting known pedophiles in new parishes with no warning to the new congregation. Let us be unambiguously clear about this: the Vatican intentionally put children at risk to protect its priests. That is a fact. That is a crime. That is a subversion of moral values. Putting a child in harm’s way, exposing a little boy or girl to the sick yearnings of a pedophile priest, who the child is told to trust completely as a representative of a higher power, is a crime unique to the Church, not an invention of the media and not the fault of society. Sick priests are one problem; Vatican policy is another, one not explained away by human frailty. The problem has shifted from sex abuse to the crime of covering up sex abuse; the latter a greater crime because it perpetuates the former.

But we can take a deep breath, and for the sake of argument remove from the equation the notion that the Church, as a self-proclaimed arbiter of morality, must hold itself to a higher standard than society at large. Given that, does the assertion that pedophilia in the Church is found in the same proportion as in the general populace have any merit?

The way statistics are compiled there is no way to answer that question definitively. But we can get toward an answer tangentially. Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a Web site that compiles reports on abuse cases, noted that the records show, “…there’s a vast gap, a multiplier of two, three or four times, between the numbers of perpetrators that the prosecutors find and what the bishops released.” There is clear evidence the problem is underreported as a matter of Vatican policy; no such organized policy exists in the general population. One could reasonably surmise therefore that the amount of underreporting is greater within the Church than in society at large. But the question itself is wrong: even if true that pedophilia was found in the Church at rates equivalent to society at large, that offers no excuse for Vatican policy of covering up the crime and transferring known pedophiles to new unsuspecting congregations. The argument itself reveals unconditional surrender to moral decay.

My dear friend is wrong; the Church cannot be defended. Even if we could explain away pedophilia in the ranks of the priests as typical of the general population; even if we could blame the media for exaggerating the problem or society for creating stress for clergymen; even if the Church need not hold itself to a higher moral standard than secular institutions based on its own claims of divine insight; nothing can defend the Vatican’s practice of systematically covering up the crimes of sex abuse within its ranks or sending pedophiles to new parishes to prey anew on a fresh batch of young men.

And so too my friend the Indian restaurant owner is wrong. Being Christian does not bestow upon anybody a higher degree of moral depth or any greater propensity for honesty. After all, we are reminded that priests and laity alike are only human, and will suffer the same moral failures as the non-Christian population. That is what the Church itself argues: Christians are no better than anybody else, and cannot be expected to be so. Exacting standards must be equally applied to secular and non-secular alike. So Christians by the Church’s own admission will be equally prone to crime, deceit and all the moral failures attributed to human frailty. They might be absolved of their sins through confession in the eyes of the Church, but victims still suffer the consequence of the human failings of those forgiven. The Church and its apologists can’t have it both ways by making the self-contradicting and absurd claim that Christians are more honest and more moral, but no different from anybody else.

Fair-Weather Capitalists: Conservative Politics Gone Wild

As recently as a few months ago, Republicans were betting on beating Obama on the issue of the economy, with an emphasis on unemployment. They were counting on history repeating itself: no president since FDR has won a second term when unemployment rates exceeded 7.2% on election day. The rate was 7.8% when Obama took office, which is about where economists predict the rate will be next November. That would seem to make Obama extremely vulnerable, causing Republicans to salivate.

But these numbers are not static, and trends matter. When Obama took office the number of jobs lost per month was greater than 700,000, so the trend of unemployment was sharply up. If predictions are borne out and the rate is about 7.8% next November, the trend line will be sharply down from a peak rate tickling 10 percent. A downward trend engenders optimism, which is good for America but bad for Republicans.

The fact is that our economy is improving under Obama by measure of most major indicators. For example, comparing August 2011 to January 2012, we see unemployment fell from 9.1 to 8.3 percent. The much touted increase in gasoline prices is partially offset by a 2% decline in natural gas prices and a 0.3% decline in food prices. There is good news on retail sales and industrial production. We are now seeing a rebound in sales of previously-owned homes, a reversal indicating the market there has bottomed out.

Blaming Obama for the collapsing economy and declining stock market he inherited was to be the primary strategy for Republicans in the presidential election. But, oh, how strange that is (even before being made obsolete by a recovery). Remember that George Bush complained for eight years that every economic woe over which he presided was Clinton's fault. This is not hyperbole, but fact: he claimed in a speech at a Mississippi high school in August 2002 that the weak economy could be explained by the fact that, "When I took office, our economy was beginning a recession." Even as he was walking out the door of the Oval Office Bush blamed Clinton for Wall Street's collapse in a final attempt to push his failures onto his predecessor. Said Bush, "I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so" before he became president. Bush simply took no ownership or responsibility for the economic decline and near collapse that happened on his watch.

Bush's false assertion about what he inherited from Clinton is a classic example of the Big Lie, an untruth repeated so frequently that people accept the falsehood as real. What Bush actually inherited from Clinton was, at worst, a mild reduction in growth following eight years of historic economic expansion. That conclusion is not mine, but that of National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a non-partisan organization that is considered the definitive word on business cycles. Here is the NBER November 26, 2001 report:

The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has determined that a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession. The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began. The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER's chronology.

Be clear about this; Clinton presided over the longest expansion recorded, and when he left office that momentum carried the economy forward to a peak in March 2001, into the first month of the Bush presidency. Bush took office January 18, 2001. But the Bush debacle is nevertheless all Clinton's fault even though no president in modern history ever inherited an economy as healthy as what Bush got from Clinton.

I bring up this history of the transition between Clinton and Bush because it reveals a remarkable and glaring hypocrisy in the Republican mind set now that a Democrat occupies the White House. By Bush's own formulation, Obama should blame Bush for all of the country's economic woes during the entire tenure of his presidency, even at the end of a second term. Republicans should accept this assessment without question. After all, that is what Bush did to Clinton with full Republican support. Obama's position in assigning blame to his predecessor is in fact much stronger, for what he inherited from Bush is vastly more onerous than what Bush was gifted from Clinton. Bush inherited a reduction in growth while Obama was bequeathed an economy on the verge of catastrophic collapse. But with the roles reversed, transitioning from a Republican to a Democrat in the Oval Office, Republicans repudiate everything they previous said about the role of a president's successor.

So. Republicans blamed Obama for what he inherited from Bush, but disavow any idea that Obama should be credited with the astonishing growth during his presidency. We are back to the tired Republican refrain: all bad things are due to the current president; all good things are a consequence of actions taken by his predecessor. But the facts belie this fantasy. Republicans hollered with indignation when Obama supporters pointed out that he inherited the problem of rapidly rising unemployment and an economy on the verge of total collapse. They absolved Bush of all responsibility not just one month into Obama's administration, but actually prior to Obama taking office, preaching that just the anticipation of his presidency was causing the market collapse.

Republican statements about Obama in early March 2009 are stunning in their duplicity. Obama was to blame for a collapsing economy after only five weeks in office but George Bush was free of any responsibility after eight years. Let's take a quick look at right wing publication headlines as the new Administration settled in:

• Bloomberg.com (March 6, 2009): "Obama Bear Market Punishes Investors as Dow Slumps." In this article the claim is further advanced with, "President Barack Obama now has the distinction of presiding over his own bear market."

• Wall Street Journal (March 6, 2009): "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow." Author Michael Boskin prognosticates that, "It's hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president's policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis." The DOW is now over 12,000 so the claim was blatantly wrong; I have heard no apology yet.

• Perhaps most astonishing of all, John Tanny of Real Clear Markets, wrote on November 25, 2008, an article entitled, "This Is Obama's Market, Good and Bad." Obama was not yet president! That did not stop Tanny from writing that, "Lacking clarity, investors can only guess about what's ahead based on Obama's decidedly anti-business rhetoric used during the campaign. Whatever direction he takes, it should be clear that today's stock market is the Obama stock market, so it's up to him to decide its basic direction." Even though Obama was not yet president.

These claims were absurd when made, and have been proven wrong factually. Where are Bloomberg, the WSJ and Real Clear Markets now? Where is the praise for Obama for a market moving beyond 12,000? Silence. Nothing but silence. No apology; no mea culpa. These organizations blamed Obama for a declining market after one month is office, but now offer no support for his policies three years later, policies that have lead to a growing economy recovering from the abyss of a Bush recession; policies vigorously and ferociously opposed by Republicans. Voters should be screaming with frustrated indignation at this outrage.

While the economy has a long road ahead to recover from the depths of the downturn, the trends are clearly positive. Perhaps most striking in this regard, and the most detrimental to Republican aspirations, is the health of the stock market, and where credit lies for the recovery. Again, some history is helpful. On Bill Clinton's first inaugural day, the DJIA was at 3310. The market was 6813 when he was next inaugurated. At the end of Clinton's second term, on the day Bush took office, the DJIA was at 10,578; that is the market Bush inherited from Clinton. When Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, the Dow was at 7,949, a decline of 25% over the eight years Bush was president. By March the DJIA had completed its tumble to bottom out with a 12-year low at just over 6500. Blindly forgetting their tale from Clinton to Bush, Republicans blamed Obama for the continuing decline from 7,900 to 6,500 during his first month in office, but not Bush for the loss from 10,600 to 7,900 in eight years as president. About one year later the Dow hit 11,000. The stock market doubled in value during Obama's first 14 months in office. Now the DJIA exceeds 12,000. No wonder Republicans no longer mention "Obama's economy." The closest they now foray into this territory is a sad effort to blame Obama for gas prices. That is all they have left. But none feel embarrassed by the long-held view, now fully discredited, that the economy was declining under Obama due to his socialist tendencies.

And so the Republicans suddenly want to change the subject. We get Santorum becoming nauseated over a JFK speech about separating Church and State, arguments over gay marriage, controversy over contraception and Romney repudiating his own views on a woman's right to choose. Extreme views on social issues play well to the right wing base that controls much of the primary mechanism, and so each candidate is trying to out-nut-case the other with inflammatory, outrageous statements and positions. Every time Santorum opens his mouth, another vote somewhere falls to Obama. Let's hope the Republican primary seasons continues to be arduous with no clear winner as the candidates dig themselves into an ever deeper whole of extreme views that will never play well in a national election. With unemployment declining and the Dow rising, Republicans will only become ever more desperate, creating a widening gap with mainstream America. November 2012 is looking up in the face of the GOP's tenuous relationship with reality. Outrageous hypocrisy may sell in the Tea Party, but not with the majority of Americans.

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a former White House senior policy analyst the author of five books, including A New Moral Code and his latest, Calorie Wars. Learn more about Jeff at his website.

Southern Fried Pancreas

The collective reaction to Paula Deen's diabetes announcement tells us much about our attitude toward health and nutrition. Of course nobody is shocked at the news, but many commentators missed an opportunity to make a bigger point. Yes, anyone pushing "butter, salt and grits" as the three main food groups is obviously asking for trouble, and that is the thrust of most comments. But what the pundits seem to miss is that Deen's predicament says more about us than her.

Deen celebrates a type of willful ignorance that seems disturbingly popular in a society that increasingly eschews science fact for popular whim and instant gratification. She has plenty of company in promoting a lifestyle well known to be harmful. Down Home With the Neelys is not exactly a health food show. Every Day With Rachael Ray proudly promotes double-decker burgers with bacon, and similar concoctions. All of these popular hosts rely heavily on fried foods, fats, salt and sugar. They essentially celebrate obesity as they target young couples, and more ominously, young couples with children. The problem though, is not that these shows air or that bad advice is published in magazines. The problem is that we watch the shows and buy the magazines. Let us be clear: Anybody who thinks Deen, Ray, the Neelys or their ilk have something interesting to say about cooking is intentionally turning a blind eye to firmly established and troubling facts.

Let's start with the most disturbing tidbit: Nearly one in three American children under the age of 18 is now overweight. (All statistics cited here are all documented in Calorie Wars: Fat, Fact and Fiction.) Think about that: We have doomed a third of our children to a lifetime of health problems and a shortened lifespan. We know absolutely that obesity creates an increased risk of diabetes. In 1990, about 11 million Americans had Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, a disease of insulin resistance (a condition that commonly coexists with obesity); just nine years later the number was 16 million, or about 6 percent of all Americans. Then from 1999 to 2003 we saw a 41 percent increase in diagnosed diabetes. Since then obesity has ballooned to an astounding 64 percent of all Americans and the number of diabetics continues to explode.

Nor is diabetes the only problem. No, I refer not to the unsightly nature of our growing girth, although that too is an issue. Sure, a jiggling gut rolling over a thong on the beach might be unpleasant to witness, but the real concern is not aesthetics but our increased risk in adulthood for joint problems, angina, high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes. It gets worse:

About 300,000 deaths per year are attributed to obesity; individuals with a body mass index (BMI) over 30 have a 50 to 100 percent increased risk of premature death from all causes compared to lean people with lower BMIs.

High blood pressure is twice as common in obese adults compared to those with a healthy weight; obesity is associated with elevated blood fat (triglycerides) and decreased good cholesterol (HDL).

A weight gain of only 11 to 18 pounds increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes; over 80 percent of people with Type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese.

Obesity is associated with an increased risk of cancer of the uterus, colon, gall bladder, prostate, kidney and postmenopausal breast cancer.

Sleep apnea is more common in obese people. And some recent studies have indicated that a lack of sleep might impact hormone levels to a degree that could, indeed, cause weight gain.

Obesity during pregnancy is associated with a greater risk of birth defects, including spina bifida.

Every increase in weight of two pounds increases the risk of arthritis by 9 to 13 percent.

Deen might airily dismiss the health concerns associated with her fondness for fat and salt, but the troubles associated with obesity are deadly serious; all can result ultimately in a premature demise. Outside of the human costs, health experts estimate that treating adult obesity-related ailments will have cost the American economy nearly $150 billion in 2009 (the latest year for such estimates). We are awash in a sea of greasy fast food and sweet soft drinks. Junk foods oozing with processed sugars, trans-fats and excess salt are ubiquitous, available anywhere, everywhere, all the time. Deen helps us pretend this is all OK, that an unhealthy lifestyle is just fun and games.

But Deen and her colleagues are not the problem, in spite of their irresponsible promotions of bad eating. We are. We are eating ourselves to death. Why? Because we have not accepted the basic notion of personal responsibility. In a special op-ed piece in the June 23, 2011, Washington Post, the director of the Nutritional and Metabolic Research Center, Ken Fujioka, argues that obesity is caused in part by temptation. This widely-accepted idea is as dangerous as it is absurd. Nobody has any obligation to minimize temptation in our lives because we may have no self-control; instead we each have a personal responsibility to resist temptations that would result in harmful or illegal behavior. A woman has the right to dress as provocatively as she wishes, fast food restaurants can advertise their wares with the most effective promotions possible, and your local coffee shop can entice you to drink calorie-laden sugar-filled quaffs to the best of their ability. We can't indulge in inappropriate behavior just because someone tempts us. There is nothing about diet that carves out an exception to this reality.

Weight loss and maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle are our personal responsibility, no matter now others may tempt us from that course. With only rare exception, obesity is caused by our own actions, our own decisions about our own lives. We cannot pass that responsibility to others because they tempt us to behave badly. We eat too much, we eat too unhealthily and we don't exercise enough. That is reality, and that is why we are obese. We would be wise to be less smug in our reaction to Deen's diagnosis and a bit more introspective as we reach for our next double cheeseburger and fries.

For more by Jeff Schweitzer, click here.

For more on diabetes, click here.

For more on diet and nutrition, click here.

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a former White House senior policy analyst the author of five books, including A New Moral Code and his latest, Calorie Wars. Learn more about Jeff at his website.

Opinion, Fact and Hubris: Our Response to a Changing Planet

As a minor branch on a vast evolutionary bush, modern humans have been roaming the earth for no more than a few hundred thousand years of the earth's 4.5 billion-year history. Ours has been a brief presence, with too little time to demonstrate if the evolution of large brains is a successful strategy for long-term survival of the species.

Human beings are not inevitable, and our brief existence is not preordained to be extended into the distant future. As are all creatures, humans are a genetic experiment resulting from selective pressure, random mutations, and pure chance that our ancestors avoided extinction from catastrophic events, such as meteorite impacts. If Homo sapiens is to have a continued presence on earth, humankind will reevaluate its sense of place in the world and modify its strong species-centric stewardship of the planet.

Bush of Life

Humans are certainly unique, with our combined abilities to reason, to communicate with complex language, and to modify our environment on a global scale. But cheetahs are unique, too, in their ability to run over 100 km per hour (60 mph). Sperm whales alone can dive to 2000 meters (nearly 6100 feet) on a single breath, and hummingbirds are the only aviators that can hover in mid-air, shift sideways and fly backward by flapping their wings up to 200 times per second while precisely controlling the wing's angle of attack. Specialized bugs live in deep-sea volcanic thermal springs in temperatures up to 113 oC (235 oF), where no other creatures on earth could survive.

Each species, including humans, occupies a special place on the evolutionary bush according to its unique characteristics. Humans happen to possess a well-developed central nervous system as one of our defining traits, and this evolutionary development has provided us with the ability to contemplate ourselves and our future. But large, complex brains are simply another extreme in the development of animal traits, just as speed and strength are found in extremes in other animals. Our large brains do not confer upon us any special status among our living cousins, and it is the height of folly to claim that evolution was driven toward humans as the pinnacle of achievement. One could claim with equal validity that evolution advances toward a pinnacle of speed, or that bacteria are the perfect creation because only they can occupy extreme conditions of temperature, salinity, pressure and acidity. The evolution of large brains confers no exalted status on the human race.

But unlike cheetahs or bacteria, our particularly notable evolutionary achievement enables us to reason and communicate, and we therefore have a monopoly on making any claims about our status in the world. This monopoly has led to the self-serving and comforting conclusion that humans are somehow separate from, and superior to, the rest of the animal kingdom. The long-term survival of our species may require that we change this perspective.

The Age of Bugs

In an often-told story, a group of ministers asked the famous scientist, J.B.S. Haldane, to characterize god based on Haldane's knowledge of the natural world. He replied (in one variation of this story) that god apparently has an "inordinate fondness for beetles." He had this opinion because about 20 percent of all known species of animals in the world are beetles. But even in his great wisdom, Haldane was wrong. God apparently has a greater propensity for prokaryotes, organisms comprised of just one cell, so small they can be seen only in powerful microscopes.

While our sensitivities may be offended, we are living not in the Age of Man, but in the Age of Bacteria and Archea, or "bugs" as they are generically known. These single-celled germs are the most successful of all life forms, and have been dividing away for nearly 4 billion years. Bacteria have been found to live in virtually every conceivable environment at extremes of pressure, temperature, salinity, radiation, alkalinity and acidity. A spoonful of good quality soil may contain ten trillion bacteria representing more than ten thousand different species. More than 1 million bacteria are found in 1 milliliter of seawater, and these constitute most of the ocean's biomass. The ocean holds many drops. Even more abundant by number in the ocean's waters are viruses, packing in roughly 10 million per milliliter. That means that viruses lock up as much as 270 million tons of carbon, more than 20 times the estimate for the amount stored in the earth's supply of whales.

Unwittingly referring to bacteria, Mathew 5:5 says that "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth," and indeed they shall. For regardless of the fate of humanity, bacteria will likely survive. The urgent question becomes: for how long can we delay or prevent that fateful day when humans, and perhaps all mammals, are just another extinct evolutionary experiment, while bacteria continue their unparalleled dominance?

Unwarranted Hubris

Even acknowledging the obvious success of bacteria, changing our perspective toward a more humble understanding of the status of humans in the living world will be difficult. For millennia, peoples of nearly all cultures have been taught that humans are special in the eyes of their god or gods, and that the world is made for their benefit and use. For example, this is made clear in Genesis 1:1.

This early biblical passage is representative of many that give humans the special status of being made in god's image, unlike any other creature on earth, and clearly implies human dominance over all other living things. Humans are told to "subdue" the earth and "rule over" the air, land and sea. These religious teachings not only condone but actively encourage humans to view the environment as separate from them, put here for their pleasure. Such biblical bias about our place in earth's history is one reason why the religious right resists the idea of anthropogenic climate change; we could not alter something god put here for our benefit.

The explicit religious mandate to exploit natural resources remains clear and unambiguous, in spite of heroic efforts to harmonize religion and environmental sciences. Numerous academic and international organizations have made the futile attempt, including The Forum on Religion and Ecology, the largest international multi-religious project of its kind, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, founded in 1936 by the Vatican to promote scientific progress compatible with the Church's teachings.

The argument used by those seeking reconciliation between religion and environmental protection point to the integrity of all creation, or reverence for all things created by god, insisting that religion and concern for the environment are not only compatible, but have been so all along. Those are welcomed sentiments. In fact, as is frequently the case, the Bible contains contradictory passages about the natural world, reasonably allowing for such an interpretation. Old passages can also simply be reinterpreted to fit the facts or to be compatible with newly adopted ideas. Pope John Paul XXIII said in 1961:

Genesis relates how God gave two commandments to our first parents: to transmit human life — 'Increase and multiply' — and to bring nature into their service — 'Fill the Earth, and subdue it.' These two commandments are complementary. Nothing is said in the second of these commandments about destroying nature. On the contrary, it must be brought into the services of human life.

But the harsh facts of human history belie this benign revisionist interpretation of the meaning of "subdue". The preponderance of unambiguous passages in the Bible giving mankind dominion over nature's bounty argues against any idea that religion is environmentalism in disguise. As Renaissance scholar Lynn White famously wrote in 1967, "We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man." His words remain true 40 years later, when religious conservatives in the United States view resource extraction as an inalienable right.

Why Opinion Is Not Fact

We face an even greater threat, though, than religion's skewed world view that grants special status to human beings. We have entered an age in which science offers the public nothing but another opinion, no more valid than the views expressed by any random radio host with a microphone and transmitter. In this brave new world climate change becomes just another liberal agenda item on par with discussions about gun laws.

Honest people with good intentions can legitimately disagree about the role of government and how to fund the public sector. We can argue whether drilling for oil in the Arctic is good policy. But there is no room for opinion when discussing facts. Facts and opinions differ fundamentally. The late Stephen J. Gould said eloquently that in the world of science, "fact" means "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent."

Yes, of course "facts" change with advances in scientific knowledge; that is the very essence of scientific inquiry. But that does not mean that facts as currently established can be willfully disregarded as simply another opinion. Facts carry more weight than opinion; to modify or overturn something previously accepted as fact requires deep proof with convincing evidence that is widely accepted by the majority of experts in that field. Opinions can vary with every individual; facts are a broadly accepted body of evidence. Everybody can have a different opinion; not everybody can have a different fact. The two are fundamentally different.

Atoms are the building block of nature. That is a fact, not an opinion. Atoms are not a liberal agenda item. You can't see, hear or feel an atom, but we accept their existence — because scientists have proven that atoms exist beyond any doubt even if using methods that we do not really understand. The average person cannot know from casual observation if the earth orbits the sun or the sun orbits the earth; but we accept as absolutely true that the sun is the center of our solar system. A heliocentric world view is not a liberal plot. Bacteria and viruses cause disease. DNA is life's genetic code. We accept all of this and more without demanding proof because we accept that the conclusions are widely adopted in the scientific community. Certainly as non-specialists we are not capable of proving or disproving that DNA is our genetic code; but we accept that as fact. We don't wait for more evidence because we've never actually seen DNA.

And now we circle back to religion, which contributes to the blurring of this clear distinction between fact and opinion. In the case of religion, faith is alone sufficient to substantiate a claim: "I believe in god therefore god exists." I need no proof, no evidence, no established fact to support my conclusion: I simply need to believe. Bringing this perspective to opinions outside the realm of religion is a tiny step. As with faith, my opinion becomes fact simply because I believe it to be true. In this worldview, the distinction between fact and opinion becomes meaningless. But just as with opinion, every person can have different faith, but not every person can have different facts. An atom is the building block of nature whether you believe that true or not. Your opinion does not matter here. Your faith does not matter here — because a fact is not equivalent to opinion or faith. Facts do not change on the whim of every individual.

This confounding of fact and opinion has had real and sometimes tragic consequences. The odd "birther" movement can only exist on the fuel of confusion between opinion and fact. President Obama's birth in the United States is a fact when "fact" means "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." And so too is climate change. Thousands of climatologists from 166 countries agree without reservation that our climate is changing and that humankind is contributing to that change by emitting greenhouse gases.

Skepticism about climate change comes with a particularly rich irony. Many doubters cite the earth's past cycles of glaciation and warming to discount what we are seeing today as nothing but natural variation. How do the skeptics know of that climate history? From the very scientists whose conclusions they now doubt! As if the scientists themselves are unaware of their own conclusions about the earth's past, or if they are aware, did not take that history into account. Doubters preferentially believe one set of facts from those scientists but dismiss other facts as liberal nonsense. Doubters can do this because they confuse opinion and fact.

Really, on what basis do doubters base their views? Have they evaluated the evidence and decided based on their expertise that thousands of scientists are wrong? No, they listen to radio or talk show hosts with no background in climatology and simply adopt the opinion that climate change is a hoax. What if the same show host claimed atoms were a hoax? Would doubters be any more or less qualified to accept that opinion as fact? The opinion that climate change is a hoax does not carry the same weight as the fact of climate change established by experts around the world. Expert conclusions about our changing climate are not different than the results about subatomic particles that we see coming from the world's particle accelerators. Where are the doubters that stand up and say, "No, neutrinos really do not have mass – that is nothing but liberal propaganda." Why not? Doubters have no more expertise in particle physics than they do in climatology, so why doubt one conclusion from expert but reject the next? Because doubters confuse opinion and fact.

Missed Opportunity

Humankind had an opportunity to change course and prevent our climate from changing at a pace greater than our ability to adapt. We failed to act because opinion and fact were confused, and we believe that both are equivalent. The inevitable suffering to come is tragic because it was preventable. Worse perhaps is that we could have acted in ways that make sense anyway even in the absence of a changing climate but failed to do so while waiting for more "evidence." Meaning we ignored established fact while waiting to validate our opinion. We have been here before. The Catholic Church insisted for 1500 years that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun orbited the earth. Eventually the accumulation of fact simply became too great to support that view. But that came long after the facts had actually been established by observation. In the case of climate change, by the time doubters throw in the towel in the face of rising oceans any hope of taking corrective action will have long been lost.

So when the fact of climate change becomes as evident to doubters as the orbit of the earth, or the existence of atoms, in the face of mass migrations, starvation, advancing disease, and wars over scarce resources, when climate change can no longer be denied, perhaps we will learn from this colossal mistake of elevating opinion to the status of fact. If we are lucky enough, we will have another chance.

Jeff Schweitzer is the author of five books, the latest of which is Calorie Wars: Fat,, Fact, and Fiction. Visit Jeff at his website.

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Secular Guidelines to Moral Living: A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens

As with the passing of any accomplished author and philosopher, the death of Christopher Hitchens brings to the forefront the ephemeral nature of life. Pausing to reflect honestly upon our own lives is perhaps the most fitting tribute we can offer to someone who was so thoroughly dedicated to the objective truth. These are my musings.

Those hoping for a deathbed conversion were of course sorely disappointed. But the hope that Hitchens would find God was always futile. What the faithful fail to understand is that impending death will not suddenly cause a rationalist to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or an invisible man in the sky. There are plenty of atheists in the foxhole. Hitchens was just the most recent.

Observing the trajectory of an average life, a pessimistic realist could conclude that our existence is a tragedy interspersed with brief moments of happiness. An optimist would say that happiness is life's norm, interrupted at times by tragedy. But both could agree that no matter our disposition toward one or the other we should acknowledge each day the joy of being alive. Think how keenly that was felt in Hitchens' last days. The other option, as he would tell you, is usually worse.

Given our short time here, we can better tilt the scale in favor of happiness when we find a healthy balance in extracting the most from life every day, but with the prudence of delaying rewards when necessary to plan for a productive and happy future. Hitchens' obvious excesses with alcohol and tobacco are an example of how imbalance in yielding to immediate indulgence and thoughts for the future can lead to unpleasant consequences. Of course he has plenty of company; but in spite of his and our real human frailties, we all have the power to live each day to the fullest in our particular circumstances, to a degree that is responsible.

Certainly, sacrifice and self-discipline are necessary to achieve lasting happiness in life, but a little indulgence each day honors the pleasure of being alive. But not too much. At different life stages, the balance between these opposing forces of immediate and delayed gratification will tend to shift. With age, experience and accomplishment comes a natural tendency toward reaping the rewards from past sacrifice. For example, a serious student will devote years of hard study for the benefits of a degree, while others during that time are enjoying more of life on a daily basis. But that sacrifice once made yields a commensurate reward in future pleasures. Unfortunately, no clean formula exits to balance self-indulgence and self-sacrifice. The best approach is to incorporate a clear recognition of the dilemma into life's daily decisions. Live for today, but plan for tomorrow.

So, in honor of Hitchens I propose here guidelines to how we can make those daily decisions, a secular distillation of moral behavior derived from those characteristics that define us as human. Each person will by definition develop a unique approach tailored to personal need. But natural variation should not be understood to mean that everybody has free reign. Our mutual obligations create boundaries around individual moral codes. That is analogous to free speech being defended up to the point where speech creates injury to others, such as falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater. Free speech, yes, but within responsible confines. Personal choice has limits. What follows is my list of how we might make good choices within accepted boundaries.

• Respect the environment

• Be honest

• Be reliable

• Be responsible

• Be faithful to your life partner

• Respect and be tolerant of others

• Do no harm to others

• Be happy for the success of others

• Cherish family and friends

• Enjoy safe and responsible sex

• Nourish good health

• Be true to yourself

• Be moderate in all things, including moderation

• Be consistent

• Disdain mediocrity

• Find balance in life

• Be curious

• Use time wisely

• Donate to charity

• Respect animal rights

• Leave the world a better place

I have elsewhere expanded on each of these points, but they are largely self-explanatory. These suggestions are not mandated from above by a higher power, but instead are derived from our biology. One prominent characteristic of humans is sociality. Functioning as a group in many circumstances conveys significant advantages on members of the group. Associated with sociality is altruism, which is sacrificial behavior that in some way promotes the propagation of the genes of the altruistic individual, usually by aiding the survival of a close relative sharing some common genetic stock. The ultimate altruistic behavior would be dying for the sake of another's survival. An uncle getting in harms way to protect a nephew is an example. Social cooperation and altruism are likely significant factors in the success of our species, a fact that underlines the biological basis for a natural ethic as a defining and adaptive human characteristic.

As a species endowed with large complex brains, we can choose a path unique to humans by elevating ourselves above the common fate of other species. We can choose to be moral. Amazing clarity is achieved in realizing that life is not controlled by some unseen and mysterious god, but by an individual's power to make decisions, and a personal choice to be moral. There is tremendous joy in understanding that purpose and meaning in life are self-derived, and that these precious commodities are not some gift from above that can be taken away arbitrarily by a wrathful deity working in mysterious ways. We are the masters of our own fate. Nothing is more powerful, or more satisfying.

I don't know to what degree Hitchens would agree with or follow any of the above. But I am sure he would love to debate the issues, and that he would do so with his usual fiery charm and the smug confidence that he could just not contain.

I know too that Hitchens conformed to at least one of these guidelines: he left the world a better place. He will be missed.

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a former White House senior policy analyst the author of five books, including, A New Moral Code and his latest, Calorie Wars. Learn more about Jeff at his Website.

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The Faux Rage About a False War on Christmas

Rejoice humanists: the "secular progressive agenda" is on the verge of total victory. Christmas will soon be dead. Rationalists will be dancing in the streets. No more White House Christmas tree; no more tree lighting ceremony in Rockefeller Center. We will suffer no more from months of Christmas decorations, Santas and fake snow in every retail outlet and mega-mall. Our taxpayer dollars will not be spent to erect "holiday" decorations in city streets. We will endure no longer tinny Christmas music piped into every elevator and over every public speaker from October through December. We will never hear again the unending stream of "Merry Christmas" greetings at every casual passing on the street. We won. Victory is ours.

But of course nothing of the kind will ever happen. In spite of annual conservative cries to the contrary, there is no war. Christmas is everywhere, inescapable, omnipresent, a force so powerful that nothing can impede its pervasive influence. A Christian complaining that Christmas is under attack when submerged in that holiday's ubiquitous presence is like a fish in the Pacific Ocean complaining that there is not enough water. A lone humanist swimming in the middle of that vast ocean would be hard pressed to agree that water was in insufficient supply.

Since about 2004 Bill O'Reilly has been agitating about a "war on Christmas" with an assist in 2005 from Fox News Host John Gibson, the author that year of The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought. In this world view we are one "happy holiday" away from hordes of secularists forming angry mobs hell bent on going house to house to take down Christmas lights and burn down Christmas trees. Plastic snowmen, wire Rudolph and roof-perched Santas don't stand a chance. For mocking this absurd idea, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart is going to hell, as decreed by Mr. O'Reilly in the latest skirmish of this fake war. Let's take a step back and see if Jon has an appointment with the devil.

Bully as Victim

According to a 2008 survey from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than 78% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. Only 4% are self-proclaimed non-believers (broken into the survey categories of atheists at 1.6% and agnostics at 2.4%).

Yet in spite of these vast, massive, overwhelming, deeply embedded majorities, Christians often speak in the dialect of victimhood. O'Reilly taps into this sentiment. The idea of Christians as modern victims while enjoying an overwhelming supermajority is difficult to swallow. Envision that humanist floating in the middle of the Pacific. From the perspective of a tiny 4% minority, any claim by a group representing 78% of the population that the views of a few are a threat to the many is simply surreal. Nobody would take seriously a big brute of a bully who beat the daylights out of an innocent bystander, and then claimed he was victimized because he scraped his knuckles. Yet O'Reilly and his gang continue to gain traction by complaining about their sore knuckles.

The real problem, though, is not this fake war on Christmas, which could be easily dismissed as a far-right attention-getting gimmick. Much more is at stake: Christians like Bill O'Reilly have declared war on religious freedom, demanding that the United States convert to a Christian nation. They use the subterfuge of claiming religious persecution as they seek to dominate all other religions. Religious freedom to them means freedom for Christians to impose their will on all others. O'Reilly justifies this power grab by claiming that only Christians stand between innocent Americans and the onslaught of euthanasia, legalized narcotics, abortion at will and gay marriage. He believes that only Christian morality can save the day.

The Real War

So we now come to the real war, which has nothing to do with Christmas. The right claims that Christmas is under attack as a surrogate victim to promote a much broader agenda, one that goes beyond threatened holidays and the fear of moral decay. The barrier separating us is defined by the unbridgeable gulf between god and rationalism. This is not a culture war, but a cosmic battle between theism and humanism.

Before imploding in the face of his sordid extramarital trysts, presidential candidate John Edwards based his campaign on the idea of two Americas, one rich the other poor. He was right about the idea that American is divided, but wrong about the nature of the division. The deeper and more important split is defined by religiosity, not riches.

The nearly even distribution of votes between conservatives and liberals in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008 reveals clearly a lasting and deep chasm in American society. Heated rhetoric, vitriol, excessive passion and closely contested elections with hanging chad expose to light the existence of two societies with little in common, living side by side but miles apart. O'Reilly speaks to one half, Jon Stewart to the other.

The conflict between these two world views is made apparent in the details of our voting booth preferences. The closest election in American history (Bush and Gore) offers plenty of evidence for the religiosity divide. Of those voters who attend church more than once per week, 68% voted for Bush and 32% for Gore. Of those who never attend church, 35% went for Bush, 65% for Gore. Religiosity alone is the most important, obvious and conclusive factor in determining voter behavior. Simply put, church goers tend to vote Republican. Those who instead go the hardware store on Sunday vote Democrat by wide margins. The divide in our society is not between rich and poor, or Catholic and Protestant, or Christian and Muslim, but between those have faith and those who have reason. Obama's election does not negate that calculus. Forget not that 50 million Americans voted for the other ticket.

Rationalism and Theism

Those who accept the idea of god tend to divide the world into believers and atheists. Yet that is incorrect. Atheist means "without god" and one cannot be without something that does not exist. Atheism is really a pejorative term that defines one world view as the negative of another, as something not what something else is. The word atheist is analogous to the denigrating word "colored" to describe African Americans, which was meant to say they are colored relative to the pure "standard" of white. Atheism is similarly meant to describe rationalists against the pure "standard" of belief. Both terms are the result of ignorance and bias about what constitutes the baseline for comparison. Just as we thankfully no longer use the world colored, we should abandon the term atheist.

If we insist on defining one group as the negative of the other, then the world would better be divided into rationalists and "arationalists" meaning those with reason and those without. But a more reasonable and neutral description of the two world views would be theists and rationalists (or humanists, take your pick).

The Moral Divide

Perhaps the clearest distinction between theists and rationalists is found in the perception of which group best defines and protects our moral values.

The association between morality and religion has been established so firmly over the past 2000 years that the link largely goes unquestioned. Churchgoers tend to believe that they have a leg up on moral behavior relative to humanists, or worse that rationalists are a threat to morality. In that environment of religious fervor, any attempt to shift to a strictly secular model of morality strikes many as heretical even today, on par with Galileo's transgression so long ago.

But cold statistics prove the association between religion and morality wrong. A recent paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology concluded that societies with the lowest measures of dysfunction are the most secular. How did the author, Gregory S. Paul, arrive at this conclusion? He analyzed 25 indicators of "social dysfunction" including rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STDs, unemployment and poverty. He compared those rates to religiosity as measured by self-professed beliefs and frequency of church attendance within each country studied. The two most religious countries, the United States and Portugal, turn out also to be the most socially dysfunctional measured against those 25 indicators. His conclusions have been challenged by some skeptics who claim the results are a consequence of "selection bias" in what data are collected and analyzed. There is likely some truth to that since social and behavioral studies can only rarely completely eliminate the bias of self reporting. Paul's conclusions though are fairly robust in spite of the study's flaws. Society has the association of morality with religion inverted. Humanism is the guardian of morality, not its greatest threat.

Secular and Religious Morality

Traits that we view as moral are deeply embedded in the human psyche. Honesty, fidelity, trustworthiness, kindness to others, and reciprocity are primeval characteristics that helped our ancestors survive. In a world of dangerous predators, early man could thrive only in cooperative groups. Good behavior strengthened the tribal bonds that were essential to survival. What we now call morality is really a suite of behaviors favored by natural selection in an animal weak alone but strong in numbers. Morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development, not a gift from god.

Our inherent good, however, has been corrupted by the false morality of religion that has manipulated us with divine carrots and sticks. If we misbehave, we are threatened with the hot flames of hell. If we please god, we are promised the comforting embrace of eternal bliss. Under the burden of religion, morality has become nothing but a response to bribery and fear, and a cynical tool of manipulation for ministers and gurus. We have forsaken our biological heritage in exchange for coupons to heaven. That more secular countries suffer less social dysfunction is not only unsurprising but fully expected. O'Reilly fears moral decay if Christianity fails to dominate; he instead should fear the false morality based on hopes of earning coupons to heaven.

Human Hubris

Religious morality is fundamentally flawed, resting precariously on the false notion of human superiority. For millennia, peoples of nearly all cultures have been taught that humans are special in the eyes of their god or gods, and that the world is made for their benefit and use. This is revealed clearly in Genesis, which gives humankind the mandate to fill, rule over and subdue the earth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Of all visible creatures only man is "able to know and love his creator." He is "the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake," and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God's own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity. (CCC #356)

Blinded by this deeply-ingrained religious bias, we keep forgetting that our highly developed cerebral cortex does not confer upon us any special status among our living cousins. People easily embrace the idea that humanity is set apart from all other animals. But nothing could be further from the truth. Humans are nothing but a short-lived biological aberration, with no claim to superiority. If evolution had a pinnacle, bacteria would rest on top. When the human species is a distant memory, bacteria will be dividing merrily away, oblivious to the odd bipedal mammal that once roamed the earth for such a brief moment in time. Our self-promotion to the image of god is simply embarrassing in the face of the biological reality on the ground. There is a loss of credibility when you choose yourself for an award.

This hubris and conceit of human superiority as the only creature close to god is not benign, leading to catastrophic consequences for humanity. The species-centric arrogance of religion cultivates a dangerous attitude about our relationship with the environment and the resources that sustain us. Humanists tend to view sustainability as a moral imperative while theists often view environmental concerns as liberal interference with god's will. Conservative resistance to accepting the reality of climate change is just one example, and another point at which religious and secular morality diverge, as the world swelters.

There is no war on Christmas; the idea is absurd at every level. You are probably being deafened by a rendition of "Jingle Bells" right now. But the Christian right is waging a war against reason. And they are winning.

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a former White House senior policy analyst the author of five books, including A New Moral Code and his latest, Calorie Wars. Learn more about Jeff at his website.

The Faux Rage About a False War on Christmas