Yesterday, Stephen Barr was kind enough to explain to us how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva could revolutionize the field of fundamental physics for the FT lay reader. While Barr’s article doesn’t go into what happens if we’re all sucked into black holes, or if the whole world will be destroyed, it certainly elucidated the more promising aspects of what the experiment could yield.

Those are good finds, Keith. If we leave aside the patently false assertions about book banning and evolution, and the misinterpretation of Palin’s remarks at her former church, we can focus on Doniger’s remarks on womanhood. Doniger articulates beliefs that many pro-choice people appear to hold, albeit less strongly. This may seem like stating the obvious, but I think that’s worth doing:

According to Doniger, it’s not just that Sarah Palin is against women, it’s that all pro-life men and women are against women. It’s not just that Sarah Palin is not a woman for being pro-life, it’s that no woman who is pro-life is really a woman.

The Wall Street Journal has a collection of recent writings against Trig Palin, or more specifically against Sarah Palin for giving birth to Trig. I had suspected that many in the media felt threatened by a mother who would give birth to a son with Downs, but Salon’s Cintra Wilson takes the cake:

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right.

Giving birth to a child with Downs is a move in the culture war? As the Journal notes, “This is worse than tasteless or even unhinged. It is depraved. It represents an inversion of any reasonable conception of right and wrong, including liberal conceptions.”

without a taste of The Onion.

Last January we published Jason Byasee’s “Not Your Father’s Pornography.” This week, another FT contributor, Ross Douthat, has a piece at the Atlantic (where he is a senior editor) asking whether using pornography is adultery. The piece catalogs the rise not only in the ubiquity and accessibility of pornography, but also in its nature–the progression from pin-ups to video-taped sex–and in its acceptability. The core of his argument lies in these three paragraphs:

Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it’s never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become—at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by “real” prostitutes and “real” affairs, we’re ultimately universalizing, in a milder but not all that much milder form, the sort of degradation and betrayal that only a minority of men have traditionally been involved in.

Go back to Philip Weiss’s pal and listen to him talk: Porn captures these women before they get smart . . . It’s painful to say, but that’s your boys’ night out. This is the language of a man who has accepted, not as a temporary lapse but as a permanent and necessary aspect of his married life, a paid sexual relationship with women other than his wife. And it’s the language of a man who has internalized a view of marriage as a sexual prison, rendered bearable only by frequent online furloughs with women more easily exploited than his spouse.

Calling porn a form of adultery isn’t about pretending that we can make it disappear. The temptation will always be there, and of course people will give in to it. I’ve looked at porn; if you’re male and breathing, chances are so have you. Rather, it’s about what sort of people we aspire to be: how we define our ideals, how we draw the lines in our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves if we cross them. And it’s about providing a way for everyone involved, men and women alike—whether they’re using porn or merely tolerating it—to think about what, precisely, they’re involving themselves in, and whether they should reconsider.

Another startling quotation came from Dan Savage, a sex columnist that many in my generation admire, who said that men who claim not to look at porn are “liars or castrates” and that women who are troubled by being supplanted by pornography should “GET OVER IT.”

Douthat’s piece is interesting because he articulates in purely rational terms that pornography is not just a lesser evil to be tolerated, but a vice that demeans our humanity. That is a message many would consider ludicrous, but one we need to be reminded of.

Michael Gerson in this morning’s Washington Post takes on the Faith-Based Condescension in the intellectual and media elites’ criticism of Gov. Sarah Palin. “Palin is portrayed as a ‘theocrat’–a Muslim fundamentalist in lipstick. She has ‘a right to her religious beliefs’ in precisely the same sense that one has a right to believe the moon is made of Muenster, but she must not be allowed to ‘impose’ such beliefs on others.”

Gerson notes that there are serious responses to such silliness, but suggests that the political fallout “must have Team McCain shouting and hollering with the joy of a frontier camp meeting.” And then, the zinger:

In general, liberal political and media elites demonstrate a religious diversity that runs the spectrum from secularism to liberal Episcopalianism–all the varied shades from violet to blue. Yet they assume their high church or Mencken-like disdain for religious enthusiasm is broadly shared. It was the sociologist Peter Berger who observed, “Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Episcopalians each form around 2 percent of the American population. Guess which group does not think of itself as a minority.”

If you think for a moment that Gerson himself is exaggerating or engaging in a bit of journalistic hyperbole, look no further than the comments by one Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Writing for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, she writes:

[Palin’s] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

And as for religion, I’d love to know precisely how the Good Lord conveyed to her so clearly his intention to destroy the environment (global warming, she thinks, is not the work of human hands, so it must be the work of You Know Who), the lives of untold thousands of soldiers and innocent bystanders (He is apparently rooting for this, too, she says), and, incidentally, a lot of polar bears and wolves, not to mention all the people who will be shot with the guns that she thinks other people ought to have. An even wider and more sinister will to impose her religious views on other people surfaced in her determination to legislate against abortion even in cases of rape and in her attempts to ban books, including books on evolution, and to fire the librarian who stood against her.

According to Prof. Doniger, Palin is not only a crypto-theocrat, she is a non-woman.

From last week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement, comes this amusing note on words and wordiness: “Each reissue of a dictionary is accompanied by a press release intended to alert journalists to new words and phrases. While some are likely to stick around . . . most will whither unlamented: Aerobicize, celbutante, retronym, e-Baying.”

“More interesting,” writes TLS, are “words that never made it. Johnson’s Dictionary, for example, offered effumability, the capacity to be converted into vapour, an expression which would come in handy in literary criticism–“Mr. X’s poetry is rich in effumability, if nothing else . . .”

One can only imagine the state of modern poetry, had the critical force of effumability been unleashed at the dawn of the Romantic age. A few more words, deserving resurrection or rehabilitation, are as follows: “honey-fuggle: to obtain by deception; bloviate: to talk pompously; hugsome: someone who can be hugged; immoment: unimportant; baggegery: the rabble; jolliment: merriment; malt-worm: a drunkard.”

But I’ll stop there, lest I weasel my way into the bloviating coterie of philologians.

In today’s Daily Article, Fr. Neuhaus offers us a fine reflection on the nature of religious freedom in America. By coincidence, Benedict XVI also reflects today on religious freedom (in France) as he begins his pilgrimage to Paris and Lourdes:

Describing himself as a “sower of charity and hope,” the pope quickly zeroed in on a perennial and crucial issue in France: the proper role of the church in a secular society.

On one hand, he said, it was right to “insist on the distinction between the political realm and that of religion in order to preserve both the religious freedom of citizens and the responsibility of the state toward them.”

At the same time, he said, society must become more aware of “the irreplaceable role of religion” in forming consciences and instilling values. . . .

He cited the long list of contributions made by French Catholic communities and said the French people should know that their country is “often at the heart of the pope’s prayers.”

In church-state relations, he said, past suspicions have been transformed into “a serene and positive dialogue.”

In making the point that “the roots of France–like those of Europe–are Christian,” he cited Sarkozy’s own statement to that effect last year.

At the moment, the full text of the Pope’s address is only available in French, but I look forward to reading a translated version when it’s available.