Sanctity of life a chasm in campaign

On some issues, voters may have difficulty distinguishing between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Examples could include the economy, energy, defense and even taxing and spending. But there is one area in which their differences are absolutely clear: the rights of unborn children. McCain would protect these innocents and Obama would not. Ever since Roe v. Wade (1973), which held that unborn children are not persons and denied them any rights whatsoever, defenders of the controversial decision have employed the rhetoric of "a woman’s right to choose" or "reproductive rights." Indeed, in the name of "health," a woman may have an abortion for any reason during the entire nine months of pregnancy. It has been, and always will be, an absurdity to maintain that women cherish the right to make war on their nature or that they would place no value on the most precious gift of the Creator. But the euphemisms are necessary to conceal from everyone, including the parties directly involved in an abortion, with the actual horrific nature of baby killing.

In fact, "pro-choice," which is another version of the euphemism, has an historical antecedent which has all the vicious attributes of its vile successor. That would be "popular sovereignty," the rallying cry of northern Democrats before the Civil War who sought to deprive the decision of whether to permit slavery in the Western territories of any moral significance. "Let the people decide" is no different in principle from "let the woman decide." There is never a right to do what is wrong, so advocates or apologists for evil acts have to resort to sophistry. The most effective method is to corrupt liberty or majority rule, flattering the people but leading them astray.

McCain has always opposed Roe v. Wade, which nationalized abortion protection, and has advocated that the matter be returned to the states for their determination. He believes that the people should legislate and not the courts. Obama, on the other hand, is a cosponsor of the "Freedom of Choice Act," which would remove all barriers to unrestricted abortion, including financial. He has said that this will be a priority of his administration.

When Congress passed the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, McCain voted for it. This gruesome procedure is employed late term to ensure the death of the infant by severing its spinal cord at the back of the neck. Obama insists on a "health" exception, which would serve the same function as it does in Roe v. Wade, meaning that no such abortion could be prevented. Obama opposes the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), which upheld the congressional ban.

The late Rep. William Hyde of Illinois in 1975 authored the amendment which bears his name forbidding federal funding of abortions. McCain has always voted for it when it has been challenged. Obama opposed any limits on funding in the Illinois legislature and has stated that he does not support the Hyde Amendment.

No thanks to the "sexual revolution," millions of adolescent girls have gotten pregnant and many of them are pressured by their (frequently older) boyfriends to have an abortion and spare them the responsibility of supporting the child which the couple has conceived. Even states with permissive abortion rules and funding have adopted measures that require an abortionist to notify at least one parent of the impending procedure. McCain voted for such legislation whereas Obama voted to block it even if the child is from another state.

Finally, sometimes babies survive late-term abortions and yet they are either allowed to die or are put to death by drowning or suffocation. McCain voted for federal legislation to protect these babies just as those who are born prematurely, while Obama voted three times against a similar bill in the Illinois legislature.

It came as no surprise to those familiar with Obama’s pro-abortion record when he told Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Baptist Church that determining when life begins is "above his pay grade." McCain forthrightly declared that the rights of the child begin at conception. Nothing else but a human child is developing in the mother’s womb, a fact which Obama denies and McCain affirms.

The real Ayers threat

I've been researching a piece on the Ayers connection, so was glad when Palin started focusing on Obama's relationship with this "unrepentant domestic terrorist", and have, like many in the conservative blogosphere focused my own blog often on Obama's work with Ayers at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. I'm glad that the mainstream media is finally being forced into addressing the issue -- even as they continue to whitewash the issue in their determination to make Obama president. But in looking deeper into the Ayers connection, I realize that part of the story has not been effectively told -- and that is the practical impact that Ayers will have on the education policy of an Obama presidency. The most significant aspect is a focus on "education debt" -- essentially paying reparations to minorities for the "history of oppression" perpetrated by Whites. This is a cornerstone of Bill Ayers' education reform program, and is also a key element in the race-based education philosophy of Linda Darling-Hammond -- a Professor of Education at Stanford, Obama's primary education adviser and prospective Secretary of Education in an Obama administration.

Here's part of what I found -- excerpted from my piece entitled "Reading, Writing and Radicalism": The radical orientation of Ayers as an “educational reformist” should be well known, as he has written more than a dozen books on the subject and has been a leading educational scholar and advisor in Chicago for the past two decades. Ayers was recently elected vice-president for curriculum for the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association -- the nation's largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. His work with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has been highly emphasized by the Obama campaign as a form of “legitimization”, and Daley was recently quoted in the New York Times as saying “People make mistakes. You judge people by their whole life”. Daley’s view is likely based on a politician’s appreciation for Ayers’ role in doling out $100 million in grants within the city during the 1990s rather than any deep analysis of Ayers’ political or educational views – none of which have changed since the 1960s. Ayers continues to describe himself as a “radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist”, and has written that he believes “teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression”. He sees teaching as a natural extension of the quest for social justice – which he feels requires a revolution in the capitalist economic, political and education system. In a speech given in November, 2006 before Hugo Chavez and the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, Ayers said the following:

As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion! It is in this context that the Obama-Ayers relationship should be viewed. While the Ayers’ terrorist connections are significant retrospectively, his education goals that were actively endorsed and sponsored by Barack Obama are prospectively even more important.

And this is where things get interesting. While it is obvious that Ayers will not have a formal role in an Obama administration, it is equally obvious that Obama’s experience with Ayers and the CAC will animate his education policy as president. The Obama Campaign’s primary education adviser is Linda Darling-Hammond, a Professor of Education at Stanford University, and well-known expert in school design and teacher training. Hammond has been mentioned as a possible Secretary of Education in an Obama administration, has been a vocal supporter of traditional teacher certification programs, current union control of public education and opposes charter school programs. She also has been a vocal critic of the implementation of the current No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. More importantly, she is an advocate of a race-based paradigm for education that fully embraces the concept of “education debt” – a form of reparations for generations of racial bias perpetrated by White America. Hammond argued forcefully last year in the liberal magazine The Nation, for example, the importance of “pay(ing) off the educational debt to disadvantaged students that has accrued over centuries of unequal access to quality education.” The concept of education debt is an idea laid out in 2006 by Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin, the then-president of the American Education Research Association and actively supported by Ayers. Ayers wrote himself in January of 2008 on his website the following:

The dominant narrative in contemporary school reform is once again focused on exclusion and disadvantage, race and class, black and white…the monster in the room: white supremacy. Gloria Ladson-Billings upends all of this with an elegant reversal: there is no achievement gap, she argues, but actually a glancing reflection of something deeper and more profound—America has a profound education debt. The educational inequities that began with the annihilation of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans…transformed into apartheid education, something anemic, inferior, inadequate, and oppressive. Over decades and centuries the debt has accumulated and is passed from generation to generation, and it continues to grow and pile up. Further, the long-standing professional relationship between Ayers, Darling-Hammond and Ladson-Billings – and thus Barack Obama -- is well established. As legal analyst Steve Diamond writes at No Quarter, a chapter called “Education for Democracy” by Darling-Hammond appeared in a volume co-edited by Ayers called “A Light in Dark Times”. In addition, a chapter co-authored by Ladson-Billings on “racing justice” appeared in a book co-edited by Ayers called “Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader”. Ladson-Billings wrote the foreword to Ayers’ book “To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher” and Ayers and Ladson-Billings are co-editors of “City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row” just published. All have been consistent in support of a radical education reform program.

Linda Darling-Hammond’s piece in The Nation is an excellent illumination of what may underscore education policy under a President Obama. She makes abundantly clear that she supports the notion of education reparations and that this should be paid in part by a wholesale revamping of NCLB to focus on more on investment and less on testing – modifications that the Obama Campaign’s education platform also supports . She calls for a “New paradigm for national education policy…guided by dual commitments to support meaningful learning on the part of students, teachers and schools; and to pay off the educational debt, making it possible for all students to benefit from more productive schools.” This is education code-speak for vast sums of money to be poured into minority schools and community programs to atone for past sins.

The Ayers-Hammond approach to education debt has been essentially supported by Barack Obama on the campaign trail. In fact, Obama has spoken repeatedly about the need for reparations to make amends for the past oppression of minorities. On “Meet the Press” in July he said:

The biggest problem that we have in terms of race relations, I think, is dealing with the legacy of past discrimination which has resulted in extreme disparities in terms of poverty, in terms of wealth and in terms of income…And that involves investing in early childhood education, fixing the schools in those communities, being willing to work in terms of job retraining. And those are serious investments.Obama’s education platform as outlined at his campaign website is full of community-focused programs that will be ripe targets for massive “reparation” investments in a reformulated NCLB. His K-12 Education Fact Sheet discusses at length the expansion of Head Start programs, universal preschool and includes “enlisting parents and communities to support teaching and learning”, including “school-family contracts” and a massive school redesign project that includes increased funding for teacher recruitment and retention. It is a blueprint taken almost whole-cloth from one written by Darling-Hammond that calls for a “Marshall Plan” for teaching and the institution of a more authoritarian structure for driving curriculum development, testing and investment. Like Ayers’ own admiration of Venezuela’s centralized educational dictatorship, Darling-Hammond has expressed support for countries such as Singapore that have instituted highly structured systems that are the antithesis of school choice – signaling what will certainly be a strong emphasis on the unionized public education system in the U.S. under an Obama administration.

The real impact of the Obama-Ayers relationship is not in Ayers’ radical past but rather in his radical present. The influence that Ayers’ has had on Obama’s view of education during his time at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge can be seen in his appointment of Linda Darling-Hammond as his primary education advisor, and signals what is certain to be radical reform at the core of Obama’s education policy as president. This will include more investment into the current public school monopoly at the expense of free market solutions like vouchers and charter schools, and a more aggressive social change agenda that will result in greater control by unions and community organizations – all orthodox elements of the William Ayers radical agenda.

California needs Proposition 8

"We, the people of the United States, in order to . . . secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The Orange County Register (Oct. 2), lead newspaper in the Freedom Communications chain, is devoted to the freedom of every individual, particularly political and economic. Experience has demonstrated the wisdom of the maximum of liberty for promoting justice and prosperity. But as the Preamble above makes clear, a free society also must be devoted to perpetuating itself and not facilitating practices at odds with the common good.

When it comes to decisions regarding marriage and family, no one should be forced into unwanted relationships. But inasmuch as marriage has been understood as the union of one man and one woman by every rational definition; and protected, until recently, by every society in the history of the world; it hehooves us to support Proposition 8. Then we may know that we have secured our rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

The Register wishes to secure individual rights (there are no other kind) against denial by majorities and their governments, but overlooks the indispensable role of public opinion and public officials. Reflection and experience taught our forbears to reject governments of the one or the few because, as Thomas Jefferson observed, "Republican government is the only one not in open or secret war with the rights of mankind."  He also said that the people are bound "by the moral law."

It is not true that the California Supreme Court decision sanctioning same-sex marriage will have no effect on marriage. It already has, as county clerks have been ordered by state authorities no longer to refer to the parties as bride and groom, but as A and B. Just this week Gov. Schwarzenegger signed into law bills (1) mandating that nurses support homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality (SB 1729), (2) making foster parents teach homosexual-bisexual-transsexual "rights" to foster kids (AB 3015) and (3) elevating homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual "rights" above everyone else's rights (AB 2654). If same-sex marriage is right, the State Legislature and the Governor have decided, all barriers to its full development must be swept away.

Marriage indeed has been reformed to insure the equality of both sexes and to remove racial barriers, as the Register maintained, but it has always been between one man and one woman. It is remarkable that the Register expresses satisfaction that marriage has "evolved" when it has done the opposite with other judicial decisions that treated the text of the Constitution as an "evolving" document.

The Register expresses the hope that same-sex marriage will promote societal stability and reduce promiscuity, but only after affirming as a right what no society heretofore has ever sanctioned. I have read too many angry pronouncements by activists inveighing against "Ozzie and Harriet" families to believe that "lullaby argument."

It is simply wrong for the Register to claim that "Legal recognition of same-sex marriage does not require those who have a moral objection to homosexuality or to homosexual marriage to recognize or approve of it," including ministers. What sort of argument can any responsible party be making against those who disapprove of same-sex marriage except a moral one? Ministers would be advised to protect their congregations from being inundated with demands for same-sex marriage, for surely lawsuits will be filed against and damages sought from uncooperative clergy.

The state has "inserted itself" into marriage and family for good reasons. We all have a stake in insuring that our free society perpetuates itself by upholding the only institution that channels potentially dangerous passions into loving relationships, secures everyone's property rights, and protects children from adults more concerned with their own gratification than the welfare of their offspring. Children need a father and a mother to guide them as they grow up and to provide examples of how to be a man and woman.

The Register has rightly been dubious of experiments in government and the marketplace. It needs to include marriage and family among the institutions to be protected against the same folly. We should vote 'Yes' on Proposition 8.

Diversity for its own sake? Why?

With a woman on one ticket and a black on the other, let's not forget that the popular slogan that "diversity is our strength” rests on a historically and empirically unwarranted premise. The notion was started by the Marxist in the 1950’s as a divide and conquer strategy, no more no less. I remember going into the Communist Party bookstore in San Francisco as a college junior to load up on stuff for a class I was taking at Berkeley. (In those days it wasn’t completely taken over by the Marxists as it is now.) I remember seeing the “Hero Negro” comic books they’d pass out to blacks. If the Feds photographed everyone who went in and out, I’m probably on the list.

Ever since then, the Marxists have successfully pitted various groups against each other: ethnic groups, young against old, poor against the rich, gay against straight, town vs. country, anything they can find and exploit. They get all these groups discontented and clamoring for their entitlements, creating disunity. Sound familiar, say in the Obama campaign? This Marxist premise has been virtually unchallenged over this ensuing generation.

Remember Rep. Pat Schroeder’s pressure on the armed services to insert women into positions of authority in the early 1980s, just for the sake of it? This notion has spread up the chain until we see what we have today even at the presidential level.

So in the present situation, if we’re going to assert that this notion “diversity is our strength” is detrimental to the country, we will have to start at a much more foundational level than McCain’s choice for VP.

Ask any woman what she thinks of the Sarah Palin VP choice. I would wager she has a positive feeling about it. I know my wife was in tears of joy when Palin gave her acceptance speech. McCain’s political calculation is to capitalize on the discontented Hillary voters. We will see quickly what the progressives do to counteract this. You can bet they will marshal great resources to quash this threat: ** Dig dirt ** Strategic disinformation ** Put the word out to Al Qaeda in Iraq to capture or kill Palin’s son to grieve and destabilize Palin emotionally. Doing this before November 4th would be the most effective. ** Do something to destabilize her marriage, such as siren seductresses targeting her husband, lonely with the Mrs. away for weeks at a time, complete with hotel rooms with hidden video cameras to record the proceedings.

In the long run, if we have a President whose response to a crisis is to burst into tears and cease to function, then the Marxists have succeeded, and we’re fornicated. But we’ll see. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meier were pretty good leaders, so I am cautiously hopeful.

Echoes of history at 2008 Olympics

The Beijing Olympic Games have replayed not only the international political and cultural story of our generation, but the ultimate, age-old story of heaven and earth themselves. The top three medal-winning countries stand in fascinating relation to one another. Russia, led by Soviet throwback Vladimir Putin who is even now in the process of a hostile occupation of independent Georgia: 36 medals.

China, led by an old-world Communist Politburo which systematically abuses the basic human rights of its people while attempting to project an image of justice and prosperity to the world: 67 medals.

United States, far from perfect but still a beacon of liberty, justice, strength, and real human rights for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the tempest-tossed of the earth, and with one-seventh the population of China: 72 medals.

No mere jingoism or Olympic-week enthusiasm, this synopsis reveals that these Beijing Games are what every Olympic replay is: a microcosm of both the recent and ancient past that produced the athletes and international relations involved in them.

In our case, the recent past is the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. Adolf Hitler attempted to use the 1936 Berlin Games in much the same way China is attempting to use the 2008 Beijing Games: as a demonstration and tour de force of his nation's political, social, and economic advancement, and thereby of his own ideology. Unlike China, he also intended to use the games to display German athletes' physical prowess and genetic superiority over people groups such as ethnic Africans.

The delicious irony was not lost on the world, least of all the United States - my mother told me the story with relish in the suburbs of American Georgia when I was but a lad - when James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens, grandson of a slave and son of a sharecropper, collected four gold medals in track and field events in Berlin while Hitler watched: the 100m dash, the long jump, the 200m dash, and the 4x100m relay. This feat would not be repeated until another American, Carl Lewis, did it in the 2004 Games in Los Angeles, long after Hitler had been swept from the world stage in due ignominy.

Hitler, in the stands on the first day of the Owens events, came down to congratulate German event winners but declined to congratulate any others, including Owens. Owens responded with the same kind of grace American athletes have demonstrated at the 2008 games: "I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany."

Even at home, two Democratic Party presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, neither invited Owens to the White House nor bestowed on him any honors in the wake of his accomplishment. Owens would have to wait for his proper national recognition until the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who heralded Owens as an "ambassador of sports."

Yet while Stalin was enslaving and slaughtering his own countrymen and Hitler was on the verge of enslaving all of Europe, America had shed its own sons' blood to abolish domestic slavery, and despite remaining cultural prejudice at home the descendants of her former slaves had now risen to international acclaim. Nine years after the Owens games the United States would be the main power responsible for defeating Hitler, and for holding Stalin and his ideological heirs in check for another half century until they could be decisely defeated without firing a shot in direct warfare, under the steadfast American leadership of a man for whom, when he died a mere four years ago, Lady Margaret Thatcher suggested that "all the trumpets sounded on the other side," Ronald Reagan.

There is a litany of American Olympic stories as long as the litany of the general international triumphs of the United States. The unlikely conquest by the U.S. national hockey team of the heavily favored Soviet team in 1980 at Lake Placid matches the unlikely conquest of the United States of the technology, logistics, national determination, and financial investment required to put a starred and striped flag - the only such flag to this day - on the moon, or a scientific lander - the only such lander - on the distant planet of Mars, with plans for a manned mission to Mars to come in the near future.

There is the 1972 collection of seven gold medals - an Olympic record until another American surpassed him in 2008 - by swimmer Mark Spitz, or the repeated domination of both springboard and tower diving events by Greg Louganis between 1980 and 1988, to match the American invention of the telephone, the electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the transistor, the Internet, satellite navigation, and many more core technologies that define what it means to live anywhere on earth in the 21st century.

Louganis was of Samoan and Swedish descent and was raised by Greek-American adoptive parents in California. Like Albert Einstein and the other German scientists who fled Hitler's Germany following World War II to establish nuclear technology in the United States, Louganis' adoptive ancestors came to America to be free and to give their descendants the opportunity to prosper.

From every corner of the world during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, they came to America. They replayed, wittingly or not, the coming of the Mayflower and the desire of its passengers to build a nation that was a lighthouse. Even beyond the immigration of Louganis' adoptive family, the symptoms of this mass migration to the land of the free are everywhere to be seen in every Olympic Games, and 2008 is no exception.

The personal coach of lead American women's gymnast Shawn Johnson is Liang Chow, who once competed on the Chinese national gymnastics team then came to America in 1990 to study and coach at the University of Iowa. Johnson is from west Des Moines. The father of American men's gymnast Alexander Artemev is Vladimir Artemev, the former Soviet all-around world gymnastics champion in 1984 before he came to America in 1994 when Alexander was 9. Both became American citizens in 2002.

One searches the Russian and Chinese Olympic teams in vain for any sign of an American who migrated to those countries to achieve athletic greatness or any other kind of greatness not offered in better timber in his native land.

The greatest athletes competing for other nations at the 2008 games, if they have not migrated permanently to the United States, have come to the U.S. to train, compete, and to get an education. Premier Chinese basketball player Yao Ming plays professionally in the American National Basketball Association (NBA), as do Spain's Pao Gasol, Germany's Dirk Nowitzki, Argentina's Manu Ginobili, and every other international basketball great.

The University of Auburn swimming program alone boasts members from Australia, Brazil, Estonia, Denmark, France, Croatia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Arizona State University boasts athletes from Brazil, Canada, Finland, Italy, Great Britain, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, and Sweden. At the University of Alabama, swimmers from Ecuador share the pool with ones from Greece, Kazakhstan, Romania, Hungary, and South Africa. In swimming as in so many other international sports, the road to Olympic glory for one's home country usually passes through an American league or university.

They not only came to America to live free, but they came to bring glory back to the land of their ethnic heritage. They came, they worked, they learned, they trained, they sent money home, and with their help America not only mounted athletic conquests to match her economic, social, political, and military conquests - military not in aggression against free, independent states like Putin in Georgia, but military in defense of free, independent states, like Eisenhower in Normandy or Reagan in Nicaragua or Bush in Iraq - and in the process America became a blessing to the nations.

Her 23-year-olds become Olympic legends by winning more gold medals than any other Olympian in history. Her 41-year-old mothers become Olympic legends by winning medals two years after giving birth at the age of 39. Games of size and speed such as basketball are not simply won but dominated by the United States, and her basketball players are celebrated around the world as icons of athletic genius.

Her athletes, in turn, educate the world on why it is at least as cool to love the United States as it is for anyone else to love his or her country, despite widespread international media and political prejudice to the contrary, a prejudice born of too great a sympathy for Russian and Chinese visions of political wisdom. Kobe Bryant, American basketball great, in an interview with NBC's Chris Collinsworth, said a few days ago that when he first received his Team USA basketball jersey he laid it on the bed and "just stared at it." This exchange followed between Collinsworth and Bryant:

Collinsworth: "Where does the patriotism come from inside of you? Historically, what is it?"

Bryant: "Well, you know it's just our country, it's... we believe is the greatest country in the world. It has given us so many great opportunities, and it's just a sense of pride that you have; that you say 'You know what? Our country is the best!'"

Collinsworth: "Is that a 'cool' thing to say, in this day and age? That you love your country, and that you're fighting for the red, white and blue? It seems sort of like a day gone by."

Kobe: "No, it's a cool thing for me to say. I feel great about it, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I mean, this is a tremendous honor."

Bryant may not understand exactly where American greatness comes from, or how the exceptional opportunities he rightly appreciates first developed, but like so many normal, everyday Americans from Bryant's Los Angeles to Shawn Johnson's Des Moines to Michael Phelps' Baltimore, he senses at a deep level that the greatness is real and the greatness is unequaled by another nation.

Americans do not compete at the highest levels in every world sport, to be sure, but the 2008 games have shown once again that they compete at the highest levels on a wider and deeper athletic scale, and across a wider range of ethnicities and people groups producing athletes who call themselves Americans, than any other political entity recognized by the world, past or present.

And American athletes accomplish their feats with the same kind of grace, charity, and universal concern for all nations with which President George W. Bush carries and expresses himself, notwithstanding foolish caricatures everywhere to the contrary.

It is as difficult to pinpoint the source of this grace and charity in American athletes as it is for Kobe Bryant to pinpoint the source of his patriotism, but the question leads beyond the immediate history of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in which the United States has stood at the center of the international epic, back to...

... Plymouth Rock and into the Middle Ages; to the fall of Rome; to the birth and death of Jesus Christ; to the ancient mystery of the Jewish people group that produced both Him and His chief disciple, the Apostle Paul, who compared his efforts to be like Christ to the efforts of an Olympic athlete preparing for his games; and further back still...

...to the vicious world of the ancient Near East out of which the Jews were first called - a world where Everyman was nothing and the king was Everyman, a world of nothing if not one of universal slavery before the Jewish presence illuminated it with the message, the commandments, and the very presence of Yahweh.

The question of grace and charity takes us to these places because the question of grace and charity is, as America has shown the world better than any other nation in the modern era, the real center of history. In the end the Olympic games are only games. They will pass, the glory will fade, the medals will lose their luster, and the records will be broken.

But the presence of grace and charity on the international scene beneath, behind, and in the midst of an unrelenting drive toward victory - the reality of virtue and humility in the face of evil and slight, of national health, endurance, determination, and stability in the face of the rise and fall of international despots, of the promise such national strength represents of a Kingdom yet to be revealed in which grace and charity will find their complete fulfillment and manifestation among every tribe, tongue, and nation - this is the stuff of lasting legends, the story of Earth, and the meaning of the cosmos: that grace and charity, and the God who is their ultimate source, and the peoples who worship that God, become and remain triumphant, though charlatans and derelicts give battle to the end.