Twelve Twelve Twelve

At 12:12 on 12/12/12 it was only 12 days until Christmas. I slept through it.

Having missed the moment, I have been meditating all day about what to write on this momentous date, 12/12/12. It should be something really stupendous, tremendous or at least significant. Just about every metaphysical system ever dreamed up has a special place for the number 12. Twelve months in a year, twelve signs in the zodiac, twelve hours on the clock (unless you are military,) twelve peers on a jury, twelve days of Christmas, and did I mention that 12 is a dozen which is a typical number of donuts, certainly a metaphysical alignment if I ever heard one.

If you read the Bible closely, the number 12 comes up more than two dozen times. In Judaism it is the number of completeness. It appears throughout Scripture: twelve tribes, twelve apostles, twelve miles each way for the new Jerusalem. It is not recorded, but I would wager that the Garden was twelve square something. I have no doubt that God in his wisdom has built meaning into everything he has done; it often escapes us, but it is there whether we recognize it or not.

However, it is the height of hubris to think that a date on the Gregorian calendar would necessarily have universal symbolic meaning. The calendar we use today was not adopted until 1582 A.D. (or CE if you prefer.) While it is true that most of the civilized world has adopted this method of tracking time, it is by no means the oldest. There are several calendars far older. The date today on a Mayan calendar might be 8/11/3114. The Chinese would have us believe it is 10/29/4710. The Jewish date is 9/28/5773, measuring (as they believe) to the time of creation.

My point is that it is just like us egotistical Westerners to think that the entire universe revolves around us and our calendar. This same kind of thinking led dark ages clerics to burn at the stake heretics who suggested that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Oops! The heretics were right. Barely one generation before our enlightened forefathers settled on a calendar, their grandparents were scoffing at the plans of one Columbus of Genoa who thought he could sail west around the world and reach the east. I admit he miscalculated the distance, but he had the concept right. Thank goodness Ferdinand and Isabella were willing to finance his efforts.

As this momentous day nears its end, I think it is wonderful that thousands of couples were able to book their weddings today; it will be hard for those guys to forget the date of their anniversary (or not.) Hundreds of happy parents are gushing over their newborns who will forever carry 12/12/12 on their birth certificates. In addition, I am certain that many people will have had meaningful things happen today, and they will record 12/12/12 as one of the best or worst days of their lives. Beyond that, I suspect that most people will record absolutely nothing today.

That is a shame. Not only is today the first day of the rest of your life, today is the last day of all the days that have gone before. More importantly, today is the only day you have to live. Instead of looking for significance in astrology, numerology, cosmology or any-ology, you should be looking for the best way to use the moment you are in right now. Maybe it is nine days to the end of the world as Mayan speculators predict (12/21/12.) More important, for more than 150,000 people, today was the end of their world, or I should say their life on earth.

So there it is: it does not matter what today's date is. What matters is what your next address is. Every body ends up in a six foot box in a six foot hole, but every soul lives on through eternity. The most important date in my life was 4/21/63; that's when I sealed the deal on my eternal destiny. Although there is a metaphysical sense in which I have been seated with Jesus in heaven ever since that day, practically speaking, whatever the date on whatever calendar I use I am called to live each day I get on earth as if heaven matters most. I believe it truly does.

Living with Infamy

"I do not believe in using women in combat because women are too fierce." Margaret Mead

Back on December 7, the day that FDR said would live in infamy, I saw a story that should also live there, but it probably won’t, given the slouch toward Gommorah we are rapidly assuming. Blake Page, a West Point cadet, announced his resignation only five months before he would have graduated. There is so much about this story that is ironic, not least of which is the timing, but maybe he gave no thought to its relationship to Pearl Harbor and everything it stands for.

I marveled slightly at the fact that he couldn’t wait another few months after what he describes as an untenable situation he bore up under for years. He claims that he has suffered grievous discrimination due to his sexual preference – one guess as to what that is. He claims that he and his fellow homosexuals are regularly subjected to hazing, bullying, loss of privileges and denied advancement into the select few that make up the top tier of the Academy. Because Obama rescinded don’t-ask-don’t-tell, the cadet was able to openly lead a gay organization on campus. But apparently this wasn’t enough to keep him there for one more semester. He claims he has been suffering with depression over what to do about his cause.

The cadet claims that the discrimination came predominately from what he called “evangelical” Christians in the Academy. He felt that his First Amendment rights to freedom from religion (sic) were being violated. I wonder if some brand of religion shouldn’t be required of all West Point graduates as sine qua non of their preparedness. It is as W. T. Cummings has said, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” This being the case, an atheist leader would be unprepared for the experience of warfare; he would be unprepared to lead his men (and women) into battle.

This story parallels one from a couple weeks ago about female military personnel suing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta because they are not allowed to claim combat experience. They say it restricts their ability to qualify for the higher ranks because combat experience weighs heavily in the process of advancement. They claim that their current assignments, although different from their male peers, still involve them in combat situations, so the distinction is, in their estimation, unconstitutional.

In both of these stories, whether the protagonists are gay, atheist, or female, we have "jumped the shark" in the debate. The military is by nature a very specialized institution. While it is a necessary part of maintaining a civil society, it is nonetheless an atypical environment. While our society may wish for gays, atheists and females to have totally unrestricted access to all other aspects of modern life, there must be an exception carved out for military training and service.

The place of the military establishment in society is purposely on the fringe. As long as there are people in the world who want to kill us and break our things, we need a matching force willing to do likewise. However, I do not think this force must mirror the rest of society; in fact, I hope it does not. I want our military to be trained, practiced experts in doing things in the war zone that would be unthinkable in a school zone, hospital zone, a residential zone or any other zone not embroiled in battle. To do these atypical things requires atypical skills and relationships.

Our society wants to act like men and women are alike in every way except for some obvious biological differences. Society wants to ignore the fact that the biological differences are merely the physical evidence of fundamental ontological differences. Man was created a different being than woman with different responsibilities and different processing equipment (if you will.) Men are from Mars (the god of war) and women are from Venus (the goddess of love.)

Because of the inherent differences between men and women, they relate to one another and to the opposite sex differently. Plug these different styles into a battle scene and problems develop immediately. One obvious issue involves the risk of capture; men don't have to worry about being raped if they are captured; women certainly do. A battlefield commander would be reluctant (or should be) to send women into front line situations where capture is likely. Men in battle will by nature think differently about their comrades-in-arms if they are female. I believe this means that even if women were given the same assignments as men, there would be a de facto differentiation in their front line deployment.

The reason I have been discussing women in battle after starting with Cadet Page's homosexual complaint is because gays serving openly in the military present many of the same issues. The LGBT lobby's argument is that certain people are born in the wrong body; they claim some people are women in men's bodies and vice versa. It follows logically that these women-in-men's-bodies would present the same difficulties as women in women's bodies. The same awkwardness in relationships would surface making the prosecution of war more difficult than it already is.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have been warning about the feminization of our culture. It is interesting that no one seems to be calling for the masculinization of women. Perhaps it is worth asking why that is the case. If true egalitarianism were the driving force, it would be logical for those interested to be advocating for women to become more like men as men are asked to become more like women. This is clearly not the case.

I believe this is true in part because of a strong undercurrent in modern progressive thinking that the traditional patriarchal structure of society is inferior to a matriarchal one. Witness the rise of the goddess movement, Gaia and Wiccan religion, all oriented around feminine power. Even popular literature like Dan Brown's novels pervert religious history by suggesting that the true scion of Jesus was a woman. The Prince of Darkness hates the Father of Light and will do anything to diminish his image in humans.

Lest I be misunderstood, I believe the imageo dei (image of God) is both masculine and feminine; this is why (in my humble opinion) he had to create both male and female: neither would alone be sufficient to reflect the totality of who he is. Because of this I believe we should celebrate gender differences instead of trying to ignore them. I also believe this is why God is so repulsed by homosexuality: this perversion shatters the imagery of his perfect creation. And, with all due respect to the ladies, I think the battlefield is no place for women or for men who think they are women.

No Grown-ups in DC

I have not posted in a while. This is partly due to the fact that I have been writing an essay that was due this week. (Yes, students, teachers are given assignments too.) There were more than a few times in recent weeks when a subject had my fingers itching, but I was so nearly burned out after the election cycle that I forced myself to stay on the bench. I submitted my rough draft yesterday (on time) and I can hold out no longer.

One wants to ask whether there is even one grown-up left in Washington D.C. The most obvious example of our elected officials acting like small children is the so-called fiscal cliff situation. I am not an economist and I don't play one on TV (parody Robert Young,) but it is plain to any thinking adult that no entity, not governmental nor commercial nor domestic, can continue to spend more than it takes in and remain functional. The word "fiscal" softens the real impact of the "cliff" we are approaching.

Fiscal means having to do with money. Money is what makes the world go 'round. A cliff is a sudden drop-off where ostensibly one loses one's footing, perhaps falling out of control into some depth of disaster. The "fiscal cliff" is, therefore, a looming economic disaster. Listening to the Republicans and Democrats take shots at each other you would think the only disaster they have in view is the reduction of their political power.

If a true disaster were pending and the pols would admit it, they would look like they did on September 12, 2001. The mutuality and cooperation on that day seem like something out of a fairy tale in light of the shenanigans in D.C. today. I try to imagine what it would have been like if both parties had seen the airliners coming at the buildings on 9/11. Would the elephants have bellowed at the donkeys that their policies had reduced the covert operations of our government to such a paucity that we could not foresee the attack? Would the donkeys bray at the elephants that the attack would not be pending if Bush had not invaded Iraq? Would they continue slinging slurs until the planes smashed into their targets?

Although the question seems ridiculous, we are witnessing exactly the same scenario if the economic situation is as dire as they propose. In fact, the analogy can be extended: we had seen a precursor to 9/11 a few years prior when attempts were made to topple the towers in 1991 and 1993. Attacks on embassies and the USS Cole should have continued to sound the alarm. The market crash of October of 2008 is the parallel to the 1991 bombing. The housing crisis and subsequent multiple bail-outs are also directly analogous. Yet the children in Washington continue to act as if there are not fiscal planes heading for our financial towers.

The present posturing of the political classes makes one wonder which side of their mouths to listen to. If their shared warning concerning the frightful consequences of going over the cliff are true, then their behavior vis a vis the necessary compromise with their adversaries is worse than childish: it is mutually diabolical. On the other hand, if one party is correctly assessing the situation and the other party is to blame for blocking sincere efforts to find a solution, then the party guilty of blocking is alone contemptible if not traitorous. I suspect the truth may lie somewhere in the middle.

More and more one hears commentators suggesting that the best solution to our current crisis is to do nothing and let the cliff do its work. A businessman who is good friend of mine suggested after Obama was elected in 2008 that the only way people would realize their mistake would be for his policies to drive our nation to its knees. We may be there now: on our knees with a fiscal gun to the back or our head and no way to keep the hit man from pulling the trigger.

The image of being on our knees is doubly appropriate. Financially and politically we have been forced to our knees and an execution seems immanent. But being on our knees also suggests a posture of spiritual and emotional destitution, a place from which there is no recourse but to turn to God in prayer. That too smacks of September 12, 2001. It is sad but true that only destitution seems capable of driving us arrogant, up by the bootstraps Americans to a place of need. Choose your analogy: "Jesus Take the Wheel" as Carrie Underwood sang a few years back, or, "Into thy hands I commend my spirit," as Jesus said at his execution. Either implies that childlike faith Jesus commended. If only our representatives would start acting childlike instead of childish.

A Modest Proposal (2012)

I have an answer to the divided political situation that plagues America.

Divide. That seems to be the only workable solution in a country where we split almost right down the middle on virtually all the fundamental issues we face. Both parties say there must be compromise to get anything done, but neither wants to make any real concessions to reach an agreement. Obama's idea of compromise is Republicans agreeing to his agenda. The Republican efforts at compromise tend to look like the George W. Bush era which, frankly, was satisfying to neither conservatives nor liberals.

Why not just give up on the idea that we need to remain fifty united states? Who says fifty is a magic number anyway. Have you looked at the electoral map of the last election? Geography doesn't really matter that much in our digital age, but for convenience sake, we could remain pretty contiguous in the new nation (under God) I propose. The "other guys" would be splintered and scattered, but that seems poetically justifiable. (Click this link to see my map.)

Most of  the current states that are equally divided can be partitioned easily. Virginia lets D.C. annex the surrounding counties. Pennsylvania can split somewhere between the I-76 and I-80 corridors. Ohio could do the same using I-70 and I-80. Michigan just gives the south east counties to North Ohio. They wanted that land back in the Toledo War anyway, so let them have it. (I would let them take everything west to Lansing if they wanted, although I know some State fans who would object.) We may have to continue the division across northern Indiana and Illinois even though I realize that cuts off West Michigan (my new home state) from her sisters to the south. I could live with that since I am not giving up the entire Great Lakes to the other guys. Add parts of Iowa and pretty much all of Wisconsin and Minnesota and you have the tier complete.

Moving out west, I suspect if division fever really strikes, there might be three different countries along the coast. Seattle is so distinctly different from San Francisco which is different from San Diego that I don't see them making nice. Oregon would probably go along with Washington, but I don't know the politics there well enough to predict. I would love to see San Diego vote with our side; they have the best weather anywhere and that would give us a Pacific seaport. This would be contiguous with the southern tier also. I wouldn't complain if Nevada went with the rest of the left coast fruitcakes; gambling and deserts would be no loss.

So there you have it. I know it gets a little sloppy with my insistance on keeping West Michigan and the U.P. in our camp. There are doubtless hundreds of other similar issues buried in my simplistic division of states with which I am unfamiliar. I don't care. This is what I call compromise. As for the names of these two new nations, I propose the Central States of America for our side and the Discontinuous Democratic Socialist Atheist Union of Like-minded Liberals for their side. Or they can pick their own name.

They can have the Navy and the Marines and the Coast Guard; we will take the Army and the Air Force. They can have the paper dollar and we will go back on the gold standard. We will keep Old Glory and they can have the LGBT flag or whatever they want. We will declare English the official language of our country, but we will universally teach Spanish as a second language in our schools and invite everyone to assimilate into our traditional American culture. We will keep the borders open with the DDSAULL (or whatever they choose to call themselves,) but we will close the border with Mexico and invite everyone who lives in our territory to become citizens with all the rights and privileges and responsibilities pertaining thereto.

Any citizen who can pass a rigorous background check (parameters to be decided) can carry a weapon openly or concealed. All religions will be free to practice as they wish, but the Bible will be brought back into schools and used as a moral foundation for all students. Prayer to whatever God one chooses will be welcomed. Homosexual practices will be treated the same as smoking or alcohol abuse; these behaviors create unwanted health problems and shorten life expectancy and as such should be warned against, not promoted. This is not a moral judgment; it is a general welfare consideration.

We will have no IRS. Revenue will be generated by a consumption tax on all purchases except groceries. Manufacturers will pay the tax on capital expenditures but not raw materials (trying to avoid double taxation.) Deficit spending and government borrowing will be illegal; all spending will be based on projection of revenue. All government entities will be required to operate under a balanced budget which will be submitted prior to the fiscal year for which it applies. Medicare and Social Security allotments will be deducted from revenue on a per capita actuarial basis and placed in escrow from which payments will be made. A separate fund will be established for paying present citizens already receiving payments.

As for foreign policy, we will not join the United Nations. We will seek friendly relations with any nation that wishes to deal openly and honestly with us and their own people. We will not have military bases in any other nations unless they invite us and pick up at least half the tab. The same deal goes for defending our allies. If they can't put up at least half of their own defense, we will not help them fight their battles. Fair trade treaties will be welcomed with any nation that applies.

There it is. I know this has been a rant: what I would do if I were king of the world. I needed this. After last Tuesday, I needed this. It was fun to think about. Could it ever happen? You tell me.

The Real Cliff is Behind Us

There must be a reason why this country could elect Obama twice.

So I’m standing in line to vote Tuesday and I hear a female voice behind me explaining how she made her voting choices saying, “I only look at the .orgs; the .coms are all biased.” Shocked, I turned around enough to see she was a twenty-something blonde in sweats and running shoes talking to an older matronly looking woman. My first thought was to say, “What are you; stupid or something?” I stifled that and said, “Oh, I knew you had to be blonde to make a comment as stupid as that one.” Okay, I didn’t say that either, but I wanted to.

This is how we elect someone as unqualified and decidedly incompetent as Barak Obama to a second term. All economic indicators are worse now than when Obama was elected in 2008. More people are unemployed and more on government assistance than during the Bush years. Our foreign policy is in a shambles. Think assassination of ambassadors and shooting at drones in international air space. Obama has commited to the public record more lies than the prevaricator-in-chief Bill Clinton, yet none of this information is making it to the blonde twenty-somethings who have voting rights. I wonder if the founding fathers’ idea that only certain select people should vote has merit.

The real problem is the media environment and education system we have fostered in America. Our education system no longer teaches the skill of critical thinking. We spoon feed answers to pre-selected questions. This is what I find my students in college expecting from me. The concept of coming to an answer through a process of reasoning is completely foreign to most of my students. Combine this with a media culture that feeds disinformation or outright falsehoods in attractive, entertaining packages (The Daily Show, for example) and you have a recipe for a misinformed electorate.

I typically don’t go in for conspiracy theories. I was not behind the movement to prove Obama was not born in the US, although I still wonder why he couldn’t provide a birth certificate. I know exactly where mine is. I didn’t agree with the critics who claimed Obama was a secret Muslim, although I know from his policies and pastors he is not the kind of Christian I am. No pastor of mine has ever said, “God damn America.” The bottom line is that it does not take a conspiracy theory to see that the media deserves at least part of the credit for Obama’s reelection. Common sense says that his record should have doomed his reelection from the beginning. But since the media did not allow his true record to be shown, the voters like the blonde behind me in the voting line did not see the whole story and couldn’t vote on the facts. Add to that her misconceived idea that moveon.org is not biased.

Was it by some coincidence we didn’t learn about the President’s failure in the Benghazi affair until after the election. Why is it that the fiscal cliff everybody talks about won’t be dealt with until after the election. The so-called auto bail-out by the President will never be shown as the government take-over it was because the media won’t tell it like it is. The loss of religious liberty hidden in Obamacare won’t make it to the public consciousness. Each of these unwritten stories remain because the major media outlets are infatuated with Obama.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said our republic would not survive without an educated electorate. I am afraid we have reached the point where survival is unlikely. If there are many more like the blonde behind me in the voting line, we are doomed. I suspect I am late coming to this conclusion; we just reelected a man who had no business being President in the first term. That he was reelected proves there is a cliff behind us worse than the so-called fiscal cliff ahead. It was the educated electorate cliff, and we have already flown over the edge.

Don't Ask Why

If a good god is in control, how can a 12 year old get raped by her father?

The eternal question of why bad things happen to good people resurfaced this week with the comments by Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock. He was widely reported as saying that rape is God's will. What he said precisely was, "Life is that gift from God. I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” His comment propelled many people into a philosophical highdive into the deep end of the theology pool.

John South, a jail chaplain from Arizona, said that he knew of a twelve year old who was being raped repeatedly by her father. She came to the jail pregnant. CNN reports that South said, "that the girl... opted for an abortion and her father was ultimately convicted of rape. He said he grappled often with why she was subjected to such horrendous pain and torture, mentally, physically and emotionally. 'Did it shake my faith? No,' South said. 'Did I ask God why? Of course.'”

CNN also sought comment from Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  Kushner said Mourdock’s remarks were off-base: “He’s invoking the will of God where it is not appropriate." The Catholic perspective was provided by Father Tom Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. He said he found Mourdock’s comments troubling from a Catholic perspective because “God does not want rape to happen. Someone getting pregnant through rape simply means biology continues to function. That doesn’t mean God wills it."

So where is God in all this. People like Kushner set up a false dilemma by saying either God is not good, or else He is not all-powerful, both characteristics which traditional Bible scholars hold to be true. This is a false dilemma because it imagines a world where God must operate according to Rabbi Kushner's rules. In the real world created by the God of the Bible, evil exists because sin entered when Adam and Eve chose to reject God's perfect plan. The entire Bible narrative is about God's work to redeem the fallen creation, not least of all, sinful humans.

Father Reese makes a different but no less misleading suggestion that some things happen outside of God's will. Here things get sticky, and many people jump ship theologically speaking because the truth is not pretty. The truth as orthodox Christianity has presented it for centuries is that God is sovereign over all His creation. This uncomfortable position includes the question of evil. The book of Job and the record of God's dealing with recalcitrant Israel prove this to be the case, as it must be. If God were not in control of everything, then logic dictates that He could ultimately be in control of nothing.

John South said his experience with the pregnant incest victim made him ask God why she was subjected to such horror. This is precisely where most people fall victim to humanistic thinking. There are many things about God that we cannot know. The realm of "why" is filled with those things. The things we can know about God are revealed in the Scriptures and are accessible to anyone who will sincerely look for them. But we must not look only for answers we like. It may be that God, being sovereign will choose to do things mere mortals cannot understand. He may do things, allow things we will honestly hate.

In a fallen world, 12 year olds will be raped. This is not God's fault; this is man's fault for turning from God's perfect ways. The good news is that we are not trapped in the downward spiral of evil that assaults us every waking moment. We have a Savior; we have an escape; we have the assurance that even the worst imaginable thing can be turned into good eventually by the good God who works all things together for His purposes. We must not ask God why; we must ask what: what am I to learn from this. And then we must wait patiently for the day when evil is removed from the earth and righteoussness reigns. The only legitimate why quiestion might be, "Why not today?"

Say What You Mean, Joe

I never thought I'd find myself supporting Joe Biden over Paul Ryan.

Maybe it is going too far to say I support Biden's position, but I think he may have stated the role of personal faith in politics correctly last night in his debate with Paul Ryan. Moderator Martha Raddatz pointed out that both debaters were Catholic and asked how that faith would affect their governing.

Ryan said he believed that life begins at conception then went straight to the campaign position that abortion should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother. This position is not logically sustainable (see my earlier post,) nor is it proper Catholic teaching. According to Catholics for Choice, "The Catholic church hierarchy today does not permit abortion in any instance, not even in case of rape or as a direct way of saving the life of a pregnant woman." Historically, given the tough choice between saving a mother or her child, the Catholic position has been to save the child. The Ryan position fails both as a reflection of his faith and as a logically defensible argument.

Biden, on the other hand, gave a slightly more consistent answer. He said he too believed that life begins at conception and was against abortion as a personal matter of faith. However, he said that he did not believe he had the right to impose his religious beliefs on society. Much as I hate to say it, I must agree with Joe; America was founded as and continues to be a place where citizens may embrace any religion or none at all with no interference from government - almost.

The flaw in the pro-choicers' argument stems from the basic position outlined by both men in last night's debate: life begins at conception. While the Judeo-Christian scriptures do support this claim, it is more than a religious principle. Logic firmly supports it as well. There is no way to distinguish between the fertilized egg and the post-partum result of that fertilization. The humanity of the life form is different only by degree. As I said in my earlier post, it is a slippery slope to begin judging which humans are human enough to deserve to live.

Ryan (and ostensibly his running mate) wants to allow the murder of innocents if circumstances seem to warrant it. This violates the principles of both faith and reason. Biden (and Obama) are equally inconsistent. It sounds democratic (small "d") to say one will not allow personal ideology to influence public policy. Forgetting the ridiculous impossibility of such a position, this too violates faith and reason. It is unreasonable because one who believes that life begins at conception (a logical conclusion) cannot condone the taking of that life for any reason. It violates Joe's faith because his church disagrees.

Ken Ham has been correctly preaching for years that as Christians in society, we should focus on battling the foundational flaws in humanistic philosophy (aka religion,) rather than merely opposing its policies. Laws must be founded on some ideal; moral relativism leads to anarchy when what's right for you may not be right for me. To see the frightening result of such thinking, one need only read a few words by such Pragmatists as the old William James and John Dewey or the newer spokesmen, Cornel West and Richard Rorty. Peter Singer, a utilitarian pragmatist from Princeton, who appears to have ice water in his veins, will positively terrify any thoughtful, considerate human being with his support of outright infanticide and euthanasia.

I still plan to vote for Romney/Ryan because I believe their position on abortion is closer to mine than Obama/Biden, but I wish someone would stake out a truly pro-life position. I also wish Christian politicians would stop wobbling on their faith commitment. Everyone makes decisions based on some assumption about truth. This nation was unashamedly founded on the assumption that a Creator invested humans with inalienable rights and the government's job is to protect those rights.

Muslims, Bhuddists and atheists are all safe under an American government anchored to Biblical principles. The same cannot be said for Christians under a Muslim government. It certainly would not be true if Peter Singer were king. And apparently, there will still be a few of the unborn who will not be safe even under a Romney/Ryan administration. That's a shame.