“it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!”

and yelled at him to get out of his seat and leave, that he had no right to be there.

Wow, so wrong so many different ways. Plenty has already been said — and it pretty well speaks for itself — so I’ll leave it at that. Read and hear the entire exchange; she gets pretty worked up. Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune has a good roundup.

The Washington Post review called it “gripping.” From the WP:

In 2004, when the Dover, Penn., school board voted to require biology classes to use a supplemental textbook that promoted the theory of intelligent design rather than evolution, the conflict that erupted was about far more than semantics. As Edward Humes describes in this lively and thoughtful book, Dover — like Dayton, Tenn., during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” — became a proving ground for clashing beliefs about the origins of life and constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

Learn more about Monkey Girl at edwardhumes.com or at the DYD bookstore.

But what a sad and melancholy decision this is for me and many other conservatives. Should John McCain capture the nomination as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. I certainly can’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama based on their virulently anti-family policy positions. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president for the first time in my life.

Dobson cites McCain’s devilish record on stem cell research, his position on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and his foul mouthed ways as reasons for his decision. Read more and hear Ingraham read the statement at Talking Points Memo.

God in the White House

… [E]xamples suggest that the quest for moral rectitude in presidential candidates may be chimerical. The candidates’ declarations of faith over the past several decades provide a fairly poor indicator of how they govern. Even the record of the two redeemer presidents of the past half century, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, is mixed. Carter actually sought to govern according to his moral lights and in fidelity to the principles of decency, honor, and fair play that he articulated on the campaign trail; the American voters resoundingly repudiated him when he ran for a second term.

Bush sought the presidency on a platform of morality and Christian virtues. Yet his policies in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflected those values only dimly, if at all. Perhaps it’s time to shift our attention away from the candidates and toward the electorate. What is it we expect from our presidents? Do we look for charisma and political skills, experience in foreign and domestic policy, and administrative competence? Or do we demand that candidates for the White House pass some sort of catechetical test? It’s not an either-or proposition, of course, but the record of the last four decades of the twentieth century suggests that we’ve moved toward the latter and away from the former.

But at what cost?…

Read the complete excerpt, “Cheap Grace: Piety and the Presidency” at npr.org.

Randall Balmer is also the author of the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America.

Or get your craft on for the New Year and whip up some of Kate’s make-your-own solstice decorations. Click here to get step-by-step instructions for making solstice lanterns from strings of holiday lights and pretty tree ornaments from citrus fruit.

It is hard to believe that Benedict, touted as a great Roman Catholic intellectual, would put forth the worn argument that Stalin and Mao are proof that disbelief itself is a source of monumental evil in the world, but that is exactly the tired old horse he trots out. So much has been written about this, that I couldn’t have much to add, except to say that it seems obvious that cult of personality leaders of the 20th century were not so much anti-religionists as men who simply wanted to replace one god with another in the Big Power Equation — to replace the unquestioned divine right of kings with the unquestioned divine right of, well, themselves. Louis XVI would have understood Stalin perfectly. One was the Vatican-backed ruler of the Most Catholic France who starved, brutalized and executed his countrymen, the other a “godless” former seminarian who took over the oppression of Russia to starve, brutalize and execute his countrymen.

Also always appropriate to note while running over this rutted old road, adherents to this Stalin/Mao argument seem to be cafeteria critics, conveniently picking a few “godless” monsters to damn all disbelief by association, but as Christopher Hitchens points out, “No country has ever fallen into despotism because it has followed the teachings of Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein .” [thx religionandatheism] It is as convenient for Il Papa to forget these as it is for him to forget Torquemada. It is easy for him to limit his discussion to the roots of evil in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the church had routinely tortured and burned people alive for the crime of dissent just a few generations earlier. Easy for him to ignore the fact that all of these atrocities have fanatical unquestioning belief — not disbelief — in common.

Politico: Dean says Jews can go to heaven.

Newsweek: No communion or Presidency for Giuliani say Catholic Bishops.

Of course now that he’s being called on it, Romney is in full denial mode. But talkingpointsmemo’s Josh Marshall explains it all to us (4 mins 30 secs):