I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a replay of that episode of The Office, the one about the rival Christmas parties. It would be just like Rowan Williams to hide the conservatives’ karaoke-machine power cord.

Meanwhile, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is taking it all in her stride.

Cheese. What does it mean? Cheese . . .

Double tonsure tip to Kendall Harmon.

I see that Jonathan Last and Michael Novak have been having at it, and getting me in the middle. Please leave me out of it. I have written about the Mormon factor in the Romney candidacy here, here, and here. But let me spare you the trouble of re-reading all that. My argument can be briefly summarized:

(1) If people who are concerned for religious reasons about the influence of Mormonism oppose Gov. Romney’s candidacy, that is not necessarily an instance of bigotry;
(2) It certainly does not violate the constitutional prohibition of a religious test for public office, since people may support or oppose a candidate for any reason they think pertinent, even voting for a candidate because she is a woman (without establishing a sexual test for public office);
(3) Those who oppose Romney for the aforementioned reason should not be told that politics trumps religion;
(4) I believe a candidate should be judged by the four criteria of policies, character, competence, and electability;
(5) I think Romney is a very appealing candidate, although, contra my friend Michael, I do not do endorsements.

Now that I have stepped out of the ring, Jonathan and Michael can go to it.

The recent unpleasantness at Princeton brought to mind Villanova professor Robert Maranto’s musing about the ideological tilt of academia, “As A Republican, I’m on the Fringe.” It’s a familiar story. There are far more liberals and Marxists in the professoriate than conservatives and libertarians, and the numbers get dramatic — reaching 20 to 1 — when you start to focus on the folks who study and teach about culture: sociology, anthropology, literature, and history.

This extraordinary Leftward tilt leads to a hiring bias evident to anyone who has participated in the high seriousness of the academic appointment process. Everybody wants to find somebody really smart to hire, and since only an idiot would vote for a Republican…. Well, you know how it ends. As Aristotle pointed out, like seeks like. It takes an great deal of intellectual and moral integrity to resist this tendency, and few professors possess enough of either.

But more interesting to me are the surprising consequences of the ideological bias of our universities. The bias has done a great deal to help staff the think tanks of the Right. Sinecures of academia unavailable, a conservative intellectual is practically forced to find a public voice. The same holds for students. A liberal student is on ideological welfare. The entire university is set up to support his or her causes. The conservatively-minded students must be entrepreneurial. If they don’t start their own organizations, then their positions go unheard.

Thus the law of unintended consequences. It seems rather obvious to me that the vibrant organizational and intellectual potency of contemporary conservatism is largely due to the transparent and relentless Leftism of the academy. Deny a podium to smart, motivated folks who hold positions consistently preferred by more than 50% of American voters, and they will find other outlets. And furthermore, removed from the relative insularity and softening wealth of the contemporary university, those same conservative intellectuals will need to be nimble, articulate, and energetic in order to survive.

Dear Ms. Rice:

I am a professor of the philosophy of law at Princeton, and someone who enjoyed your fine book Out of Egypt. I have read your endorsement of Senator Clinton and your reasoning as to why you support her despite your pro-life convictions.

I am a former Democrat who left the party because it hardened its heart toward the child in the womb. In the 1990s, I had the honor of working for Governor Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania, the last of the great national pro-life Democratic political leaders. (The governor, you may recall, was denied an opportunity to speak at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life advocacy.) I am the grandson of West Virginia coal miners who, together with my grandmothers, were loyal Democrats. If they were alive today, they would ache, as I ache, to know that the political party they loved has committed itself to the legal protection of the killing of the unborn.

I appreciated the soft voice with which you spoke in expressing your views, and I wish to respond in similarly soft terms. Although I believe you are deeply mistaken in what you are doing and encouraging others to do, I am certain that you are trying to do what is right. That is all any of us can do. Perhaps you are the one who is right, and I am the one who is wrong. I hope, though, that you will consider my reasons.

I will not try to answer all of your points, though all are, I believe, answerable, and if you ask I will be happy to say what I think the answers are. For now, what I hope you will consider is simply this: The child in the womb either is or is not a human being–a member of the human family. If he or she is, then he or she is entitled as a matter of basic justice to the protection of laws and, indeed, to the equal protection of the laws. For a voter or public official to seek to deny to the unborn elementary legal protections against killing that we favor for ourselves and others we regard as worthy is a gross and appalling injustice. There is no way around this. Once one concedes the humanity of the child–as one must in view of the plain facts of human embryogenesis and early-intrauterine development–the principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family requires the legal protection of the unborn.

Yet today the unborn are denied any legal protection and are slaughtered (there really is no other word for what is going on) at the rate of more than one million per year in our country. The scope and gravity of this injustice surely demands that we make the fight against it central in our own deliberations and actions as citizens. It is true that law cannot prevent all abortions; but unless the law recognizes the humanity and rights of the child in the womb we cannot begin doing what you and I wish to do–namely, end the horror of abortion. Recognizing what abortion is–the killing of an innocent human being–is the first step; and that step cannot be taken while we legally protect abortion and even confer on it (as the Supreme Court did) the status of a constitutional right. Our regime of law, as things stand, speaks loudly, clearly, and falsely. It proclaims that no being who matters–no creature possessing dignity and human rights–is destroyed when we tear off the limbs, burn off the skin, or suck out the brains of a human fetus.

I once had the honor of representing Mother Teresa of Calcutta as counsel of record on an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of the United States asking for the reversal of Roe v. Wade. (I would be happy to send you a copy, if you like.) Mother made the point that we cannot fight credibly against other social and moral evils, including poverty and violence, while we tolerate mass killing by abortion. In this, it seems to me, she stated with characteristic simplicity a profound truth.

You have endorsed a candidate and a political party that believes that abortion, far from being an injustice, is a fundamental right. They are pledged to oppose any meaningful legal protections of the life of the child in the womb. They have even sought to protect the grisliest of methods of abortion–the “dilation and intact extraction” procedure. In this, they are promoting the greatest injustice and abuse of human rights to be found in our country today. It is this injustice that we should be most dedicated to fighting. If abortion is what you and I say it is–what we know it to be–then the issue must be given priority in our work as citizens. We should certainly not be tying ourselves to those who see it as no injustice at all. If we do that (and let me say this with the softest and humblest of voices), we are implicating ourselves–deeply–in the grave injustice being committed four thousand times per day against the tiniest and most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters.

I have imposed on you enough, so let me stop there. I will, however, attach a paper I presented earlier this year addressing the responsibilities of citizens and public officials toward the unborn child. If you read it, I hope you will let me know if you find in it any mistake of fact or error of logic. If my argument is sound, I hope you will prayerfully reconsider the position you have taken.

Yours sincerely,
Robert George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence
Director of the James Madison Program in
American Ideals and Institutions
Princeton University

Former world chess champ and thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side Gary Kasparov has called it quits: He will not continue his bid for the Russian presidency as the “Other Russia” candidate.

Kasparov has been a none-too-subtle critic of what he considers a thugocracy in the original Russia. But it seems that opposition to opposition has made a viable candidacy untenable, to the point where Kasparov couldn’t even rent meeting space.

At least he didn’t admit to using performance-enhancing drugs during his bout with Anatoly Karpov in 1985.

(He was definitely off the juice against IBM’s Deep Blue—at least in their 1997 match-up. For a fascinating and lawsuit-worthy interpretation of that debacle, I highly recommend Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. It makes the whole Black Sox scandal of 1919 look positively inspiring.)