By chance, I happened to be visiting in Amherst, NY with Paul Kurtz-- founder of the Center for Inquiry , the nation's premier secular humanist organization-- when the Janice Rogers Brown controversy erupted. (I'm not sure whether it did"erupt" nationwide, but it was certainly the talk du jour among the secular humanists in Amherst).

I haven't gotten my hands on the full text of the speech (if there is one) but the excerpts printed in the Los Angeles Times are a bit of a doozy . In the article, Brown brags that she writes her own speeches. I believe it--except that if I were her, I wouldn't have bragged about it.

According to Brown, the nation is on the brink of a civil war on par with the Civil War. The source of the imminent attack on Fort Sumter? Why, that Satanic value, autonomy, itself reducible to mere"wishfulness," and so, to the negation of morality. (Thus does the essence of morality becomes its negation. Talk about"wishfulness.") This set of primordial cliches--the standard polemical fare of every half-witted mullah from Tunis to Dhaka--is currently being hailed by partisans of the religious Right as the essence of moral profundity. Sweet Mother of God: If this is the intellectual quality of Bush's fast-track-to-the-Supreme-Court judicial nominees, as an atheist all I can say: God help the Republican Party and God help us all.