The recent Pew Forum study on religion, widely reported in the media, shows that the vast majority of Americans remains religious: 92 percent believe in God. This percentage has remained relatively stable for more than half a century.

Atheists remain a tiny proportion of the population with some interesting anomalies: 21 percent of self-identified atheists say they believe in God, with nearly 10 percent of them "absolutely sure" of it. What this means is that 21 percent of self-described atheists are highly confused and 10 percent are certified nut-cases.

What got the most attention, however, was Pew's discovery that a majority of religious Americans believe that other religions make valid claims about God and can lead to heaven. Around 80 percent of Catholics, Protestants and Jews, as well as 55 percent of Muslims, reject the idea that their religion is the only way.

These findings, however, hardly suggest that pluralism has overtaken truth as the defining feature of American religion. First of all, Christianity is the only religion to hold another religion to be wholly true. That religion is Judaism. Second, Catholics and Protestants have become increasingly convinced that it is fidelity to creedal Christianity--and not the denominational differences of past centuries--that is decisive for salvation. Finally many people don't realize that just as Christianity sees itself as succeeding and incorporating Judaism, so Islam sees itself as coming after and incorporating both Judaism and Christianity. Consequently I'm not surprised that most Muslims view Jews and Christians as fellow monotheists rather than hell-bound infidels.

Soon my Orange County debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens and Jewish radio host Dennis Prager will be up on the web and I'll link to it. The debate, amusingly billed as a Christian-Atheist-Jewish showdown, had some fiery and fascinating exchanges. At one point Hitchens sought to alienate me from the Jews in the audience by asking me if good and decent Jews can go to heaven. I said I believe they can. This is no denial of the central Christian proposition that Christ is the way to salvation. The Bible clearly specifies that there is salvation through Christ for his followers.

But Scripture and Christian teaching leave open the question of what happens to virtuous non-Christians who either lived before Christ or who have not had a chance to accept him. My hope and belief is that God's mercy can extend to them also, as it did to Moses and Abraham and the God-fearing Jews of the Old Testament. If so, they too would be saved through Christ's sacrifice on the cross, even if they did not consciously and explicitly embrace that sacrifice. As for atheists who reject God and affirm with Hitchens that they want nothing to do with heaven, we can be reasonably confident that God will respect their free will and reluctantly grant their wish.

There are two kinds of pluralism: the kind that holds that truth does not matter, and the kind that holds that truth matters greatly but as flawed human beings our reason and experience gives us only limited access to the truth. The first kind of pluralism is deadly for religion, and is typically embraced by flaccid people who are too lazy to think or who have been seduced by postmodernist flimflam. The second kind of pluralism is the shared ground of debate between intelligent believers and unbelievers. The stakes could not be higher.

It is the essence of democracy that people should be able to decide the moral rules that govern the nature of a community. If people don't have that power, then they are living under an autocracy.

True, this majority rule is not unlimited. It is limited by what the government has the power to do. Consequently the majority cannot, in general, vote to seize the homes and accumulated savings of rich people. Leaving aside exceptional cases, government cannot mandate how parents how should raise their children. These kinds of power lie outside the scope of government in a free society.

Majority rule is also circumscribed by individual rights. But these are the rights clearly specified in the Constitution. A majority of citizens cannot prevent an individual from voting because voting is a basic right, as is the right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and so on. The state is constitutionally prohibited from undermining these enumerated rights.

Now the high court of California has made gay marriage into a right that is immune from restriction by the majority of citizens in the state. We already know what California citizens think about gay marriage: they oppose it. A referendum outlawing gay marriage was passed with the support of the state's voters.

How, then, can a court invalidate the referendum and over-rule the will of the people? Basically through a kind of legal fraud. The court has to pretend that there is a right to gay marriage even though it is nowhere evident in the state constitution. Read the constitution, hold it up to the light, squeeze lemon juice on it--you won't see a right to gay marriage in there. It is simply not an enumerated right, nor is it a right that can be clearly derived from other enumerated rights.

Here we see liberal jurisprudence in its arrogant willingness to subvert the will of the people in order to achieve its ideological agenda. This has nothing to do with whether you think gays should be allowed to marry. If you think they should, go ahead and vote for candidates who support gay marriage. But you should still oppose the manufacture of bogus rights in order to reach a result that democracy would not by itself allow.

Attempting to insulate themselves from the political fallout, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both said they oppose gay marriage. The real question, however, is what they would do to express this opposition. What would a President Obama do, for instance, to protect traditional marriage? Here the answer appears to be: nothing!

In the past Democrats have always appreciated courts doing their dirty work when it comes to issues like abortion, pornography, prostitution and gay rights. This way Democrats can advance their permissive agenda without having to take political responsibility for voting against the values of a majority of voters.

I know that there are gays who desperately want gay marriage, and in a way I'm happy for them. But at the same time I'm sad for constitutional democracy, which suffered a grievous blow at the hands of the California high court.

According to the AFP, the California Supreme Court today overturned the ban on same-sex marriage, calling domestic partnerships a poor substitute for marriage:

In an opinion that analysts say could have nationwide implications for the issue, the seven-member panel voted 4-3 in favor of plaintiffs who argued that restricting marriage to men and women was discriminatory.

There's a precedent for California starting a domino effect. David Cruz, a law professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in constitutional law, says in the AFP article:

"In the 20th century California was the first state to strike down laws against inter-racial marriage. They did that 19 years before the US Supreme Court got around to it."

So, soon (er, in 19 years) we could be a nation that grants gay couples the same rights as straight ones. How does it feel?

The historicity of Christ, including his death by crucifixion, is a fact that about as well attested as any in the ancient world. The evidence for Christ's existence is much stronger than that for Socrates, Alexander the Great, and numerous figures of ancient times whose historicity no one doubts. Historians are unanimous that Christ was born, that he developed a following, that he antagonized the Jewish and Roman authorities, and that he was put to death. But what about the resurrection?

"If Christ had not been raised," Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:17, "our preaching is useless and so is your faith." The resurrection is the most important event in Christianity. (For this reason, Easter is actually a more important holiday for Christians than Christmas.) Other religions such as Judaism and Islam may feature miracles but miracles are not central to their theology. Christianity, by contrast, is based on the miracle of the resurrection.

Ironic, isn't it? Some conservatives have been calling for an inquiry into Barack Hussein Obama's Muslim connection--didn't he attend a madrassa in Indonesia?--when the real problem turns out to be Obama's Christian mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Wright is a kind of Ward Churchill in vestments. Remember Ward Churchill? He's the leftist white guy who was posing as an American Indian as he gave speeches saying America deserved to be attacked and that 9/11 was a case where the "chickens came home to roost." Eventually the University of Colorado gave Churchill the boot.

Oddly enough Wright used exactly the same language as Churchill in saying that on 9/11 America got its comeuppance. Actually, Wright's statements taken collectively are worse than those of Churchill. Wright also said the U.S. government deliberately introduced AIDS into the black community. And he insisted that instead of saying "God bless America" we would be better to say "God damn America."

This is the man that Obama calls "like family." This is the man that Obama credits with "introducing me to my Christian faith." This is the mean that Obama choose to marry him and his wife, and to baptize his children. This is the man who inspired the title of Obama's book. This is the man whom Obama credits with being a mentor over more than two decades.

I found it very interesting to hear Wright explicitly endorse Obama over Hillary in church. Normally when evangelical preachers cross the political line they get hammered for violating the separation of church and state. One pastor I know invited a local Republican official to give his personal testimony in church and had to answer to the IRS for it. How come black churches engage in blatant electioneering, even to the point of busing members to the voting booth, and nobody from the ACLU or the media raises an eyebrow?

Equally fascinating is Wright's comment in church that unlike Hillary, Obama will be a race man. Wright's argument is that Obama will stand up for poor blacks against the rich whites who control the country. In the past Obama has been accused by some of being insufficiently attentive to black concerns. The term sometimes used for this is Oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. Wright by contrast seems to be claiming that Obama is white--or at least tan--on the outside but black on the inside.

Wright poses a possibly lethal threat to Obama's chance to be president. Obama's great appeal is that he's the political equivalent of Tiger Woods. He's not an America hater or a race man like Charlie Rangel or Jesse Jackson. Wright makes Americans wonder: why is Obama so close to a man whose incendiary views are far worse than that of just about any black radical figure with the possible exception of Louis Farrakhan? Isn't professed ignorance of Wright's political views, combined with a refusal to cut ties with him, proof of Obama's bad judgent?

Pretty soon people are going to ask: Is Wright's influence the reason why Obama doesn't want to wear an American flag pin? Or raise his hand to his chest when the national anthem is played? Is Wright's ideology part of the reason why Obama's wife says she has not been proud of America for her whole adult life? And behind all this, the big question: at a time of war, can America is entrusted to a man who seems tolerant of the kind of vicious anti-Americanism that we are used to hearing from our worst enemies?

According to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, speaking on Anderson Cooper's CNN show Monday night, Eliot Spitzer should not resign nor should he be prosecuted because prostitution is a "victimless crime."

Dershowitz gave us the usual nonsense about how Europeans would regard all this as no big deal, but what does this prove other than the fact that many Europeans have reached the nadir of moral debauchery? Yes, we all know that in France the discovery that a politician has a mistress or even patronizes prostitutes can raise their poll ratings. Is this really an area in which we wish to emulate French degeneracy?

I'm more interested in Dershowitz's claim that Spitzer is guilty of a crime that doesn't have any victims. Is this really true? Let's make a list of all of Spitzer's victims.

His wife: Spitzer's wife of 20 years not only has to cope with the public knowledge that her high-profile husband frequents prostitutes, but she also has to stand alongside him while Spitzer makes a press statement on his sexual and legal offenses. Converting your wife into a political prop--what could be more humiliating?

His daughters: For years the girls could think of their dad as a champion of legal and moral rectitude, fighting Wall Street crooks, shutting down prostitution dens, and so on. Now these innocent children must endure the knowledge that their father is far from what he portrayed himself to be. Spitzer has made shipwreck of his family and disgraced his children in public. What are his daughters going to say when they next see their friends?

New York citizens: Isn't there something outrageous when a high public official, and in this case a former attorney general, somehow gets the idea that he is above the law? That he can break the law with impunity? Why should other New Yorkers be held accountable to the law but not Spitzer? Spitzer of all people has worked to emphasize the idea that no one is above the law. So if Spitzer gets away with this, he will have screwed more than the $4000 hooker.

Alan Dershowitz: There is something about Democratic malfeasance (Barney Frank's relationship with a male prostitute, Clinton sex scandals, the latest Spitzer prostitution scandal) that causes liberal Harvard professors who agree with the politics of the culprits to lose their normal good sense. Whether Dershowitz thinks the law in question is a good one or a bad one is irrelevant here. Laws are made to be followed, and it's odd when law professors think that this doesn't apply to laws about sex. Clearly Alan Dershowitz's legal and moral intelligence has become the latest victim.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is dead, and modern American conservatism has lost its chief intellectual spokesman and leader.

Buckley is one of the main reasons that I became a conservative. It wasn't just the influence of God and Man at Yale, Buckley's first and seminal book that made the case that Yale had abandoned its conservative Christian roots. Buckley had the novel idea that private colleges don't belong to their administration and faculty; these are the employees. Rather, colleges belong to the students who pay the tuition and who are there to learn. They along belong to the alumni, the living body of graduates who represent what the institution has produced; alumni also largely fund their alma mater and thus maintain their ties even when they have left.

I learned all this from Buckley, and our renegade newspaper The Dartmouth Review was patterned on Buckley's National Review. But there was more to Buckley than his books and writing. Interestingly Buckley never produced an important book after God and Man at Yale. His real influence was in who he was and what he represented. He was a suave, erudite and generous man, and he represented a conservatism that was witty, iconoclastic and fun. In my teens I had envisioned conservatives as stuffy and narrow-minded businessmen who upheld the status quo. Buckley showed me an irreverent conservatism that enjoyed life and fought to change the liberal status quo, especially on the college campus.

Before Buckley, there was no conservatism in America. The literary critic Lionel Trilling once famously remarked that America has a single political tradition and it is liberal. Conservatism, to the degree it exists, is only reaction. The conservative is not a man of ideas but simply twitches and barks in response to the inexorable march of liberal change. The conservative is against progress. Buckley himself played with this idea, and once described the mission of National Review as one of "standing athwart history, yelling Stop!" With this remark Buckley appeared to confirm the stereotype while in fact exploding it. An unthinking, unimaginative conservative would not have devised such a pithy, witty formulation.

Buckley may not have single-handedly invented modern intellectual conservatism, but he certainly made it respectable. He became the chief intellectual spokesman of the movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan. I never knew him well, although every few months I received an autographed Buckley book--typically about spies or sailing--in the mail. When Alan Wolfe launched his pompous and ignorant fusillade against my book The Enemy at Home, even suggesting that I was not a real conservative, Buckley rushed to my defense, noting that he was a far better authority on conservatism than Wolfe. In the end, it is these little kindnesses that you remember the most.

Today modern American conservatism is at the crossroads, and it's not clear what it's future will be. Oh, if only there were another young Buckley to gallantly lead the intellectual brigade. Still, what Buckley's movement accomplished, both through its intellectual and political successes, is nothing less than the transformation of American politics, even world politics. Buckley's life proves that ideas have consequences, and many of us continue to walk in the path that this far-seeing man cleared for us.

President Gene Nichol of William and Mary College has just resigned, and apparently I had something to do with it. Not directly, of course. Until last year I had no idea who Gene Nichol was. Then some students at William and Mary asked me to debate President Nichol on the issue of whether he was right to remove the Christian cross from the Wren Chapel.

I'll let Nichols, in his resignation letter, explain why he did this. The chapel, he noted, is "used regularly for secular college events, both voluntary and mandatory." He wanted "to help Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and other religious minorities feel ore meaningfully included as members of our broad community." Moreover, "The decision was likely required by any effective notion of separation of church and state." In sum, the usual pablum about diversity and legality.

The issue, of course, is not whether we should respect the Constitution but what the Constitution actually requires. As I discovered upon looking into the situation, there is no case that says colleges cannot have religious symbols in their own chapels. While feigning strict loyalty to the Constitution, Nichols was actually reading his own political preferences into the Constitution--although in his defense he is hardly the only one to do so.

Second, we all want the religious minorities, both actual and hypothetical, to feel welcome and happy, but should this be at the price of insulting the religious sentiments of the Christian majority? If it hurts a Muslim's feelings to step into a Christian chapel and see a cross, isn't it even more hurtful for a Christian to step into a Christian chapel and have the cross removed? Shouldn't Hindus and Muslims expect to see crosses in Christian chapels? How would they feel if we went to Pakistan and removed Muslim symbols from the mosques over there, in order to make us feel welcome? Would a lively church-state discussion ensue, or would we end up running for our lives?

Yes, I had a case to make. And perhaps knowing this, Nichol ducked the idea of debating me. Every time the students tried to reach him, he pretended to be unavailable. On one occasion students even spotted him going into his office. Yet when they dialed his extension, his secretary said he wasn't in. "But we just saw him entering the office," the students said. The secretary was too well-trained to say, 'Yes, but he's hiding under his desk." It's comical and it's sad. And this is what passes for leadership in higher education today. Finally a historian at William and Mary, David Holmes, agreed to debate me on the cross. The debate, lively and well attended, was held on February 1, 2007 in Wren Chapel, and you can watch it here.

Even before the debate, there was alumni and student resistance to Gene Nichols over the cross issue. Eventually members of the Virginia legislature got involved and one even introduced legislation to suspend Nichols' salary until the cross was returned. But many at William and Mary are saying that my high-profile debate was the single event that turned the tide against Nichols. It exposed the hollowness of his argument, and it galvanized the opposition. Ultimately it was the trustees of the college who decided that Nichols had become a liability, and they informed him this month that his contract was not going to be renewed. Nichols resigned immediately, conceding that his resignation would lead his critics to "claim victory."

I take no pleasure in Nichols' resignation, but I am glad to see the cross restored to Wren Chapel. In an era where political correctness often triumphs over common sense, that's no small victory.

There's been another school shooting, this one at Northern Illinois University, where a man opened fire this afternoon in a lecture hall, shooting approximately fifteen people, some in the head. According to the report:

Witnesses said the young man carried a shotgun and a pistol. Student Edward Robinson told WLS that the gunman appeared to target students in one part of the lecture hall.

"It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot," Robinson said. "He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at."

There have now been four school shootings within a week, six total already this month in six different states. Just what is going on?

My mom, who lives in Mumbai, India, has trouble understanding American politics. Recently she asked me to give her a brief summary of what's going on.

I explained, "There are two parties in American politics. There is a stupid party and there is an evil party."

In an attempt to put my own cards on the table, I confessed, "I am a proud member of the stupid party."

Then I added, "Sometimes, American politicians do things that are both stupid and evil. Those things we call bipartisanship."

I was kidding, of course, but the humor arises out of the element of truth in this description. Consider the charge of stupidity. Would the Republican Party be in the confused state it is now if Bush had appointed a vice president who was electable and actually sought the nomination?

I'm not saying Bush shouldn't have appointed Cheney the first time around. Cheney inspires irrational and paranoid loathing on the left--he's Darth Vader for the Michael Moore set--and this alone was good reason to keep him reasonably close to the Oval Office, not to mention the nuclear arsenal.

But when Bush ran for re-election, he should have sent Cheney packing. Then the GOP would have an heir apparent who would have an inside track to the nomination and who could claim up-close experience in the responsibilities of governance. If Bush had done this, he would have shown both foresight and concern about the future of the GOP.

Now let's turn to the evil party. What other term is appropriate to describe a party where Ted Kennedy's endorsement is actually counted as a positive? This is the moral equivalent of Republican candidates rushing to make campaign commercials with Larry Craig. Notice how the moral scoundrels in the GOP are typically hounded out while the moral scoundrels in the Democratic party generally continue to enjoy their prestige and good standing.

Any party with a sense of decency would ignore and marginalize Ted Kennedy. Besides, what constituency does this man represent? Is it really that important to lock in the votes of dissolute, philandering seniors who still go down to Florida for Spring break?

So here's the situation. Kennedy offers his blessings to Obama and offers to say some black masses for him. Meanwhile, Hillary's camp claims that Obama turned away while Hillary was shaking Kennedy's hand because she is a woman.

Given the irrelevance of gender to this situation, the Hillary team's reaction is downright comic. Yet the shrews at the National Organization for Women are echoing the cries of sexism from the Hillary camp. All that remains is for Obama to counter with the race card and accuse Hillary of making such charges because he is black.

As the election gets closer, I'll try to give my mom a more detailed account of the issues at stake. But I think I've given her enough to keep her informed, and entertained, at least through the primaries.

Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we've heard that one before. Well, the two groups--the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism--managed to secure major media attention by making the claim that the Bush administration released 935 false statements. Clearly no one was in the mood to read all 935, so the leftist groups boiled them down to 532. We hear that on 532 occasions the Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the claim is not that Bush told 532 lies, but that he told the same lie 532 times.

But consider this: If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn't possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn't Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out? When I raise this point with liberals on campus, they typically say, "Well, we're not saying that Bush knew for sure that there were no such weapons. We are saying that his administration stacked the data." But this is another way of saying that Bush actually believed that there were those weapons, and he mobilized whatever evidence he could muster to make his case. This may reflect prejudice against Saddam Hussein's motives or even imprudent decision making but it is hardly proof of lying.

Consider a similar decision made by President Roosevelt. In the period leading up to World War II, a group of refugee German scientists warned Albert Einstein that the Germans were building an atomic bomb. The project was headed by that country's greatest scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Acutely aware of the dangers of Hitler getting such a weapon, Einstein took this information in the fall of 1939 to President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. America built the bomb, and later dropped two of them on Japan.

Many years later, Americans discovered that the Germans were nowhere close to building an atomic bomb. Their project was on the wrong track, and it seems to have stalled in its infancy. Some historians believe Heisenberg was trying to thwart the project from the inside. Be that as it may, in retrospect we now know that the intelligence that led to the Manhattan Project was wrong. But no one goes around saying, "Einstein lied" or "FDR lied." They didn't lie. They used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.

The same is true of Bush. As a statesman, he had to act in the moving current of events. He didn't have the luxury of hindsight. To those leftist pundits who say, "Knowing what we know now, Mr Bush, why did you do what you did then?" Bush's answer is, "Obviously I didn't know what we know now." Acting against the somber backdrop of 9/11, Bush made a hard call based on an assessment of the intelligence provided to him. He may have acted in haste, and he may have acted in error, but he did not act in bad faith. Therefore the claim that Bush lied is itself a lie.

Who is the greatest African American of the past hundred years? Who was the most prophetic about civil rights concerns for the twenty-first century? Not Martin Luther King. I would have to rank him second or third. The greatest and most prophetic figure was Booker T. Washington. To see why, we have to revisit an early twentieth-century debate between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Although the debate focused on black Americans, it is relevant to the question of how any group starting out at the bottom can advance in society.

DuBois, a distinguished scholar and co-founder of the civil rights organization NAACP, argued that blacks in America face one big problem, and it is racism. Washington, who was born a slave but went on to become head of the Tuskegee Institute, countered that blacks face two big problems. One is racism, he conceded. The other, he said, is African American cultural disadvantage. Washington contended that black crime rates were too high, black savings rates were too low, there were too many broken families, blacks did not have enough respect for educational achievement, and so on.

DuBois insisted that these problems, if they existed, were due to the legacy of slavery and racism. Washington did not entirely disagree, but he insisted that, whatever their source, these cultural problems demanded attention. What is the point of having rights, Washington said, without the ability to exercise those rights and compete effectively with other groups? To put the matter in contemporary terms, there is little benefit in having a right to a job at Microsoft if you don't have the skills to get and perform the job. Washington further implied that if these cultural deficiencies were not remedied, they would help to strengthen racism by giving it an empirical foundation.

The civil rights movement, led by the NAACP and later Martin Luther King, fought for decades to implement the DuBois program and secure basic rights for black Americans. This was a necessary campaign, and ultimately it was successful. The laws were changed, and blacks achieved their goal of legal equality and full citizenship. Other minorities (and I count myself in this group) also benefited from the doors that King and his fellow activists opened. Obviously issues of enforcement remain, but by the late 1960s the early civil rights agenda represented by DuBois and King had been largely achieved. At this crucial juncture, the civil rights movement should have moved to embrace the Booker T. Washington agenda.

Unfortunately this didn't happen. It still hasn't happened. Even today Jesse Jackson and the NAACP continue (in the famous words of Frederick Douglass) to "agitate, agitate, agitate" for black progress. But now there are hardly any Bull Connors and Southern segregationists to fight, and so the activists are reduced to fighting "covert racism" and "institutional racism" and "racism that has gone underground" and basically racism that is only visible to them and to no one else. Most significant, these fights do little to help the blacks who are the poorest, the group that sociologist William Julius Wilson termed "the truly disadvantaged."

Meanwhile, there is another group that is following the Booker T. Washington strategy, and that is the nonwhite immigrants. I don't just mean the Koreans and the Asian Indians; I also mean black immigrants--the West Indians, the Haitians, the Nigerians, and so on. All are darker in complexion than African Americans, and yet racism does not seem to stop them. The immigrants know that racism today is no longer systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to find ways to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start out at the very bottom have shown that they are make rapid gains. These groups are surging ahead of African Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves. West Indians, for instance, have established a strong business and professional community and have achieved income parity with whites.

How is this possible? The nonwhite immigrants don't spend a lot of time meditating about the hardships of the past, nor do they blame their circumstances on society. They recognize that education and entrepreneurship are the fastest ladders to success in America. They push their children to study, so that they will be admitted to Berkeley and MIT, and they pool their resources and set up small businesses, so that they can make some money and move to the suburbs.

Thus we find that any group trying to move up in America is confronted with two possible strategies--the DuBois strategy and the Washington strategy---and it is an empirical question as to which one works better. A century ago, when segregation was still the rule, clearly the DuBois strategy was better. In this sense, Booker T. Washington was wrong during his day. But today it's clear that the man was ahead of his time. So far the evidence is overwhelming that the immigrant approach of assimilating to the cultural strategies of success is vastly better for group uplift than the tired old strategy of "agitate, agitate, agitate."

Martin Luther King nobly led the first phase of the struggle, but he only dimly saw the next stage. At the time of his death King was peddling all kinds of impractical schemes for sharing the wealth and he also became unnecessarily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement which diluted his currency as a civil rights leader. Even so, there were moments when King was prescient about the future. At one point he said that ultimately every man must write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation. I take him to mean that we all have the right to be treated equally under the law. We have this right, but we don't have any more rights than this. What we do with our rights, what we make of ourselves, the script that we write of our own lives, this finally is up to us.

Postscript: This article has been loosely adapted from my book What's So Great About America. The issues it raises are exhaustively treated in one of my earlier books, The End of Racism.

When a female politician faces adversity on the campaign trail, she has a political option unavailable to men: a good cry.

For a male presidential candidate to cry would be political suicide. In the past politicians like Ed Muskie have looked weak by breaking down on the campaign trail. Bush shed tears after 9/11 but they were tears of sorrow for the people who died; this was not a case of a man who felt sorry for himself.

Swedish scientists have concluded a study to find out why the Arctic is melting so fast. Watch this CBC video for more information and visit Nature.com to read the study.

In response to my blog yesterday noting that the cultural left opposes democracy in the Muslim world, several people expressed indignation. One challenged me to provide a single example. Others lugubriously noted that they favored the idea of democracy but alas it wasn't succeeding in Iraq. Certainly it does seem odd that a left which is always calling for "more democracy" in America would resist democracy in Muslim countries.

Yet it's true, and my book The Enemy at Home provides chapter and verse. For instance, the leftist author Robert Fisk resolutely opposed America's attempt to introduce democracy in Afghanistan. Incredibly Fisk said that the Taliban government should be kept in power because it had nothing to do with 9/11. Leftist Howard Zinn also equated America's displacement of the Taliban and holding of free elections with the 9/11 attacks themselves, as though both were equivalent crimes. Leftist legal scholar Richard Falk called for a "negotiated settlement" with the Taliban in order to protect the country's "sovereign rights." If leading leftists such as Edward Said, Toni Morison, Jesse Jackson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jane Fonda and Jim McDermott had their way, the U.S. would not have overthrown the Taliban government and Afghanistan would not have had free elections.

Immediately following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, leftist philanthropist George Soros warned that "I would consider Iraq the last place to choose for a demonstration project" in democracy. Why the Iraqis were ineligible to rule themselves, Soros did not say. When Iraq had its first free election, columnist Bob Herbert said it meant nothing because "a real democracy requires an informed electorate" while the Iraqi people were "woefully uninformed," apparently because they didn't make the choices that Herbert wanted. Leftist columnist Robert Dreyfuss said the Iraqi elections were invalid because "the Sunni community was tricked into voting" and moreover the elected Sunnis "do not represent the resistance." Apparently Dreyfuss thinks car bombers need representation too! Ivan Eland wrote in The American Prospect, "Spreading democracy doesn't reduce terrorism and, if anything, actually makes it worse." How democracy promotes terrorism, Eland neglected to explain.

Notice how the cultural left routinely condemns Bush for "hypocrisy" in using the rhetoric of democracy while the U.S. is allied with secular despots, but very rarely do leftists call for free elections in countries like Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. There was even some cheering on the left when Turkish generals threatened a coup to subvert the elected government from holding free elections a few months ago. So why does the left hate democracy in the Muslim world? The reason is simple. Muslims are socially conservative and generally want a greater role for Islam in their private and public lives. Consequently Muslim democracies are likely to be more conservative socially than they are when secular despots rule them. The left fears Muslim democracy because it is terrified of Muslim values, especially sharia or Muslim holy law. Feminists and gays are not likely to fare very well under Muslim holy law.

When Iraqis rejected secular candidates and voted for a party that pledged to have sharia, at least in some forms of domestic law, the New York TImes howled that democracy could be "consigning Iraqi women to a life of subjugation." Columnist Maureen Dowd warned that "the Iraqi election may actually be making things worse" because "it is going to expand the control of the Shia theocrats." These complaints might have some plausibility if women or Sunnis were not permitted to vote. But women and men both voted for the Dawa party, and so essentially the Times and Dowd were arguing that if Iraqis don't want equal roles for men and women, their democracy is a sham.

Bush's attempt to introduce democracy to Iraq, and to expand the role of democracy in Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan, is a brave and noble experiment. It might fail, and past historical experience is not promising. But if Bush succeeds we could see the beginning of an historical transformation no less significant than the transformation of the old Soviet Union. No wonder the left, not usually given to supplication, is praying very ardently this Christmas season that Bush does not succeed. If democracy fails, in Iraq and elsewhere, there is the added benefit that Democrats will have a better chance to take the White House in 2008.