George Weigel has penned a sharp response to Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec’s response to his original Newsweek column.

The whole thing is worth reading, so it’s hard to select just a couple sample paragraphs. But here’s the opening:

I take it as an iron law of controversy that when three tenured law professors like Nick Cafardi, Cathy Kaveny, and Doug Kmiec fret in print about “intellectual siren calls” and “elegant theorizing,” something other than real argument—moral argument or policy argument—is afoot. A serious, bipartisan, national debate about the ways in which people of goodwill in both political parties can work together to build a culture of life in 21st-century America would be welcome. Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec are not making the contributions to that argument of which they were once capable. Indeed, as the Most Rev. Charles Chaput, archbishop of Denver recently put it (speaking, he emphasized, as a private citizen), “To suggest—as some Catholics do—that Senator [Barack] Obama is this year’s ‘real’ pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse. To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred ‘pro-life’ option is to subvert what the word ‘pro-life’ means.”

Why? Because the public record amply demonstrates that Senator Obama is not the abortion moderate of our professors’ imagination, but a genuine abortion radical. In the third presidential debate, Obama described Roev. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that obliterated the abortion law of all fifty states, as “rightly decided”—a judgment with which Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec have all disagreed in the past. Moreover, Senator Obama’s defense of Roe extends far beyond anyone’s “elegant theorizing.” Support for Roe was Obama’s stated reason for opposing Illinois bills aimed at providing legal protection for children who survived an abortion. Support for Roe buttressed Obama’s criticism of a Supreme Court decision upholding state partial-birth abortion laws. The full implementation of the most radical interpretation of Roe would seem to be the goal of Obama’s support for the federal Freedom of Choice Act [FOCA], which, by stripping Catholic doctors of “conscience clause” protections currently in state laws, would put thousands of Catholic physicians in jeopardy.

In short, there is very little, if anything, in Senator Obama’s public record to suggest that he agrees with Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec that abortion is a “tragic moral choice.” On the contrary, the 2008 Democratic platform removed language that described abortion as “regrettable” from the relevant plank. Do Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec imagine that they have a better grasp of Senator Obama’s views on the life issues than, say, the National Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL], or other pro-choice Obama supporters?

The ending is even better. Read the entire thing.

If you’re in the New York area on November 13, frequent FT contributor Stephen Barr will deliver the St. Albert’s Day Lecture at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer (Lexington and 66th) at 7:00 PM. The lecture is free and open to the public and is entitled Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. For more information, click here.

From today’s Independent:

Gayle Williams worked with the poorest and most unfortunate of the children in Afghanistan, young boys and girls who had lost limbs to landmines and bombs. She was dedicated to her task of teaching them the basic skills needed to survive in a harsh and violent land. Yesterday the thirty-four-year-old British woman was murdered while walking along a quiet, tree-lined street in Kabul on her way to work. . . .

Ms. Williams had been in the country for two and a half years, working for a charity called Serve Afghanistan, which helps disabled children and adults to learn to live with their handicaps. A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, declared that she had been executed “because she was working for an organization which was preaching Christianity in Afghanistan.” Converting from Islam to Christianity is a capital offense in Afghanistan but friends and colleagues of Ms. Williams stressed that while the organization she worked for was Christian in its beliefs, she was extremely careful not to try to convert Afghans.

Here’s a question for the logicians out there: How do you reconcile this:

Climate change is happening faster than previously predicted according to a new World Wildlife Fund report.

Bringing together some of the most recent scientific reports and data, “Climate change: faster, stronger, sooner” reveals that global warming is accelerating more rapidly than the predictions made in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007.

One of the most concerning aspects of recent data is evidence that, in some places, the Arctic Ocean is losing sea ice 30 years ahead of current IPCC predictions.

Summer sea ice is now forecasted to completely disappear in the summer months sometime between 2013 and 2040–something which hasn’t happened for over a million years.

With this:

The number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures–they’re going down, not up.

On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to “a negative PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs–El Ninos–produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones–La Ninas–produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as “solar minimums” magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded–none–and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. “This is no coincidence,” he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate. . . .

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an “almost exact correlation” between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost “no correlation at all with CO2.”

An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration. . . . This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.” . . .

For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 . . . cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”

Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years–the period corresponding to reduced solar activity–all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.