National Association of Conservative Life Underwriters

Last night I was privileged to participate, along with a number of colleagues in the conservative media, in a taping of tonight's Hannity TV special vetting President Obama.

Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner, radio host David Webb, journalist Erik Rush, Dr. Alveda King and the Daily Caller's Michelle Fields take star turns dissecting Obama's much un-examined autobiography Dreams from My Father, with the rest of us discussing as the show moves along.

Take a look tonight on Fox at 9pm.

And yes...in this space we will be returning to the subject of Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama -- and the Romney campaign -- next week.

Thanks again to our host, Sean Hannity. He is fearless. Which, of course, is exactly why Mr. Obama seems to be obsessed with Hannity, attacking him in the latest version of Dreams from My Father. At the conclusion of the book's re-issue is the inclusion of an excerpt from Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope in which Obama snarls: 

When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. 

Coulter and Hannity as "sourpusses"? This is the laughable description of a deeply irritated president who is used to nothing but the kind of adoring coverage he gets from the mainstream media, where anchors like Chris Matthews get a "thrill" going up their leg whenever Obama speaks.

So tune in to Hannity tonight. We'll all be baying across the television screen together. Aroooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! 

Chicago Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood will apparently announce his retirement later today.

The announcement may come following this afternoon's game at Wrigley Field against the crosstown rival White Sox as interleague play begins.

Wood, who turns 35 next month, has struggled this season. In nine appearances out of the bullpen, Wood has gone 0-2 with an 8.64 ERA surrendering eight runs in eight and a third innings pitched and has walked more than twice as many batters as he has struck out (11:5).

In a classy move by the Cubs, it looks like Wood will get to pitch one more time in front of Cubs fans before he hangs it up.

Wood was the Cubs first round pick in the 1995 MLB draft and would make his MLB debut in 1998. In his fifth big league appearance, on May 6, 1998, Wood set a National League record and tied a major league record held by Roger Clemens (and later Randy Johnson) by striking out 20 Houston Astros on a one-hit complete game shutout.

Wood won 13 games that season and was named NL Rookie of the Year as the Cubs won the NL Wild Card.

However, injuries would soon become Wood's constant companion. He missed the entire 1999 season due to Tommy John surgery. In all, Wood would be placed on the Disabled List 16 times including earlier this season due to a sore shoulder.

His best season came in 2003 when Wood won a career high 14 games and led the NL in strikeouts with 266 as he and Mark Prior led the team to the NL Central Division title. Of course, the Cubs were five outs away from going to the World Series in Game 6 of the NLCS until Luis Castillo hit that ball down the leftfield line. What is forgotten is that there was a Game 7 which Wood started. He even hit a two-run homerun in the second inning to tie the game at 3-3. Unfortunately, the Marlins took the lead in the fifth and Wood was removed in the sixth having given up seven runs. There would be no joy in Wrigleyville and Steve Bartman had nothing to do with it.

The Cubs converted Wood into a reliever late in the 2007 season and in 2008 would record 34 saves for the Cubs who won another NL Central title before being dispatched by the Dodgers in the NLDS.

After more than a decade in a Cubs uniform, Wood signed a two-year deal with the Cleveland Indians prior to the 2009 season. However, Wood would be traded to the New York Yankees in mid-2010 where he pitched effectively as an eighth inning set up man for Mariano Rivera. But after the Yankees declined to sign him in 2011, Wood returned to Wrigley.

If not for injuries, Wood could have been amongst the all-time greats. But he certainly had flashes of greatness and never made excuses when things weren't so great which made him one of the most popular players in Cubs history.

The Death of Liberalism
By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
(Thomas Nelson, 208 pages, $19.99)

In the army of American conservatives, Bob Tyrrell packs a unique punch. Not for him the heavy artillery of a Charles Krauthammer or a George Will, nor the shock troops of the Kristols and Podhoretzes, père et fils. Instead, Tyrrell resembles the Navy SEALs: a special force who operates behind enemy lines, light on his feet and breathtaking in his daring. He has been harrying the forces of the left for nigh on half a century, but he has never lost his taste for hand-to-hand combat, nor his impish wit. When Bill Buckley died, the American Right lost its intellectual leader, and he has yet to be replaced; but as long as Bob Tyrrell has anything to do with it, conservatives will go on taking the fight to their opponents. It is not in his nature to adopt the comfortable role of Grand Old Man; he may be a veteran of countless journalistic campaigns, but his eagle eye is firmly focused on the future of the republic. In fact, the aptly named R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. may only just be reaching his prime. Proof that Tyrrell possesses the elixir of eternal youth is his new book, The Death of Liberalism. This obituary for the Obama era is as sprightly and mischievous as we have come to expect from his pen, but it gains additional force from two factors.

The first is the sheer awfulness of the destination toward which the land of Manifest Destiny seems to be headed under the enlightened despotism of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief. Thus the diagnosis of what ails America that Dr. Tyrrell has been giving us for forty years has now been overtaken by events; hence his prognosis is more likely to be taken seriously. It will be taken seriously, that is, at least by those Americans (the vast majority) who love their country, do not relish the wave of pessimism now sweeping it, and, rather than treating its decline as a given fact, want something to be done about reversing it. It is not, after all, America that is in decline, but American Liberalism. Only someone who identifies completely the fortunes of Liberalism with those of the United States; who regards those who do not share his Liberal politics as Un-American; who thinks those who “cling to guns or religion” are of no account; only such a person could occupy (I use the word deliberately) the White House for three years without any discernible inkling of what makes America exceptional.

The second factor is the thoroughness of his post mortem on the cadaverous relics of Liberalism. Whether in theory or practice, the grisly evidence that rigor mortis set in long ago is laid out here on the slab for inspection. Tracing the history of the movement from its heyday in the Thirties and Forties, through the Coat and Tie Radicals of the Sixties to the Stealth Socialists of the present, Tyrrell gives the reader chapter and verse of who said what, when, and to whom. But that is not all. The intellectual defects of the Liberal project are also set out in clinical detail, from Rousseau to Rawls and Rorty, along with the follies of the academic and journalistic cheerleaders for the (now somewhat moth-eaten) New Politics, who have done their best to indoctrinate generations of students with the historical inevitability of Liberalism.

Tyrrell follows Buckley in making an orthographical distinction between the classical liberals of the remote past—for whom the preservation of liberty really was a touchstone—and the Liberals of modern times. That capital “L” stands for a radical ideology that is the very opposite of the political creed of the Founding Fathers and their greatest successors, from Lincoln to Reagan. They all subscribed to ideas which are nowadays regarded as conservative—fidelity to the Constitution and the Rule of Law, to the Judeo-Christian ethics of the Bible, to the freedom of the market, a limited government, and representative democracy. Tyrrell traces the origins of postwar Liberalism back to the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century. One of their leaders, Woodrow Wilson, demonstrated a characteristic Progressive attitude when he demanded “permission...to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle,” by which he meant that “a nation is a living thing and not a machine.” But as Tyrrell points out, the Founding Fathers intended no such thing. Their checks and balances, their separation of powers, already incorporated the evolutionary principle that Wilson invoked, allowing interests to compete but preventing the tyranny of the majority or of Big Government.

THE ARROGANCE OF the Progressives was inherited by the Liberals, whose sense of moral superiority sometimes renders them incapable of engaging in debate with conservatives—especially when that moralism is augmented by intellectual and social snobbery. It is ludicrous to suppose that the Liberal media would condescend to give a white working-class Catholic the same generous treatment as they once gave a black middle-class Harvard academic. Yet former Senator Santorum has at least as strong credentials to run for President as Senator Obama had four years ago.

The suffocating self-righteousness of the Liberal establishment blinds it to the fact that it has, as Tyrrell shows, turned its back on the very people who once formed the backbone of the Democratic Party. And those electors in turn have turned their backs on the Liberals: the striving, upwardly mobile working and middle classes that elected Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson have mostly given up on a party that no longer speaks for them or the things they hold dear. Hubert Humphrey was one of the last of the old-style Democrats who could properly claim to speak for this grand coalition of working and middle-class voters, which used anti-Communist labor unions, church, and synagogue to incorporate ethnic communities into Democratic politics. The coalition had proved so formidable that even an arch-conservative like Nixon was obliged to trim his sails in order to defeat Humphrey in 1968. Yet within a few years, the Democrats had chosen George McGovern, a Liberal of the most extreme hue, as their leader. Ever since McGovern, the Democratic Party has been held hostage by well-heeled Liberals, even if most presidential candidates have run as moderates. And, as Charles Murray shows in his new book Coming Apart, these upper class Liberals loathe middle-class values.

What is the explanation for this hijacking of one of the world’s most formidable electoral machines? In a word—and it is a word of Tyrrell’s coinage—it was the Kultursmog. Back in Truman’s time, his aide Clark Clifford observed with great prescience: “The ‘right’ may have the money, but the ‘left’ has always had the pen.” Throughout the New Deal and the war, FDR enabled Liberals to avoid making hard choices: they could flirt with Communism without embracing it. Then, in what Tyrrell calls “Liberalism’s first civil war” of the late Forties, the Liberals had to decide whether to support former Vice President Henry Wallace, who ran against Truman on a Progressive ticket, surrounded and manipulated by the Communists and fellow travelers he ludicrously dubbed “Gideon’s Army.” To their credit, the Liberals chose Truman. But over the next few decades, the tough-minded Liberal anti-Communism typified by Max Ascoli and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was supplanted by the sentimental, paranoid, and illiberal Liberalism that has gradually come to permeate so much of American public life. The Kultursmog is the cultural-political complex—Liberalism’s answer to the military-industrial complex.

Some of the characteristic vices of Liberalism have been there from the start: the arrogance and smugness; the readiness to spend other people’s money; the sense of entitlement, as if they owned the political mainstream and all other views were extreme. Other vices, however, have emerged mainly since the Sixties: the fear of progress and prosperity, propped up by a self-serving industry that feeds on apocalyptic anxieties; the assumption that the West in general and America in particular are always to blame and always in decline; the fatal embrace of libertine lifestyles and of moral and cultural relativism; the refusal even to engage with conservatives, let alone to compromise with them for the sake of all; the ascendency of feelings over facts, public displays of emotion as a substitute for action; above all, a total and lethal lack of any sense of humor.

Contemporary Liberalism does not add up to an attractive package of beliefs. This ought not to matter to those who are not Liberals and have no stake in their privileged status. But the regulation of professional and personal relationships by political correctness and the usurpation of the legal system by the hypertrophy of human rights mean that Liberal ideology has insinuated itself into more and more spheres of private and public life. Because Liberals have insisted that countless fields in which people used to mind their own business should instead become the Government’s business, dealing with the Liberal mindset has become everybody’s business. That is why Bob Tyrrell’s book is indispensable.

THE TITLE OF THE BOOK ALONE should lift the spirits. This is not one of those gloomy tomes that list endless outrageous case-histories of ordinary folks being humiliated by officialdom or that play on the conservative penchant for pessimism. In 2009, when the euphoria surrounding Obama’s victory had yet to be dispelled, Sam Tanenhaus rushed out an ephemeral exercise in Schadenfreude: The Death of Conservatism. With the birth of the Tea Party that year, even the most fanatical Liberals were forced to concede that reports of the death of conservatism had been exaggerated.

Tyrrell believes on the contrary that it is Liberalism, not conservatism, that is moribund, having been intellectually dead for decades, and he sets out to prove it. Marx claimed that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its contradictions; he was wrong, of course, but in 1989 his own brainchild, Communism, actually did just that. Its collapse did grievous collateral damage to social democracy (the European term for what Americans call Liberalism). The left suffered a mortal blow to its credibility everywhere at the hands of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Various bids were made to resurrect the old Liberal doctrines under new guises, but all failed. The most successful center-left politicians have been those, such as Tony Blair, who conceded that the game was up and embraced a more limited role for government, at least in the economy.

Then the financial crisis exhumed Liberalism from the graveyard of history. Barack Obama may not look like a zombie, but in Tyrrell’s view that is precisely what he is. His administration has no new ideas and can have none because Liberalism is intellectually dead. The President himself Tyrrell describes as the Stealth Socialist, because of his relentless drive to bring the U.S. economy under his control, while leaving posterity to pay the check. In just three years, he has nearly doubled national debt from 40.3 percent of GDP to 72 percent. Even if he loses in November, his legacy will be the fiscal equivalent of the Augean stables—but where is the Republican Hercules to clean them out? It is not easy to imagine Romney, say, getting his mitts dirty in the ways that will be necessary to get America back on track.

What, though, if Obama wins again? Stealth Socialism is not the end of the story. After that, argues Tyrrell, comes Friendly Fascism. Given a second term and control of both houses of Congress, the President would mutate into a dictator in all but name. “The blueprint for the future of the American left, if it can ever resurrect, is fascism with a friendly face.” From Obamacare to the Dodd-Frank Act, the net effect of Obama’s policies is to reduce democratic oversight over the executive. Sinister new agencies, such as the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau, will enforce the new order.

Tyrrell is not the first to issue such warnings: Jonah Goldberg wrote a book and a blog entitled “Liberal Fascism,” and others too have played variations on the theme. On this point I part company from Tyrrell, for the same reason that I don’t like it when Liberals accuse conservatives of being fascists—as the late Tony Judt denounces Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich in his posthumous book Thinking the Twentieth Century. Mussolini may have started out as a leftist schoolteacher, but Obama is no Mussolini.

Tyrrell, though, concedes that this Liberal fascism will remain “an unrealized American nightmare” if the electorate follows through the repudiation of the Democrats that began in 2010. “The numbers,” as Tyrrell repeatedly reminds us, “are against the zombies. They are outnumbered two to one by the conservatives, and when we throw in the moderates, or independents as they are called, it gets worse...President Obama is dead in the water.”

Amen to that. But there is a real danger: conservative pessimism. The Kultursmog would have us think that Obama is sailing to an easy victory. If the Republican candidate, whoever it may be, loses heart and starts to believe this, he may appear as what used to be called a trimmer—a wavering, havering appeaser, jettisoning moral principles as he goes in a last desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with voters. The danger to America is not that, given a chance, Obama would morph into il Duce in designer gear. It is that a pseudo-conservative Republican, lacking what the late James Q. Wilson called “moral sense,” will hand over the White House to the zombies for another four years.

I am used to surprises from the New York Times—a newspaper so far from me culturally and politically it might as well be a daily bulletin about life in a parallel universe—but last August I read a personal essay in the “Modern Love” space of the “Styles” section that really brought me up short. “My Husband is Now My Wife” (quite a tabloidy title for this genteel newspaper) was about the deeply ambivalent day the author escorted her husband to a hospital for surgery in which he would “take his first surgical step into womanhood.”

I’m a jaded ex-Manhattanite, awright? “Sexual reassignment surgery,” as it is called, is not news. I know about the clinics in Colorado where they slice up existing organs and then do Play-Doh sculpturing with the tissue that’s left. The surgery thing has been going on since the sixties. And I know from cross-dressing. On my Upper West Side block it was not uncommon to encounter a neighbor—skinny, middle-aged, bald pate surrounded by a cap of stringy graying locks—taking his daily constitutional…on roller skates, wearing a tiara and a pink tutu, blessing passersby with a Tinkerbell wand.

So it wasn’t the soo-last-century, Dude-Looks-Like-a-Lady part that startled, it was the part near the end where the author lets slip that all her fussing about losing a husband and gaining a wife was actually over a hospital stay in which her husband would have “facial feminization surgery, a not uncommon procedure in male-to-female transitions, in which a surgeon carves out a more femininely proportioned version of a male face.”

“In my husband’s case,” she wrote, “this meant higher eyebrows, a smaller nose and a more pronounced chin. A few months later, his Adam’s apple would be shaved down and he would receive breast implants.”

Almost as if it was an afterthought, she added “genital surgery would follow” on some unspecified date.

OK, he hadn’t had the genital surgery yet. It was unclear if he ever would. Certainly, for the average woman, the breast part could be hard to take. But the point is, at the moment, “Husband” had just messed around with his face. So what entitled him to claim membership in the sorority of majestic, complex, mysterious creatures called Women? It was actually a bit presumptuous. (If I were a feminist I would say, “How very male.”)

But here we had our author, one Diane Daniel of North Carolina, telling herself sternly that she must remember to stop referring to Husband with “him,” “his,” and “he.” We meet the couple’s therapist who has been “suggesting for months” that Daniel “use female pronouns at home” when addressing Husband, even before he went into the hospital:

“I will when I need to,” I’d told her on our last visit. “But for now he’s still a man to me.” I’d turned to my husband, dressed in jeans and a black button-down shirt. “When I look at you, hon, I see a man.”

“But she’s a woman,” our therapist countered, her words slicing through my denial.

By the end of the essay, Daniel has re-educated herself. Now she gently corrects nurses when they use the “incorrect” pronoun:

“After he eats a little something, we’ll give him pain pills,” a nurse said.

“Could you say ‘she’?” I asked gently.

Once I looked in to it, I found more “Modern Love” columns where it was just assumed the reader has already accepted that “gender identity” (what you decide you are) trumps “gender assigned at birth” (what your body says you are). There was, for instance, the woman who started her essay by writing, “Before we met, my partner had changed names from a female-sounding one to a male one…”

…and by the time we were together, everyone we knew either called him by this new name or spoke of him with male pronouns. He identified himself as a transgender man, woman to man. It wasn’t until two years after we began dating that he decided to have his breasts removed. For him, chest surgery was the next step in transitioning genders, a symbolic and physical gesture of leaving womanhood behind.

This essay, written by a younger woman than Daniel, was much more philosophically evolved. Apparently this boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, hadn’t had any medical interventions at all. She merely “identified himself as a transgender man” and began dressing as a man (what does that mean nowadays anyway?) and that was enough, the author says, for everyone they knew to either call him by this new name or speak of him with male pronouns.

WELCOME TO THE Brave New World of “gender identity” versus stick-in-the-mud old “gender.” This subjective aspect—the demand that the world recognize you as what you think you are, simply because you’ve decided you are—is new. It turns out law and theory to support this new definition have been proliferating quietly for quite some time as well.

In other words, when we stodgy old conservatives, not attuned to the latest reverberations of the “progressive” world, think of a “transsexual” or (this is much more correct) a “transgendered person,” we’re probably imagining, say, Christine Jorgensen (if we’re really old) or Jan Morris, i.e., someone who made a good old Protestant Work Ethic effort to “transition” to the other sex. We are thinking of people who have at least put a considerable amount of effort and in most cases, a lot of money, like their life savings, into this illusory project of “becoming the other sex.”

The various stodgy old state laws (it is the states that control issuance of the all-important birth certificate) reflect this attachment to physical reality versus subjectivity. Most state laws are still like those in New York City, which, since 1971, has been willing to issue a “corrected” birth certificate to a transgender person provided he or she is able to prove, via a detailed medical record, that “the applicant has undergone ‘convertive’ surgery, which has generally but not exclusively been interpreted by the Department [of Health and Mental Hygiene] to mean genital surgery.”

This onerous surgery requirement has been excised in a several states but that’s hardly enough, say the gender activists. As lawyer Christopher Daley of the very activist Transgender Law Center explains, a transgender person is one “whose internal understanding of their own gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.…Transgender persons seek to live in accordance with the sex that takes proper account of the sex of their brain…” (The Transgender Law Center is apparently even so uncomfortable with the designations like “men’s room” or “women’s toilet” that they refer to “gendered” public bathrooms as “bathrooms intended for people who identify with a particular gender.”)

In the future, as Kristina Wertz of the Transgender Law Center puts it, all of official America will recognize “that gender identity is not dependent upon anatomy or the ability to access expensive medical treatment.” Wertz applauded the State Department for its June 2010 policy change, a small but important one, stating that applicants wishing to change the gender markers on their passports will only need to present certification that they have “undergone appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.” The State of Vermont has amended its law to say that “hormonal or other treatments” are sufficient for a sex change on a birth certificate.

Chaz Bono, one of America’s most famous female-to-male transgendered people, was a beneficiary of California’s liberalized law. On May 2, 2010, Bono was able to leave a Santa Monica courthouse officially a man, after the court’s acceptance of a vaguely worded letter from a doctor stipulating that he had “performed an irreversible surgical procedure for the purpose of altering Chaz Bono’s sexual characteristics from female to male.” (At the time Bono had had a mastectomy and lots of testosterone.) Meanwhile the press had never questioned that Chaz Bono was anything other than all man, from the moment the Chaz persona appeared on the scene and throughout “his” turn on “Dancing With the Stars.” When Hollywood Reporter reviewed the documentary Becoming Chaz, it obediently informed us that Chaz Bono “was a male trapped in a female body since birth.”

Outside of the Mainstream Media, there are, of course, still some dinosaurs skulking around who are not comfortable with the notion that you can change your sex by whacking something off and soldering something else on. There is the matter of chromosomes, and wombs, and the fact that the newly constructed genitals aren’t good for much of anything except just kind of sitting there—like a trophy, a symbol. They are useless for procreation. Both kinds of sex reassignment surgeries, female-to-male and male-to-female, render the recipient irreversibly sterile. And they are not too good for other uses either. As Chaz Bono explained on the David Letterman show, she has not been rushing the decision to get what the trans community calls “bottom surgery” because “you can end up with something functional but very small or something that’s more normal sized but without much erotic sensation.” (Chaz did admit that “There’s different ways to do the surgery, from real basic to more and more options. It’s like a car.”)

In short, the long-standing “surgery requirement” laws may have seemed silly when they first appeared, but they now stir up something like nostalgia. At least they are a nod to the idea that gender is rooted in anatomy, and that maybe human beings are defined by their role in the procreative project.

SO IS THERE SUCH A THING as “the sex of one’s brain”? Questions like this raged back and forth in 1966 when Johns Hopkins Hospital opened its Gender Identity Clinic and became the first hospital in America to do sex change operations. The doctors had a variety of opinions about why these operations were worth doing. Some, bolstered by a new genre of psychological theory, were downright messianic about “correcting the body to match the real gender.” Some seemed to feel that the surgeries were like a nose job or any other cosmetic surgery, a chance to make a body-part-obsessed person feel better. Some, like psychiatrist Paul McHugh, who did psychological screenings for the program, eventually became fiercely opposed. He saw other doctors’ relatively easy acceptance of the project as a kind of abdication of the professional’s role and a symptom of a social climate in which “all standards by which behaviours are judged are simply matters of opinion—and emotional opinions at that.” The new relativism was even reflected in new attitudes toward schizophrenics—who, increasingly, were deinstitutionalized as a matter of course and treated as if they were just expressing “a different lifestyle choice.” With a similar reluctance to “be judgmental” about someone else’s life choice, McHugh felt that patients were too often approved for surgery without much probing, out of “the spirit of doing your thing, following your bliss, an aesthetic that sees diversity as everything and can accept any idea, including that of permanent sex change, as interesting and that views resistance to such ideas as uptight if not oppressive,” he wrote in a scathing article for the American Scholar titled “Psychiatric Misadventures.”

“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should,” wrote McHugh. In his intake interviews, the typical applicant claimed it was “torture for him to live as a man, especially now that he has read in the newspapers about the possibility of switching surgically to womanhood.” But “[u]pon examination it is not difficult to identify other mental and personality difficulties…” which McHugh believed, unless resolved, would follow the patient into his new body and torment him again after attaching to a new external target.

“It is not obvious,” he note, “how this patient’s feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body differs from the feeling of a patient with anorexia nervosa that she is obese despite her emaciated, cachectic state.”

“We don’t do liposuction on anorexics,” he wrote. “Why amputate the genitals of these poor men? Surely, the fault is in the mind not the member.”

BUT THE STANDARDS McHugh complained about in the late sixties have become so entrenched, I may as well be quoting cuneiform off a stone tablet. Allowing some patriarchal white male Ob/Gyn to have the power to take a cursory glance at your baby genitalia and “assign a gender” doesn’t seem to fit in a world where “self-definition” has become a mantra.

And this may explain why, according to the New York Times, “a growing number of high school and college students…are pushing for the right to change their pronoun whenever they feel like it.” Katy Butler, one of those high school students, identifies herself as part of the “nonconforming gender community” and is one of those enthusiastic about “Preferred Gender Pronouns” (PGPs).

“You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning Association meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their PGPs.

A PGP can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir,” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”

Butler is lucky enough to live in the anything-goes enclave of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Out in the hinterlands the idea that a newly chosen “gender identity and expression” must be tolerated at all times does not always go down so well. Men who have recently decided they are women, for example, and show up at work wearing a dress have been fired or been harassed until they quit. There have been a number of savage attacks on trans people who attempted to use the public restroom corresponding to their gender identity.

Enter what the New Republic last year called “America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle,” the struggle to end discrimination against transsexuals in housing, the workplace—and eventually any other place a trial lawyer can discover it. Sixteen states (plus D.C.) and 143 cities or counties have added “gender identity or expression” to their protected categories lists—alongside the usual race, religion, gender (the other kind of gender), age, and disability. A more subtle but telling sign that more states will probably add the new category is the news that 207 major corporations (places like Coca-Cola, Apple, Chevron, Kellogg, and Best Buy) now offer insurance covering the cost of full-scale “transitions.” According to 2011 numbers collected by the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Corporate Equity Index, this is an increase “from just 85 a year earlier.” When HRC began following the issue a decade ago, no corporations covered the surgery.

A number of recent gender identity discrimination cases have been settled in the plaintiffs’ favor. If Johnny is hired as a paper pusher, and then starts to come to work as Jane, and then is fired, his lawsuit for workplace discrimination and wrongful termination is relatively straightforward, because the defendants cannot usually prove the sex change affected the job of paper pusher.

Things get murkier when a workplace has established a “Bona Fide Occupational Qualification” to justify hiring only males or only females. Yes, there are jobs where one can still discriminate. Take “urine monitors”—the people who would watch you pee into a cup if you went for a drug test.

El’Jai Devoureau is currently embroiled in a gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, Urban Treatment Centers of Camden, New Jersey. Devoureau, a fortysomething who claims to have been dressing as a man for years, to have had years of hormone therapy and some kind of surgery which she/he has so far been very opaque about, and who even has a “male” driver’s license, applied for the male-only job but was fired after two days because Devoureau’s supervisor said rumors were going around that she/he was not a man. Devoureau, who wears long corn rows, sports a wispy beard, and looks a bit like the ’80s singer Terence Trent D’Arby, said, “But I am a man.” The supervisor said something to the effect of, “Um, we don’t think so.” And the standoff began. The case has thus begun its crawl through the New Jersey court system. More evidence to support Devoureau’s claim may have to be…er, unveiled to support Devoureau’s claim—but maybe not. As the New York Times says, the outcome could turn on “the question of what is a man.” It could certainly be precedent-setting.

WHAT I FIND REALLY ODD about this “new Civil Rights movement” is that it’s happening now—after decades of struggle over the boundaries of sex roles and a great expansion of norms. As one of the online commenters to the New Republic’s “Great New Civil Rights Struggle” article put it, “Isn’t the trans-sexual phenomenon at heart conservative? Instead of enlarging the range of human behavior, it narrows the options down to ‘girls act one way and boys another so if you act one way, you have to be trapped in the wrong gender’s body.’   ”

But exactly. As a sign of how far we have come, there is a film, Alfred Nobbs, currently in theaters. It’s about a 19th century woman “living as a man” apparently because she seeks the love of women. But in 2012 no woman has to dress as a man in order to openly partner with another woman. (Well, in most parts of the country!) No woman has to attempt to “pass” as a man to take a job on a highway crew, or to enter a training program for fighter jet pilots.

Another curiously retrograde part: Once they “transition” many transgenders become the most devout standard-bearers for sex stereotypes. “When you discuss what the patient means by ‘feeling like a woman’ you often get a sex stereotype in return—something that woman physicians note immediately is a male caricature of women’s attitudes and interests,” Paul McHugh wrote. “One of our patients, for example, said that, as a woman, he would be more ‘invested with being than with doing.’”

“Ever since I became a woman, I just can’t do math anymore,” trills the main source in the New Republic’s “Civil Rights” article.

Chaz Bono is now infamous for having become a walking sexist-comment-machine. (“I can be a a-hole; I can be insensitive.…There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating.…I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that [my girlfriend] can talk endlessly.…I got way more gadget-oriented.…Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”)

Accordingly, Warren Beatty’s oldest child (who started life as Kathlyn but is known, after hormone treatments, as “Stephen Ira Beatty”) has taken to excoriating Bono from her blog, with flamers like: “I don’t want any rich white trans guy…telling the media that testosterone made him a misogynist…he has some deep-seated misogyny to work through.”

If your head is spinning with all this gender-bending, join the club. But keep in mind that there is one reference point that will hold steady like the North Star: With this new category of victim slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, the trial lawyers are girding happily. I await the day a male-to-female trans applies for a job at Hooters.

The Egyptian military and organized Islamic political groups came out of the 2011 Cairo Spring as the real power brokers of the country. Gone are the student and youth crowds that dominated Tahrir Square, along with the women of all ages who demonstrated by the thousands seeking political equality. Gone also are the masses of foreign TV and print journalists with their instant analyses of complicated issues. One could say that Egypt is slowly returning to its contentious normality.

The forthcoming elections of May 23-24 should produce two contestants for the second round in June that will determine who will assume the presidency of Egypt on July 1. What happens then is clearly a matter for speculation. Supposedly there was to be a new constitution created before the presidential election. The military commission now running the country demanded it -- but no charter came forth. As the military commission is supposed to dissolve and pass on all its authority to the new president, the question exists regarding under what legal powers the new chief executive will govern the country.

This problem can not be said to be unexpected. The parliament had appointed a 100 person commission to work out the details of the new constitution -- then disbanded this body when it became obvious that the Islamist-dominated parliament had not surprisingly appointed an Islamist-dominated constitutional commission. What was surprising was that a federal court has dissolved the commission and ordered a new body be created that satisfied the demands for equal representation of women and "other minorities" as well as non-religious lobbying groups. How this all was to be accomplished before July 1 is a mystery of the pyramids.

After first announcing that they would nominate the hard-line Sharia law advocate, Khairat El-Shater, as their presidential candidate, the Moslem Brotherhood went to their second choice, Mohammed Morsi. The election commission disqualified many of the top candidates who had announced their intentions to run and the Brotherhood had been given the tip that el-Shater would be considered a definite reject. In a surprise shift, the more ideologically strict Salafists countered with the comparatively moderate Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh to head off the new Brotherhood choice. El-Shater, no shrinking violet, openly attacked the military commission for being behind his black ball. He'll be trouble for whomever gets the presidential post.

Enter Amr Moussa, former Mubarak foreign minister and Secretary General of the Arab League. The cigar-smoking Moussa is one of the best known Egyptians on the international scene. Smart, tough and smooth-as-silk, the multi-lingual Moussa has no shortage of financial backers eager to see an experienced professional assume Egypt's leadership. The deal-making involved with his candidacy includes much behind-the-scenes negotiating with the Coptic Christians and secularist groups. The knock on Moussa is his greatest political strength: He is known as rabidly anti-Israeli -- not a bad thing when you're in Egyptian politics.

Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, is said to have strong backing from his old Air Force buddies, but is of course under attack as a Mubarak toady. There are a total of thirteen candidates, including four minor party aspirants. One well-known individual is not running. Mohammed ElBaradei, of longtime IAEA and Nobel Prize fame, has opted out of the process, preferring to create a new party of his own and seek the presidential post in four years. He didn't have much choice because he earlier had lost his expected moderate Islamist backing.

In the end, however, it will be the heavily American-financed ($1.3 billion) Egyptian military that retains ultimate control of the country. Even the Moslem Brotherhood does not have the strength to override the massive firepower Egypt's army and security forces can put on the streets any time they want. However, the military's power also brings to whatever civilian group that wins the presidency a guarantee that they will ensure its existence as long as it does not run counter to the army's interest in maintaining its predominance. As long as military cohesion exists, the new president and his backers will retain power.

A career in the Army or Air Force has been the stepping-stone for Egyptian political life since Gamel Abdel Nasser. It was often said that "the best and brightest" could be found in Egypt's young officer corps. One of the reasons, besides anti-dynastic feelings, that Mubarak's son, Gamal, was not acceptable as his successor was his lack of military credentials. It would appear that while the military is willing to defer to a civilian administration as "the choice of the people," they have no intention of losing their grip on the security of the country -- and ultimately its foreign policy.

All of which brings up the prospect of a newly elected Egyptian government continuing a peaceful relation with Israel. The truth is that neither Egypt's nor Israel's leaders really can count on the old 1979 agreements -- though Cairo's military $1.3 billion can be kissed goodbye the moment that status quo is upset!

George H. Wittman writes a weekly column on international affairs for The American Spectator online. He was the founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy.

Should consenting adults be allowed to play football?

Prior to a debate on the subject at New York University earlier this month, 53 percent of the audience opposed a ban on college football (and just 16 percent supported). Following the debate, 53 percent of the audience supported a ban.

That dramatic opinion shift comes in the wake of several decleaters to the game's reputation.

In March, the NFL came down hard on the New Orleans Saints, whose bounty program offered financial incentives to defenders for injuring opposing players. More than 1,500 players have joined lawsuits against the league for not informing them of the dangers of the game. The suicide of Junior Seau, whose extremely long and violent NFL career unleashed not unreasonable speculation that so many jarring hits may have unmoored the beloved linebacker's mental circuits, has hurt the league worse in every way imaginable than the Saints or the suits.

 "American football is dying," John Kass writes in the Chicago Tribune. "It's about time." He thinks parents will forbid their children from playing, thus starving the NFL of fans and participants. For parents who shuttle their kids to Pop Warner practices, he advises: "So why not make it simple and just give the kids packs of cigarettes instead?"

There's strong evidence, not speculation, that cigarettes cause cancer. There's no evidence, just speculation, that football caused Junior Seau to kill himself. Writers making connections between the self-administered demises of two retired stars (Seau and Dave Duerson) and the gridiron might as well ponder the pitfalls of their own profession. Do the unhappy endings of Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, and Arthur Koestler demonstrate a link between scribbling and suicide?

Journalists have parlayed a few tragic anecdotes among tens of thousands of retired professional athletes into a national anti-football frenzy -- in a football-crazed country, no less. But statistics, experience, and observation strongly suggests that the people playing football are healthier than those watching it -- and even those refusing to watch.

A government study commissioned by the NFL Players Association found that athletes in the league lived longer than their male counterparts in American society. The study looked at 3,439 men who played for five years or longer in the league between 1959 and 1993 and discovered 334 deaths. Had the results mirrored statistical norms among American men, the researchers would have found 625 deaths. It turns out that professional football players have lower rates of cancer and heart disease.

Who would have guessed that there are health benefits to all that running, jumping, pushing, and pulling?

The number of football deaths at all levels has fallen dramatically over the last half century. Present hysteria aside, rule changes and advances in equipment have made it a safer game. During the second half of the 1960s, brain-injury deaths averaged more than 20 per year for football players. That figure is now less than five per year in a sport played by millions.

Perhaps four deaths annually, and an uncountable number of concussions, is an unacceptable price for what amounts to an amusement. Former American Spectator writer Malcolm Gladwell said as much in that NYU debate by wondering aloud about the ethics of watching a game in which contestants risk life and limb. But every year about 40 Americans die skiing, about 800 die bicycling, and about 3,500 die swimming.

Are those dangerous activities permissible because they haven't captured voyeurs the way the NFL has?

Like football, there are benefits to skiing, cycling, and swimming. There aren't figures on how many lives those activities extend and enhance. But sensible people know that skiing, cycling, and swimming are on the whole good for you.

So is football.

When I played in high school, I spent five to six days a week working out in the weight room and sprinting on the track in anticipation of the season. I strangely ran with weighed-down tires roped to my waist, broad-jumped my way up stadium bleachers, and imbibed powder-based concoctions that the vitamin store insisted were healthy but that my palate insisted were not. All that trouble resulted in a touchdown reception, a fumble recovery, and a few special teams tackles. I spent most of my senior year on the sidelines rather than on the field.

Football never bruised my brain. It bruised my ego.

One senses an ego bruise may be responsible for the football-phobic jumping on the pile. Eggheads resenting all the attention jocks received way back when now relish bestowing the wrong kind of attention upon them. Thus, a cultural tic masquerades as a public-health crusade.

It's a shame that the smart-set isn't smart enough to grasp the benefits of contact sports.

One rarely sees neighborhood kids in pickup football games anymore. They're too busy playing video games, text messaging, and friending strangers on Facebook. The unhealthy aversion to football (and other sports not named "soccer") has little to do with head injuries and much to do with an indoor society that's lost its head. Surely strenuous outdoor activity is a fine remedy for what ails climate-controlled, obese, antiseptic adolescence.

Playing football is good for you. Being a wuss isn't.

School boards over the years, when faced with opposition to a bond issue, have often resorted to a doomsday threat to get voters in line. If the bonds don't pass, they would say, school sports -- starting with football season -- will be canceled and the school band disbanded.

California's once and current governor has dusted that one off and is aiming it for the fences. Early this year he began promoting a tax increase package for the November ballot, telling everyone that if it were to be defeated at the polls in November, the public will have been forewarned that drastic budget cuts would follow. By early April it had 54 percent support in a poll.

He touts his tax increase measure as "temporary." (Ronald Reagan one said, "The nearest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program.") It would raise the state sales tax to 7.5 percent from 7.25 for four years. It would also raise income tax rates on those earning $250,000 or more a year ("millionaires and billionaires" as defined by Mathemetician-in-Chief Barack Obama). Those making $1 million or more would see their rate go from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent -- easily the nation's highest. With more of the investor class changing their residences to income-tax-free states every year, one guess as to what will be the effect of that increase. 

Complications have set in. In addition to Brown's proposal having gathered enough signatures for the ballot, so have two others. One, headed by a hedge fund manager, Tom Steyer, would eliminate the choice companies how have to use a tax formula based on California sales in proportion to sales elsewhere or one based on sales, payroll and property only in California. Steyer's measure would eliminate the first option. Its purpose is to raise revenue for the government. 

The third measure, headed by "civil rights" attorney Molly Munger, would raise income taxes on a sliding scale for all but the poorest California workers for the next dozen years. The purpose is the same as Steyer's: to raise revenue for the state. It would make tax rates on higher income Californians even more lopsided than they are now.

Brown had been figuring on raising about $6 billion or so to erase most of a projected $9 billion budget deficit. That is until a few days ago when the state's green eyeshade people delivered the bad news that the deficit would be $16 billion, not $9 billion. The reason? Tax collections and other revenue this spring were well under estimates. 

Bad news for Brown? Not if he can use it to scare the voters into doing his bidding. It helps him make his threats all the more real. He talks of deep cuts to school budgets and aid to poor and ailing seniors -- on top of already-announced closings of state parks. Wave the specter of cuts to education at California voters and they usually succumb. 

Several years ago they voted for a ballot initiative that has required about 40 percent of the state's general fund go to education. This has not brought higher student performance, but in more than a few cases it has brought a surplus of school administrators.

Not mentioned in the governor's list of cost-saving targets are bloated public employee pension programs. In his first iteration as governor in the late 1970s, he signed the order permitting public employee unions to engage in collective bargaining. Gradually, but steadily, they have become the state's most powerful special interest. They virtually own the Democrats' legislative majority. A few months ago, Brown sent up a trial balloon to require state employees to pay more into their own retirement accounts and health care plans and to have less generous programs for new hires, but the unions and the legislative Democrats punctured the balloon.

Brown's proposal to cut state employee salaries is another trial balloon. It will drift away with the next breeze. And if you think he'll cut expenses by eliminating the FY 2013 budget's $2.3 billion allocation for that chimera, high-speed rail project, you are living in a dream. He sees that as his "legacy," but at the rate he's going his legacy will be bankruptcy. 

Nevertheless, Even California voters are uneasy about high taxes and deficit spending. With three tax-increase measures competing on the ballot, they just may say to all three, "Nuts!"

Peter Hannaford's latest book is "Reagan's Roots." He was closely associated with the late President Ronald Reagan for a number of years, including serving as director of public affairs in the Governor's Office. 

Long a troubled nation, Nigeria now risks religious war. So far the killing essentially runs one way: Islamic extremists kill Christians. President Goodluck Jonathan has responded with good intentions and occasional arrests, including of a terrorist leader last Friday. However, if the government is unable to stop the killing the country's future will be at risk.

Like so many other former colonies, Nigeria stumbled almost immediately after gaining independence. Blessed with oil, it has suffered through multiple corrupt and repressive governments. It now is a functioning democracy, but the political process is complicated by the need to balance the ambitions of the Muslim north and Christian south.

Maintaining political peace has been made more urgent by persistent sectarian violence. The State Department emphasizes that "The constitution and other laws and policies protect religious freedom and, in practice, the government generally enforced these protections." Unfortunately, the lack of state persecution does not protect Nigerians against private violence.

Observed the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in its most recent report, "Since 1999, more than 14,000 Nigerians have been killed in religiously-related violence between Muslims and Christians. The government of Nigeria continues to fail to prevent and contain acts of religiously-related violence, prevent reprisal attacks, or bring those responsible for such violence to justice." Muslim-dominated states in northern Nigeria also have applied Sharia law as part of their criminal codes and discriminated "against minority communities of Christians and Muslims."

The greatest threat today is the group Boko Haram, which has been active for three years. The group now appears to have at least some contacts with al Qaeda affiliates and some members have been discovered in Mali. Unfortunately, the organization has been steadily expanding its reach. The State Department's latest religious freedom report observed that "Violence, tension, and hostility between Christians and Muslims increased, particularly in the Middle Belt [divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians], exacerbated by 'indigene' (native) and settler laws, discriminatory employment practices, and resource competition."

International Christian Concern regularly puts Nigeria in its Hall of Shame and similarly reported increased attacks on Christians in 2010 in the Middle Belt. According to ICC, "The year's worst attack occurred on March 7, as Muslims invaded villages around the [Plateau state] capital city of Jos. The mobs attacked sleeping families in their homes at 2 a.m. with machetes. More than 500 Christians were murdered that day, most of whom were women and children." Killings of Christians continued in nearby villages throughout the year. 

Since then the situation has worsened. Observed State: "Violence between Christian and Muslim communities increased in several regions arising from complex factors, including economic disparity, ethnic identity, and seasonal migration patterns. Acute communal violence in the Middle Belt heightened tensions between religious groups." Yet, "even in areas outside the Middle Belt that did not otherwise experience violence, tensions remained between Christians and Muslims."

The growing violence is a genie that cannot easily be returned to the bottle. Noted the Commission: "The past year saw a dramatic rise in sectarian or religiously-related violence." Post-election riots in the north against the election of Jonathan, a Christian, killed some 800 people. "Although triggered by political issues, the post-election violence quickly became sectarian. In addition, Boko Haram, a militant group that espouses an extreme and violent interpretation of Islam, has been emboldened by the climate of impunity."

The group, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege," is deadly serious. No bromides about representing a "religion of peace." Added the Commission: "Boko Haram has shifted its tactics and emphasis by targeting, killing, and bombing Christians and Christian clergy and threatening to kill all remaining Christians in the north, while continuing its attacks against government officials, as well as killing hundreds of Muslims, including Muslim religious leaders who spoke out against the group." Also targeted have been Western-style schools in the north, which provide an education beyond memorization of the Koran.

Boko Haram does some of its killing retail, one by one. In March in the Muslim-majority city of Maiduguri, the terrorist group killed the 79-year-old mother of a local pastor. Her throat was slit with a note in Arabic placed on her chest, proclaiming that "We will get you soon."

However, the group also murders wholesale, attacking church services. For instance, April was not a good month for Nigerian Christians. Reported the Economist: "In Kano, a city in northern Nigeria, gunmen on motorbikes killed at least 20 Christian worshippers in a university lecture theater where churches hold their weekly services. They threw small bombs into the church before shooting those trying to flee. In another attack on a church service in the northeast town of Maiduguri shooters opened fire, killing five people including the priest. Seven people were killed on Monday in a bomb targeting a police commissioner's convoy in the eastern town of Jolingo in the usually peaceful Taraba state."

It could have been worse. On Easter Sunday in the city of Kaduna a suicide bomber was blocked from getting into the compound of two Protestant churches. Instead, he detonated his bomb on a nearby road, which still killed 41 people. Later the same day there was a bombing in the city of Jos, which killed one person and injured others. Last Christmas 44 people were killed by a church bombing in Abuja, the nation's capital.

No one claimed responsibility for the April murders, though they looked like the work of Boko Haram. However, warned the Economist, "it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell when Boko Haram is responsible for such violence and when other groups, inspired by their methods, are to blame." Boko Haram has destroyed an incredible 350 churches throughout northern Nigeria over the past year. So far this year the group is estimated to have killed nearly 500 people.

Nigeria's Catholic leaders have called on Muslim leaders to speak out and act to end the violence. Like in Pakistan many Nigerian Muslims send their children to Islamiyya, or religious, schools, which provide few practical skills. Educator Rotimi Eyitayo observed: "Those who stop going to school don't get education, they become a menace." In a country with too few jobs some of these ill-educated and unskilled appear open to Boko Haram's call.

In March Boko Haram abandoned preliminary talks with the government. Unfortunately, the group has few negotiable objectives. It insists on the release of all followers from jail and has variously proposed creation of an Islamic state in the north and imposition of strict Sharia law across all of Nigeria. Last month it released a video threatening to "devour" Jonathan and "end" his government after he pledged to bring the group under control by mid-year. The group proclaimed that it would "never give up as we fight the infidels." Apparently political objectives are secondary: Boko Haram's members simply want to kill Christians.

While visiting Germany in April to promote trade and investment, President Jonathan argued that "The security situation in Nigeria is being blown out of proportion. It is exaggerated." Hundreds of dead Nigerians probably would disagree.

In fact, the Jonathan government has reacted with desperation. In January the Wall Street Journal reported: "In response to the mounting attacks, President Goodluck Jonathan last month authorized searches without warrants, indefinite detention, and thousands of roadblocks." Moreover, he has "raised police and military spending to one-fifth of government outlays -- the largest amount Nigeria has ever spent on security." 

The authorities can claim some successes, but the group appears unaffected and the slaughter continues. Two weeks ago security forces killed the suspected organizer of recent attacks on churches. Last weekend the police in Kano said they captured the local Boko Haram operational commander. Yet nothing is likely to change. Catholic Archbishop Ade Job has appealed for foreign help: "It is apparent that, if we depend only on our available active security agents, we shall not make much progress." 

A religious war threatens Nigeria, yet the Obama administration has downplayed the religious roots of the conflict, preferring to emphasize the malign impact of poverty and poor governance. At a recent Senate hearing, Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson made the rather astonishing claim that "religion is not the primary driver behind extremist violence in Nigeria." He should read the State Department's own report on religious liberty.

While the U.S. cannot intervene in the conflict, it should declare Boko Haram to be a terrorist organization. Washington also should encourage the Nigerian government to act vigorously to protect all of its citizens. If the Jonathan government fails to do so, a nation of 170 million could violently crack apart. Nigeria already suffered one bloody civil war during its short life. The humanitarian consequences of another one could be catastrophic.

There is a big burly guy in my neighborhood named Joe, the kind of friendly gent who would never hurt a fly unprovoked but could probably smash anyone who attacked him into smithereens. We seem to shop for groceries on the same schedule, and each of these frequent chance encounters turns into a discussion of matters political. Actually, he starts the ball rolling by asking me one question or another in a tone that respects my expertise, seducing me into unleashing long tirades of opinion that I usually have the good sense to reserve for the paying customers.

"Do you think Romney can win?"

The first time he asked that one I shared with him the analysis by Dick Morris that shows that 7 to 8 out of every 10 undecided voters in midyear polls wind up going against the incumbent. He figures the logic for that is they know the incumbent already and if they tell the pollster they are undecided, that is their reticent way of communicating that they are not too thrilled with the fellow in office.

He asked me a variation on that question the next time and the time after that. The other day was about the fourth version: "If you had to predict right now who would win the election… if you had to bet right now on the election… do you feel that there is a definite chance…?" He was polite enough to stay in the role of questioner, but I could hear his opinion screaming to be released from confinement.

"What do you think of Romney's chances?" I asked, breaking the cardinal rule of the columnist: Never let your readers turn you into their therapist.

Finally someone wanted to know what Joe thought and he was only too happy to tell. "I don't believe this country is ready to elect a Mormon. I spend a lot of time with members of different Christian denominations and to hear them speak about Mormonism is a real education. They hate it; they don't consider it real Christianity; they look at it as a cult."

My rejoinder to this was that all of those prejudices have been buried forever. We already elected a Catholic President, a Jewish Vice President (although the technicality of the Electoral College prevented him from serving despite getting a half-million more votes), a couple of Southern Baptists and who knows what all. No one is voting for the guy they don't believe in because the guy they do believe in believes in things they don't believe in.

Walking away afterwards, I realized a point I had missed throughout the primary season. Namely, that Romney being a Mormon turns out to be a big asset for him in this particular election. The hardest part for a lot of the Independents in rejecting Obama is the feeling they had four years ago that they were doing something beautiful for the image of American tolerance by voting for this guy. They were, although it came at a high price, bringing a volcanic flow of molten collegiate abstraction down on the guys at the bottom of the mount listening to the sermon.

Now they need a competing narrative, these indie types do. It has to be a win-win, where they get to be nice guys both times. They need a woman or a Hispanic or an American Indian or someone in a wheelchair or… eh? A Mormon you say? A fellow whose grandfather had to run to Mexico because he was persecuted here? That will do.

So, my friends, it is time to make history, to show once again how open-minded and good-hearted and broad-minded and big-hearted we are. Yes, there has been a tragic history of mistreatment of Mormons in this country. They were viciously murdered as they made their scary trek from New York westward, finally settling in Utah mainly because there was no one else there. It is time to make up for this sorry chapter in our history, to right a wrong we committed against a beleaguered minority.

There are other reasons too, like the fact that this guy specializes in fixing messed-up budgets with big deficits. But this is no time to think selfishly. It is time for apologies and reparations. As for Obama being laid off, there is no need to fret. I hear Joe Biden has a shovel-ready job for him.