When the Right puts forward its argument for a Constitutional Amendment in favor of traditional marriage (only a man and a woman), it basically reasons that some of the People have the right to impose on a certain minority class of individuals, the majority's own moral views. This is a subtle point and well worth looking at more carefully.

The very first phrase in the Bill of Rights (which gives us some idea of its importance in the minds of our Founders) is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;". Already this has been defined by the Supreme Court to permit a State to regulate the use of drugs as part of religious ritual, on the basis of "compelling state interest", while at the same time the Court says elsewhere that compulsory prayer in school is unconstitutional.

In one case the Court is allowing the State to regulate religious practice, and in the other the Court is telling the State it cannot impose a particular religious practice. This helps us see the basic parameters of the discussion - what is the relationship between the State and the exercise of religion. The First Amendment recognizes this dual role, for it first seeks to prevent the State from imposing religion (no law respecting the establishment of), and then seeks to prevent the State from prohibiting its free exercise. For a State-run school to require prayer violates the establishment provision, and yet the State does have the power to limit its "free" exercise, when there is a compelling State interest (ritual use of peyote, plural marriage etc.).

Any sociologist, or political scientist, worth his PhD knows that in modern life the so-called Christian Religious Right has been seeking to impose its moral views everywhere in American society, mostly by using the State's legal authority. This view of the Christian Right is not justified by any real understanding of the role and purposes of Law, or of the historic nature and ultimate development of the United States as the People of Peoples. America is not a mere Christian Nation, but is instead that most remarkable creation out of the Genius of History, of the first People in which religious, cultural and language differences could achieve a cooperative form of existence.

The Christian Right seeks to bring history to a stop, and to assert power over the American People in order to impose its own religious version of moral order.

This is actually an understandable position, for many places in the world are aware of what has to be called the almost violent pace of change. Our Age is a time of much too rapid change, as if the whole social and historical developmental process was racing out of control. The Christian Right sees this in what they originally called the "family values crisis" and what is now generally characterized as "cultural warfare". They understandably want to resist those cultural forces which might lead their children to travel paths outside their traditions.

This is nothing new in history, and certainly is true in far wider places than the United States. This same Christian Right, for example, while decrying the changes in the moral nature of America, seek to impose, through laws restricting our foreign aid from supporting abortion clinics or these same clinics from providing sex education to show people how to avoid aids, their own moral codes in the lives of other Peoples and Nations.

On the one hand they don't want the State to keep prayer out of schools, while on the other hand they want to use the power of the State to enforce moral rules inside our borders (no Gay civil rights such as equal protection) and outside our borders in what is a permissable use of foreign aid.

This is in no way a consistent position, in a rational sense, while it is an understandable position when people are faced with a too rapid pace of change.

Unfortunately it is a view which does not understand the nature of a Society, of the meaning of History, or the significance of Law within the struggle to create order. It is a view with a very narrow self-protective focus, that believes the best way to protect itself is to impose values on others, all the while complaining about the imposition of others values on it (cultural warfare).

For example, the Law is not meant to impose moral order on a Society, but rather to define the foundational rules below which Society will not tolerate behavior to go. Law is the lower border of expectable behavior, and moral behavior, by its very nature, is the upper border - the goal toward which we believe a human being can and should aspire.

Law, such as a Constitution, then is the product of a community process, within which everyone is meant to be equal - to have the same rights, and duties. Moral behavior is an individual process, by which one is guided by one's religion or philosophy toward ethical or conscience based activity.

We cannot afford to confuse the two. Yet, the whole nature of the political activity of the Christian Right is to do just that - create enormous confusion between Law and Morality. In seeking to impose a moral view on our Society's basic legal structures, by the Marriage Amendment, the Christian Right effectively wants to do an end run around the First Amendment, and actually build into the constitution a kind of irreconcilable difference.

What makes this all the worse, is that when you listen to the reasons put forth by the Christian Right and the Republican and (unfortunately) Democratic leaderships, that seeks to court their votes by following this disastrous plan, it is clear that the real motive is not to add something of value to the Constitution, but rather to impose through Law their own values on a minority.

In this abuse of majority power, the Christian Right demeans our legal processes, savages the fundamental nature of the Republic, and eviscerates the Bill of Rights., which exists precisely to prevent a tyranny of the majority.

All this is mostly driven, not by any rational process, but by a fear of too rabid change, Nothing good can come from this abuse of Law and of the basic structure of our form of Government. Morality is not the purview of the State, but rather of religious teaching and individual conscience. The State exists to hold us equal, and to protect the minority from the majority. If a religion can not inculcate its moral values through teaching only (without the abuse of the Law as a club of enforcement), then those values have no real meaning.

What this really represents for the Christian Right is a lack of faith. It is only from a position of weakness that one would seek to impose one's moral values on others. Christ's Teachings have no need of the application of such force of arms (the rule of Law), for their value is readily apparent to any human being of conscience. In seeking to impose through Law, these moral ideas, the Christian Right is no better than the Catholic Church of the Middle ages with its hate mongering torture chambers and burnings at the stake.

This then is the real driver behind the Marriage Amendment - fear of change and hate of Gays. The offered rationality of protecting marriage is a sham. Marriage is in fine hands already, and it is under no threat from those who seek to enter its sacred chambers wishing to sanctify their own love and desire for family. In fact, to confine the Sacrament of Marriage to just a man and a woman, is to place failure prone human limits on God's Love. This means that the Christian Right lacks both faith, and a real appreciation of the Love of the Creator. But the dimensions of that problem is a whole other discussion.

I watched the West Wing the other night.

It was a show about nuclear proliferation. Made me sad to think how dangerous the world is these days. Its not so much that people die, or that wars happen, for none of that is new in history. But what is new is how much damage we can do today.

If India and Pakistan were to have gone to war a hundred years ago, millions might have died but the world would have gone on. Today we can destroy all life on the Planet, with bombs or nerve agents, or deadly diseases for which there is no inoculation.

Yet that is not news - we have gotten used this being the way we live. It got this way in the 1950s, when the United States and Russia began the Cold War and the arms race. Madness really. A war seeming to have no deaths, because the real use of such weapons is too terrible to contemplate. It probably is not good that there were no deaths. Maybe we aren't yet scared enough to draw back from the madness. Maybe we need for it to go very badly wrong before we'll find the will to draw back, and seek wisdom instead of wandering into a further descent into insanity.

Why has it come to this? Why has, at this moment in human history, humanity now come to possess the capacity to destroy all life? Is it some cruel joke by God?

I get the same kinds of repeating loop questions trying to understand terrorists. Do they ever achieve their objectives? Is there some hall of fame somewhere that I missed that celebrates the wars and political goals won by terrorists? Or is terrorism something that can't live with a rational goal at all. Maybe all it can conceive is an irrational goal. Maybe something else is going on.

What are the facts that we do know? Well, there are far too many, but I'm going to pick a few and see if that can lead us somewhere new.

To my thinking there is, to civilization, an outside and an inside. The outside is the obvious things, such as our level of technology, our size, our impact on the Planet. The inside is more subtle. It is, among other things, what matters mean. It is more like our ideas and moral values, than it is like an object, a television set or a tool.

It is my view that the inside is under transition - that we are going from one kind of civilization to another, in a big way, because the fundamental nature of the inside is changing. The inner ground is not shared anymore. It has no coherence and no stability.

This is what makes for the terrorist. Driven by fear and rage, and oblivious to the real consequences of their acts, they strike out. They reach for chaos, imagining this will lead to the form of order they desire, except for the lessons of history that show that terrorism never has worked - ever.

Terrorism is different from revolution, although the goals are the same. The terrorist believes that in making ordinary people, women, children and other non-combatants, suffer, a State can be forced to change its policies. A terrorist is basically a madman, seeding the worst kind of destruction in pursuit of an unattainable goal.

Terrorism seems to be a mental state, quite common in our time, that arises when the inside of civilization has lost its meaning and coherence. It is a psychic disturbance in the mental life of a civilization in decay. It is also infections in a way, but remains irrational in that it assumes that by striking fear into the hearts of a people, they will react rationally and give the terrorists what they want, overlooking that fear drives rationality out, and really only ever promotes retaliation in kind.

Now in terms of history, the doctrine of the Cold War, mutually assured destruction (or MAD), comes before terrorism in time. In essence, this is a sign of the State itself succumbing to the loss of meaning and coherence in civilization. In the creation of an arms race involving weapons of mass destruction, that State itself abandoned rationality in favor of the effort to control by fear. Its logic is that if I am big and scary enough, they will do what I want. Which has only created a like minded response. All other States reply with seeking themselves to be equally big and scary.

In such an decaying rationality, is it any wonder that smaller groups themselves resort to that form of fear creation to which their limited stature confines them - namely terrorism. The illogic of the Cold War leads inevitably to terrorism. Each is fear mongering, with only the scale changing.

Unfortunately, history also teaches us that the way out is always the way through, and we will, without doubt, suffer greatly acts of terror on an increasing scale. The small groups seeking to do terror, will escalate until they involve the larger groups, and the use of weapons of mass destruction seems the inevitable result.

There is in this process of the downfall of Western Civilization then, that which first clearly manifests in madness at the level of State activity (cold war, arms race). This then, like the psychic virus that it is, soon infects the most powerless, who apply then the same insane principle of believing that any thing good can come from making other people afraid.

It would seem a hopeless cause, but there are two players in the Game who want to change the rules.

The first is ordinary people, who basically are neither the State or the individual terrorist, but rather the victims of the insanity of both. More and more they act through Civil Society, through anti-war and anti-globalization movements. Their means is difference. They seek not to rule by fear, but to survive by cooperation and peace. Where the old Civilization lies in ruins in the illogic of the State, and of individual terrorist groups, a new Civilization is being reborn in the wisdom of the peace bringers.

At the very least, this can be said. There is a war going on, between those who want to rule by fear, and those who believe in human nature and in peace. The People of Peace have some powers on their side that make the so-called weapons of mass destruction and the car bombs of the terrorists look like vain fireworks on a starry summer night. In spite of all those who make trouble for others, there is something to Faith and Hope and Charity that far out weights the madness and irrationality which seems to dominate the world. The human spirit is far stronger than mere fear, and retains the power to overcome those forces of destruction. The power to create is greater than the power to destroy. Or, as used to be said: "the pen is mightier than the sword".