Possibly the networks overestimated the appeal of gay themed shows (given that gays are not 25 percent of the population as most people think, but 2 around percent). Or possibly gays really are the new normal and so the frisson is lost.

Meet Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle.

You can see them just below with APP’s Emmett McGroarty (whom Heather calls “The General” of the movement to repeal the Common Core) at a historic bill-signing ceremony with Indiana Governor Mike Pence making Indiana the first state to “pause” the Common Core State Standards.

I know Emmett well and I’ve admired his thoughtfulness, his grit, and his determination to rollback what was essentially a secret plan between D.C. trade groups, the Gates Foundation, and the Obama administration to foist a set of untested standards on virtually every state in America.

Heather and Erin have made the journey from concerned moms to committed education activists. The Common Core flew under most people’s radar screen, but these two moms woke up to find their children’s math education was radically changed—for the worse.

If you Google “Common Core” as I did; you will still find educators, and experts touting the lie that the Common Core State Standards are like the national standards of high-performing countries such as Finland and Japan. However, as you will read, this is simply, demonstrably false.

The remarkable thing is that education policy in more than 40 states has been radically changed using standards that have never been tested and found effective anywhere in the world.

As Prof. Diane Ravitch at New York University put it, “The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of the nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.”

Read and learn more, as I did, and pass this letter onto another concerned mom or dad.

The movement to repeal the Common Core and restore the rights of parents is only just beginning.

Please read “Two Moms vs. Common Core” at National Review.

This event in Indiana and that article reflect some of the important work being done at the American Principles Project.  If you benefit from the letters I send you each month, and God has given you the means, could you please consider making a donation of $10, $50 or $100 in lieu of a subscription?  DONATE

Together I believe we can make a difference.

Thank you again for caring enough about life, marriage and religious liberty to spend this time with me,

Faithfully,

Maggie

Maggie Gallagher.com

P.S.  APP has generously supported my work since I left the National Organization for Marriage; if you appreciate and want to support my work by donating $5 or $50 or $500 to keep this letter going, please donate here now.

P.S.S. Also remember if that’s not something you can afford to do while meeting your primary obligations to family and faith community; you can still help by passing this letter onto a friend.  I would be very grateful!

A great deal has been written and spoken about Common Core, but it is worth rehearsing the outlines again. Common Core is a set of math and English standards developed largely with Gates Foundation money and pushed by the Obama administration and the National Governors Association. The standards define what every schoolchild should learn each year, from first grade through twelfth, and the package includes teacher evaluations tied to federally funded tests designed to ensure that schools teach to Common Core.

Over 40 states hurriedly adopted Common Core, some before the standards were even written, in response to the Obama administration’s making more than $4 billion in federal grants conditional on their doing so. Only Texas, Alaska, Virginia, and Nebraska declined. (Minnesota adopted the English but not the math standards.)

Here is my prediction: Indiana is the start of something big.

Just a year ago Common Core was untouchable in Indiana, as in most other places. Common Core had been promoted by conservative governor Mitch Daniels, and the state superintendent of public schools, Tony Bennett, was a rising GOP education star.

How did the bipartisan Common Core “consensus” collapse?

It collapsed because some parents saw that Common Core was actually lowering standards in their children’s schools. And because advocates for Common Core could not answer the questions these parents raised.

In Indiana, the story starts with two Indianapolis moms, Heather Crossin and her friend Erin Tuttle.

In September 2011, Heather suddenly noticed a sharp decline in the math homework her eight-year-old daughter was bringing home from Catholic school.

“Instead of many arithmetic problems, the homework would contain only three or four questions, and two of those would be ‘explain your answer,’” Heather told me. “Like, ‘One bridge is 412 feet long and the other bridge is 206 feet long. Which bridge is longer? How do you know?’”

She found she could not help her daughter answer the latter question: The “right” answer involved heavy quotation from Common Core language. A program designed to encourage thought had ended up encouraging rote memorization not of math but of scripts about math.

Heather was noticing on the ground some of the same things that caused Stanford mathematics professor R. James Milgram to withhold his approval from the Common Core math standards.

Professor Milgram was the only math content expert on the Validation Committee reviewing the standards, and he concluded that the Common Core standards are, as he told the Texas state legislature, “in large measure a political document that . . . is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”

The Common Core math standards deemphasize performing procedures (solving many similar problems) in favor of attempting to push a deeper cognitive understanding — e.g., asking questions like “How do you know?”

In fact, according to a scholarly 2011 content analysis published in Education Researcher by Andrew Porter and colleagues, the Common Core math standards bear little resemblance to the national curriculum standards in countries with high-achieving math students: “Top-achieving countries for which we had content standards,” these scholars note, “put a greater emphasis on [the category] ‘perform procedures’ than do the U.S. Common Core standards.”

So why was this new, unvalidated math approach suddenly appearing in Heather’s little corner of the world, and at a Catholic school?

Heather was not alone in questioning the new approach. So many parents at the school complained that the principal convened a meeting. He brought in the saleswoman from the Pearson textbook company to sell the parents. “She told us we were all so very, very lucky, because our children were using one of the very first Common Core–aligned textbooks in the country,” says Heather.

But the parents weren’t buying what the Pearson lady was selling.

“Eventually,” Heather recalled, “our principal just threw his hands up in the air and said, ‘I know parents don’t like this type of math but we have to teach it that way, because the new state assessment tests are going to use these standards.’”

That’s the first time Heather had heard that Indiana had replaced its well-regarded state tests, ISTEP (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress–Plus) in favor of a brand-new federally funded set of assessments keyed to Common Core. “I thought I was a fairly informed person, and I was shocked that a big shift in control had happened and I hadn’t the slightest idea,” she says.

Erin Tuttle says she noticed the change in the math homework at about the same time as Heather, and she also noticed that her child was bringing home a lot fewer novels and more “Time magazine for kids” — a reflection of the English standards’ emphasis on “informational texts” rather than literature.

These standards are designed not to produce well-educated citizens but to prepare students to enter community colleges and lower-level jobs. All students, not just non-college-material students, are going to be taught to this lower standard.

I want to pause and highlight the significance of Heather and Erin’s testimony. Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle did not get involved in opposing Common Core because of anything Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck said to rile them up, but because of what they saw happening in their own children’s Catholic school. When experts or politicians said that Common Core would not lead to a surrender of local control over curriculum, Heather and Erin knew better. (Ironically, the leverage in Indiana was Tony Bennett’s school-choice program, which made state vouchers available to religious schools, but only if they adopted state tests — which were later quietly switched from ISTEP to the untried Common Core assessments.)

A STEALTH CAMPAIGN TO BYPASS PARENTS
At first Heather thought maybe her ignorance of Common Core was her fault. Maybe, with her kids (as she imagined) safely ensconced in good Catholic schools, she hadn’t paid attention.

That’s when she and Erin started contacting people — “and we found out something more shocking: Nobody had any idea,” Heather told me.

A friend of Heather’s who is a former reporter for a state newspaper and now a teacher didn’t know. Nor did her state senator, Scott Schneider, even though he sat on the state senate’s Education Committee. (In Indiana, as in most states, Common Core was adopted by the Board of Education without consulting the legislature.) Nor, evidently, did the state’s education reporters — Heather could find literally no press coverage of the key moment when Indiana’s Board of Education abandoned its fine state standards and well-regarded state tests in favor of Common Core.

“They brought in David Coleman, the architect of the standards, to give a presentation, they asked a few questions, there was no debate, no cost analysis, just a sales job, and everybody rubber-stamped it,” Heather said.

So began an 18-month journey in which these two mothers probably changed education history.

One reason the media ignored the implementation of Common Core is that the Indiana education debate was dominated by Governor Daniels’s high-profile effort to expand school choice. But as my colleague at the American Principles Project (APP) Emmett McGroarty pointed out to me, nationalizing curriculum standards quietly knifes the school-choice movement in the back. As McGroarty puts it, “What difference does it make if you fund different schools if they all teach the same basic curriculum the same basic way?”

Common Core advocates continue to insist that Common Core does not usurp local control of curriculum, but in practice high-stakes tests keyed to the Common Core standards ensure that curriculum will follow.

Emmett McGroarty turns out to have been a very important person in the journey that Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle made to take down Common Core.

Heather and Erin were helped by many people and groups along the way, including the Pioneer Institute’s Jamie Gass, the Hoover Institution’s Bill Evers, and the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke. Many Indiana organizations played key roles, beginning with the indispensable leadership of the Indiana Tea Party. Other natural allies Heather and Erin contacted and educated in order to build the movement include the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Indiana Family Institute, and the Indiana Association of Home Educators.

But Heather told me that what McGroarty and his colleague Jane Robbins at the American Principles Project did was unique. “I call him the General of this movement,” Heather says. “He strategizes with people in every state. Day or night, Saturday or Sunday, Emmett’s there if you need him.”

The 2012 white paper, co-sponsored by the American Principles Project and the Pioneer Institute, that urged the American Legislative Exchange Council to oppose Common Core became Heather and Erin’s bible. “That white paper is the most important summary; we gave copies to people and said, ‘Read this. If you can’t read the whole thing, read the executive summary.’ Because it covered all the bases, from the quality of the standards to the illegitimate federal data collection to the federal government’s involvement in promoting Common Core,” Heather told me.

But even more influential than its message development was APP’s willingness to give in-depth, hands-on, intensive help whenever Heather and Erin requested it. “Usually you call up a national organization, and they are really nice, they say they are with you, and they send you some helpful research and say, ‘Good luck with that,’” Heather explained. But APP did much more. “All along the way APP has been the greatest source of support mentally, emotionally, and with research that a grassroots organization could have had.”

A big break came in June 2012, when the local tea-party council asked Heather and Erin to develop a flyer that it could use to spread the word to tea-party meetings all across the state; the two women turned to Emmett and Jane to help draft it. The first time Heather and Erin were asked to appear on a local radio show (something they had never done before), they asked Emmett if he would fly in and do the show with them. APP staff would fly out to attend rallies, do local radio shows with Heather and Erin, help them prepare to meet with editorial boards, and act as sounding boards and strategists each step of the way as the grassroots movement grew.

THE FIRST TIME FAILED
In 2012, it looked as if Heather and Erin had failed: Prodded by Governor Daniels, the Indiana legislature voted down a bill to withdraw from Common Core.

Heather was ready to give up. Without hands-on support, she told me, “For sure, I would have given up. But Emmett told me this was just the beginning.”

So Senator Schneider agreed to introduce the bill again, and Heather and Erin went to work crisscrossing the state that summer for rallies and meetings that drew large crowds. The media reluctantly began to take notice.

And then something magical intervened: an election.

Tony Bennett’s reelection as state superintendent of public schools was supposed to be a slam dunk. His opponent, Glenda Ritz, was a Democrat in a deeply Republican state, and she had no name recognition and almost no money; she ended up being outspent by more than 5 to 1 as Bennett’s war chest swelled to $1.5 million with major gifts from Michael Bloomberg’s PAC, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, and other national players.

But Bennett was also the highest-profile public defender of Common Core, while Ritz was raising concerns about it.

When the dust had settled on election day, Bennett had lost, badly. It was the upset of the year.

When Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which backs Common Core), found out late on election night that Bennett had been unseated by the unknown, underfunded underdog Glenda Ritz, he wasn’t happy: “Tony Bennett! Sh*t sh*t sh*t sh*t sh*t,” Petrilli told Huffington Postwriter Joy Resmovits. “You can quote me on that.”

Well, something had clearly hit the fan.

Bennett’s defeat marked a decisive turning point, making every Indiana politician aware how deep voter discontent over Common Core was.

In Indiana, as elsewhere, Common Core proponents have responded to public criticism by accusing the parents of being stupid and uninformed or possibly lying. Common Core, they say, is not a curriculum; it is not being driven by the federal government; it will not interfere with local control of schools.

A few days before Senator Schneider’s anti–Common Core bill passed, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce (which had spent more than $100,000 in ads opposing the bill) lashed out in frustration at the outsized effect Heather and Erin had had on the legislature: “Two moms from Indianapolis, a handful of their friends and a couple dozen small but vocal Tea Party groups. That’s the entire Indiana movement that is advocating for a halt to the Common Core State Standards,” the Chamber of Commerce fumed.

This is not accurate, given the opposition by many education experts, including Professor Milgram, Professor Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas, Professor Diane Ravitch of New York University, Professor Chris Tienken of Seton Hall, and former assistant education secretary Williamson Evers at Hoover.

But never underestimate the power of a mother, especially one who is defending her own child’s future.

What started in Indiana is not staying in Indiana.

Legislation opposing Common Core has been introduced in at least seven other states, and large crowds are turning out at public panels and rallies in states from Tennessee to Idaho. Last month the Michigan state house voted to withhold implementation funding, despite Republican governor Rick Snyder’s support for Common Core; the Missouri senate this week approved a bill calling for statewide hearings on Common Core.

In April the RNC passed a resolution opposing Common Core as “inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.”

On April 20, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R., Mo.) sent a letter — co-signed by 33 other congressmen — to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, asking for a detailed accounting of changes in student-privacy policies associated with the new national database the Obama administration is building as part of its Common Core support. The letter pointed out that the Education Department had already made regulatory changes — without consulting Congress — that appear to circumvent the 1974 law that limits the disclosure to third parties of any data collected on students.

“The Common Core places inappropriate limitations on the influence of states and localities, while burdening them with additional, unfunded expenses,” Representative Luetkemeyer told me via e-mail.

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is taking the lead nationally in shining light on the Obama administration’s key role in promoting Common Core. On April 16, Grassley was joined by seven other GOP senators (including major presidential contenders Ted Cruz and Rand Paul), who signed a letter calling on their colleagues to stop funding the implementation of Common Core, which, they point out, appears to violate federal laws that explicitly forbid the Education Department to influence curriculum or assemble a national database. “I voted against the Economic Stimulus Bill that essentially gave the Department of Education a blank check that was used for Race to the Top, and I have been very critical of how the Department of Education used those funds to push a specific education policy agenda from Washington on the states without specific input from Congress,” Senator Grassley told me via e-mail.

The recent announcement by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, that the AFT wants to delay implementation of the Common Core tests in New York put a bipartisan nail in the coffin of consensus.

And more moms are following the trail Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle blazed.

One major objection to the Common Core standards is that they are not evidence-based. Their effect on academic achievement is simply unknown, because they have not been field-tested anywhere in the world.

But moms have a more elemental objection: The whole operation is a federal power grab over their children’s education. Once a state adopts Common Core, its curriculum goals and assessments are effectively nationalized. And the national standards are effectively privatized, because they are written, owned, and copyrighted by two private trade organizations.

“Legislators are incredulous when they learn the standards and assessments are written by two private trade organizations — the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This creates concern why public education is now controlled by two private organizations,” says Gretchen Logue, a Missouri education activist and one of the co-founders of Truth in American Education, a network of activists and organizations opposing Common Core. “They also don’t like that the standards and assessments are copyrighted and cannot be changed or modified by the states.”

So why are so many good conservatives, from Jeb Bush to Rick Snyder, supporting Common Core? Many conservatives signed on to a clever strategy that asked them to endorse, not the specific standards, but the idea of high “internationally benchmarked” national standards. It is a principle of psychological persuasion that, once you act, in however small a manner, you will feel cognitively compelled to justify your action. Many business leaders with no experience or expertise in education reform have come on board.

This is as good an explanation as any for why so many conservatives are aggressively promoting a set of national standards about which we know, for sure, four things:

a) They are not internationally benchmarked. In fact, for math in particular, they are exactly contrary to the kind of national standards used in high-performing countries.

b) The two major experts on content who were on the Validation Committee reviewing the standards backed out and repudiated them when they saw what the standards actually are.

c) State legislatures and parents were cut out of the loop in evaluating the standards themselves or the cost of implementing them.

d) The Common Core standards are owned by private trade organizations, which parents cannot influence.

These objections, among others, led Diane Ravitch to call on her blog for backing out of Common Core, as the standards were “flawed by the process with which they have been foisted upon the nation.”

Ravitch went on: “The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of the nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.”

I asked Heather how she felt on that historic day she saw the very first anti–Common Core bill in the nation pass. “I was elated!” she told me. “We were up against so many powerful groups with so much money. We fought against all odds, tons of money, a slew of paid lobbyists. All we had was the truth, the facts, and a passion to protect the future of our children. Our victory is proof that our American system of government still works.”

Originally posted at National Review.

When a baby is born, a mother always is nearby. The question is whether a father will be involved in the life of that child and, if so, for how long.

Marriage increases the odds that a man will be committed to both the children that he helps create and to the woman with whom he does so.

The recent oral arguments at the Supreme Court highlighted this and other key questions about redefining marriage as we’ve always understood it in America. That is, marriage is the union of a man and woman as husband and wife to provide any children of that union with a father and a mother.

A leading argument from liberals is that marriage so understood unjustly excludes same-sex relationships. However, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, during arguments on California’s Proposition 8, resisted any characterization that marriage was about “excluding a particular group.”

As Roberts explained: “When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say let’s have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.” . ..

…Another conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, was particularly forceful on this point. In an exchange with lawyer Ted Olson, who argued that laws defining marriage as a male-female union are unconstitutional, Scalia asked “when did it become unconstitutional…? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted? … Has it always been unconstitutional?”

Olson sounded stumped. “I – I can’t answer that question.”

Scalia wasn’t impressed: “I can’t either. That’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem.”

Marriage must be colorblind, but can’t be genderblind he says.  Go here to read the whole thing by this young rising star, co-author of What is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense.

Here is the question that lies so heavy on so many hearts:

What “radicalized” the brothers Tsarnaev?

How could these two young refugees, whom Americans welcomed with open arms, turn so viciously against us all?  What is it that turns young men into monsters?

Why?

The elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, seemed to fit our stereotypes of the Jihadist among us: friendless, failing, restless, a sudden turn to religious fervor, overseas travel. In the first few days, it was hard for the media to find any American who claimed to know and like Tamerlan.

What about Dzhokhar, the younger brother?  This 19 year old came over as a young child, grew up among us, an athlete, a good student, winner of a scholarship from Cambridge, one whose life abounded with American friends, all of whom testify he was a great guy, a normal kid, an American son.

“He’s a really nice kid. Like, honestly, one of the nicest kids I knew. He was friendly to everyone,” said University of Massachusetts sophomore Nathan Young. He described himself as good friends with Dzhokhar in a recent interview with NBC News.

19-year-old Stephen Troio played intramural soccer with Dzhokhar, he said, “I can’t stress how normal a kid he was, like extremely nice.”

Yet this normal nice American kid drops off his backpack, next to a child, and walks away knowing—no, worse hoping—the blast will kill him.  Then Dzhokhar returns to his dorm at the University of Massachusetts, works out at the gym, and parties.

How could such a normal, well-integrated kid, one of those refugees Americans pride ourselves for rescuing from totalitarian oppression, come here and then want to kill us all?

It’s horrifying because we want to believe that someone who could decide to kill innocents in cold blood must be a monster. We don’t want to believe that nice people who are well-integrated, educated Americans, can choose evil.

How, I wonder then, do we explain Dr. Kermit Gosnell?

The crimes he committed in Philadelphia defy the imagination and make the heart shudder.

The natural instinct is to avert one’s eyes.

While the Tsarnaev brothers did their best to bathe Boston in blood in broad daylight; the secret crimes of Dr. Kermit Gosnell came to light at trial in Philadelphia.

The crimes are very different—one was directed at us all, an attack on every American the two brothers could reach.

The other was committed in secret, intended to remain secret, discretely directed against the most vulnerable of us all: the newborn child of a failed abortion whom nobody loves – not even his or her mother.

One set of murders was prompted by the romance of evil, the idea that their lives could achieve significance by killing innocents—and dying covered in innocent blood—for what they imagined as a magnificent cause.

The other American grandfatherly doctor killed for greed who normalized bloodshed in the name of “choice.”

Gosnell was bored with pretending the line between good and evil is merely geographical, and bored with the pretense that the child outside the womb is to be protected.

(Bless all those pro-choicers who hold fast to this one line between abortion and infanticide, by the way, however irrational.  The right to kill, once unleashed, is hard to cabin.)

How do we explain 49-year-old Steven Massof of Pittsburgh who says he received medical training in Grenada but was never licensed to practice as a doctor in this country? He has admitted to snapping the necks of at least 100 babies born alive after late-term abortions.

How do we explain two Delaware doctors who had their licenses suspended for failing to turn Dr. Gosnell in for openly violating the law?

The grand jury report on Gosnell was extremely critical of other doctors in the Philadelphia area who failed to turn in the doctor who was killing women, as well as, babies.

“We are very troubled that almost all of the doctors who treated these women routinely failed to report a fellow physician who was so obviously endangering his patients,” they wrote in January.

Then again the Associated Press notes, the one doctor and medical examiner who did complain to state officials never had their phone calls returned. The grand jury notes that state officials failed to respond appropriately.

The politicians, beginning with pro-abortion GOP governor Tom Ridge in 1994, are complicit in that the laws requiring inspections were not enforced.  Inspections were barriers to access we were told. The junior bureaucrats acquiesced and turned a blind eye to the women dying, being injured, and suffering in a clinic that also deliberately murdered newborns.

Dr. Gosnell’s practice was extremely lucrative, reportedly pulling in a million dollars a year.  But what of his employees whom he trained to kill newborns for ten bucks an hour?

Kareema Cross worked in the clinic for four years; she testified she saw at least 10 babies born alive and then “snipped.”  “I thought they were breathing,” Kareema Cross testified Thursday, saying she saw their chests go up and down. “He would say they’re not really breathing.”

Words are magical things in this postmodern culture, in the same way that laws are only suggestions to be ignored when inconvenient.  First you redefine “life” then you redefine “breathing.”  Why not? Who are we to let reality interfere with desire?

Dr. Gosnell apparently became tired of the hypocrisy our laws promote that make a big deal about the location of the baby. Gosnell began to get hit with damages for leaving parts of the baby in the womb (putting women in emergency rooms, ruining their fertility). So he implemented the bright idea of first inducing labor and then just killing them. For a while Dr. Gosnell dutifully suctioned the brains outside the womb after snipping their necks, but eventually began to wonder why he was following the protocols for late-term abortions after the baby was outside the womb.  Instead snip the spinal cord after delivering the baby.

As I said, bless all you pro-choicers who draw the line at infanticide of newborns.  I mean that sincerely.  It is apparently not a position that makes much sense to a late-term abortionist like Gosnell who has to perform the procedure however.  He asked the question – dangerous surgery inside the womb or a few clean snips outside the womb?

How do we explain Pearl Gosnell, who worked in the clinic for years, saw what Dr. Gosnell did, and then dear reader, she married him?

Cross testified that at least twice a day, six days a week, at least two babies would be born before Dr. Gosnell ever arrived. In Gosnell’s absence,. “Dr.” Steve snipped the babies.  When present, Dr. Gosnell did it himself.

Once Cross saw a large baby delivered into a toilet; the baby struggled “swimming” to try to get out. Another clinic worker, Adrienne Moton, “snipped” that baby’s neck while the mom sat bleeding into the toilet.

In 2009, Cross testified that Linda Williams, another clinic worker, called her over to show her a newborn baby. The baby was breathing. Linda reached down and lifted the baby’s hand up, but the newborn pulled it away on its own strength. Cross said she saw the baby breathing for about 20 minutes before Williams snipped that baby’s neck.

Linda Williams doesn’t appear to know how she could have done that.  According to media reports, she appeared almost catatonic during her testimony, emotionless, taking long pauses before answering questions.

Cross was disturbed enough that she did something. She snapped pictures of the newborns and the filthy conditions and then reported Gosnell to authorities using a false name.  Bless her for that.

But she saw babies being killed in front of her eyes and she never called the police, or cradled one of those newborns in her own arms to protect him or her.  She could have walked out with a live baby.  She kept her ten bucks an hour and her position performing unauthorized medical procedures instead.

She’s a human being with some sort of a conscience, and yet she still stood by and let murder happen, how do we explain that?

The courtroom was transfixed by horrifying photos Cross snapped of Baby Boy A. While the mother lay heavily sedated on a filthy table the biggest baby Cross had seen “just came out.”

Dr. Gosnell then picked up the baby and placed him in a plastic shoe box—Baby Boy A was so big he didn’t fit in shoe box, his arms and legs were draping over the edges.  Suddenly, the baby drew in his arms and legs to fit inside the box; he assumed the “fetal” position on his own volition. Gosnell calmly carried the box over and snipped the baby’s spinal cord.

Four human lives were snuffed out by the Boston bombers; including a precious 8 year old boy.  It is horrifying.  The two men who did this were under the influence of an imported ideology that taught them killing innocents was justified.  One bomber is dead, the other is likely to pay for his crimes with his life.

Hundreds of newborn babies were killed in the Philly abortion clinic. This happened in America. These are our children, sons and daughters of America–both the ones who died, and the ones who killed.

How do we explain evil?

Evil is not foreign, it is not an outsider, and it is not outside us.  It is the temptation within each of us.

Men and women workers who would never have killed newborns on their own were placed in an environment that seemed to teach it was okay.    That’s all it took for them to participate in, or turn a blind eye to, murders performed right in front of them.

We are very good at rationalizing our crimes, at redefining them, unless we stay firmly rooted in the idea that moral truth is not our own creation, but stands apart from our desires and needs. Truth is something we discover not invent.

“The line between good and evil runs through every human heart,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

It’s long been one of my favorite lines.  But I hadn’t read it in context for years; he begins by recognizing his own capacity for evil—and also for good.

The idea came to him while he was imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag:

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and we could create a clean line of separation between them and us, root out the evil ones, and destroy them.

But the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  And, therefore, we need to remind ourselves of the need for a commitment to moral principles, and to the Author of those principles.

Tamerlan was not a monster.  He was a man. He was man who chose freely to do great evil in the name of a perverted ideal – a false god.  The evil he committed was not fore-ordained.  He could have listened to the better angels of his nature.

So could Dr. and Mrs. Gosnell.  So could their employees.  So could the fellow doctors who didn’t report them.  So could the bureaucrats who followed the politicians who decided not to enforce the law.

Our forefathers remind us “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  So too, we learned in these last horrible weeks, is the price of simple human decency.

Thank-you again for spending this time with me on the great questions facing us as a nation: life, marriage, religious liberty.

Warmly,

Maggie

Maggie Gallagher, fellow

American Principles Project

Sources:

Associated Press,  2013. “Ex-Mt. Lebanon Man Testifies He Saw 100 Infants Killed at Philly Abortion Clinic” Philadelphia Tribune-Review, (April 5, 2013). http://triblive.com/usworld/nation/3783403-74/gosnell-clinic-massof#axzz2RIV1iqJT

Daily Mail, 2013. “Bomber Phones His Mother During Shoot-Out With Cops,” U.K. Daily Mail (April 21, 2013) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312767/Tamerlan-Tsarnaeva-Boston-bomber-phoned-MOTHER-final-shoot-told-Mama-I-love-you.html

Daily Mail 2013. “House of Horrors Worker,” U.K. Daily Mail (April 19, 2013)http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2311354/House-horrors-worker-I-saw-10-babies-BREATHE-I-pregnant-Gosnell-pressured-abort.html#ixzz2RIXKfRPZ

Maryclaire Dale and Associated Press,  2013. “Philadelphia ex-clinic worker offers powerful testimony, Washington Post. (April 18, 2013)http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/philadelphia-abortion-clinic-ex-worker-offers-powerful-testimony/2013/04/18/9dcf1672-a869-11e2-8302-3c7e0ea97057_story.html

Steven Ertelt, 2013. “Kermit Gosnell Judge Drops Three Abortion-Infanticide Charges,”LifeNews.com (April 23, 2013).  http://www.lifenews.com/2013/04/23/kermit-gosnell-judge-drops-three-abortion-infanticide-charges/

Miranda Leitsinger, 2013. “Classmates of Suspected Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Suggest ‘Brainwashing’ by Older Brother,” NBCNews.com (April 21, 2013).http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/21/17851546-classmates-of-suspected-bomber-dzhokar-

Elyse Madison, 2013. “Sentencing Day for Abortion Clinic Worker,” NBCPhiladelphia.com  March 19 2013. http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Sentencing-Day-for-Steven-Massof-Abortion-Clinic-Worker-135431128.html

This new poll suggests why: 55 percent of Americans, including 38 percent of pro-lifers, do not know that Planned Parenthood provides any abortions. Just 6 percent of all Americans know Planned Parenthood clinics perform more than 300,000 abortions each year.

Alongside the refusal of television and other media to cover the sensationally disturbing Gosnell trial, this fact alone exposes the extent of the Left’s cultural domination of the media-infotainment landscape. The culture war is a war over the power to “name reality.” The new, new Left is consciously exercising this power, shamelessly.

Cross-posted from The Corner

Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one.

By Rod Dreher • April 11, 2013

Illustration by Michael Hogue

Twenty years ago, new president Bill Clinton stepped on a political landmine when he tried to fulfill a campaign promise to permit gay soldiers to serve openly. Same-sex marriage barely registered as a political cause; the country was then three years away from the Defense of Marriage Act and four years from comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s prime-time coming out.

Then came what historians will one day recall as a cultural revolution. Now we’re entering the endgame of the struggle over gay rights and the meaning of homosexuality. Conservatives have been routed, both in court and increasingly in the court of public opinion. It is commonly believed that the only reason to oppose same-sex marriage is rank bigotry or for religious reasons, neither of which—the argument goes—has any place in determining laws or public standards.

The magnitude of the defeat suffered by moral traditionalists will become ever clearer as older Americans pass from the scene. Poll after poll shows that for the young, homosexuality is normal and gay marriage is no big deal—except, of course, if one opposes it, in which case one has the approximate moral status of a segregationist in the late 1960s.

All this is, in fact, a much bigger deal than most people on both sides realize, and for a reason that eludes even ardent opponents of gay rights. Back in 1993, a cover story in The Nation identified the gay-rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right, and though the word “cosmology” may strike readers as philosophically grandiose, its use now appears downright prophetic. The struggle for the rights of “a small and despised sexual minority” would not have succeeded if the old Christian cosmology had held: put bluntly, the gay-rights cause has succeeded precisely because the Christian cosmology has dissipated in the mind of the West.

Same-sex marriage strikes the decisive blow against the old order. The Nation’s triumphalist rhetoric from two decades ago is not overripe; the radicals appreciated what was at stake far better than did many—especially bourgeois apologists for same-sex marriage as a conservative phenomenon. Gay marriage will indeed change America forever, in ways that are only now becoming visible. For better or for worse, it will make ours a far less Christian culture. It already is doing exactly that.

 

When they were writing the widely acclaimed 2010 book American Grace, a comprehensive study of contemporary religious belief and practice, political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell noticed two inverse trend lines in social-science measures, both starting around 1990.

They found that young Americans coming into adulthood at that time began to accept homosexuality as morally licit in larger numbers. They also observed that younger Americans began more and more to fall away from organized religion. The evangelical boom of the 1970s and 1980s stopped, and if not for a tsunami of Hispanic immigration the U.S. Catholic church would be losing adherents at the same rate as the long-dwindling Protestant mainline.

graphic by Michael Hogue

Over time, the data showed, attitudes on moral issues proved to be strong predictors of religious engagement. In particular, the more liberal one was on homosexuality, the less likely one was to claim religious affiliation. It’s not that younger Americans were becoming atheists. Rather, most of them identify as “spiritual, but not religious.” Combined with atheists and agnostics, these “Nones”—the term is Putnam’s and Campbell’s—comprise the nation’s fastest-growing faith demographic.

Indeed, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center study, the Nones comprise one out of three Americans under 30. This is not simply a matter of young people doing what young people tend to do: keep church at arm’s length until they settle down. Pew’s Greg Smith told NPR that this generation is more religiously unaffiliated than any on record. Putnam—the Harvard scholar best known for his best-selling civic culture study Bowling Alone—has said that there’s no reason to think they will return to church in significant numbers as they age.

Putnam and Campbell were careful to say in American Grace that correlation is not causation, but they did point out that as gay activism moved toward center stage in American political life—around the time of The Nation’s cover story—the vivid public role many Christian leaders took in opposing gay rights alienated young Americans from organized religion.

In a dinner conversation not long after the publication of American Grace, Putnam told me that Christian churches would have to liberalize on sexual teaching if they hoped to retain the loyalty of younger generations. This seems at first like a reasonable conclusion, but the experience of America’s liberal denominations belies that prescription. Mainline Protestant churches, which have been far more accepting of homosexuality and sexual liberation in general, have continued their stark membership decline.

It seems that when people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.

This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

 

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist Christian Smith’s research on what he has termed “moralistic therapeutic deism”—the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the normative version of the faith in contemporary America—suggests that the task will be extremely difficult.

Conservative Christians have lost the fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before anyone even thought same-sex marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.

Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.

They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America, if not American spirituality, is in mortal danger. The future is not foreordained: Taylor shares much of Rieff’s historical analysis but is more hopeful about the potential for renewal. Still, if the faith does not recover, the historical autopsy will conclude that gay marriage was not a cause but a symptom, the sign that revealed the patient’s terminal condition.

Rod Dreher blogs at www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher.