Saliman ou Écrasons linfâme ! (Le Pied de la Lettre) (French Edition)

To his mother, power was ugly, Obama determined: Which response to the world had a deeper effect on the person Barry Obama would become? Soetoro, described later by his daughter Maya as a sweet and quiet man, resigned himself to his situation and did not grow or change. He became a nondescript oilman, befriending slick operators from Texas and Louisiana who probably regarded him with racial condescension.

He went to their parties and played golf at the country club and became western and anonymous, slipping as far away as possible from the dangers of the purge and the freedom of his student days. Ann certainly had more options, but the one she eventually chose was unusual. She decided to deepen her connection to this alien land and to confront power in her own way, by devoting herself to understanding the people at the core of Indonesian culture, artisans and craftsmen, and working to help them survive.

A certain strain of realism can lead to inaction. A certain form of naivete can lead to action. This time, there was no sudden and jarring disappearance. She acquired numerous languages after that. Not just Indonesian, but her professional language and her feminist language. And I think she really got a voice.

Obama offers unusually perceptive and subtle observations of himself and the people around him. Yet, as he readily acknowledged, he rearranged the chronology for his literary purposes and presented a cast of characters made up of composites and pseudonyms. Only a select few were not granted that protection, for the obvious reason that he could not blur their identities — his relatives. And so it is that of all the people in the book, the one who takes it on the chin the most is his maternal grandfather, Stan Dunham.

It is obvious from the memoir, and from interviews with many people who knew the family in Hawaii, that Dunham loved his grandson and did everything he could to support him physically and emotionally.

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When Barry was 10, his mother made the difficult decision to send him back to Honolulu to live with her parents so he could get better schooling. He had been accepted into the prestigious Punahou School, and Madelyn and Stan had moved from a large house on Kamehameha Avenue to the apartment on Beretania, only five blocks from the campus. Gramps now seemed as colorful and odd as those monkeys in the back yard in Jakarta.

He cleaned his teeth with the red cellophane string from his cigarette packs. He told off-color jokes to waitresses. The most powerful scene in the memoir, as devastating as it is lovingly rendered, described how Stan, by then out of the furniture business and trying his hand as a John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance salesman, prepared on Sunday night for the week ahead. By the time Barry returned to Hawaii, Toot had become the stable financial source in the family, well known in the local lending community.

In the library of the Honolulu Advertiser, no clippings mention Stan Dunham, but Madelyn Dunham crops up frequently in the business pages. A few months before Barry arrived from Indonesia, his grandmother had been promoted to vice president at the Bank of Hawaii along with Dorothy K. He came for the month of December, and his mother returned from Indonesia beforehand to prepare Barry for the visit. She taught him more about Kenya and stories of the Luo people, but all of that knowledge dissolved at the first sight of the old man.

He seemed far skinnier than Barry had imagined him, and more fragile, with his spectacles and blue blazer and ascot and yellowish eyes. The first moment angered Barry; the second made him proud. But nothing much lingered after his father was gone. Late in , Neil Abercrombie and Pake Zane traveled through Nairobi on a year-long backpacking trip around the world and stayed with Obama for several days before they made their way on to the port city of Mombasa and to India. Five years later, in , Zane returned during another trip around the world. He was drinking very heavily, and he was very depressed and as you might imagine had an amount of rage.

He felt totally vulnerable. His mother, separated from Lolo, was back in Hawaii with little Maya. Barry joined them in an apartment at Poki and Wilder, even closer to Punahou School. They had no money beyond her graduate school grants. Thirty-five years later, she can remember a filing cabinet and a rocking chair, and how she and her big brother would sit in the chair and keep rocking harder until it flipped over, which is what they wanted it to do.

There was a television across from the rocker, and she would purposely stand in front of it during basketball games to irritate him. And there was Big Sandwich Night, when Gramps would haul out all the meats and cheeses and vegetables. After three years in Hawaii, Ann had to go back to Indonesia to conduct her fieldwork.

Barry had absolutely no interest in returning to that strange place, so he stayed behind with his grandparents. Keith and Tony Peterson were rummaging through the discount bin at a bookstore in Boulder, Colo. Their friend from Punahou School. They both bought copies and raced through the memoir, absorbed by the story and especially by the sections on their high school years.

They did not recognize any of the names, since they were all pseudonyms, but they recognized the smells and sounds and sensibility of the chapters and the feelings Obama expressed as he came of age as a black teenager. This was their story, too. They wondered why Obama focused so much on a friend he called Ray, who in fact was Keith Kukagawa. Kukagawa was black and Japanese, and the Petersons did not even think of him as black. Yet in the book, Obama used him as the voice of black anger and angst, the provocateur of hip, vulgar, get-real dialogues.

Keith Peterson had felt the same way, without being fully able to articulate his unease. It was a connection. It was amazing as I read this book, so many decades later, at last I was feeling a certain amount of closure, having felt so isolated for so long.

I spent a good portion of my life thinking I had experienced something few others had. I was not the only one struggling with some of these issues. But his brother Tony, who reached Punahou first, said he had regular discussions with Obama about many issues, including race. Tony was a senior when Obama was a freshman. The Petersons lived miles away, out in Pearl City, having grown up in a military family that was first based at Schofield Barracks.

While Obama walked only five blocks to school, Tony had to ride city buses for an hour and a half each morning to get there.

Peterson, Smith and Obama would meet on the steps outside Cooke Hall for what, with tongue in cheek, they called the Ethnic Corner. Obama and Smith were biracial, one black and white, the other black and Indian. That is one thing we talked about. We talked about time. We talked about our classes. We talked about girls. We talked specifically about whether girls would date us because we were black. We talked about social issues. But our little chats were not agonizing.

They were just sort of fun. We were helping each other find out who we were. We talked about what we were going to be. I was going to be a lawyer. Rick was going to be a lawyer. And Barry was going to be a basketball player. Now it was his obsession. He was always dribbling, always playing, either on the outdoor courts at Punahou or down at the playground on King Street across from the Baskin-Robbins where he worked part-time.

He was a flashy passer with good moves to the basket but an uneven and unorthodox jump shot, pulling the ball back behind his head so far that it almost disappeared behind him. Basketball dominated his time so much that his mother worried about him.

In ninth grade, at least, he was the naive one, believing he could make a life in the game. All those Ethnic Corner trips to the snack bar and playing ball made the year a lot more enjoyable, even though the snack bar trips cost me a fortune. Anyway, great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Her understanding of race was far deeper than that joke; she was always sensitive to issues of identity and made a point of inculcating her children in the cultures of their fathers. Still, there were some problems she could not resolve for them.

She wanted us to think of it as a gift that we were multilayered and multidimensional and multiracial. This meant that she was perhaps unprepared when we did struggle with issues of identity. She was not really able to help us grapple with that in any nuanced way. I remember Mom wanting it not to be an issue. In an apparent effort to show a lifelong plot to power, some opponents last year pushed a story about Obama in which he predicted in kindergarten that one day he would be president.

The conspiracy certainly seemed to go off the rails by the time he reached high school. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was the most political animal at Hot Springs High in Arkansas — organizing the marching band as though it was his own political machine, giving speeches at the local Rotary, maneuvering his way into a Senate seat at the American Legion-sponsored Boys Nation — Obama stayed away from student leadership roles at Punahou and gave his friends no clues that a few decades later he would emerge as a national political figure. In a school of high achievers, he coasted as a B student.

He dabbled a little in the arts, singing in the chorus for a few years and writing poetry for the literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola. The group he ran with was white, black, brown and not identified with any of the traditional social sets at the school: Did we defer to Barry? It was a very egalitarian kind of thing, also come as you are.

And they smoked dope. He acknowledged smoking marijuana and using cocaine but said he stopped short of heroin. Some have suggested that he exaggerated his drug use in the book to hype the idea that he was on the brink of becoming a junkie; dysfunction and dissolution always sell in memoirs. But his friends quickly dismissed that notion. Do I remember specifically? Punahou was a wealthy school with a lot of kids with disposable income. The drinking age in Hawaii then was 18, so a lot of seniors could buy it legally, which means the parent dynamic was not big.

And the other partying materials were prevalent, being in Hawaii. There was a lot of partying that went on. And Barack has been very open about that. Coming from Hawaii, that would have been so easy to expose. His signature move was a double-pump in the lane.

This did not serve him well on the Punahou varsity team. His coach, Chris McLachlin, was a stickler for precisely where each player was supposed to be on the court and once at practice ordered his team to pass the ball at least five times before anyone took a shot.

He never won the arguments, and the team did well enough anyway. Obama came off the bench to score two points. So much for the dream of becoming a rich NBA star. His senior year, his mother was back home from Indonesia and concerned that her son had not sent in his college applications. In their tensest confrontation in the memoir, he eggs her on by saying it that was no big deal, that he might goof off and stay in Hawaii and go to school part-time, because life was just one big crapshoot anyway. She had rebelled herself once, at his very age, reacting against her own parents — and perhaps against luck and fate — by ignoring their advice and getting pregnant and marrying a man she did not know the way she thought she did.

Now she was telling her son to shape up, that he could do anything he wanted if he put in the effort. Sixteen years later, Barry was no more, replaced by Barack, who had not only left the island but had gone to two Ivy League schools, Columbia undergrad and Harvard Law, and written a book about his life. He was into his Chicago phase, reshaping himself for his political future, but now was drawn back to Hawaii to say goodbye to his mother. Too late, as it turned out. She died on Nov.

She was weakened from a cancer that had been misdiagnosed in Indonesia as indigestion. American doctors first thought it was ovarian cancer, but an examination at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York determined that it was uterine cancer that had spread to her ovaries. Stan had died a few years earlier, and Madelyn still lived in the apartment on Beretania. Ann took an apartment on the same floor, and underwent chemotherapy treatments while keeping up with her work as best she could. Her dissertation, published in , was a masterwork of anthropological insight, delineating in 1, pages the intricate world of peasant metalworking industries in Indonesia, especially traditional blacksmithing, tracing the evolution of the crafts from Dutch colonialism through the regime of General Suharto, the Indonesian military strongman.

Her deepest work was done in Kajar, a blacksmithing village near Yogyakarta. In clear, precise language, she described the geography, sociology, architecture, agriculture, diet, class structure, politics, business and craftsmanship of the village, rendering an arcane subject in vivid, human terms. It was a long time coming, the product of work that had begun in , but Dewey said it was worth the wait: Each chapter as she turned it in was a polished jewel. She had also worked in Lahore, Pakistan; New Delhi; and New York, helping to develop microfinancing networks that provided credit to female artisans in rural communities around the world.

This was something she had begun in Jakarta for the Ford Foundation in the early s, when she helped refine Bank Rakyat, set up to provide loans to farmers and other rural entrepreneurs in textiles and metalwork, the fields she knew best. David McCauley, who worked with her then, said she had earned a worldwide reputation in the development community. She had a global perspective from the ground up, he said, and she passed it along to her children, Barack and Maya.

Maya was in New York, about to start graduate school at New York University, when her mother got sick. She and her brother were equally slow to realize that the disease was advancing so rapidly. She was in a wheelchair. I knew that someday she would die, but it never occurred to me that it would be in November. I think children are capable of stretching out the boundaries of denial. But by November her condition had worsened.

She was put on morphine to ease the pain and moved from her apartment to the Straub Clinic. One night she called Maya and said she was scared. I arrived on the seventh. My grandmother was there and had been there for some time, so I sent her home and talked to Mom and touched her and hugged her, and she was not able to respond. It was about 11 that night. Barack came the next day. He had just finished a book about his missing father, but now it was more clear to him than ever that his mother had been the most significant force in shaping his life.

Even when they were apart, she constantly wrote him letters, softly urging him to believe in himself and to see the best in everyone else. A small memorial service was held in the Japanese Garden behind the East-West Center conference building on the University of Hawaii campus. Photographs from her life were mounted on a board: They recalled her spirit, her exuberance and her generosity, a worldliness that was somehow very fresh and naive, maybe deliberately naive, sweet and unadulterated.

And her deep laugh, her Midwestern sayings, the way she loved to collect batiks and wear vibrant colors and talk and talk and talk. About 20 people made it to the service. This was where Ann wanted them to toss her ashes. She felt connected to Hawaii, its geography, its sense of aloha, the fact that it made her two children possible — but the woman who also loved to travel wanted her ashes to float across the ocean. Barack and Maya stood together, scattering the remains. The others tossed flower petals into the water. Suddenly, a massive wave broke over the ironing board and engulfed them all.

A sign at the parking lot had warned visitors of the dangers of being washed to sea. Barack Obama left Hawaii soon after and returned to his Chicago life. I bought the video on a visit to Occidental College in Los Angeles, not long after Obama took office. He attended Oxy from to , then lit out after his sophomore year and never returned. During my visit the campus was transforming itself into a three-dimensional tribute to its most famous dropout.

In the common room of the library a shrine of sorts had been set up in a glass display case, under the famous Shepard Fairey Hope poster. Every item on display was derivative and indirect in its relation to the man being honored. There were photos of three of his professors, a copy each of his two memoirs, an invitation that someone had received to his inauguration, and an issue of Time magazine showing a recently discovered cache of posed pictures taken of Obama by a classmate in You see a figure traveling lightly and swiftly over the surface of things, darting away before he could leave an impression that might last.

Archivists have combed college records and come up empty, mostly. Barry Obama, as he then was known, published two poems in the campus literary magazine his sophomore year. The testimony of the handful of professors who remembered him, four by my count, is hazy. Perhaps Obama is included? The film, with a cover showing a rare photo of Obama on campus, lasts no more than 15 minutes and seems padded even so. Our host is a large and enthusiastic man named Huell Howser.

He sports a Hawaiian shirt and a crewcut. With an Oxy flack as guide and a cameraman in tow, he strides the sun-drenched campus and pauses here and there as if simply overwhelmed. On the steps of the school administration building they are almost struck dumb. He finds a professor who taught Obama political science. The professor says he remembers Obama, but only because of his Afro hairstyle and his improbable name. The man gives one of those nods that are more headshake than nod.

And there we are. They faced a challenge known to anyone who tries to account for Barack Obama: How do you turn him into a man as interesting and significant as the world-historical figure that so many people, admirers and detractors alike, presume him to be? Obama had an unusual though hardly Dickensian childhood complicated by divorce, and at age 33 he wrote an extremely good book about it, the memoir Dreams from My Father. He followed it with an uneventful and weirdly passive career in politics, and he wrote an extremely not-very-good book about it, The Audacity of Hope.

Then, lacking any original ideas or platform to speak of, he ran as the first half-black, half-white candidate for president and, miraculously, won. There are two ways to aggrandize Obama, to inflate the reality so that it meets the expectation: Pure Obama-hatred was enough to shoot the book to the top of the Times bestseller list for the first three weeks after its release. Klein is best known as a Kennedy-watcher, author of such panting chronicles as All Too Human: A Portrait of Her Final Days; among the many info-bits he has tossed onto the sprawling slagheap of Kennedy lore is the news that Jackie lost her virginity in an elevator the elevator was in Paris, where else.

And you believe it? I wonder if they met in a darkened garage. Blind quotes appear on nearly every page; there are blind quotes within blind quotes. With such thin material, the only way to keep a book like The Amateur chugging along is with gallons of high-octane contempt. A few pages later Obama and Valerie Jarrett are accused of ignoring their old Chicago friends—a sign of coldness and amateurism. Klein is an Obama despiser, Maraniss is a big fan—big fan. Klein assumes the worst of his subject at every turn, Maraniss gives Obama every benefit of the doubt, sometimes with heroic effort.

Klein writes hastily and crudely, Maraniss writes with great care, veering now and then into those pastures of purple prose that Obama frequently trod in his own memoir. It is not, however, the book that Obama lovers will hope for—maybe not the book that Maraniss thinks it is. I Googled it today and got , hits, pardon the expression. In Dreams, he treats the drug use as another symptom of his singular youthful confusion.

Obama really, really liked to get high. Maraniss hints at a darker, even slightly menacing figure. Years before Obama haters could inflate him into an America-destroying devil or Obama worshippers spied those rolling swells of greatness that have yet to surface, Barack Obama was carefully fashioning from his own life something grander than what was there.

He was the first Obama fabulist. Obama himself drops hints of this in Dreams. All of this is offered to the reader as acceptable literary license, and it is, certainly by the standards of the early s, back in the day when publishers flooded bookstores with memoirs of angst-ridden youth and there were still bookstores to flood.

Maraniss demonstrates something else: The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent. At least it should be alarming to admirers of Dreams. Early on Obama signals that his book will be more self-aware, more detached and ironical, than most youthful memoirs, especially those involving the humid subject of race. Thus we meet Ray, a classmate at Punahou School in Hawaii.

We were in goddamned Hawaii. The white girls refuse to go out with them—for the same reason. Racial resentment is the key to Ray. He provides a crucial example of the resentment that Obama is tempted by but at last outgrows. His mother was half-black and half-American Indian; his father was. With a Japanese name, Kakugawa would have trouble—more trouble than half-black Barry Obama—identifying himself as an African American and speaking as one. Maraniss cuts Obama much more slack than he would, say, if he were an editor at the Washington Post magazine fact-checking a memoir he hoped to publish.

Many freshmen have known the feeling. But then Barry Obama meets Regina. The two are introduced by a mutual friend, Marcus, in the campus coffee shop. She asks him about the name Barry—and becomes, in a liberating moment, one of the first to call him by his given name, Barack.

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The afternoon with Regina transforms Barack. Regina, Maraniss thinks, was the combination of a wealthy white girl there were lots of them at Oxy, then and now, none overly familiar with the authentic black American experience and a female black upperclassman who grew up middle class. The background, Maraniss says, may have been drawn from Michelle Robinson later Obama , whom Obama would not meet for another 10 years.

And even then the facts are obscured: Take this spat between Regina and Barry, occurring the evening after his big antiapartheid speech, given on those steps that years later would wow Huell Howser:. Regina came up to me and offered her congratulations. I asked her what for. You spoke from the heart, Barack. It made people want to hear more. Without them not much is left: It made for a story, anyway.

We can see the dilemma he faced. Obama signed a contract to write a racial memoir. They were all the rage in those days, but in fact their moment had passed. Even with the distant father and absent mother, the schooling in Indonesia and the remote stepfather, Obama lived a life of relative ease. He moved, however uncomfortably, into one elite institution after another, protected by civil rights laws, surrounded by a popular culture in which the African-American experience has embedded itself ineradicably. He did in effect what so many of us have done with him. He created a fable about an Obama far bigger and more consequential than the unremarkable man at its center.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. The shaping of a president: But it is significant in history because along for much of that weaving was a little boy and young man who was shaped by following her through her world, and now that man shapes our world as the leader of its most powerful nation. The senior Obama is portrayed as brilliant stopping just short of earning a doctorate in economics from Harvard in three years , driven, charismatic, but also arrogant and abusive both psychologically and physically.

And, as he grew older, all of his less endearing traits were magnified by a deepening relationship with alcohol. Maraniss suggests it was lucky for his son that Barack Obama Sr. The real story is Stanley Ann, named, some say, after her father Stanley Dunham, though Maraniss advances a more or less convincing theory that it was really her mother, Madelyn, who named her after a character in a B movie played by Bette Davis.

Madelyn Payne Dunham of small-town Kansas longed for sophistication. Bette Davis personified it, and the film in which Davis played a woman named Stanley seemed to embody the bold breaking loose of convention that Madelyn wanted and that was passed along to her daughter. Near the end of the campaign, Barack Obama canceled what would have been a massive Madison rally so he could return to Hawaii and be at her side in her final days. Along the way, Dunham acquires a college degree and works a series of academic odd jobs on her way to a Ph. The senior Barack Obama is eventually killed in a car accident fueled by alcohol, but by that point it hardly matters.

His contribution to history is his genes, all nature, no nurture. The nurturing role belonged mostly to Stanley Ann. Maraniss shows us in intricate detail how the personality of the president was shaped. How a young boy of high intelligence and good humor adapted to his constantly changing and sometimes odd surroundings, learning, absorbing, finding a way to get along and to blend in, but also staying apart, since he never knew what was around the next corner with his footloose mom. Barack Obama may be one of the least qualified men ever to occupy his office.

His experience on the national stage amounts to four years as a junior U. And yet, thanks to his mother, there were few who understood the world better. His face is a map of the world. Maraniss proves conclusively that the president is not a Muslim, but reveals he is French. For Rush Limbaugh conservatives, which is worse? Not only did he grow up in Indonesia and Hawaii, but he also grew up amid diversity in both places, which brought him into casual, daily contact with Africans, Asians, Natives and Caucasians, people of all kinds of ethnic variations and political and social differences.

What he did not experience in his early life is mainland, American-style racism. Growing up in places that were diverse, he never had to confront his identity as a black man until his college years. There are no slaves in the Obama family tree, and he missed most of the tumultuous civil rights struggle because of his youth and the physical distance from the mainland. Even when Barry, which is how he was known, finally made it to the mainland as a college freshman, he chose elite Occidental College in Los Angeles, a diverse environment in a sheltered section of the city that gave him virtually no taste of the typical experience of blacks in America.

He had to discover his blackness. This sets him apart from the dominant African American experience, and it accounts for some of the reluctance on the part of veteran civil rights advocates like Jesse Jackson to embrace his candidacy early on. The feeling was apparently mutual. As a student at Columbia, Obama saw Jackson speak at a rally and came back unimpressed. The argument can be made that Barack Obama, raised by a white mother and white grandparents, is half white genetically and more than that culturally.

But the reality of race in America is that skin color trumps everything. It is not, still and sadly, the content of your character that shapes how you are perceived, at least initially. That incident happened while the most important person in his life, his mother, was off doing her graduate research in Indonesia. And even in death in , at the age of 52, she had an impact on her son. Her struggle with cancer was a theme he used often as he argued for a health care overhaul.

Neither strikes me as all that important compared to the narrative surrounding Stanley Ann. Maraniss forgives most of the discrepancies as poetic license that Obama admits to at the start of his memoir. But his character had already been shaped by his experiences with his mother and grandparents. By the time we meet the girlfriends, they are reporting on what we already know. The book also wanders into countless narrative cul de sacs, detailing the lives, and sometimes the deaths, of people who have only a tangential relationship to Obama.

Maraniss is a reporter and editor for The Washington Post. He grew up in Madison and spends his summers here, where he wrote much of the book. The Story, if only to marvel at the twists and spellbinding turns in the life of the girl named Stanley who shaped — almost entirely for the better — the personality of the most powerful human being on the planet. Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. Back in , Oprah Winfrey admitted to feeling embarrassed after learning that James Frey, whose memoir she had praised and promoted, fabricated many of his life stories.

And as we would expect from a woman who rose from poverty to build a powerful media empire, Oprah did not take this sitting down. She invited Frey back on her show to confront him face-to-face. The interview, for anyone who missed it, was not for the faint of heart. Throughout the interview, Oprah supplied a healthy serving of indignation and anger to a hapless Mr. So if Oprah and much of the media had this strong a reaction to misrepresentations made by a previously unknown man who was just trying to make his life story sound a little exciting, one can only imagine how strong her reaction would be to a politician who was misrepresenting his life story to further his political career.

Which brings us to our president. Not only did she invite Obama on her show to discuss his memoir, Dreams from My Father, but in , even before he officially entered the presidential race, Oprah publicly endorsed Obama for president. Without them not much is left[. He explains that all the episodes in Dreams where Obama faced any character defining struggle were simply made up; the conversations never happened, and the characters never existed. In fact, conservative writers and bloggers have been noting many of these inconsistencies and misstatements for the past couple of years.

The only difference is that as an editor of the Washington Post, Maraniss is too prominent a liberal for the media to ignore. Indeed, many of these fabrications have been covered by news media outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed since his book was published. So he did what Frey did and turned an otherwise mundane life story into a more meaningful and interesting one. Ever since she did so, her career has been in a steep decline. That is, if she could even stand to talk to him at this point. Ayers has admitted bombing the U. Ayers only avoided conviction when the evidence against him turned out to be contained in illegally obtained wiretaps by the FBI.

He was, in fact, guilty as sin. That Obama should ally himself with Ayers is almost beyond understanding. The former terrorist had not repented of his views and the education grants he got were expressly designed to further them. His chief financial supporter was Tony Rezko, now on his way to federal prison. His spiritual adviser and mentor was the Rev. Since Obama is asking us to let him direct education spending by the federal government and wants us to trust his veracity, these are difficulties he will have to explain in order to get the votes to win.

Now that Obama is comfortably ahead in the polls, attention will understandably shift to him. We will want to know what kind of president he would make. The fact that, within the past 10 years, he participated in a radical program of political education conceptualized by an admitted radical terrorist offers no reassurance. Why did Obama put up with Ayers? Why did he hang out with Jeremiah Wright? Because he was new in town, having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and having been educated at Columbia and Harvard, and needed all the local introductions he could get to jump-start his political career.

Why was he so close to Rezko? Not a good recommendation for a president. Pollak Breitbart 4 Jun Senate—in the form of a now-scrubbed blog post placing Obama at the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, on July 4, He wrote at 8: I spent the 4th of July evening with star Democrat Barack Obama! Obama was at a barbecue at the house next door given by a law professor who is a former member of the Weather Underground and we saw him over the fence at our barbecue.

Well, the others did. It had started raining and he had gone inside be the time I got there. Perrin did not respond. He did, however, delete his entire blog from the Internet. Of course, Breitbart News had saved a screen grab of the blog beforehand:. Senator—at the Ayers barbecue has been confirmed by another source, who told Breitbart News: LaBolt said the men first met in through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood.

He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park. Obama and Ayers may not have emailed or spoken by phone, but they had, we now know, spoken face to face—at least on July 4, , and perhaps at other times as well.

His intellectual and political roots remain extreme. Stanley Kurtz National Review June 7, On the evening of January 11, , while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In , candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions.

He also joined the New Party. Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early lists Obama as a member, with January 11, , indicated as the date he joined. The group was notorious in for thug tactics, fraudulent voter registrations, and its role in popularizing risky subprime lending. So why not simply confess the tie and make light of it?

Although Obama is ultimately responsible for deceiving the American people in about his political background, he got help from his old associates. Obama formally requested New Party endorsement, signed the candidate contract, and joined the party. The notion is implausible. Nearly three decades ago, Barack Obama stood out on the small campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles for his eloquence, intellect and activism against apartheid in South Africa.

Obama, then known as Barry, also joined in the party scene. Obama, of Illinois, has never quantified his illicit drug use or provided many details. He wrote about his two years at Occidental, a predominantly white liberal arts college, as a gradual but profound awakening from a slumber of indifference that gave rise to his activism there and his fears that drugs could lead him to addiction or apathy, as they had for many other black men. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana. Obama in college, remembered him as a model of moderation — jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at the gym, hitting the books and socializing.

Thummalapally, an Obama fund-raiser. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. What seems clear is that Mr. He developed a sturdier sense of self and came to life politically, particularly in his sophomore year, growing increasingly aware of harsh inequities like apartheid and poverty in the third world. He also discovered that he wanted to be in a larger arena; one professor described Occidental back then as feeling small and provincial.

A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments. Obama wrote that he learned of a transfer program that Occidental had with Columbia and applied. Obama and wrote him a recommendation for Columbia. He was a kid searching for answers and a place who had made some mistakes. Obama wrote in his memoir, he stopped getting high. In the page book, published when he was 33, Mr. He got the book contract after becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. At first, he considered writing a more scholarly book about the law, race and society, but scrapped that in favor of writing about his search for identity.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Mr. Obama wrote that he would get high to help numb the confusion he felt about himself. At Punahou, a preparatory school that had few black students, Keith Kakugawa and Mr. Obama were close friends. They met when Mr. Obama was a freshman and Mr. Kakugawa, who is Japanese-Hawaiian, was a junior. Kakugawa remembered that the two often discussed wealth and class and that their disaffection would surface. He said race would come up in the conversations, usually when talking about white girls they thought about dating.

Kakugawa, who spent seven years in and out of prison for drug offenses beginning in , said he pressured Mr. Obama into drinking beer. Obama did not smoke marijuana during the two years they spent time together even though it was readily available, Mr. Kakugawa said, adding that he never knew Mr.

Obama to have done cocaine. He had graduated, however, by the time Mr. Obama wrote that he imagined how an air bubble could kill him. Kakugawa or the others interviewed for this article who knew Mr. Obama at Punahou recalled hearing that story from him. In his freshman year at Occidental, Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner of debating. Obama seemed interested in thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he studied in a political thought class in his sophomore year.

The professor, Roger Boesche, has memories of him at a popular burger joint on campus. To make a point, students camped out in makeshift shantytowns on campus. In his book, Mr. He was one of a few students who spoke at a campus divestment rally. While he would sometimes attend parties held by black students and Latinos, Amiekoleh Usafi, a classmate who also spoke at the rally, recalled seeing him at parties put together by the political and artistic set.

Usafi, whose name at Occidental was Kim Kimbrew, said the most she saw Mr. Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer. Les livres qui ont fait Obama. Il obtint une nouvelle bourse, cette fois pour poursuivre son Ph. Sur la page suivante, il y en avait une autre: Il est sans doute gravement malade, me dis-je. Je sentis la chaleur envahir mon visage et mon cou.

Mais quelque chose me retint. Je ne sais pas exactement. Ne le prenez pas mal: Les gens bien dans leur peau trouvent un boulot plus calme. Comment transformons-nous un pur pouvoir en justice, un simple sentiment en amour? Ils choisissent la meilleure partie de notre histoire. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken acknowledged during a tense exchange with senators on Capitol Hill a deal being sought by the Obama administration that would constrain its nuclear breakout capability without eliminating its nuclear program.

Blinken also floated the possibility of extending nuclear talks past the June deadline should additional time be needed to finalize details of a possible deal with Iran. Many believe that the interim deal has done little to halt the program and allows the regime to continue some of its most controversial nuclear operations, including the construction of new reactors and work on ballistic missiles. Asked at a later point in the hearing if the administration would consider prolonging talks yet again, Blinken said that this is a possibility.

Iran has enriched enough uranium to fuel two nuclear bombs in the past year, according to experts. Despite the pressure from Menendez and others, Blinken was adamant that the administration opposes any new sanctions on Iran, even if they were scheduled to take effect only if negotiations fail. Bliken also made clear his opposition to Congress holding an up or down vote on any possible deal that the administration may agree to.

Blinken said that the administration is apprehensive about a possible congressional role in the process. The administration is giving up too much, particularly on the issue of uranium-enriching centrifuges, he said. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made. In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the Moslem terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. No matter that Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews.

As far as the leader of the free world is concerned, his massacre of four Jews at the market can teach us nothing about anything other than that some random people are mean and some random people are unlucky. By de-judaizing the victims, who were targets only because they were Jews, Obama denied the uniqueness of the threat jihadist Islam and its adherents pose to Jews. By pretending that Jews are not specifically targeted for murder simply because they are Jews, he dismissed the legitimate concerns Jews harbor for their safety, whether in Diaspora communities or in Israel.

After coming under a storm of criticism from American Jews and from the conservative media, both Psaki and Earnest turned to their Twitter accounts to walk back their remarks and admit that indeed, the massacre at Hyper Cacher was an anti-Semitic assault. Their walk back was no better than their initial denial of the anti-Jewish nature of the Islamist attack, because it amplified the very anti-Semitism they previously promoted.

As many Obama supporters no doubt interpreted their behavior, first Obama and his flaks stood strong in their conviction that Jews are not specifically targeted. Then after they were excoriated for their statements by Jews and conservatives, they changed their tune. The subtext is clear. The same Jews who are targeted no more than anyone else, are so powerful and all controlling that they forced the poor Obama administration to bow to their will and parrot their false and self-serving narrative of victimization.

The only one that behaved disrespectfully and rudely was Obama in his shabby and slanderous treatment of Netanyahu. Second, by boycotting Netanyahu and encouraging Democrats to do the same, Obama is mainstreaming the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to isolate Israel. Whereas the journalists murdered at Charlie Hebdo magazine were killed because their illustrations of Mohammed offended Moslem fascists, the Jews murdered at Hyper Cacher were targeted for murder because they were Jews. In other words, the Islamist hatred of Jews is inherently genocidal, not situational.

If Islamists have the capacity to annihilate the Jews, they will do so. Since the outset of his presidency, Obama has vigilantly denied the connection between Islamism and terrorism and has mischaracterized jihad as peaceful self-reflection, along the lines of psychotherapy. The perception that Obama either does not oppose or embraces Islamic extremism is strengthened when coupled with his appalling attempts to ignore the fact of Islamic Jew-hatred and its genocidal nature and his moves to demonize Netanyahu for daring to oppose his policy toward Iran.

Iran has stopped enriching uranium to 20 percent purity levels, and sufficed with enriching uranium to 3. But at the same time it has developed and begun using advanced centrifuges that enrich so quickly that the distinction between 3. Iran has made significant advances in its ballistic missile program, including in its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. It has continued its development of nuclear bombs, and it has enriched sufficient quantities of uranium to produce one to two nuclear bombs.

Since the US-led campaign began last fall, Iran has achieved all but public US support for its control over the Iraqi military and for the survival of the Assad regime in Syria. He is clearing the path for a nuclear armed Iran that controls large swathes of the Arab world through its proxies. It is also clear that Iran intends to use its nuclear arsenal in the same way that Coulibaly used his Kalashnikov — to kill Jews, as many Jews as possible.

Perhaps Obama is acting out of anti-Semitism, perhaps he acts out of sympathy for Islamic fascism. Whatever the case may be, what is required from Israel, and from Netanyahu, is clear. Speaking to Congress may be a necessary precondition for that action, but it is not the action itself. She is the author of The Israeli Solution: It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below—one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.

Front cover outside — note Barack Obama listed in alphabetical order. Jay Acton no longer represents Obama. Breitbart News attempted to reach Goderich by telephone several times over several days. Her calls are screened by an automated service that requires callers to state their name and company, which we did.

The design of the booklet was undertaken by Richard Bellsey, who has since closed his business. Acton, who spoke to Breitbart News by telephone, confirmed precise details of the booklet and said that it cost the agency tens of thousands of dollars to produce. Dystel did not respond to numerous requests for comment, via email and telephone. The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama—or the people representing and supporting him—manipulate his public persona.

In addition, Obama and his handlers have a history of redefining his identity when expedient. In March , for example, he famously declared: I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother. Obama has been known frequently to fictionalize aspects of his own life. When Americans discovered the Rev. Nor has Wright renounced any of his anti-Americanism. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon—and we never batted an eye!

The question is why Barack Obama, raised without any faith at all, chose one of the most incendiary preachers in Black America to preach the word of God to him. His father, Jeremiah Wright, Sr. Education mattered deeply to the Wrights. They helped their son with his homework while they bettered themselves with part-time courses. It was 90 percent white. The young Jeremiah was off to a promising start, but at age 15 was arrested for grand larceny auto theft. His parents sent him to the all-black Virginia Union University. But Wright quit after two years and joined the Marines. After quitting the Marines, Wright joined the Navy, where he served for four years.

He was stationed mostly in Washington D. At Howard, Wright heard firebrand Stokely Carmichael, a. Kwame Ture, lecture on black power. After that, it was off to the University of Chicago Divinity School for six years. Trinity, on its last legs when Wright joined it, was an odd choice. Wright often compared Chicago to apartheid-era South Africa: There were, of course, impediments to that goal, not least his white colleagues.

Wright had come under the sway of the writings of James Cone, a professor of divinity, father of the black theology movement and author of the seminal Black Theology and Black Power Trinity gave Wright a chance to introduce ordinary blacks to these writings. Bush did, and cited the Sermon on the Mount to make the case for his economic policies. It would be the Gospel according to Wright.

Preaching black theology, Wright made his dashiki-wearing flock the largest—and blackest—church in the largely white UCC. America boycotted it on the grounds that it would descend into an anti-Jew hate fest as it had in previous years.

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He predicted that his trip to Libya would cause trouble for Obama in To further his claim that the white man was an active enemy of the black man, Wright has often recommended a favorite book of the Nation of Islam, Emerging Viruses: Nature, Accident, or Intentional? Horowitz, a conspiracy theorist and former dentist, who argues that HIV began as a biological weapons project. Wright had remained on the bus for so long because his friendship gave Obama an authenticity on the South Side that he otherwise lacked as a highly educated black man who grew up in white and multiracial environments.

Had Obama not successfully defined himself as an ordinary African American, had he not worked the streets on poverty wages, his political career probably would have gone nowhere. And I still have faith that this dream is the one that will prevail, in the end. Brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long. Hodges, which created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, was its deep emotion. This was no mere legal opinion. Indeed, the law and Constitution had little to do with it.

To Justice Kennedy, the most persuasive legal precedents were his own prior opinions protecting gay rights. This was a statement of belief, written with the passion of a preacher, meant to inspire. Consider the already much-quoted closing: As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death.

It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. And what is more compelling than this ode to love? The challenge for orthodox religious believers is now abundantly clear: Now, all of that rhetoric has been constitutionalized, embedded in the secular scripture of our land.

To be sure, Justice Kennedy did at least nod in the direction of the orthodox, declaring: Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered.

But this rhetoric, as he knows, is legally meaningless in the face of the potent combination of emotion and legal doctrines that have long deemphasized religious freedom. But now our love — expressed in the fullness of a Gospel that identifies homosexual conduct as sin but then provides eternal hope through justification and sanctification — is hate. They imagine themselves willing to lose their jobs, their liberty, or even their lives for standing up for the Gospel. Social scorn is worse than the lash. This is the era of sexual liberty — the marriage of hedonism to meaning — and the establishment of a new civic religion.

The black-robed priesthood has spoken. Will the church bow before their new masters? Defense Contractors Nuclear deal or not, Tehran is keeping its ballistic missiles. But the contractors likely will also do just fine if the negotiations unexpectedly collapse. American defense contractors have long recognized the lucrative opportunity in the region, and they are counting on increased weapons sales to the Middle East to counteract a U. Most of that growth is expected to come from its sales of missile defense systems.

It is not the number of deals that drives up profits, but the huge cost of fielding just a few systems. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, also are reportedly working to acquire the mobile, truck-mounted firing system, as well as an associated radar made by Raytheon. The Saudi military joined a select club of countries that have deployed the Patriot missile in combat, knocking down a Scud missile fired over the border by Houthi rebels in Yemen this spring.

Raytheon officials declined to comment for this story. Those numbers should go up in coming years, regardless of the outcome of the Iran negotiations. Following a May summit of GCC leaders in Washington, the Gulf nations issued a hopeful joint statement for progress on the network they described as a regionwide early-warning system — ostensibly as a safeguard against Iran.

Building a networked radar and missile system is not merely about putting interceptors in the desert and pointing them toward the sky. And that raises the overall threat for the Gulf nations. While talk of selling more missile defense systems to the Middle East may seem a relatively easy way to blunt the Iranian missile threat, Washington should be cautious about how it balances its priorities.

But anti-ballistic missile systems are, to some degree, easier to sell to Gulf allies than other military weapons. The Defense Department has so far ruled out selling F fighter jets, for example, since that would rile Israel and upset the qualitative military edge that Washington, by law, affords its staunchest ally in the region. But the relationship will likely fray only so much, no matter the outcome of the eleventh-hour talks in Vienna between world powers and Iran.

At the same time, the Gulf is not about to let its guard down. Because Iran already fields a ballistic missile capability that has largely been left outside the nuclear negotiation process, any deal — or lack of a deal — still leaves a serious threat in place. Over the rainbow Mariage gay: Mais pas la Tour Eiffel. The Heritage Foundation October 15, Liberalism as we know it today in America is on the verge of exhaustion. Facing a fiscal crisis that it has precipitated and no longer sure of its purpose, liberalism will either go out of business or be forced to reinvent itself as something quite different from what it has been.

Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism. Barack Obama had the distinction of being the most liberal member of the United States Senate when he ran for President in The title had been conferred by National Journal, an inside-the-Beltway watchdog that annually assigns Senators and Congressmen an ideological rank based on their votes on economic, social, and foreign policy issues.

Since then, we have learned a lot more about his political leanings as a young man, which were fashionably leftist, broadly in keeping with the climate of opinion on the campuses where he found himself—Occidental College, Columbia University, Harvard Law School.

Though a meeting of democratic socialists and, yes, community organizers, the conference as well as his long-running friendships with radicals of various sorts would have drawn more sustained attention if the Cold War were still raging. But it was not, and Obama pleaded youthful indiscretion and drift; and of course his campaign did its best to keep the details from coming out.

He still had to answer, in some measure, for his ties to William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, but the issue with, say, the good reverend concerned his sermons about race and Middle East politics, not his penchant for visiting and honoring Fidel Castro, not to mention the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Still, the President is not a self-proclaimed socialist—nor, like Wallace, a self-deceived fellow traveler or worse. Obama never went so far, so openly—whether out of inertia, political calculation, or good sense—and therefore never had to make a public apostasy. As a result, we know less about his evolving views than we might like, though probably more than he would like.

He calls himself a progressive or liberal, and we should take him at his word, at least until we encounter a fatal contradiction. Conservatives, of all people, should know to beware instant gratification, especially when it comes wrapped in a conspiracy theory. And so the question arises: What does it mean anymore to be a liberal? To answer it, we must first retrace the history of liberalism over the course of the past century.

It had made deep, decisive changes in American politics long before conservatism as we know it came on the scene. Modern liberalism spread across the country in three powerful waves, interrupted by wars and by rather haphazard reactions to its excesses. Each wave of liberalism featured a different aspect of it—call them, for short, political liberalism, economic liberalism, and cultural liberalism—and each deposited on our shores a distinctive type of politics—the politics of progress, the politics of entitlements, and the politics of meaning.

These terms are conceptual rather than, strictly speaking, historical. They help to organize our thinking more so than our record-keeping, inasmuch as elements of all three were mixed up in each stage. Each attempted to transform America, as their names suggest, and the second and third waves worked out themes implicit in the first. But the special flavor of each period owed much to the issues and forces involved, the legacy of previous reform, the character of the political leaders, and the disagreements within and between the generations of reformers. The third wave, centered on the Sixties, showed just how fratricidal liberalism could become.

The first and most disorienting wave was political liberalism, which began as a critique of the Constitution and the morality underlying it. That morality, Woodrow Wilson charged, the natural rights doctrine of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, was based on an outmoded account of human nature, an atomistic and egoistic view that needed to be corrected by a more well-rounded or social view, made plausible by the recent discovery that human nature was necessarily progressive or perfectible. So-called natural rights were actually historical or prescriptive, evolving with the times toward a final and rational truth.

The 18th century Constitution, based on the 18th century notion of a fixed human nature with static rights, had in turn to be transcended by a modern or living constitution based on the evolutionary view. The second wave explicitly adopted the name of liberalism, laying aside the old banner of Progressivism. It championed liberality or generosity in the form of a new doctrine of socioeconomic rights and tried to connect the new rights to the old, the Second Bill of Rights as FDR called it to the First.

Instead of rights springing from the individual, the New Deal reconceived individualism as springing from a new kind of rights created by the State. The new entitlement-style rights posed as personal rights, even though they effectually attached to groups; but due to the slight family resemblance, they allowed Roosevelt to present himself and the New Deal as the loyal servants and successors of the American Revolution, of the old social compact suitably updated. It was only when this wave crashed around them that the radical character of liberalism became clear to the American people; only then that conservatism became, at least temporarily, a majority movement, insofar as it stood for America against its cultured despisers and reformers.

Freedom required not merely living comfortably but also creatively, a demand that the New Left took several steps further than poor Lyndon Johnson was willing or able to go. For conflicting reasons, liberals lost faith that they were on the right side of history and that the State could ever provide the conditions for complete self-development or spiritual fulfillment.

Obama inherited that frayed liberalism. He brought America to the verge of a fourth wave of political and social transformation, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans thought possible. Perhaps after the debacle of the Great Society, three decades in the political shadow of Ronald Reagan, and the current protracted economic doldrums, Americans have grown suspicious of the liberal vision of the future as a kind of Brigadoon—a land of wonders that voters glimpse every four years but that quickly fades into the mists, and from which no one has ever returned.

Tempting as it might be to write off the President, it would be a big mistake. Whatever else he may accomplish, his staggering victory on health care reform has earned him a future place on the Mount Rushmore of liberalism, alongside those other supreme hero-statesmen of the creed, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Assuming that his signature achievement is not unceremoniously repealed and replaced, Obama will almost certainly become one of the Democratic immortals, the giants who built and expanded the modern liberal state.

Part of what makes him interesting is how he handles the conflicting strains of his own thought. It would also create a free-rider problem: Why risk opposing segregation if its fall is inevitable? As the product of a very liberal education, alas, Obama never discovered that this quandary could be resolved by returning from history to nature as the unchanging ground of our changing experience, as the foundation of morality and politics.

The progressivist assumptions, though decadent, were still too strong. He thought the only way was forward. But shaping history leaves ambiguous just how much freedom or influence human beings actually have—whether we shape history decisively or only marginally. As he declared in Iowa in after his health care victory: Our future is what we make it.

For Obama, in Progressive fashion, the two appear to go together. America stands for the ability to change, openness to change, the willingness to constantly remake ourselves—but apparently for no particular purpose. A certain impatience and irritability creep into his voice. His tone turns petulant, and he begins to issue orders to follow him. The main target of his scoldings is, of course, the House Republicans, who tend to obstruct his measures. But in a larger sense, Obama displays the Progressive impatience with politics itself.

Eventually, man will be worthy of liberalism, assuming it has its way with him and conditions him to love the State as the bee loves the hive. He began his State of the Union address by invoking the first theme: At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They focus on the mission at hand. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Yes, if politics were rigidly hierarchical, if we had to follow orders from above without question, and if living together as a free people were as unequivocal and straightforward an affair as pumping bullets into bin Laden, then we could accomplish a lot more—or a lot less, depending on how highly you value democratic self-government as an accomplishment.

And the truth is that the leadership paradigm values freedom and self-rule much less than it does getting things done, attacking social problems, and making sure that liberal programs survive the struggle for existence on Capitol Hill. Leadership is a term from the military side of politics, and one of the reasons the Founders resisted it was their determination to preserve republican politics as a civilian forum, as the activity of a free people ruling itself. At the same time, they are returning to an older Progressive tradition, highly visible in the New Deal, of trying vainly to make politics the moral equivalent of war.

In any event, no one has to put on a uniform to be an equal citizen with equal rights under our Constitution. President Clinton began this renewal in the s. He far outshines Clinton, however, in telling the story of America in a way that reinforces a resurgent liberalism. It begins with the Founding—with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He tries to construct a new consensus view of the country that acknowledges and then contextualizes traditional views in a way meant to be reassuring but that points to very untraditional conclusions.

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundations of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. Abraham Lincoln, when explaining the Declaration, traced its central idea to God and nature, not to 18th century ideologies.

The latter phrase, plucked from the Preamble, has long been a favorite of liberals from Wilson to Bill Clinton. How easily liberal magicians transform needs into desires and desires into rights. They do it right before our eyes and never explain the secret of the trick. Unfortunately, that government proved enduringly unpopular with conservatives, who refused to adjust to the new times; and so finding the proper balance between the individual and the community continues to stoke our increasingly polarized and polarizing political debates.

Deliberation of that kind, endorsed by The Federalist and consistent with natural rights, would seek means to the ends of constitutional government. And who judges whether the resulting conversation meets the requirements of democracy or not? Obama deplores the bile in our contemporary politics, and it must puzzle him that he causes so much of it.

Obama expects 21st century people to have, roughly speaking, 21st century views, as he does. What then of Jefferson and his 18th century compeers? Obama soon makes clear that despite their fine words, Jefferson and the other Founders were less than faithful to the liberal and republican inferences of the principles they proclaimed. Like a good law school professor, in The Audacity of Hope, Obama lines up evidence and argument on both sides before concluding that, in fact, the Founders probably did not understand their principles as natural and universal, despite their language, but rather as confined to the white race.

On the contrary, Obama accepts Dred Scott as rightly decided according to the standards of the time. His understanding of the past thus pays lip service to such things as self-evident truths, original intent, and first principles but quickly changes the subject to values, visions, dreams, ideals, myths, and narratives. Anyone who believes, really believes, in absolute truth, he asserts, is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic; absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere.

Surely the problem is not with the degree of belief, but with the falseness of the causes for which the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, and the jihad stood. A fervent belief in religious liberty is not equivalent to a fervent belief in religious tyranny any more than a passionate belief in democracy is equivalent to a passionate longing for dictatorship. His attempt to resolve this contradiction carries him into still deeper and murkier waters.

He seems to suffer from certainty envy. He respects passionate, even fanatic commitment as such. That they are willed absolutely, not pragmatically or contingently? Even his rejection of absolute truth is now uncertain. So, finally, in his perplexity, he turns again to Lincoln.

Obama seems never to have heard of prudence, the way a statesman and a reasonable and decent person moves from universal principles to particular conclusions in particular circumstances. Unlike John Brown, Lincoln was an absolutist who realized the limitations of absolutism yet still brought forth a new order. The kind of crisis that is approaching, however, is probably not their favorite kind—an emergency that presents an opportunity to enlarge government—but one that will find liberalism at a crossroads, a turning point.

It faces difficulties both philosophical and fiscal that will compel it either to go out of business or to become something quite different from what it has been. For most of the past century, liberalism was happy to use relativism as an argument against conservatism. Those self-evident truths that the old American constitutional order rested on were neither logically self-evident nor true, Woodrow Wilson and his followers argued, but merely rationalizations for an immature, subjective form of right that enshrined selfishness as national morality.

But there was a final stage of development when true morality would be actualized and its inevitability made abundantly clear—that is, self-evident. Disillusionment came when the purported end or near end of history coincided not with idealism justified and realized, but with what many liberals in the s, especially the young, despaired of as the infinite immorality of poverty, racial injustice, Vietnam, the System, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Relativism rounded on liberalism. Having promised so much, liberalism was peculiarly vulnerable to the charge that the complete spiritual fulfillment it once promised was neither complete nor fulfilling. And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

More worrisome even than the danger of a superman able to promise that everything desirable will soon be possible is a people unattached to its constitution and laws; and for that, liberalism has much to answer. You call that progress? His residual progressivism helps insure him against his instinctual postmodernism. In the beginning, Progressivism commanded all the social sciences because it had invented or imported them all.

Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson could be confident in the inevitability of progress, despite temporary setbacks, because the social sciences backed them up. An expertise in administering progress existed, and experts in public administration, Keynesian economics, national planning, urban affairs, modernization theory, development studies, and a half-dozen other specialties beavered away at bringing the future to life. What a difference a half-century makes. The vogue for national planning disappeared under the pressure of ideas and events.

Friedrich Hayek demonstrated why socialist economic planning, lacking free-market pricing information, could not succeed. Keynesianism flunked the test of the s stagflation. The Reagan boom, with its repeated tax cuts, flew in the face of the orthodoxy at the Harvard Department of Economics but was cheered by the Chicago School.

Conservative and libertarian think tanks multiplied, carrying the new insights directly into the fray. The scholarly counterattack proceeded in political science and the law, too. After World War II, an unanticipated and at first unheralded revival of political philosophy began, associated above all with Leo Strauss, questioning historicism and nihilism in the name of a broadly Socratic understanding of nature and natural right. New studies of the tradition yielded some very untraditional results.

Though there were left-wing as well as right-wing aspects to this revival, the latter proved more influential and liberating. The unquestionability of both progress and relativism died quietly in classrooms around the country. The developments in political philosophy challenged the ends of Progressivism, proving far more damaging to it.

In sheer numbers, the academy remained safely, overwhelmingly in the hands of the Left, whose members in fact grew more radical, with some notable exceptions, in these years. But they gradually lost the unchallenged intellectual ascendancy, though not the prestige, they once had enjoyed. Thanks to this intellectual rebirth, the case against Progressivism and in favor of the Constitution is stronger and deeper than it has ever been. Progressivism has never been in a fair fight, an equal fight, until now, because its political opponents had largely been educated in the same ideas, had lost touch, like Antaeus, with the ground of the Constitution in natural right, and so tended to offer only Progressivism Lite as an alternative.

The sheer superficiality of Progressive scholarship is now evident. Progressives could never take the ideas of the Declaration and Constitution seriously for many of the same reasons that Obama cannot ultimately take them seriously. Wilson never demonstrated that the Constitution was inadequate to the problems of his age—he asserted it, or rather assumed it. His references to The Federalist are shallow and general, never betraying a close familiarity with any paper or papers, and willfully ignorant of the separation of powers as an instrument to energize and hone, not merely limit, the national government.

Though he thought of himself as picking up where Hamilton, Webster, and Lincoln had left off, Wilson never investigated where they left off and why. Today liberalism looks increasingly, well, elderly. With a track record to defend, he will have to speak more prose and less poetry. With a century-old track record, liberalism will find it harder than ever to paint itself as the disinterested champion of the public good.

Long ago, it became an Establishment, one of the estates of the realm, with its court-party of notoriously self-interested constituencies: Not visions of the future, but visions of plunder come to mind. It is exhibit A in the case for the intellectual obsolescence of liberalism. Finally, we come to the fiscal embarrassments confronting contemporary liberals.

Again, Obamacare is wonderfully emblematic. Perhaps it is a stratagem. More likely it is simply the reflexive liberal solution to any social problem: To some liberals, that premise implied that socioeconomic rights could be paid for without severe damage to the economy and without oppressive taxation, at least of the majority. Obama is the first liberal to suggest that even capitalism cannot pay for all the benefits promised by the American welfare state, particularly regarding health care.

Granted, his solution is counterintuitive in the extreme, which makes one wonder if he is sincere. To the extent that liberalism is the welfare state, and the welfare state is entitlement spending, and entitlements are mostly spent effecting the right to health care, the insolvency of the health care entitlement programs is rightly regarded as a major part of the economic and moral crisis of liberalism.

Like every other Democratic candidate since Walter Mondale, who made the mistake of confessing to the American people that he was going to raise their taxes, Obama swore not to do that. But odds are we stand instead at the twilight of the liberal welfare state. Currently, the welfare state operates almost independently alongside the general government. Taken together, these reforms will work to reintegrate the welfare state into the government, curtailing its state-within-a-state status and, even more important, integrating it back into the constitutional system that stands on natural rights and consent.

Is it just wishful thinking to imagine the end of liberalism? Few things in politics are permanent. Parties have come and gone in our history. The Canadian Liberal Party collapsed in Recently, within a decade of its maximum empire at home and abroad, a combined intellectual movement, political party, and form of government crumbled away, to be swept up and consigned to the dustbin of history. Communism, which in a very different way from American liberalism traced its roots to Hegel, Social Darwinism, and leadership by a vanguard group of intellectuals, vanished before our eyes, though not without an abortive coup or two.

If Communism, armed with millions of troops and thousands of megatons of nuclear weapons, could collapse of its own dead weight and implausibility, why not American liberalism? The parallel is imperfect, of course, because liberalism and its vehicle, the Democratic Party, remain profoundly popular, resilient, and changeable. Elections matter to them. Some elements of liberalism are inherent in American democracy, then, but the compound, the peculiar combination that is contemporary liberalism, is not. Compounded of the Hegelian philosophy of history, Social Darwinism, the living constitution, leadership, the cult of the State, the rule of administrative experts, entitlements and group rights, and moral creativity, modern liberalism is something new and distinctive, despite the presence in it, too, of certain American constants like the love of equality and democratic individualism.

Under the pressure of ideas and events, that compound could come apart. Trust in government, which really means in the State, is at all-time lows. A majority of Americans oppose a new entitlement program—in part because they want to keep the old programs unimpaired, but also because the economic and moral sustainability of the whole welfare state grows more and more doubtful. The goodwill and even the presumptive expertise of many government experts command less and less respect.

A series of nasty political defeats and painful repudiations of its impossible dreams might do the trick. At the least, it will have to downsize its ambitions and get back in touch with political, moral, and fiscal reality. It will have to—all together now—turn back the clock. Much will depend, too, on what conservatives say and do in the coming years. Will they have the prudence and guile to elevate the fight to the level of constitutional principle, to expose the Tory credentials of their opponents?

His course makes the problems of liberalism worse and more urgent, as though he is eager for a crisis. Sooner or later, the crisis will come. If the people remain attached to their government and laws and American statesmen do their part, the country may yet take the path leading up from liberalism.

He is the author of I Am the Change: Threshold Editions, , pp. Crown Publishers, , p. Basler New Brunswick, N. Rutgers University Press, , vol. Library of America, , pp. For a commentary, see Harry V. He was the change. A review of I Am the Change: Four years ago, in the excited aftermath of the election, Barack Obama was widely viewed as a liberal messiah who would engineer a new era of liberal reform and cement a Democratic majority for decades to come. He would prove to be, as many pundits predicted, a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or perhaps even an Abraham Lincoln, for our time.

They were not alone in saying this: Obama himself said much the same thing. These forecasts seemed grandiose at the time; today, after four years of an Obama presidency, they look positively silly. In contrast to , Obama looks less like a transformational president and more like a typically embattled politician trying to survive a tight contest for reelection. Extravagant hopes have given way to a scramble for survival. Few continue to believe that Obama will establish the foundations for a new era of liberal governance.

Some are beginning to point toward a more surprising turn of events: Far from bringing about a renewal of liberalism, Obama is actually presiding over its disintegration and collapse. This is the thesis of Charles R. Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of The Claremont Review, is a well-known conservative scholar and authority on the history of liberal thought. Professor Kesler presents a critical yet nuanced portrayal of Obama and his rise to power. Viewed through a wide historical lens, Obama appears as the most recent—and perhaps the last—of a line of liberal presidents beginning with Woodrow Wilson a century ago and running through FDR to Lyndon Johnson and beyond to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

A signal virtue of this book is that it shows how the Obama presidency fits into the evolution of modern liberalism from its origins in the Progressive movement more than a century ago. The great political battles in the United States during the nineteenth century were never ideological contests in the modern sense but rather controversies fought over the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of the founding fathers.

Political contests over expansion, the Bank of the United States, slavery, secession, and the regulation of commerce were fought out along constitutional lines. The politicians and statesmen of that era were not divided into liberal and conservative camps; those terms had little meaning in nineteenth-century America. The Progressives introduced an ideological element into American politics by detaching their arguments from the Constitution and grounding them instead in claims about progress and historical development.

Constitutionalists looked backwards to the founding fathers; Progressives looked forward to a vast future of never-ending progress and change. The founding fathers and their nineteenth-century successors anchored popular government in a philosophy of natural rights; Progressives looked to different foundations in history and development. Progressives could not get rid of the Constitution, but they could reinterpret it to allow for more federal action to regulate the trusts, resolve industrial disputes, and engineer progress.

The Progressives were proponents of scientific government, not necessarily of popular or representative government. They disdained legislative bodies with their vote-trading and petty disputes over constituent interests; thus, they looked to the presidency rather than to the Congress for national leadership in the direction of reform and progress.

The president spoke for the people or the nation, Congress spoke for special interests. Progressives wanted to delegate power to administrative bodies, commissions, and bureaus staffed by disinterested experts who could apply up-to-date knowledge to solve new problems. The Progressives dreamed of a time when political contests among rival interests would give way to impartial administration by experts and judges trained by and recruited from the best colleges and universities in the land.

Academic institutions, as Mr. Kesler points out, would go on to play a major role in the evolution of liberalism. Professor Kesler identifies Woodrow Wilson as the chief architect of this vision in American politics, helping to lay the intellectual foundations for progressivism and then beginning to put them in place during his term as president. As a research scholar and university president, Wilson brought some of the abstract qualities of a college professor to the study of politics. While he admired the founding fathers, he criticized them for leaving behind a constitutional structure that was disorderly and inefficient, and encouraged conflict rather than cooperation.

Thus he claimed that the separation of powers in the Constitution was a mischievous invention designed to limit the powers of government and to prevent cooperation among the branches which was partly true. Wilson wanted to bring the branches closer together through presidential leadership and responsible party government. He favored a parliamentary system like that in place in Great Britain in which the executive and legislative branches are unified under the control of a single party and led by the Prime Minister.

Most fundamentally of all, Wilson claimed that the vision of the founding fathers did not lead to progress but to endless division and factional infighting. The Constitution was a Newtonian machine designed to balance conflicting forces when what was now required was a Darwinian instrument flexible enough to evolve in response to changes in its environment. It was not necessary to change the Constitution itself in order to bring about such a fundamental change; it was only necessary for Americans to think about it in a new way.

After all, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison led a revolution and wrote the Constitution in response to the challenges of their time: Why should not Americans in the twentieth century do the same? Thus Wilson and his associates in the Progressive movement looked to an intellectual revolution as the means by which Americans would liberate themselves from the constricted and obsolete doctrines of the founding fathers, and in the process free themselves from the limits the founders placed upon government.

Given his vast ambitions, Wilson could not hope to implement much of this agenda in eight short years in office. Yet he established the foundations for an influential and long-running movement based upon progress and change as a way of life, presidential leadership and executive power, trust in experts, and disdain for traditional constitutional forms. It was also Roosevelt who hijacked the term from the classical liberals in order to associate it with reform and the welfare state in opposition to free markets and limited government.

FDR, as Professor Kesler suggests in an illuminating chapter in the book, kept the language and rhetoric of the founders while not so subtly changing their meaning and purposes. This has also been true of the liberal presidents who have succeeded him. Jefferson wrote about natural rights and liberty while FDR spoke of positive rights as a foundation for security.

Johnson began his political career in the s as a New Deal functionary and then as a young member of the House of Representatives. Johnson mastered the art of using public patronage to build political support. Johnson, as Professor Kesler explains, sought to complete the agenda of quantitative liberalism by passing federal health insurance programs for the aged Medicare and the poor Medicaid , and expanded welfare and food stamp programs to assist the underprivileged. Yet, given the insatiable spirit of modern liberalism, Johnson was not content to rest there.

In his Great Society speech, he proclaimed a new agenda of qualitative liberalism through which government would elevate the spirit and quality of life of the American people. His vast expansion of domestic expenditures turned loose an ugly stampede for federal dollars that only incited demands for more. Far from being an era of spiritual fulfillment, the s was one of anger, alienation, and escape through drugs and violence. If the New Deal stands out as the great triumph of modern liberalism, then the Great Society represents its signal tragedy and failure.

This was the period, as Mr. Yet, as the author argues, this kind of over-reaching is endemic to modern liberalism. Liberalism both lives and dies off promises it cannot fulfill.

• What happened?.
• Brighter, Brighter, Brighter!.
• Economic Geography.

Barack Obama is the latest liberal president to attempt to harmonize grand hopes with the messy realities of programmatic reform. Yet of the three, only one of them may be said to have ended his presidency on a positive note. Kesler doubts his prospects for success. He celebrates the flag, observes patriotic holidays, and praises the military. He is a solid family man. He even extolls the founding fathers, up to a point. In his view, the founders made a good start in laying down some noble principles, even if they did not live up to them and perhaps did not really believe them.

Obama was also aware that many of the bold initiatives of the s were eventually discredited and, for the most part, rejected by the American people. No liberal today could possibly run for office citing the model of the Great Society. One answer was that Obama himself, as a biracial and multicultural candidate, son of a Kenyan father and middle-class American mother, personified the change he and others were seeking. It was proof that America could overcome its racially scarred past.

Here, then, according to Mr. Kesler, is one terminus of the liberal project. Where can it go beyond Barack Obama and the personal politics of hope and change? Another end point is fiscal and budgetary. There is not even enough money left to fund those already in place. That is a distinct possibility, and one brought into clear focus in this most illuminating and gracefully argued book.

Kesler; Broadside Books, pages. Les pouvoirs publics sont-ils conscients des risques qui, selon vous, nous guettent? Je ne le crois pas. En , la Chine en occupe 7. Memo to Supreme Court: The Heritage Foundation March 10, Abstract There is nothing in the U. Constitution that requires all 50 states to redefine marriage. The only way one can establish the unconstitutionality of man—woman marriage laws is to adopt a view of marriage that sees it as an essentially genderless, adult-centric institution and then declare that the Constitution requires that the states re define marriage in such a way.

In other words, one needs to establish that the vision of marriage our law has long applied is wrong and that the Constitution requires a different vision. There is, however, no basis in the Constitution for reaching that conclusion. Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are distinct and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father, and states have constitutional authority to make marriage policy based on these truths.

Over the past year, four federal circuit courts—the Fourth, Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits—have ruled that the states and their people lack the ability under the federal Constitution to define marriage as it has always been defined: Last fall, the Supreme Court allowed those four circuit decisions to go into effect, thereby overriding the votes of tens of millions of citizens in many parts of the nation.

The overarching question before the Supreme Court in the four cases that were consolidated before the Sixth Circuit and for purposes of review by the Supreme Court—Obergefell v. Snyder, and Bourke v. Beshear—is not whether an exclusively male—female marriage policy is the best, but only whether it is allowed by the U. To resolve that overarching question, the Supreme Court has directed the parties in those cases to address two precise questions:. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?

Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state? Those suing to overturn the marriage laws in the four states covered by the Sixth Circuit Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee thus have to prove that the man—woman marriage policy that has existed in the United States throughout our entire history is prohibited by the U.

The only way someone could succeed in such an argument is to adopt a view of marriage that sees it as an essentially genderless institution based only on the emotional needs of adults and then declare that the U. Constitution requires that the states re define marriage in such a way. Equal protection alone is not enough. To strike down marriage laws, the Court would need to say that the vision of marriage that our law has long applied equally is just wrong: Constitution, however, is silent on what marriage is and what policy goals the states should design it to serve, and there are good policy arguments on both sides.

Judges should not insert their own policy preferences about marriage and declare them to be required by the U. Constitution any more than the Justices in Dred Scott should have written into the Constitution their own policy preferences in support of slavery. That, of course, is not to suggest that same-sex marriage is itself comparable to slavery.

The point is simply that, as in Dred Scott, this is a debate about whether citizens or judges will decide an important and sensitive policy issue—in this case, the very nature of civil marriage. Back in the s, could anyone who drafted that amendment or any of the citizens who voted to ratify it have reasonably thought that it could be used to invalidate state marriage laws defining marriage as a man—woman union? Imagine, for example, how President Lincoln—an accomplished lawyer and an ardent opponent of Dred Scott—would have reacted if the amendment had been introduced before his death and someone had suggested that it might one day be interpreted to require states to recognize same-sex marriages.

He would have viewed that suggestion as preposterous. Lincoln would also have noted the similarities between Dred Scott and a decision imposing same-sex marriage. Indeed, as the Sixth Circuit pointed out, all sides agree that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require the redefinition of marriage: Supreme Court Justice in American history has written an opinion maintaining that the traditional definition of marriage violates the 14th Amendment.

Whether it was right or wrong as to DOMA, Windsor strongly supports the authority of states to define marriage: Every single time that Windsor talks about the harm of DOMA, it mentions that the state had chosen to recognize the bond that the federal government was excluding. The Windsor opinion did not create a fundamental right to same gender marriage nor did it establish that state opposite-gender marriage regulations are amenable to federal constitutional challenges.

If anything, Windsor stands for the opposite proposition: Not surprisingly, laws almost always fail strict scrutiny. Clearly, a right to marry someone of the same sex does not fit this description. Whenever the Supreme Court has recognized marriage as a fundamental right, it has always been marriage understood as the union of a man and woman, and the rationale for the fundamental right has emphasized the procreative and social ordering aspects of male—female marriage. None of the cases that mention a fundamental right to marry deviate from this understanding, including decisions that struck down laws limiting marriage based on failure to pay child support,[17] incarceration,[18] and race.

Thus, a challenge to state male—female marriage laws cannot appeal successfully to the fundamental-rights doctrine under Glucksberg. Comparisons to interracial marriage fare no better. Schaefer, in Loving v. Loving simply held that race, which is completely unrelated to the institution of marriage, could not be the basis of marital restrictions. With respect to those who would redefine marriage, the court observed that:.

Their definition does too little because it fails to account for plural marriages, where there is no reason to think that three or four adults, whether gay, bisexual, or straight, lack the capacity to share love, affection, and commitment, or for that matter lack the capacity to be capable and more plentiful parents to boot. Plaintiffs have no answer to the point. Ancient thinkers as well as the political society in Greece and Rome, without being influenced by Judeo—Christian teaching, affirmed that marriage is a male—female union even as they embraced same-sex sexual relations.

Even in Windsor, Justice Kennedy did not claim that the man—woman definition of marriage was fueled by animus. The Sixth Circuit acknowledged that same-sex couples have experienced unjust discrimination but noted that marriage laws are not part of that phenomenon:. But we also cannot deny that the institution of marriage arose independently of this record of discrimination.

The traditional definition of marriage goes back thousands of years and spans almost every society in history. Laws that banned homosexual sodomy are radically different from laws that define marriage as the union of husband and wife. The Supreme Court found that the former infringed a privacy and liberty right, while the latter specify which unions will be eligible for public recognition and benefits. Other advocates of same-sex marriage, including the Ninth Circuit,[31] have argued that the denial of marriage to same-sex couples infringes the rights of a protected class: Even if the Supreme Court did find sexual orientation to be a suspect class, as liberal scholars like Andrew Koppelman have recognized, marriage laws do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation anyway.

The APA, in short, says that no one can agree on the causes or even the definition of homosexuality, so it is not a readily identifiable group.

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This point is confirmed by Dr. Paul McHugh, former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital and former chairman of the psychiatry department at Hopkins medical school, and legal scholar Gerard Bradley:. There is no scientific consensus on how to define sexual orientation, and the various definitions proposed by experts produce substantially different groups of people. While asserting incorrectly that it would not be a major adjustment for the American public to accept same-sex marriage, she correctly observed that:.

Or even our child. But not so, I think, of the gay-rights movement. In short, it is hard to say that gays and lesbians are politically powerless. It is therefore impossible for the Court to find that they are a suspect class. One could also argue, as the Fourth, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits have held, that there is simply no rational basis for man—woman marriage laws, meaning either that there is no legitimate purpose in such laws or that the laws are not rationally related to a legitimate purpose.

From a policy perspective, marriage is about attaching a man and a woman to each other as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children their sexual union may produce. When a baby is born, there is always a mother nearby: That is a fact of biology. The policy question is whether a father will be close by and, if so, for how long. Marriage, rightly understood, increases the odds that a man will be committed to both the children that he helps to create and to the woman with whom he does so. The man—woman definition, moreover, is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are distinct and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father.

Even President Barack Obama admits that children deserve a mother and a father:. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves.

And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it. But you do not have to think this marriage policy is ideal to think it constitutionally permissible. Unless gays and lesbians are a suspect class, for an equal protection challenge to succeed, this simple analysis of the social function of marriage would have to be proved not just misguided, but positively irrational. Universal human experience, however, confirms the rationality of that policy. Compelling Interest and Narrowly Tailored: Constitutional at Any Level of Scrutiny.

Even if one implausibly granted that sexual orientation was a suspect class and that marriage laws thus had to be held to heightened scrutiny, man—woman marriage would still be constitutional. A strong marriage culture is a compelling interest because it affects virtually every other state interest, and defining marriage as the permanent and exclusive union of a husband and wife is a narrowly tailored means of allowing it to fulfill its social function.

As noted, there is no dispute that marriage plays a fundamental role in society by encouraging men and women to commit permanently and exclusively to each other and to take responsibility for their children. In addition to financial incentives, as ample social science confirms, this combination of state-sanctioned status and benefits also reinforces certain child-centered norms or expectations that form part of the social institution of marriage.

It thereby gently encourages man—woman couples to rear their biological children together, and it does so without denigrating other arrangements—such as adoption or assisted reproductive technologies—that such couples might choose when, for whatever reason, they are unable to have biological children of their own. And just as those norms benefit the state and society, their dilution or destruction can be expected to harm the interests of the state and its citizens. For example, over time, as fewer heterosexual parents embrace the biological connection norm, more of their children will be raised without a mother or a father.

After all, it will be very difficult for the law to send a message that fathers and mothers are essential if it has redefined marriage to make fathers or mothers optional, and that in turn will mean more children of heterosexuals raised in poverty, doing poorly in school, experiencing psychological or emotional problems, having abortions, and committing crimes—all at significant cost to the state. In short, law affects culture.

The law teaches, and it will shape not just a handful of marriages, but the public understanding of what marriage is. Consider the impact of no-fault divorce laws, which are widely acknowledged to have disserved, on balance, the interests of the very children they were supposedly designed to help. By providing easy exits from marriage and its responsibilities, no-fault divorce helped to change the perception of marriage from a permanent institution designed for the needs of children to a temporary one designed for the desires of adults. In the early s, in the face of state judicial decisions seeking to impose same-sex marriage under state law, the definitional choice a state faced was a binary one: There is no middle ground.

Recognizing Same-Sex Marriages from Out of State If the points made above succeed—on the rational basis of state marriage laws defining marriage as the union of husband and wife and the reasonableness of thinking that redefining marriage will undermine the public policy purpose of such marriage laws—then a state should not be required to recognize other state marriage laws that would undermine its own public policy. Moreover, given that the Full Faith and Credit Clause deals specifically with the recognition of official acts in other states, there is no sound basis for invoking the Fourteenth Amendment as a stand-alone basis for requiring a state to recognize a marriage performed in another state.

Conclusion At the end of the day, there simply is nothing in the U. Part of the design of federalism is that experimentation can take place in the states: To a make a plausible case to the contrary, as we have seen, one cannot reasonably appeal to the authority of Windsor, to the text or original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, to the fundamental rights protected by the Due Process Clause, or to Loving v.

So, too, one cannot properly appeal to the Equal Protection Clause or to animus or Lawrence. Nor can one say that gays and lesbians are politically powerless, so one cannot claim they are a suspect class. Nor can one say that male—female marriage laws lack a rational basis or that they do not serve a compelling state interest in a narrowly tailored way. The only way one can establish the unconstitutionality of man—woman marriage laws is to adopt a view of marriage that sees it as an essentially genderless, adult-centric institution and then declare that the Constitution requires that the states re define marriage in that way.

In other words, one needs to establish that the vision of marriage our law has long applied is just wrong and that the Constitution requires a different vision entirely. There is, however, no basis in the Constitution for reaching that conclusion any more than there was a basis in the Constitution for concluding—as Dred Scott did—that the people of the United States lacked the power to abolish slavery in their territories. He has previously served as Associate Counsel to the President and as law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and has handled dozens of cases including six he personally argued before the U.

A Defense, is William E. North Carolina, U. See also Baker v. Anderson, Marriage, Reason, and Religious Liberty: Abbott Laboratories, F. Sexual Disorientation, Geo. Cleburne Living Center, U. Party Affiliation, Gallup, available at http: Times, July 15, , http: The Heritage Foundation March 11, Abstract Marriage is based on the truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the reality that children need a mother and a father. Redefining marriage does not simply expand the existing understanding of marriage; it rejects these truths.