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Dennis Prager writes in the August 25 Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Because of Europe's history of Christian anti-Semitism, many American Jews instinctively oppose any public expression of Christianity. This opposition has had a corrosive effect on American life. Sectarian Protestantism, a uniquely tolerant form of religious expression, has been the conduit of American democracy. It has created a uniquely secular government and a religion-based society.

American Jews must stop devaluing the Judeo-Christian basis of America. Without that basis, the moral glue that binds our diverse civilization will crack, and moral chaos will ensue. The weakening of Judeo-Christian values makes America a less moral place, and one more hospitable to hate groups. When moral norms break down, Jewish security will erode.

Prager writes in the August, 1996 issue of Commentary:

I BELIEVE in God, the God of the Bible. This God is good, holy, supranatural, personal. As good and holy are self-explanatory, I will briefly explain supranatural and personal.

Supranatural: God created nature and is in no way part of it. All movements—from Spinoza to Mordecai M. Kaplan to contemporary nature adulation—that place God within nature are forms of avodah zarah, idol
worship. The greatest single purpose of Torah teaching is to separate God from nature—hence, for example, Genesis begins with God creating nature.

Personal: God knows each of us. If God did not know us, there would be no practical difference between atheism and belief.

I believe that the Torah is divinely revealed. This does not necessarily mean that every word is divinely dictated, but I treat the Torah as if it were. The
Torah is not merely “the Jewish people’s search for God” or anything else that places the Jews, rather than God, at its origin.

I accept the binding nature of the Torah’s values, but not of all the rabbis’ laws. God is God, rabbis are human. Therefore, for example, I observe each
of the Torah’s festivals, but do not observe the second day added to each one by the rabbis—it is irrational and it contravenes the Torah; the Torah specifies
the number of days for each holiday, and it prohibits adding to or subtracting from its laws. I also use musical instruments on the Sabbath to make religious
music, just as the Psalms directed us, but which the rabbis later prohibited.

If I did not believe that the Jews were chosen by God, I would not raise my children as Jews. To bequeath the suffering that may attend being Jewish to my descendants is defensible only if we have a divine calling. And since a good Christian can lead as good and holy a life as a good Jew, I see few compelling reasons to stay Jewish if we are not God’s messengers.

Being a messenger is what chosenness is about. We are here to bring the world to ethical monotheism, i.e., the one God and His one universal moral law. Few Jews, tragically, believe in this religious mission to the world: most religious Jews ignore the world, and most Jews who talk to the world ignore Judaism.

Bringing the world to ethical monotheism ought to be the distinctive role of the Jewish people. In reality, however, perhaps the most distinctive role that many
secular Jews play in the modern era is working to overthrow Judeo-Christian civilization, the closest thing we have to ethical monotheism. Examples include
those Jews who embraced Marxism, or those Jews today who toil to undo the mother-father-based family (through advocating same-sex marriage, removing
the stigma from single motherhood, etc.) and to replace God-based ethics with “every man doing what he thinks is right in his own eyes” (Deuteronomy
12:8).

Jewish messianism has caused more problems than it has solved. Let God bring the messiah in His good time. In the meantime, I have to worry about genocide in Rwanda, about children being taken away from loving homes and given to abusive birth parents, and about the gender confusion being foisted upon the next generation by the elite of the present generation.

The Holocaust only confirms for me what I learned in yeshiva, that people are not basically good, and that those who hate the message from Sinai will hate
the messengers from Sinai.

The state of Israel, on the other hand, had a profoundly positive impact on my Judaism. It enabled one young Jew, born three years after the Holocaust, to stand tall as a secure Jew. As a Jewish adult, however, I no longer rely on Israel for my Jewish strength; I get it from Judaism.

The greatest stimulus to my Jewish belief is the present decline of America (and the West generally) emanating from its abandonment of God. Once-great universities no longer seek truth, or even believe truth exists. Once-great museums now offer displays of men urinating in other men’s mouths and “art works” made of menstrual blood. We have gone from the God-touching music of Johann Sebastian Bach to the anus-touching art of Robert Mapplethorpe, and from seeking truth to deconstructionism—all because, as
the Psalms put it, “Wisdom begins with fear of God.” No fear of God, no wisdom.

Thus, I came to my passionate beliefs in God and Judaism primarily because I have seen the abyss to which the alternative, secularism, leads.

From http://www.ifas.org/fw/9505/prayer.html:

Dennis Prager, a conservative Jewish commentator, offers answers to three common objections to school prayer. His assertions appeared in a column by Don Feder, a syndicated columnist with The Boston Herald. Prager's rejoinders are the very reason state-sponsored school prayer is unconstitutional.

Objection: Children can pray any time they want. We don't need an amendment.

Answer: Fans at a ball game can sing the National Anthem any time. We sing it publicly to make a patriotic statement. School prayer makes a philosophic statement and symbols are important.

Objection: It won't make kids better.
Answer: A prayer recited at the start of congressional sessions doesn't make legislators
more spiritual. In order to give something social significance, it must be publicly affirmed.
School prayer affirms the importance of God to our civilization. It compels students to take
note that this society deems God important.

Objection: Even if they're not required to say the prayer, some students may be uncomfortable.
Answer: The Pledge of Allegiance probably makes Jehovah's Witnesses uneasy. If
sensitivity is the absolute standard, most liberal educational indoctrination (sex education,
suicide studies, multi-culturalism) must be rejected.

The error of Prager's arguments is that they all sanction state endorsement of religion, a clear
violation of the separation between church and state.

By rejecting every Supreme Court decision regarding state-sponsored school prayer of the last 50 plus years, Prager, like many ultra-conservative Jews, is playing into the hands of the Religious Right. If he truly cared about the First Amendment's religious liberty clauses, which promote government neutrality toward religion, he would not espouse state-sponsored school prayer.

8/18: In his first hour, Prager attacked the National Coalition of Trial Lawyers who called on the governor of Texas George Bush to prove his "compassionate conservatism" by not executing a murderer of five persons who was diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Prager responded that it is more compassionate to execute murderers.

BS: This morning Dennis had on the mother of a girl recently murdered, in support of his position for capital punishment.

He defines "compassion" and his other straw man definitions with his own meanings then pins these meaning labels on his adversaries, as he allows the
callers who are against these Pragerized positions to talk their head into his noose; then he yanks! The body then disappears into hang-up land as Dennis pontificates.

I wonder if anyone is interested in forming or joining a committee to elect DP governor of California, on the condition that Dennis will personally carry
out all executions on TV during his term of office. He could run it on closed circuit TV and charge for it. The proceeds would go to the families of the survivors.

Doug Hill: Wednesday morning, 8/18 KABC news has been playing the tape of William Shatner's 911 call when his wife drowned. When it came on, I turned off
the radio in disgust. His personal tragedy doesn't belong on the radio. Kudo's to DP for criticizing his own station on this in his 11 am hour. He argued that this is voyeurism, not news. (I agree.)

Let me also say that my sympathy goes out to Mr. Shatner and his wife's other survivors.

8/17: Prager derided the rally at Columbine High School for its warped moral thinking and its psychologizing of evil. Prager was sad that the rally did not even include a momentof silence for the dead.

8/12: On his show Hardball last night, Chris Mathews almost threw Dennis Prager off for supposedly making a joke about the Holocaust.

The issue was gun control. Coming back from a commercial break, Prager asked Holocaust survivor and congressman Tom Lantos if the problem in the Holocaust was a lack of gas control or a lack of Nazi control.

After Lantos answered, Mathews told Prager that he was about to pull the plug on him for making a joke about the Holocaust. "Don't laugh about gas," said Mathews. "Don't make jokes about it. Just stop it. Let's move on to gun control."

Prager is furious. He says he was making a point, not a joke about the Holocaust. And that Hardball was the rudest he's been treated on any national TV show. And that TV is not a forum to develop ideas. And that iti s no wonder that there is so much anger in America when there are rude TV hosts like Mathews.

I think Mathews was a schmuck but Prager needs to realize that his provocative and incendiary stances at times are going to create such reactions.

Laurie, Prager's assistant, said: What about people who are shouted down on TV, who don't have a national radio show to respond?

Why didn't Prager walk off? He didn't want to look like a pansy who can't take disagreement.

Mathews appears on the cover of the media magazine Content. "Scream TV," reads the cover, "How Chris Matthews built a career on it."

Shannon: "I happened in on the portion of the Hardball show featuring Prager. I thought DP's analogy was inane, trite, insensitive and more than that totally
irrelevant to the issue of gun control. Still it was refreshing to see DP having to experience the threat of having someone cut him off on-air as he does so often to callers that trump or correct him on his radio show."

In a message dated 8/12/99 2:17:48 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
burstein@myna.com writes:

> I want to thank Luke for bringing an up date as to the trials and > tribulations of Dennis Prager. I wish I had known he would have been on > Hardball.

> I would like some input as to how Dennis has reacted to the events> in LA over the last few days.

Dennis was strongly opposed to the shooting of innocent children. And to secular liberalism.

The more I think about what Mathews said and did to Prager, the more I laugh... That this would happen to Dennis, who is usually pretty sensitive in his choice of words, and full of dignity and majesty (or self importance) is hilarious.

I don't think Prager has been this humiliated in his entire life.

Am I sicko for finding this amusing? That this would happen to DP... I wish I could see his face when Matthews did that...

Is it particularly disgusting to take joy in the humiliation of good and innocent persons?

Steve: "Whether or not this was an insensitive remark, the point Prager was trying to make is a pathetic, ill-reasoned, disingenuous straw-man. How is it that
someone can make so many of these types of arguments and not be dismissed as an insubstantial, pseudo-intellectual charlatan?

By Prager's reasoning: that guns don't cause crime (which is true of course) he should also be in favor of free public access to biological weapons. Because,
they don't cause crime either.

The pro gun control argument is the same as the pro biological weapons control argument: they pose too great of a public safety hazard in both accidents and in
criminal use.

Now obviously biological weapons potentially pose a greater risk, and guns can be argued to give benefits, so why not argue honestly on these grounds?

Is Dennis not smart enough, not honest enough to make credible and substantive arguments instead of this mind numbing sloganeering he seems so prone to?

PJ writes to alt.showbiz.gossip: WOW!!!! Did anybody see "Hardball" on CNBC last night? The host, Chris Matthews went berserk not once but TWICE! His performance reminded me of that Howard Beale character from "Network." The first time Matthews flew off the handle was when a female guest pointed out that NATO was in charge of operations in the Kosovo campaign. So is there anything really controversial about this statement? It is fairly well known that the operations in that campaign were run by NATO. The spokesman that we heard every night was a Brit, not an American. Plus we heard lots of commentary from NATO military folks with weird accents about the course of that campaign. But when the woman on Hardball mentioned that NATO was running the operations, Matthews went absolutely ballastic and said such statements were just rightwing agitprop.

Then later in the program Matthews went into the Howard Beale mode again. Dennis Prager was making a point when Matthews screeched: "STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!" over and over again. Prager was absolutely flabbergasted at Matthews tirade. So what is driving Matthews over the edge? My advice to Matthews is to keep up with the mental case routine. It boosted Howard Beale's ratings through the roof and it could do the same for him. I know that I will definitely be tuning in "Hardball" tonight to see if Matthews turns into Howard Beale again.

David Burstein:  Well, my friends, my term for the 90's is "Schadenfreude". I have delivered it to this august group before. In the book "Everyday Ethics"
author Joshua Halberstam offer schadenfreude as the opposite of envy. If a working defintion of envy would be the "silent dejection one feels in witnessing the success of others", schadenfreude if "the happiness one feels in witnessing the failure of others."

While the society seems to say that envy is so terrible,
schadenfreude is actually worse. We see it every day in gossip columns and in taunting and Jerry Springer.

It is the perversion of the emotion of joy. If left unchecked it can lead to joy in actively humilating another human being.

So Luke, thanks for your honesty, we all experience schadenfreude every once and a while, but it is nothing to be proud of. I try to learn things about myself when I find being envious. I can often find a positive
in that the emotion is telling me something that I really want. When I experience schadenfreude, it is very difficult to find any good.

Shannon: I happened to be in a clients car today... Prager was on. The brief time I heard DP, I was struck by the monotony of the man's polemic, false dichotmous thinking. I have not heard Prager in months, but he's still singing the same worn out
tune. Claims Prager: This nation is in moral decline (and by extention the Jewish day care center shooting is symptomatic of this) because people have
no time for God in their lives, because they do not believe in [his?] a cosmic moral and ethical aribter..Quoting G.K. Chesterton's nursery rhyme
philosophising "when people don't believe in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." Prager took his usual poorly aimed pot shots at secularism...never mind that America is BY FAR the most religiously devout western nation on the planet, that church attendance BY FAR outstrips our European cousins, that church building is a rampant growth offshoot of the construction industry in the USA, whereas in nations such as Britain churches are closing and being recycled into daycare centers and the like...

And who the hell does Prager think organise and consist these neo-nazi groups? Atheists? These wacked out crackers that join Christian Identity and Aryan Nation are bound by a form of Christian theology...a vile theology, but a theology nontheless. I hear that Kentucky has just ruled that Prager's beloved mystic incantation the 10 Commandments is to be displayed in every public school classroom. It will be interesting to see the effect that this "graven image" has on evil. I'm betting it will be the same effect it has in Northern Ireland where the Commandements are also placed on display in classrooms or in Germany a nation exposed to 15 centuries of Judaism and Christianity that still managed to conceive Nazism as righteous. Also a place where even today the 10 Commandments beams out its vibes in many public
school classrooms yet neo-nazi activity is at its strongest within that nation's youth.

Prager, as do many many others prone to simpleton solutions to complex problems, seeks the key to social decency in superstition rooted ritual and blind obeisance to a mythical cosmic sky fairy. This is a redundant and retrograde waste of energy and ulimately and insult to human potential. Until mankind concedes that our values must be measured by human worth, human need and human dignity we shall as a species maintain an endless litany of attrocity towards one another year in and year out. Abdication of moral decision making to either the State or to mythology doesn't work as our history books attest.

August 10, 1999

Dennis Prager returned from a two week vacation in Australia where he had a lovely time. Prager enjoyed Australians' relaxed attitude and civility. Prager spent two hours discussing why Americans are so angry. Then he discussed the attack on the Jewish community center.

From Salon: "Clerical pundits like Dennis Prager have taken full advantage of this anxiety, loosing op-ed jeramiads about a feminist-led "war on boys' natures" in a recent issue of the Weekly Standard. The underlying fear is that kids are learning to identify with a persona that breaks the macho mold. Of course, what's really happening has less to do with feminizing boys than with liberating all children from the tyranny of gender roles. But traditional parents may well worry at the sight of their daughter waving a light saber around the house, while their son contemplates carrying a purse like Tinky Winky."

Post: "Prager's program has recently been picked up by a Sacramento station. I have tried to give him a chance, but find him quite boring. I find he rarely discusses anything that I have not heard of through other sources weeks before, and find his spending much time talking about himself and his family quite  dull."

Ross writes: "RIGHT-WING REACTIONARY RADIO TALK SHOW DEMAGOGUE DENNIS PRAGER, IS A  PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THE "DOUBLE-STANDARD," THAT EXISTS IN AMERICA THESE DAYS. TODAY, HE IS A SELF-RIGHTEOUS FLAG-WAVING RIGHT WING PATRIOT, BUT WHEN HIS COUNTRY NEEDED HIM DURING THE VIETNAM CONFLICT, "BIG DENNY" SAVED HIS AMPLE DERRIERE, BY DODGING MILITARY SERVICE, EVEN THOUGH HE WASN'T A LEFT-WING VIETNAM WAR PROTESTER. AS A BLACK VIETNAM VETERAN, I RESENT HIS PRESENT DAY PROTESTATIONS AGAINST, AND STEREOTYPING OF, PROGRESSIVE THINKERS AS SO-CALLED "LEFTISTS." HIS PRESENT DAY "ANTI-COMMUNIST" ZEAL, IS A DIRECT CONTRADICTION OF HIS VIETNAM ERA AVOIDANCE OF EVER SERVING ONE DAY IN THE UNITED STATES MILITARY. PRAGER'S POSTURING, "IVORY TOWER," PHILOSOPHICAL RANTINGS, ARE PROOF POSITIVE THAT, TALK IS CHEAP!

The 7/12 issue of www.salonmagazine.com contains this article on Luke Ford. Here's an excerpt:

Luke Ford spends most of his time around porn stars, but he has a crush on Wendy Shalit, the neocon ingenue author of "A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue." Last time we talked, he had passed the afternoon skinny-dipping with X-rated actresses Kendra Jade and Shelle Pearson, but he was still mooning over a recent encounter with the poster girl for virtue and virginity. "Published in Commentary at only 19," he said dreamily. "I was really curious to see what she looked like, so I went to her reading. She's a little cutie, I kind of fancied her. I think we'd make a good couple -- Miss Modesty and Mr. Pornography."

He's not kidding. Ford, one of the most controversial figures in the porn universe, is a man torn between twin obsessions -- hardcore sex and conservative Judaism. He has elevated moral and spiritual schizophrenia to surreal proportions, and the split is most obvious in the two Web sites that he spends his life running. On Lukeford.com, he operates as the Matt Drudge of the triple-X industry, tirelessly reporting scandals, news, gossip, innuendo and minutia, earning $42,000 a year in ad revenue and the loathing of most of porn's major players. In his spare time, though, the sex industry's most notorious muckraker -- and the son, bizarrely, of a Seventh Day Adventist evangelical preacher -- maintains dennisprager.net, a site devoted to conservative writer, Jewish theologian and right-wing radio host Dennis Prager.

"I view porn, adultery, premarital sex, all forms of sexual expression outside of marriage as sinful, meaning against God's will," says Ford, a wry, blandly handsome 33-year-old. "Let me stress that I am single, I have never been married and the Lord has not granted me the gift of chastity. I do not fool myself that what I'm doing is OK by God or my religion. I'm really open that these are the ideals I believe in and in various ways I do not live up to them. C'est la vie. I get therapy once or twice a week for 90 minutes a session." He's a hypocrite and he knows it, revels in it -- in fact, Ford is so blunt about his personal shortcomings he disarms criticism by cheerfully concurring with everything his enemies say about him.

Gil responds:  That's [calling Prager right wing] so off the mark it is tellingly funny. Rightish, right leaning in
many areas are accurate, but there are so many areas DP is moderate or leftish, as in choice and heterosexuality to name two, that one wonders if
she didn't respond to a Luke Ford hype (who nurtures the juxtaposition of his websites because they increase his appearance of schizo) rather than do any
homework.

There are many things she could've said to elevate her credibility, but this appellation for DP of "right wing" is reminiscent of those only with an extreme leftist perspective. While it is also likely it was a SOP for her editor along with her own collegial bias, I smell Luke Ford had more than an indifferent hand in this.

You really knew your interviewer and how to make the most of her, didn't you Luke? <ROTFL> You are getting to be a virtuoso at playing the media. These
"reporters" are such prostitutes -- something of which you also know. Hey! How about a comparative article -- who today knows the two subjects better?
<G>

Daily Variety
05/18/99

In his KRLA debut, [Michael] Jackson averaged a 2.7 Arbitron rating among listeners age 12 and up during the first three months of the year, or about 67,000 listeners a day. Jackson placed No. 2 in the 9 a.m.-noon timeslot, trailing KFI's Limbaugh (who averaged 137,100 listeners) but ahead of KABC's Dennis Prager (52,100).

KABC reps noted that Prager beat Jackson in the demographic categories of listeners age 25-54 and 35-54. In fact, Prager's demo numbers were up in comparison with Winter '98, while Limbaugh posted double-digit declines.

04/29/1999
Los Angeles Times

Jackson, the former KABC host who moved to KRLA in January, got a 2.7% share among listeners 12 and older in his first survey, beating KABC's Dennis Prager (2.1%) in their weekday 9 a.m.-noon slot. Prager, however, had more than twice Jackson's share among 25- to 54-year-olds, the group most advertisers target.

But then, Rush Limbaugh on KFI-AM (640) attracted more than both of them combined, with a 5.6% share in overall audience.

While KABC stayed put at 2.4% for the second quarter in a row--its lowest audience in a decade--it moved up slightly in the 25-54 demographic and in
its own preferred 35-54 demographic. "We've got to start somewhere," said Erik Braverman, assistant program director. "For a long time, KABC was not
relevant, but Larry Elder is putting us on the map. He's clearly driving our train right now."

Elder, whose 3.3% audience share topped the 3-7 p.m. field among talk stations, was up 38% over the previous quarter and 14% over the same period a
year ago. He also showed substantial gains in the 25-54 and 35-54 demographics.

"I think it's a pretty good show," Elder, who has done afternoon drive since 1995, said this week. "These things take time. People are getting it and
getting me."

Al Rantel, KABC's noon-3 p.m. host, also had improved ratings but still was well behind KFI's Laura Schlessinger.

03/29/1999
MEDIAWEEK

No one knows better than MediaAmerica how difficult it has been to fill Rush Limbaugh's shoes. The radio rep firm lost the political pundit two years ago when syndicator EFM Media sold Rush and the Dr. Dean Edell Show to Jacor Communications. But with the news last week that MediaAmerica would syndicate and rep The Dennis Prager Show on KABC-AM in Los Angeles, the company now offers a healthy stable of talk programming covering more than 90 percent of the U.S.

Prager will launch in mid-April, running from 9 a.m. to noon Pacific Time, a period that ironically puts Prager up against Limbaugh. But the two shows couldn't be more different. "Rush has a built-in audience," said Prager, "I don't. My advantage is that my audience is unlimited."

Prager has been called a moralist and an ethicist, though his topics run the gamut from the Oscars to career choices, and yes, some politics. "I want people to disagree with me; I want people talk about what I say at the dinner table." He has a loyal following that generates call-ins on his show from some of Hollywood's best-known, including Richard Dreyfuss, Jacqueline Bissett and Jason Alexander.

While most talk shows skew toward men, Prager skews female, but only slightly. After he was moved into his current daypart on KABC, his ratings jumped 14 percent among adults 25-54, while adult women listeners increased 34 percent.

***

Author of this website, www.dennisprager.net, Luke Ford's just published his first book - "A HISTORY OF X: 100 Years of Sex in Film." From Prometheus Books. Available in all stores. Lucky Dennis Prager gets a mention on page nine:

"To modify a quote from Shakespeare, our problems are not in our stars, or in our porn, but in ourselves. Inanimate objects like videos or guns or nuclear weapons do not cause evil, Jewish theologian and KABC talk show host Dennis Prager notes repeatedly. People do. If a man remains single all his life because he will only settle down with a Playboy Playmate, this is his fault, not porn's."

***

Does porn desensitize? Is any man who consumes pornography a misogynist or, at the very least, regards women as less than human (as sexual objects)?

That last sentence came from an article opposing Harvard's firing of its Divinity School dean Ronald F. Thiemann. My hero, Jewish theologian Dennis Prager, writes: "...[N]ormal and honorable heterosexual men enjoy looking at partially clad and naked women. I feel a bit silly having to write in a publication read by college graduates what my unschooled grandmother knew.

"Enjoying looking at pictures of naked women no more means a heterosexual man loathes women or wants them demeaned than looking at pictures of naked men means a homosexual man loathes men or wants them demeaned. In fact, it means absolutely nothing.

"The Harvard affair is an example of heterophobia, the fear and loathing of male heterosexuality - a far more accepted condition among modern elites than homophobia. After all, if the dean had been a homosexual man who had pictures of naked men on his computer, the chances that Harvard would have asked him to resign his position are next to nothing. And if it had asked him to resign, charges of homophobia would have engulfed the university." (Weekly Standard, 6/14/99)

In the 6/28 issue of the Weekly Standard, readers responded:

Nathan Schlueter writes from Irving, Texas: "First, Prager's insouciant dismissal of pornography as harmless "boys will be boys" play is misguided. The "plain fact" is that most men who enjoy looking at scantily clad women usually feel a bit dirty when they do it, especially when their wives or mothers find out. Nor ist his phenomenon of shame culturally determined; it is no mistake that immediately upon eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve realize they are naked and cover themselves, with apparent approval by God. Pornography endangers human beings by transforming them from persons (subjects with intelligence and free will) into objects for the satisfaction of self-centered desire. Thus it is not surprising that criminologists have discovered a high correlation between pornography and certain kinds of violent crime.

"Second, Prager claims that this case involves a "deprivation of privacy." Does he know that word does not exist in the Constitution, that it is a figment of the Supreme Court's imagination?"

Joan Adams writes from New York: "Would Prager encourage women to pursue a career in porn? Would he welcome porn shops in his neighborhood? Doubtful.

"Downloading, collecting, and viewing pornography at work may be more stupid than immoral. Still, the stupidity of Dean Thiemann's act does not make pornogrpahy benign. Privacy should ensure that one can engage in all the socially acceptable behavior one wants, but typically that protect does not extend to work, nor does it make things like pornography acceptable."

Luke: I don't buy Prager's argument that what people do privately, so long as no innocent party is hurt, is nobody's business. If someone wants to eat like a pig, or a man to wear women's clothing, or to use some legal or illegal drug, or to simply watch trash TV... Why should someone have an absolute right to be not gossiped about? Where does this absolute right to privacy come from? Not from the Torah or Judaism nor from the US Constitution.

Public figures like Prager hate to be seen as gossips. They want to legislate (either morally or legally) against people talking negatively about them. I say we have no such right to absolute privacy (even while acting within ethical bounds) nor to be not gossiped about.

A right to privacy, like the right to free speech or the right to drive a car, and virtually all other rights must be dependent on its participants, context, and effects. Like Prager I believe in situational ethics and absolute ethics: the situation determines the absolute.

In the March 22, 1999 National Review, Dennis Prager positively reviewed Rabbi Daniel Lapin's new book America's Real War:

America's Real War is a brilliant cry from the heart. Rabbi Lapin's thesis is this: Either America will recover its Judeo-Christian heritage or the American enterprise will fail: "The choice is between a benign Christian culture and a sinister secular one." America's culture war is between religious, i.e., JudeoChristian, ideas and anti-religious, i.e., secular,
ideas. The more dominant the latter, the lower America sinks: "Almost every social pathology and nearly every sign of civic disarray can be traced to one thing: the extirpation of religion from American public life during the past three and a half decades."

I too worry greatly about the decline of Christianity in America. Like Rabbi Lapin, I believe that it is good that America is a Christian nation. I want Christmas to be a national holiday; Sunday to be a special day; Christians to attend church; the Bible used in inaugurations; chaplains to address Congress; more Christmas carols on the radio and Christmas scenes at city halls; prayer (non-denominational) in schools; and so on.

I have had the privilege of speaking in nearly every Jewish community in America over the last 30 years, and I have frequently argued in favor of this view. Recently, I spoke to the Jewish community of a small North Carolina city. When some in the audience mentioned their fear of rising religiosity among Christians, I asked these audience-members if they loved living in their city. All of them said they did. Is it a coincidence, I then asked, that the city you so love-for its wonderful people, its safety for your
children, its fine schools, and its values that enable you to raise your children with confidence-is a highly Christian city?

Too many Americans do not appreciate the connection between American greatness and American Christianity. Too many Americans believe that one can remove the source of greatness and retain the greatness.

04/02/1999
Bangor Daily News Bangor, ME

Taking stock of himself recently, Los Angeles radio talk show host Dennis Prager said he knows exactly where his outspoken views have landed him.

"There's a picture of me under the dictionary definition of politically incorrect," joked the best-selling author, philosopher and Jewish theologian who will speak at Beth Israel Synagogue in Bangor Saturday, April 10.

Prager, who studied Communism in college, said his views are shaped by his understanding of that ideology's appeal and its notion that individuals don't
need to do good because the government can do it for them.

"This is unfortunately a deeply imbedded liberal view -- one doesn't have to be a Communist to believe that," said Prager who pointed out that according
to an article in The Boston Globe the liberal states of New England give less charity per capita than the conservative states in the South.

"The reason is not that people {in New England} are bad," said Prager, "it's that they have truly imbibed the belief that doing good is the government's
responsibility, that `I've already paid my taxes, let the government do it."'