The judiciary rotunda ordinarily is as quiet as a cathedral. Except for the occasional researcher at the adjacent law library, few visitors venture there.
      Judge Moore’s chambers are far more cluttered, with several copies of the Ten Commandments on the walls, an open Bible and family photos on his desk, next to "a Ten Commandments desk clock." On the wall behind him hangs a large painting of Abraham Lincoln and a print of scales with a Scripture underneath.
      "[The Ten Commandments] represents the moral foundation of our law," says Judge Moore, 54. "And the Alabama Constitution says we are to invoke God’s favor and guidance to establish justice. My job is the administration of justice in this state."
      Judge Moore has been fighting this and similar battles for 10 years, ever since 1992 when, as a circuit court judge in Etowah County, he first displayed a plaque of the Ten Commandments on his courtroom walls. The ACLU sued him in 1995, but the case was thrown out on procedural grounds. Both sides agreed that a ruling never was made on the merits of the case.
      "It’s been a long battle," he says. "I have been in federal courts, state courts. I have spoken on this issue from the east, the west, the north and the south. I have learned that throughout that there’s a great lack of understanding of the First Amendment, a complete misunderstanding of the separation of church and state. People need to learn more about their constitution and about their rights under the First Amendment."
      The stakes were raised after Judge Moore swept to victory a year ago November. When he was sworn into office two months later, he pledged to "restore and preserve the moral foundation of the law."
      His opponents, however, say the prominent display of a Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the Supreme Court building sends a much more sectarian message.
      "The Ten Commandments are clearly sectarian," said Mr. Varley. "They apply to the Judeo-Christian traditions only. And that leaves out a tremendous number of religions in this country."
      He said: "You have a 2 ½-ton monument to the Ten Commandments sitting alone by itself roped off in a situation where it has been made clear by the Supreme Court justice that he is not going to allow anything else to be hung around there."
      Steve Melshior of Cheyenne, Wyo., the lead attorney for Judge Moore, disagrees.?
      "There’s a moral law which the state is powerless to alter," he says. "You want justice? How can you have justice

if you don’t acknowledge the basis of all law"?
      "[This case is about] left-wing powerhouses that are fighting to extricate any public acknowledgement of God," he says. "If they remove God from the picture, they remove accountability. That’s why this [case] is such a biggie.
      "What [Judge Moore] has done is no different than what we have been doing in this nation since its very inception—publicly acknowledging God," Mr. Melchior says.
      "Every branch of the federal government publicly acknowledges God on a daily basis, he adds, citing as example the congressional chaplains on the taxpayers’ payroll, the presidential oath sworn on a Holy Bible and the Ten Commandments displayed on the gates of the U.S. Supreme Court chambers.
      Mr. Varley responds that the U.S. Supreme Court has always maintained that the public display of the Ten Commandments is not unconstitutional in a historical context, on display with other laws.
      Scott Benen, spokesman for the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, calls Mr. Melchior’s and Mr. Moore’s interpretation of the First Amendment "creative."
      "If all the framers wanted to do was ban a national church, they had plenty of opportunities to state exactly that in the First Amendment," he says. "The historical record indicates that the framers wanted the First Amendment to ban not only establishment of a single church but also "multiple establishments," that is, a system by which the government assists many religions on an equal basis."
      Mr. Melchior responds that even the First Amendment was not intended to outlaw public acknowledgment of God.
      State legislators may end up deciding on the matter before the courts do. A proposed bill would enable Alabama citizens to vote on the posting of the Ten Commandments on public property within the state.
      Sen. Gerald Dial, Lineville Democrat, introduced such a bill last year in the Alabama state Senate, and Rep. DuWayne Bridges, Valley Republican, introduced a similar bill in the House. The bill passed 32-0 in the Senate, but died by a committee voice vote before reaching the House floor. It will be reintroduced this year with additional co-sponsors.
      "Now we’re for the Ten Commandments," says Sen. Albert Lipscomb, Magnolia Springs Republican, "and I want you to report that."
      The lawsuit has been consolidated with similar charges brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Mr. Moore’s attorneys filed their answer on Dec. 28 before U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson for the Middle District of Alabama.
      —The Washington Times, January 10, 2002, p. A 2

Television producer Norman Lear’s People for the American Way has created a new political lobby for left-wing religious activists. Called the Progressive Religious Partnership, and headed by renowned liberal organizer Ralph Neas, the new coalition styles itself as a left-leaning version of the once-vibrant Christian Coalition.
      "I can’t fight all of these Christian preachers on TV with all the Jewish money," Norman Lear supposedly told Episcopal priest George Regas, a co-founder of the partnership. "So you must raise some Gentile money." Regas shared the remarks at the partnership’s opening convocation this spring in Washington, D.C.
      Judging from most of the remarks at that gathering, the partnership is not likely to be known for its moderation. Besides touting traditional liberal causes, such as gun control and expanded welfare spending, partnership leaders demanded homosexual marriage, government subsidies for abortion, and reparations for slavery.
      Ralph Neas boasted that People for the American Way had spent over $200,000 organizing the partnership because it realizes that it cannot change America without first changing America’s religious climate. The "Religious Right" has dominated America’s political discourse for too long, he and many others alleged.
      Regas suggested that religious conservatives had been short on "compassion" and "justice." But others were less restrained in their critique of conservatives. United Methodist minister James Lawson of Los Angeles slammed the Religious Right as a ‘theocratic, fascist movement that emanates out of racism, sexism and violence."
      The partnership aims to combat these "isms" with its own brand of politics that are decidedly left-wing but still "rooted in the sacred story," according to Regas. Central to the movement is a balance between its demands for "economic and sexual justice."
      "We will not sacrifice one agenda for the sake of the other," Regas asserted. "We boldly set forth our affirmation of gay marriage as part of God’s design which we will bless before the throne of Almighty God."
      A number of radical Roman Catholic dissidents were present to endorse the partnership’s vision of "sexual justice." Among them was Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, who warned that the Religious Right is an "international phenomenon" often fueled by "extreme interpretations of Catholic doctrine that discriminate 

against women."
      Marianne Duddy was another prominent radical Catholic voice at the partnership meeting. Duddy is the executive director for Dignity, a pro-homosexuality caucus group for dissident Roman Catholics. "On this issue [of same-sex ‘marriage’], the Roman Catholic Church has joined forces with the Religious Right to ensure the perpetuation of civil oppression and discrimination," Duddy lamented.
      She boasted that she had celebrated a "wedding" with her lesbian partner during a Catholic mass.
      Roman Catholic Sister Maureen Fiedler, co-director of the Quixote Center in Brentwood, Maryland, opened the partnership’s gathering with an invocation. She prayed to "You who are both Mother and Father," and cited "our spiritual ancestors," including Jesus, Mohammed, Sojourner Truth, Mahatma Gandhi, and Bishop Oscar Romero. "May our…world learn that your love embraces everyone regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, class, culture, age, physical challenges, or sexual orientation," she prayed. "And may we respect the moral adulthood of each of us, women and men in making choices that affect our lives."
      The Rev. John McNeill, co-founder of Dignity, was another dissident Catholic speaker for the partnership. He gave public thanks to God for God’s "great gift" to him, which was the "presence of a gay lover in my life for 35 years."
      The two great "liberation movements" of our age are women’s liberation and "gay" liberation, McNeill said. Both are the work of the Holy Spirit, who is "preparing the world for an increased infusion of Herself into the hearts of the faithful."
      Catholic Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis of Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey, offered to the partnership gathering her own brand of eco-friendly, pantheistic spirituality. "From the beginning, the universe has had a non-material inner dimension and that has been evolving with its physical complexity," she theorized. "If consciousness and soul show up in the human six billion years later, it’s because it was inherently there in its potent form all along," MacGillis claimed. "And [it is because] this whole thing is an unbroken sequence of events, and that the human is one with and embedded in the whole. Any belief that says the human is radically disconnected from the other-than-human is the dysfunction."
      Catholic radicals were prominent at the Partnership event, but mainline Protestants had their fair share of the limelight. Katherine Ragsdale, an Episcopal priest from Massachusetts and president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, called abortion providers the "saints and heroes" of our day.
      Ragsdale declared that the "vast majority" of religious

people are pro-abortion rights, including Roman Catholics who are overshadowed by their anti-abortion hierarchy.
      The Rev. Regas was more vitriolic than Ragsdale in denouncing pro-lifers. "Deep in my soul I believe there is something vicious and violent about coercing a woman to carry to term an unwanted child." Forcing a woman to have a child is "legalized rape," Regas insisted.
      Defrocked United Methodist minister Jimmy Creech, who lost his clergy status after he violated Methodist church law by celebrating a homosexual "wedding," complained that the church’s sexual ethics were not based on the teachings of Jesus but on "Jewish, non-Christian philosophies."
      "I think it’s because of the women’s movement that we have gotten to the place where we can talk about same-gendered marriage," Creech said. "The resistance to same-gendered marriage is still that old patriarchal model that contains rigid gender roles that are imposed on all people."
      Carol Shields, who co-chairs People for the American Way, accused Methodist conservatives of exploiting homosexuality to "further a larger and larger schism" in their denomination. They were perpetuating a "big lie," she alleged. Similarly, conservative Southern Baptists exploited the "big lie" of belief in scriptural inerrancy to facilitate their takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
      "It ain’t about morals," Shield assured the crowd. "It’s about these schisms in the church which translate into political secular power…These people don’t care who gets hurt and praying for them doesn’t help."
      Predictably, several partnership speakers propagated conspiracy theories involving the close presidential election last fall. Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State revealed that the Religious Right had cut its deal with George W. Bush well before the election. The appointment of John Ashcroft to head the Justice Department was proof enough.
      "John Ashcroft is not just a deeply committed Christian," Lynn said. "John Ashcroft [has said] that Jesus was not just the Lord of his life, which many folks would say is true, but that Jesus was the king of the country." Lynn doubted that the attorney general would enforce laws that violate his allegedly strident religious views.
      Confusion about the country’s founding documents and principles was evident among other speakers. "The last time I read my U.S. Constitution, every person in this country had  

Is the U.S. romp through Afghanistan the last hurrah of a culturally hollowed out superpower? It is difficult to believe otherwise after considering the facts laid out by Patrick J. Buchanan in his new book, The Death of the West.
      Mr. Buchanan has strong opinions, but his opinions are based in facts, unlike those of his equally opinionated opponents, who have bought into the multiculturalist dogma of the evils of Western civilization wishful thinking.
      Mr. Buchanan rests his case on demography and immigration and on the multicultural attack led by Cultural Marxists on Western history, values and institutions.
      Demography is destiny. In 1960 people of European stock comprised one-quarter of the world population. Today white people make up one-sixth of the world population. By 2050 people of European descent will comprise only one-tenth of the world population.
      Whites are shrinking into a minority even within their own countries. Massive uncontrolled legal and illegal immigration, together with collapsing fertility rates of whites everywhere, foretell a vanishing race.
      In the U.S., whites are no longer a majority in California. Many are now leaving the state looking for a place to live that bears some resemblance to the country they grew up in. Before a lifetime passes, there will be no place. In 1998, President Clinton boasted to a cheering Portland State University audience that by 2050 whites would be a minority in America. "No other nation in history," he said, "has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time."
      A changing racial composition would not mean the death of the West if immigrants from Third World countries were assimilating. But the "melting pot" no longer exists. Discarded as racist and hegemonic, the "melting pot" has been replaced by the multicultural "salad bowl." As Jacques Barzun wrote in his recent history of Western civilization, "From Dawn to Decadence," not even native-born whites are being assimilated to their culture.
      Americans are largely unaware, but Cultural Marxism reigns in our universities and public schools. The old Marxists blamed capitalists and the economic system for oppression and exploitation. The new Marxists blame the white race and Western civilization itself. As Susan Sontag (among many) puts it, "The white race is the cancer of human history."

      Ms. Sontag is highly respected by American intellectuals. A survey found her to be the most respected intellectual of our time. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Had she said anything good about "the white race," she would be as demonized as Pat Buchanan.
      Cultural Marxists assault not only our history but also the family, the chastity of women and Christianity, important pillars of our civilization. Cultural Marxists use education, entertainment and the media to create a new people that shares their values.
      Mr. Buchanan thinks that the Cultural Marxist revolution will succeed but be short-lived, like Soviet communism, because it is based in lies and the disregard of reality. Mr. Buchanan’s optimism seems contrary to his facts and, perhaps, is an expression of his fighting spirit. The test is whether people respond. Does anyone care, or is the future too scary to be acknowledged?
      A case can be made that the situation is worse than Mr. Buchanan says. In the U.S., native-born whites already are second-class citizens in their own country. Unconstitutional group privileges have arisen based on race, gender and disability. White males no longer have equal rights. As the current chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission says, "Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."
      The protections in our legal system that make law a shield of the people, not a weapon the hands of government, have largely been eroded.
      But the most fearsome fact is that the demonization of white people in the universities today is more extreme than the demonization of the Jews that was a prominent feature of German university life for 60 years prior to the rise of National Socialism.
      Demonization of whites is the weapon used by multiculturalists to break up Western civilization. But teaching hatred has other consequences. Demonization has already demoralized some whites, making them ashamed and fearful of their skin color.
      By the time whites become political minorities, decades of demonization will have prepared the ground for legislation, prohibiting their propagation and, perhaps, assigning them to the gulag as a final solution to "the cancer of human history."
      None of this is ordained. Faculties could replace multicultural propagandists with real scholars, and legislation to assimilable numbers. Is Western civilization worth the effort? Does anyone any longer know what Western civilization is?
      —The Washington Times, January 9, 2002, p. A14

The purpose of the ideology known commonly as "multiculturalism" is to destroy America. In the 21st century world of fourth-generation warfare, it is likely to succeed. To understand why, we first must understand both phenomena.
      Fourth-generation warfare is the fourth major change in warfare since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the event that marks the beginning of modern war. The reason that treaty, which ended the Thirty Years War, marks the beginning of the modern period is that it established a state monopoly on war. After 1648, at least in Europe, war was between states, it was fought by state armies and navies fighting other institutions very much like themselves. Indeed, our whole picture of war, armies and navies—formal battles, uniforms, flags, saluting, etc.—is a picture of war between states. Few people in the defense establishments of today’s states can imagine it being any other way.
      But through most of history, it was another way. Many different entities fought wars: Families fought wars, clans fought wars, tribes fought wars, races and ethnic groups fought wars, religions fought wars, business enterprises fought wars. They fought using many implements, not just armies and navies: bribery, assassination, piracy, massacres, slaves raids, mercenaries and tribal levies. In many of these conflicts the "army" was composed of any males physically able to wield a weapon, and the "navy" any available ship. The object was not "politics by other means," but simply to rejoice in the slaughter of an enemy, the noble deaths in battle of one’s own champions, the seizure of the enemy’s land, the rape of his women and the selling of his children into slavery. The Old Testament is full of it, as is the Koran.
      In the fourth generation of modern war, which also marks the end of the modern period, past is prologue. The state is losing its monopoly on war, and states everywhere find themselves fighting nonstate opponents—and usually losing, despite all the technology, special training and vast resources of state armed forces. War is fought at three levels: physical, mental and moral. The state is losing at the moral level, which is the highest and most decisive.
      Around the world the state has begotten the bureaucratic state, and the bureaucratic state has begotten the New Class, or the ruling elite. That New Class has three characteristics: It can’t make things work; it uses its power and position to exempt itself from the consequences of things not working (in the United States, it has ruined the public schools while sending its own children to private schools); 

and it really cares about only one thing—remaining the New Class. Not surprisingly, people who are not members of the New Class find fighting for the state it dominates a less than entrancing prospect.
      On the contrary, many citizens are giving their primary loyalty to entities other than the state—religions, races, ideologies—and are willing, even eager, to fight against the states on behalf of something they can believe in. It is not simply from fear of U.S. bombers that Osama bin Laden, a man of great wealth, chooses to live in a cave.
      As war between states fades away, one of the older forms of conflict returning is war between cultures. With the death of state loyalties and identities, identification and loyalty to a culture is coming back strongly. Cultural differences are one of history’s main reasons for war. Human nature being what it is, when cultures rub up against each other, the resulting friction often leads to fire.
      Perhaps primary among the returning cultural loyalties is loyalty to Islam. After three centuries on the strategic defensive, Islam has during the last 50 or so years resumed the strategic offensive, expanding outward in every direction. As historian Russell Kirk wrote, culture comes from the cult, and the cult at the center of Islamic culture—Islam itself, is very much alive (unlike Christianity in much of Christendom).
      Neither the state nor secular law is legitimate from an Islamic perspective. Legitimacy adheres only to the Ummah, the international Islamic community, and to Shariah, Islamic law. Islam divides the world into the Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, and the Dar al-Harb, the world of war; with and in the latter, there can be no peace. War against the unbeliever, the kaffir, is an Islamic duty, carrying with it the promise of martyrdom and a bevy of whores (the word is from the Arabic houri) in heaven. While there are lax Islamics, there is no such thing as tolerant or peaceful Islam.
      The basic message of "multiculturalism" is that all cultures are equally good and beneficent—except Western culture, which is violent and oppressive. That message is, of course, a lie. In reality, Western culture is one of only two cultures that has been successful over time in terms of the quality of life it provided to its adherents (the other success is Chinese culture). To see real violence and oppression, one need only look at the life of non-Muslims in Islamic majority countries. The purpose of multiculturalism is to disarm the West psychologically, to make it impossible for Western men even to consider fighting in defense of the Western, Judeo-Christian way of life; to do so, as the multiculturalists preach, is to become "another Adolf Hitler" (who was, ironically, no fan of Judeo-Christian culture himself.)
      Disarmament through psychological conditioning takes place endlessly in America’s public schools, colleges and