In declaring the term “under God” unconstitutional, the Court of Appeals held that it was exclusive rather than inclusive; not only were atheists not covered by it, but neither were adherents to all nonmonotheist religions. Should the decision therefore be celebrated as recognizing that we are no longer a Protestant, nor even a Christian, nor even a Judeo-Christian society, but one that has come to offer a place at the public table for all believers, and even for those who do not believe at all?

Alas, matters are not that straightforward. Decisions involving religion have no easy constitutional solutions, which is why courts have disagreed about them so much. Despite the First Amendment ban on an established religion, the United States did have, throughout much of its history, an unofficial establishment; Protestantism governed our culture even if it did not rule our state. Throughout the 19th century, Protestants had no problem insisting that the King James version of the Bible belonged in the public schools even if the pope did not. Lincoln’s great speeches designed to heal the nation, and issues as important as Westward expansion, the creation of an American empire, even, to some degree, the welfare state were discussed in Protestant terms. Because so many Americans were excluded by language rooted in Protestantism, the U. S. Supreme Court was right to stop defining America as a “Christian nation” and to seek ways of protecting the rights of minority religions.

Yet if society goes to the other extreme and bans from the public square any form of religious language, it violates the beliefs of all those who insist that religion is more than a matter of personal conviction, that faith is essential to how we Americans define ourselves collectively. In so doing, it may extend rights to nonbelievers or to those who believe in doctrines not widely accepted, but it does so at the cost of imposing a view of what America is about that others, in this case the majority of believers, do not share.

One way around this dilemma is to find language that invokes religion rather than religions. Such a language would seek broadly defined terms that bring as many individuals as possible under their scope rather than sectarian language meant to divide one faith from another. “Under God” serves those purposes admirably. It clearly includes Muslims and not just Christians and Jews. True, nonmonotheistic religions believe in Gods rather than God, but, contrary to the appellate court’s interpretation, they are not excluded from the Pledge’s formulation, since those who believe in more than one God still believe in at least one. (They could, moreover, add their own personal “s” to the pledge without anyone noticing - or caring.) The only people excluded by the term are atheists. But since atheists define themselves against the religious beliefs of others, they should work to see the Pledge preserved, for without it, their very reason for taking public stands on these issues would be taken away from them.

By rejecting a compromise that offends almost no one, had been in existence for half a century and could not be claimed as the exclusive language of any one faith, the circuit court has opened itself up to ridicule. And that is one of the most unfortunate byproducts of its decision. Demagogues like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have discredited themselves with their bigoted comments on Islam and their extremist political views. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals now insures that they will gain much of the credibility they have quite rightfully lost, since one of their more seemingly ridiculous ideas — that there exist people in positions of authority who hate religion — has just been proven correct.

In addition to its political stupidity, the court’s opinion fails to understand what freedom really means. We need separation of church and state because, throughout history, religions have had a tendency to rely on government to coerce others. But nothing about the pledge is coercive. Students can opt out of saying it. It is not said in a religious building or context. Its purely symbolic role is understood by everyone, including the parent who challenged it. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Spanish Inquisition. In taking this case and ruling as it did, the appellate court has dishonored those who fought real battles, with real lives at stake, on behalf of conscience. Objecting to the Pledge of Allegiance is not an affirmation of liberty; it is a narcissistic act by selfish people who want their own view of how these things should work taken as definitive. And, to make matters worse, they are not determined enough to fight for their views in legislatures and in the court of public opinion; they rely instead on the most liberal judges in the country to get their way.

Since the 9th Circuit Court has been overruled more often than any other court in the United States, one does not expect that this ruling will stand too long. Yet before it is overruled, it is likely to cause considerable damage. In its own way, the United States has been moving toward solutions to problems that in other societies cause religious wars. We are the most religion-tolerant society in the West, incorporating non-Christians in ways Europe cannot seem to grasp. We tame our religious extremists because we are so reluctant to see politics and religion blended. Americans, to be sure, are not active participants in the life of their country, but our tendency to bowl alone looks good when others kill together. The secret to our success is that we have lacked both a clerical tradition insistent on imposing an official religion on society and an anti-clerical tradition that looks with disdain at anyone who professes religious belief.

The appellate court, having now adopted an anti-clerical position, can only expect a clerical reaction. Its official sponsorship of atheism is as repugnant to our tradition of tolerance as official sponsorship of religion. If Americans are not allowed collectively to express their thanks to a generic and nonsectarian God, they will be more likely to engage in battles between different conceptions of specific ones. We are a moderate people who subscribe to moderate faiths. That is something the extremists on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals fail to understand.

Part of the Kennedy mystique is surely due to the unusual nature of the family. Remember Roger Clinton? What about Neil Bush? The Kennedys, it is frequently said, were a political dynasty. Yet the Bush family constitutes one as well, and during that brief period when Hillary Clinton appeared to be the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination, the Clinton name was also burnished with dynasty status. While other families have many who seek power, however, none has had the success of the Kennedys. John, Robert, and now Teddy will all be remembered as major figures in American history. No one can say that about Hugh Rodman or Marvin Bush. Most parents would be happy to have one successful child. Joe and Rose Kennedy produced a slew of them.

The Kennedy family, like many Catholic families of its era, was a large one. It is also one that is unlikely ever to appear again. This is not just because many Catholics have found ways to have fewer children but because the Kennedys were products of a unique period in American history. The immigrant experience for most Americans lies further back in the past than it did with the Kennedy clan. Greater governmental regulation of the economy makes more difficult the kind of swashbuckling capitalism that made Joe Kennedy rich. Women are expected to work these days and not be, as Rose was, a full-time mother. Rarely are families nowadays identified with one particular place as the Kennedys are with Massachusetts; the Bush family is identified with three, Maine, Connecticut, and Texas. When marriages are unhappy, as the marriage of Joe and Rose was at times, people today, unlike them, get divorced; indeed, a significant number of Joe and Rose’s grandchildren are divorced or separated. You could not buy a Cape Cod beachfront compound like the one the family owns in Hyannis even if you were sitting on piles of cash. The Kennedys were not only a family; they embodied the idea of a particular kind of family. Alas, for most Americans, that family simply is no more.

When we contemplate the death of Ted Kennedy, then, we retrieve memories of family life as it no longer can be lived. As much as we may prefer smaller families, part of us longs for the extended clan that made it possible for the number of people in a Kennedy family portrait to approach the population of a small Iowa town. We lead lives; the Kennedys were characters in a saga. We do not read “Pride and Prejudice” in order to find a spouse but to know something about the nature of love. For the same reason, we do not fill our television schedule with scenes of Hyannis to learn how to raise kids. Every retelling of Ted Kennedy’s life will instruct us about success and sacrifice, the pleasures and puzzles of fame and the unbearable pain of loss. With Teddy’s passing — coming so quickly after the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver — we have lost not only two remarkable people but an entire way of life.

Besides the family there were the men. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Teddy Kennedy are larger than life figures. It was not just their names that made them so dominant but their success. Jack Kennedy was not president all that long and especially compared to Lyndon Johnson did not accomplish all that much. But that is in many ways the point: He had the confidence to name an all-consuming politician such as Johnson as his running mate. Compare that to the selection of a Dan Quayle, a Sarah Palin or, forgive me, a Joe Biden. We are right to remember Jack Kennedy’s guts; especially after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy encouraged dissent while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in the wake of their failure in Iraq, quashed it. The man cannot escape our memory life for a reason.

The same can be said of Robert and Teddy. Bobby Kennedy at the time of his death was, along with Martin Luther King Jr., the most impressive advocate for equality of any 20th-century American leader. Alone among American politicians of his era, he combined a prophetic voice with a pragmatic shrewdness. There is no knowing how great a president he would have been if only the violent streak in American life had been stilled long enough for him to take his turn.

But it may come to pass that we remember Teddy the most. Unlike his brothers, Edward M. Kennedy did not just give voice to the idea of making America a more just society but did more to secure that goal than either of his brothers. His accomplishments in education and healthcare recall the days when liberalism was not just the subject of books but the basis for one impressive piece of legislation after another. Although Republicans will no doubt still try their best to kill health insurance reform, the very fact that the country is on the verge of passing any legislation at all has more to do with Teddy than with Barack Obama.

Thirdly, there are the ideas. Something similar to what happens to us when we think of the Kennedy clan happens to us when we contemplate the Kennedys as politicians: We are reminded of an era that no longer seems to exist. It is not just that Democrats are more cautious than they were when Teddy first entered the Senate or that Republicans are more ideological. It is also that liberals lack the confidence in their own ideas that came as second nature to Jack, Bobby and Teddy. It is a sign of the power of the Kennedy legacy that in 2008 a young man ignored the advice of his betters, ran for president against determined opposition and won. It is also a sign of how far we have come from the heyday of the Kennedy years that Obama has little choice but to curtail the ambitions of his programs in order to get any of them passed. No wonder that Teddy Kennedy is being lionized. He reminds us of what politics used to be like before there were such things as Fox News, culture wars, 24/7 fundraising and sound bites.

Finally there are the flaws; no one can speak about the Kennedys without being reminded of their failings as human beings. Jack Kennedy lusted after women in a way that makes Bill Clinton look like a celibate monk. Bobby not only had his reputation as a cutthroat to live down, he also had to overcome his McCarthyite youth. And Teddy, of course, survived two political scandals that might have ended the career of any other politician: a case of cheating at Harvard and Chappaquiddick. It a certainly a cliché to speak of the Kennedys as characters in a Greek tragedy. But we do so for a reason: None of them were perfect.

These days we seem to be less tolerant of the flaws of our leaders. We were informed of George Bush’s alcoholism, but only to emphasize his religiosity. Obama, an Eagle Scout if there ever was one in American politics, save for an occasional smoke, seems to have no flaws at all. We either elect people who are truly remarkable or elect scoundrels adept at making themselves over. It is as if were we to acknowledge flaws in our leaders, we might have to find them in ourselves.

And this, in the final analysis, may be the most unusual of the memories inspired by the death of Edward Kennedy. The Kennedys were rich. Their family was unusual. They were the stuff of myth. Yet compared to politicians who blow-dry their hair and speak only with the help of teleprompters, the Kennedys — Teddy more than all of them — strike us as people who have had to deal with real tragedies and excruciating dilemmas. They were all larger than life because they were not completely divorced from life. Teddy Kennedy will always be remembered for his failures as well as his successes. That, more than anything else, helps explain why we will miss him so much.

McCain’s propensity to lie has become what political junkies call a meme, an idea or behavior that runs, seemingly unstoppably, from one media outlet to another. Some bloggers offer daily counts of how many falsehoods McCain tells while others wonder why the Democrats do not respond in turn. Even the mainstream press has gotten into the act. One of the pleasures of the 2008 campaign — I admit they have been few and far between — is watching all those who once admired John McCain for his truthfulness realize the true depths of his moral depravity. When McCain is linked to Palin, moreover, as he so frequently wants to be, lying experiences something of a multiplier effect. These candidates lie so much that they have taken to lying about their own lies.

Before we get carried away with enthusiasm about all this, though, we should keep two things in mind. One is that we are so quick to label McCain a liar that we tend to forget how much, and with what horrendous consequences, George W. Bush possessed the same character flaw. The other is that Republicans lie so frequently, not because the party just happened to settle upon one serial liar after another to run for high office, but because the form of conservatism to which they all adhere demands that if they are to win they have no choice but to lie.

In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, then something of a political unknown, claimed to be a compassionate conservative and promised the country a “humble” foreign policy. Lies both. Compassionate conservatism was a brilliant campaign slogan, an attempt by Bush to persuade independent voters that he was not a raving madman like Newt Gingrich, who had urged, in true Dickensian fashion, the building of orphanages to solve the welfare problem. Long before the public had ever heard of Rick Warren, Karl Rove understood that the evangelical base of the Republican Party wanted language more uplifting than traditional Republican red meat, and the idea that conservatives were in fact more compassionate than bureaucratic liberals provided it. In actuality, as we now know, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, the most compassionate program ever adopted in this country, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to do so.

Bush spoke in 2000 of a humble foreign policy for much the same reason. We now also know that the Bush-Cheney administration was intent on adopting the most aggressive American foreign stance possible, and that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, offered them the public justification for actions they had been secretly planning since taking office. We tend to forget that before Sept. 11, aggressive foreign policy moves were not all that popular. Americans wanted a peace dividend in the aftermath of communism’s collapse and seemed hell-bent on turning inward to their private pursuits. In that context, offering them a humble approach while planning a militant one constituted as dramatic a lie as one can imagine.

I would never challenge the argument that John McCain’s lies in 2008 are over the top. But if McCain is more serial a liar than George W. Bush, it is a matter of degree rather than kind. Bush’s lies, after all, led to thousands of needless deaths, and none of John McCain’s lies, at least to this point, have done that. Were he to find himself elected, McCain would no doubt lie about many things, such as whether the United States has engaged in torture or whether Iran is a genuine military threat to the United States. But the bar has been set way too high; given the mendacity of the Bush administration, I am at something of a loss to imagine that a McCain administration could lie more.

Why do Republicans lie so much? Why is McCain following the Bush script? Why, at the very moment when he wanted a “maverick” by his side, did McCain pick a congenital liar to be his running mate? Republicans engage in what I can only call “structural lies.” To understand what this means consider this: Just about every significant lie uttered by Republican politicians is designed to make them seem less conservative than they really are.

The current lie du jour of the McCain campaign is that their man will aggressively take on the greed that is causing the collapse on Wall Street. Given McCain’s lack of interest in the economy, wealthy campaign contributors, and ideological hostility toward government regulation, this stance is laughable. But McCain’s lie unconsciously reveals an important truth, which is that when the economy goes into a tailspin, the public prefers a solution long identified with liberalism. McCain could tell the truth, which is that he is all for the free market and can barely wait until the crisis passes so the rich can go about the business of becoming ever richer. But if he does that, he will lose. McCain wants to win. Therefore he lies.

It is not just the economy that features this structural dynamic. If you were just tuning into the election now — no doubt there are many Americans who have not quite tuned in yet — you would think that the Republican Party loves workers, hopes to redistribute income to the lower middle class, embraces immigrants, favors environmental protection, and hates war. Some of the Republican lies, to be sure have nothing to do with policy, such as false estimates of the size of the crowds attending Republican rallies or Sarah Palin’s announcement that she had sold the Alaska governor’s plane on eBay, but of those that do, the overwhelming majority are designed to make the Republican ticket more humane and moderate than it actually is. Only on foreign policy, where McCain shows no interest in hiding his hawkish instincts, can the ticket claim to be taking an honest position even if the face of public skepticism.

Conservatism is an honorable political philosophy whose most eloquent spokesmen, such as John Adams and Edmund Burke, proclaimed the truth as they saw it. This is a tradition that continues among all those contemporary conservatives who have been appalled at the direction the McCain camp has taken and have been willing to say so publicly. In contrast, the conservative populism that has swallowed up the contemporary Republican Party lies because conservative populism is itself a lie. It claims to be guided by faith when it is run by corruption. It speaks of diversity but remains overwhelmingly white. It uses women to push an agenda that would expose women to harm. It speaks of reform tomorrow to slash the reforms of today. It seeks popular support to enact policies that, if revealed for what they were, would be wildly unpopular.

Like so many of John McCain’s critics, I find myself astonished at the sheer brazenness of the lies he tells. But this is not because McCain is more dishonorable than Bush. It is because the conditions under which a truthful Republican could be elected in 2008 are much more difficult than they were in 2000. Through sheer incompetence and cronyism, George W. Bush showed Americans just how dangerous conservatism can be. Because he did, those conservatives who would succeed him face even more difficult obstacles placed in their path to power. In the past, they might have gotten away with lying occasionally. This will no longer do. Expect, therefore, as the country turns to the debates ahead, that John McCain, when addressing issues of foreign policy around which he has been remarkably honest, will begin to lie in that area as well.

And that, really, is Falwell’s legacy. To the religious life of the United States he made no significant contribution. But to the political life of the country, he made one: He founded the Moral Majority. In so doing, Falwell managed to take something holy — one does not have to be a Christian to admire the life and teachings of Jesus Christ — and turned it into something partisan and divisive. Falwell, the quintessential conservative Christian, was always more conservative than Christian. To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.

Even Falwell’s political contribution, despite the success of the Republicans during the Reagan years, left a mixed legacy behind. But the Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, prompting the inevitable thought that Falwell’s ideas were neither moral nor in the majority. The movement of conservative Protestants into the base of the Republican Party was far too important a task to be entrusted to a man as oblivious to public relations as Falwell. Once the Ralph Reeds and Karl Roves took over the task of blending religion and politics, there was no room for Falwell. Longing for Washington, he had to settle for Lynchburg, Va.

But then there was cable television, the perfect medium for someone as shallow as this man. Falwell appeared so many times on cable news that one tended to forget how little influence he actually wielded. Had it not been for cable television, Falwell would have been forgotten long ago (and I would not be writing about his legacy). He was perfect for the world created by Fox: extremist, polarizing, Manichaean. (The Manichees, a Persian sect that for a time attracted the great Saint Augustine, adhered to a black-and-white reality in which evil was always in an endless struggle with the good.) Five minutes of hate followed by a commercial break: It is not a format fit for all, but for Falwell, it fit like a glove.

Conservative Christianity has been trying to recover from Falwell for the past two decades. Just as his political views were too buffoonish to make the Moral Majority a reality, his religious sensibilities were too shallow to spread evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism grew in the exurban megachurches, and the megachurches, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, rejected Falwell’s approach to the faith. Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Bill Hybels — these inclusive preachers inherited the mantle of Billy Graham, not Falwell and his great rival Pat Robertson. With the maturation of American evangelicalism has come an interest in social justice, environmentalism and peace. The people who represent evangelical Protestantism’s future want little or nothing to do with injustice, pollution and war.

Of course America’s megachurches offer a thin theology equivalent to 12-step therapy. But Falwell’s contribution to American religion was even less than that. Falwell’s university — Liberty University — never achieved anything resembling serious academic status, although it did produce a decent enough basketball team. Falwell’s church, Thomas Road Baptist Church, with its Scopes-trial era insistence on hell and damnation, was not what American Christians wanted to hear. Falwell’s 1980 book, “Listen, America,” is an embarrassing string of clichés. “Sin is a transgression of God’s law and God’s law is unalterable,” Falwell wrote. “To sin is to voluntarily disobey God and His divine laws.” But it was not the sinfulness of human beings that preoccupied Falwell; it was the sinfulness of the country in which they lived: “Sin brings reproach upon a people. This is the reason we are in a nosedive as a nation.” Less than 50 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Falwell could write of America that “we have become one of the most blatantly sinful nations of all time.” Falwell’s theology, such as it was, never made clear how America could be both the promised land and Gomorrah at the same time.

Instead of pondering Jerry Falwell’s legacy, we would be better off asking how this man ever became a public figure in the first place. America has had more than its share of religiously inspired demagogues — Dr. Fred Swartz, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntyre come to mind — but they are forgotten figures, marginal even to the times in which lived. One would like to believe that the United States has become a bigger and better country since the days when men like them preached about captive nations and denounced the pernicious influence of rock ‘n’ roll. But then there is Jerry Falwell. In death, as he did in life, he reminds us that demagoguery never dies; it just changes its form. Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.

Responses to Katrina, like responses to Hobbes, can be divided into two broad camps. There are those who say that a state of nature reveals humanity as it really is; we are little more than animals, depraved creatures burdened by sin and self-interest and desperately in need of the firm guidance that only a deity or armed force can provide. For others, by contrast, the state of nature is a reminder of where we would be if we had not invented civilization; we are not animals driven by nature but builders of societies capable of keeping nature at bay. Reminded by anarchy of what a precious achievement civilization is, we transform examples of humans acting at their worst to do everything in power to help them act their best.

Remarkably for a society as modern as the United States, a surprising number of commentators find themselves attracted to the raw brutalities of nature revealed by Katrina. For them, the fact that so many of the victims are black is not just an accident; Africa, and by implications African-Americans, have traditionally been viewed by whites, especially by whites in the South, as one step removed from nature. The ever self-righteous pundits on Fox News find that images of black young men walking off with plasma-screen televisions are just too convenient to ignore. Humans as depraved as these barely deserve our help. “It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s 7 feet under sea level,” as House Speaker Dennis Hastert put it. “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

In the state of nature, no one is responsible for you. The situation in New Orleans may look like chaos, our right-wing brethren say, but in reality it is not that different from a market economy in which everyone is responsible for the choices he or she makes. People may be suffering, but, as Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown put it, residents “chose not to leave the city.” Left unsaid, but implicit in the idea of choice, is that we ought to be wary of extending too much help to people so unable to act in their own best interest that financial assistance is likely to be wasted on them. Of course, it is easier to choose to leave if you can afford a car, but no one ever said that fairness reigns in the state of nature.

Fairness may not run rampant in the state of nature, but vigilantism does. For every commentator lecturing the poor for looting, others find understandable, and maybe even a touch admirable, those who pick up guns to defend their provisions against — well, you don’t really have to spell out whom they fear. Order is preferable to chaos, but if order can only be maintained by a government that might have to raise taxes and call its National Guard home where it belongs, then perhaps chaos is preferable to order.

There is a perverse logic working here: If Americans learn how hard it is to pacify New Orleans, perhaps they will understand why our military cannot control Baghdad.

By contrast, the residents of New Orleans themselves, and the sympathetic members of the media covering their plight, sum up their political philosophy in one word: “help.” That is, in fact, one of the most important words in the history of Western thought. Why shouldn’t desperate human beings be deserving of the help the more fortunate can provide them? Once human beings start helping each other, society comes into existence. And once we have society at our disposal, we need no longer sit back and allow disaster to unfurl, irrespective of whether that disaster is caused by nature or our own ignorance.

For those who think this way, the tragedy of Katrina is a human one as well as a natural one. We knew it was coming. Our government anticipated it and even, when it had more funds available to it, developed plans for meeting it. Far from being responsible for their own plight, the victims are innocent; blame instead belongs to those who cut the funding for disaster relief, sent the troops out to wreak havoc abroad rather than keep order at home, and were so slow to respond because they lacked the empathy to put themselves in the place of those so unlike themselves.

Socially created, Katrina’s chaos can be socially cured. Horrifying as its stories are, they will serve a positive purpose if we use them to talk about race, poverty and disaster planning. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake launched the Enlightenment; since a good God could not have killed so many innocent people, philosophers began to argue that humans were themselves responsible for the good and evil around them. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation could have the same consequence: If government could have prevented it, and if government is required for dealing with it, then could we not at the least stop bashing government? Government, for modern people like us, is civilization; it is what keeps us from descending into the state of nature that, like Lake Pontchartrain, threatens the earthly city in which we live.

Some worry that the events unleashed in the aftermath of Katrina will inflame the American culture war. If only we could be so lucky. Our culture war is puny when compared with Hobbes’ war of all against all. As we watch the tragedy of Katrina unfold, we are not talking about relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom. We are talking about civilization itself, why its invention has been humanity’s greatest accomplishment and why we should do everything in our power to protect it. That we have so many people in our midst, including in the seats of power in Washington, who cannot understand what an improvement society is over nature is a tragedy fully as destructive as Katrina’s. And when the totality of that tragedy is reckoned, it may cause more death and destruction than nature is capable of doing.

Yet however we think and act in a media-saturated age, nearly every serious philosopher, none more so than the great Immanuel Kant, believed that we would be wrong to act out of emotional identification with a particular person. Especially when an issue is as heart-wrenching as the Schiavo family drama, it is important than we never lose our capacity to act reflectively rather than impulsively. And reflection demands that we consider each case on the basis of rules meant to apply to all cases.

Americans embody Kantian reasoning in the often-cited dictum that we are a government of laws, not of men. The Schiavo case reminds us why that dictum matters. In a case as conflict-ridden and morally wrenching as this one, the courts have reached a decision: Michael Schiavo’s claim that Terri would not have wanted to live this way has been upheld. In relying on its own form of civil disobedience, the U.S. Congress is claiming that we are a government of men, not of laws. Even a moment of reflection suggests why this is a bad idea; governments of men give to whomever is in power the capacity to overrule rights and procedures to get what they want. Another term for that is “dictatorship.” Upholding law might just be more important than preventing a death.

Emotion is a poor basis for making moral decisions for a second reason; it is cheap, while reason is dear. Nothing is easier to offer than sympathy at a distance. Those rushing to Terri’s “side” have no conscience with which to struggle, no doubts to be resolved, no principles to violate. They need not even be consistent, which is why they can urge respect for Terri’s life while ignoring all the deaths their cuts in Medicaid will cause. Emotional appeals surround us. No politician will earn a profile in courage by wallowing in them.

Reason, by contrast, ennobles and inspires, demanding, as it does, that we consider the interests of humanity as well as humans. Far from being easy, reason requires courage. Contrast the posturing of Republican legislators with the dignity of Florida Judge George Greer. In the past two weeks one judge has been shot in Atlanta and the family of another killed in Chicago. Judge Greer knows full well that in the Schiavo case, passions run high and people with links to violence, such as antiabortion activist Randall Terry, are involved. Greer could have taken the easy way out and protected himself and his family. He chose to uphold the majesty of the law. He should be a hero. Zealots could consider him a murderer.

Emotion, finally, fails as policy because hypocrisy is its first cousin. Intent on protecting Terri Schiavo’s right to live, Republicans cannot be oblivious to the benefits yielded by her death. To this point, “liberals” and “activist judges” can only be blamed for trying to resolve the case. Imagine the conservative glee if it is resolved and the feeding tube is removed. Every court ruling will become grounds for appointing only the most conservative of judges. Every Democrat who speaks in the language of rights and reason will be treated as an accomplice to death. The quest for emotional satisfaction can never be fulfilled; Bill O’Reilly will always demand more. We cannot predict Terri Schiavo’s fate, but we can surely anticipate outrage inflation, as every attempt to find moral guidelines in the murky world of death and dying becomes a political football.

This is why a sane society would try to put cases such as Terri Schiavo’s outside the realm of politics. Let us by all means have a national debate over persistent vegetative states, living wills and conflicts between husbands and parents. But let us hold that debate over general principles. Our laws must be designed for unnamed individuals in the future, not on behalf of specific people in the here-and-now.

Choosing the universal over the particular, our framers banned “bills of attainder,” laws that punish single individuals. The bill passed this weekend may not be a bill of attainder because it did not involve imposing a punishment. But we would nonetheless be wise to recall James Madison’s warning, in Federalist No. 44, that “bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation … The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community.”

Tom DeLay is a speculator in the lives of others. A political system that responds to him has come a long way from the ideals of the men who founded it.