This may be the real reason why:

For most of us, the death of a child is just about the most tragic event we can imagine.

The Sandy Hook massacre was so overwhelmingly gut-wrenching because the victims were mostly young children. Likewise, news reports about the Boston Marathon bombing emphasize the fact that, of the three people killed, one was an 8-year-old boy – as if to highlight the uniquely great loss of a child.

In the world of crime, one of the most incomprehensible acts is baby-murder. We’re outraged at the widespread sex-selective infanticide of newborn girls in China. And recent headlines like “Georgia boys face murder charges after cold-blooded killing of infant being strolled by mother” and “Black teens murder white baby for the fun of it” cause us to shake our heads and wonder, How could anyone possibly sink so low as to kill a baby?

Many murders of babies – in fact almost half, according to the Justice Department’s National Criminal Justice Reference Service – occur within the first 24 hours after birth, so-called “neonaticide.”

Of course, appalling crimes like these have always have been a part of life in this fallen world – a world of good and evil, of decent and indecent people, where moral outrage is kindled within all good souls by the murder of the innocent.

However, parallel to this moral, rational world exists yet another world – an amoral, irrational one, constructed over several decades with great effort and cleverness. We’re talking about the realm of … well, what shall we call it? Every official label for it – “abortion,” “choice,” “women’s health,” “reproductive freedom” – is a euphemism designed to obscure a dark reality.

That reality, stated objectively, would be: the premeditated killing of human babies residing inside their mother.

In this strange parallel world, the same killing of a baby that in the real world outrages us and results in prosecution, prison and possibly execution (or lifetime confinement in a high-security psychiatric lockup for the criminally insane) is mysteriously transformed into a “medical procedure” and “constitutional right,” provided for and fiercely defended by a multi-billion-dollar industry. And funded by taxpayers.

These two worlds have collided in the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. And when worlds collide, spectacular and utterly unexpected things sometimes occur.

News organizations get righteous – for a day or 2

As everyone now knows, Gosnell’s clinic, despite its dignified-sounding name, “Women’s Medical Society,” was actually a “house of horrors” more reminiscent of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele than a legitimate medical practice. Here’s how the grand jury summarized Gosnell’s operation:

This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.

The grand jury’s report is horrifying not just for what it reveals about Gosnell’s crimes, but because it documents that a lot of what is now universally condemned about Gosnell’s abortion business was known throughout the Pennsylvania regulatory agencies for years – but no one lifted a finger to stop it.

The sun started to shine on all this when the case went to trial. Eyewitness testimony painted an otherworldly picture of a Nazi-like torture clinic, with one Gosnell employee saying “it would rain fetuses – fetuses and blood all over the place,” and another recalling one baby expelled alive into a toilet and observing the infant “was like swimming” and “trying to get out.”

For a “mainstream press” overwhelmingly skewed toward “abortion rights,” it was stunning (although as it turned out, very short-lived) when top news organizations from the New York Times to the Washington Post suddenly and simultaneously proclaimed their outrage over Gosnell’s abortion crimes and the lack of news coverage.

“Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure,” wrote liberal Democrat and Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers in an impassioned and widely read USA Today column. “Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations? It’s not your fault,” she explained:

Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.

Likewise, the Atlantic, as “mainstream” and elite as media organizations get, headlined its report decrying lack of national press coverage, “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story.”

Its dramatic sub-headline summarized the whole sordid tale: “The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy.”

That’s great. But there’s just one snag in this temporary journalistic outrage (few media outlets followed through by sending a reporter to the trial) over Gosnell’s abortion crimes: Virtually everything Kermit Gosnell was accused of doing occurs routinely in other abortion clinics throughout America.

Everything. Routinely.

“The dead babies,” intoned the Atlantic’s headline. Yes, the dead babies – about 55,000,000 of them so far since Roe v. Wade, including hundreds of thousands of late-term abortions just like those babies “murdered” by Gosnell and his employees.

“The exploited women.” Sorry, but exploiting women – scaring and pressuring them, pretending to care about them so they’ll buy the abortion, withholding life-and-death medical information about both the unborn child’s development and the serious adverse physical and psychological consequences for the mother, and lying to them from start to finish – is the central operating principle of the abortion industry. Without it – if women were counseled with absolute honesty, candor and full disclosure – the number of abortions would plunge overnight. And that’s just the beginning: Abortionists’ routine exploitation of women when the “procedure” goes awry – as it often does – has resulted in death for many and permanent injury, trauma, sterility and soul-scarring heartache for countless more.

“The racism.” The left-leaning press, which somehow is more offended by racism than almost anything else in this life, complains about Gosnell’s “racist” double standard in treating poor minority women worse than he treated rich white women from the suburbs. Major reality check: The abortion industry is one of the most racist enterprises in the Western world. Margaret Sanger, founder of the nation’s No. 1 abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was an unapologetic racist and eugenics proponent who openly advocated for preventing blacks and other “inferior races” from breeding, and famously wrote: “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

To this day, U.S. abortion clinics are set up predominately in areas with a disproportionately high black population, a fact documented repeatedly over the years. For example, when CNS News compared the location of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics with Census population statistics, it found:

In nearly two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the comparisons, the communities with a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic had a higher percentage of blacks than the state did as a whole. In Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts and Ohio, the communities containing all of the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics had much higher black populations than their respective states, while Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming – all of which have low black populations – have none of the organization’s abortion facilities.

“The numerous governmental failures.” Seriously? It’s not just the “failures” of the Pennsylvania regulatory authorities. Government at all levels, but especially at the federal level, for decades has overtly supported, enabled and protected the abortion industry in myriad ways ranging from providing taxpayer support to enacting laws prohibiting prolife demonstrators from congregating anywhere near abortion clinics (legislation widely regarded as violating the First Amendment’s right to assemble).

‘Why is everyone upset over Gosnell?’

“So,” asks Mark Crutcher, founder and president of the Denton, Texas-based pro-life organization Life Dynamics, “why is everyone so upset over Kermit Gosnell?”

Along with other prolife activist groups like Troy Newman’s Operation Rescue and Lila Rose’s Live Action, Life Dynamics has long specialized in exposing criminal abortionists.

“For years,” Crutcher told me recently, “we’ve exposed one criminal abortionist after the other. But abortion proponents always say the offender is just a ‘bad apple’ and an ‘aberration.’ But when we expose hundreds of similar offenders, every one of them is still just a ‘bad apple’ in a barrel of good apples. At what point do we realize they’re all bad apples?”

One chapter of Crutcher’s book, “Lime 5: Exploited by Choice,” details three dozen cases (and references many more) of abortionists who raped or otherwise sexually molested their “patients.” One of the abortion doctors, called a “predator in a white coat” by California’s deputy attorney general, was accused of sexually assaulting more than 160 women.

The crime scene

The collision of these two warring worlds in the Gosnell case – the one world where killing a baby is a capital crime, and the other where killing the same baby is a “woman’s fundamental right” – forces us to confront an all-important question: Where did the killing occur?

Understand, the babies Gosnell “murdered” were no older, larger, more viable, more human or more precious than other late-term babies aborted routinely over the past 40 years. It’s just that Gosnell pulled them out of their mother before he killed them. Had he done exactly the same horrendous things (like “snipping” infants’ spinal cords) while the baby was still inside the mother, many who today express horror would have regarded “the procedure” as just another late-term abortion that mother and doctor determined to be in her best interest.

How is this possible? Aside from legal restrictions imposed (but routinely ignored) by a few states, abortion in America under Roe v. Wade is legal from the moment of conception until the moment of birth if the mother’s life or health is determined to be endangered. And “health” – here’s the giant loophole – is broadly interpreted to include both physical and mental health, which means an abortionist could sign the authorization form claiming the mother risked becoming, let’s say, “depressed” if denied the “procedure” or “therapy.”

To her credit, Powers courageously confronted this now-institutionalized mass delusion: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb – as in a routine late-term abortion – is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

The existence of these two competing worlds, one based on self-evident truth and the other on monumental selfishness and denial, is easy to explain: The deception-based world of abortion is rooted in our devotion to what has become a near-sacred belief – total sexual freedom. We have determined as a modern, secular, post-Christian society that we have the absolute right to engage in sexual relations with whomever we want and whenever and wherever we want, and we repudiate the notion that we have to take responsibility for the natural result of sex – which is children. Having committed so deeply to this proposition, it matters not how barbaric and inhuman abortion is, how many gorgeous children we see with their throats cut, heads cut off, chemically burned alive, brains sucked off, or spinal cord “snipped” with scissors. We must allow for abortion on demand or our sacred right to sexual freedom ceases to exist.

This is why, as an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama opposed the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act,” designed to prevent precisely the types of crimes committed by Kermit Gosnell. If you acknowledge that what’s at stake is a baby, the entire abortion delusion unravels.

The magic line

In the deluded fantasy world of “reproductive freedom,” we say, “Think you may be pregnant? Just take the morning-after pill.” A few weeks later, “Just take RU486,” or “Just have a suction abortion. It’s not a baby.” With each passing week of gestation, however, it becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain the delusion.

Fast forward just a few weeks or months, and now – at the point of natural birth – anyone killing the same baby is, like Gosnell, regarded as a child-murderer and prosecuted as a depraved criminal.

In an attempt to reconcile these two opposing worlds, we endlessly draw magic lines – arbitrary points before which killing babies is a revered constitutional right, and after which it’s a monstrous crime. We create lots of these artificial lines – from “first trimester,” “second trimester” and “third trimester” to “heartbeat,” “20 weeks” and “viability.”

Of course, trumping all these magic lines is an even more arbitrary and irrational measure of infant humanity – namely, whether or not the parents want the child! One child has inestimable value backed by the legal protection of the state solely because the parents want and love it, while another child of identical attributes and age, but whose parents don’t want it, is considered worthless medical waste.

Is this not a form of madness?

In reality, of course, life in the womb is a wondrous continuum of growth from the moment of fertilization to the moment of birth. There is no “line” before which or after which abortion is OK.

As the Gosnell trial has proven, these two warring worlds – the world of love and life versus the world of selfishness and death – inevitably collide somewhere along this continuum. After all, putting aside Gosnell’s unsanitary clinic conditions, “racism” and other unseemly atmospherics, the only major difference between this and other abortionists was that his killing was visible – outside the mother where others could see it.

Do we really think Gosnell’s “snipping” of infant spinal cords is somehow worse than the untold numbers of other late-term abortions in today’s America? Is “snipping” more inhumane than forcibly ripping apart human babies limb from limb, or injecting Digoxin into their heart to make them have a fatal heart attack, or chemically burning them to death with intrauterine saline and other lethal chemicals, or– as in the recently outlawed intact dilation and extraction (“partial birth abortion”) procedure, pulling the living baby feet-first out of the womb and into the birth canal, except for the head, stabbing the base of the baby’s skull with surgical scissors, inserting a tube into the wound, sucking out the baby’s brain with a suction machine (causing the skull to collapse) and delivering a now-dead baby?

How on earth can we possibly have the gall to express horror at Gosnell’s abortions, but not toward the other equally abominable but legally sanctioned killings that have scarred our nation for four decades?

Maybe the Gosnell trial is just a convenient catharsis for “pro-choice” Americans – including the “mainstream media” – an opportunity to safely express their revulsion at this “bad” abortionist’s crimes without fear that it will negatively impact all those “good” abortion practices they imagine are out there?

Today’s Americans often wonder at how earlier generations could have thought slavery was OK. We say, How could they not know blacks were fully human?

Do we think we are even slightly less blind, less deluded, less steeped in denial than our slaveholding ancestors? Remember, we’re talking about 55,000,000 dead American children – more deaths every single day than the total number of people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Abortion has always been a cosmic collision waiting to happen. In the same society where we are rightly outraged at child murder, we embrace child murder.

Meanwhile, millions of prolife Americans, like the biblical Israelites under Moses’ watch, have been marching for 40 years (since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision) in the desert of societal madness, often it seems going in circles, vainly hoping that one day they will finally arrive, through some miracle, at the promised land of restored morality and reverence for life.

Perhaps the Gosnell case is serving a great purpose – of pricking and prodding the sleeping conscience of Americans, of awakening many to the horrors that they, like the clueless German populace during WWII, too long enabled by looking the other way.

By the way, in case you wondered whatever became of Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz concentration-camp doctor known for the agonizing and often-lethal “medical experiments” he performed on Jews, including countless children – here’s the rest of the story:

Like several other Nazi war criminals, Mengele found safe haven in South America, where he evaded Nazi-hunters for the rest of his life. Settling in Argentina, he practiced medicine in Buenos Aires for several years in the 1950s.

His specialty? As the New York Times reported decades later, long-secret Argentine government archives released to the public for the first time in 1992 revealed that Mengele “had a reputation as a specialist in abortions.”

The preceding was excerpted from the May issue of Whistleblower magazine, “THE SHELL OF DENIAL BREAKS: How one high-profile criminal case threatens the entire abortion industry.”

But what few seem to realize about this transformation is that the sheer stress of living in today’s America is driving tens of millions to the point of illness, depression and self-destruction. Consider the following trends:

• Suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death for Americans. Even more disturbing, in the world’s greatest military, more U.S. soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat;

• Fully one-third of the nation’s employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all “millennials” (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder.

• Shocking new research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that one in five of all high-school-aged children in the United States has been diagnosed with ADHD, and likewise a large new study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens – children aged six to 12 – have been medically diagnosed with either ADHD, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder;

• New research concludes that stress renders people susceptible to serious illness, and a growing number of studies now confirm that chronic stress plays a major role in the progression of cancer, the nation’s second-biggest killer. The biggest killer of all, heart disease, which causes one in four deaths in the U.S., is also known to have a huge stress component;

• Incredibly, 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older are currently taking SSRI antidepressants – those highly controversial, mood-altering psychiatric drugs with the FDA’s “suicidality” warning label and alarming correlation with school shooters. Women are especially prone to depression, with a stunning 23 percent of all American women in their 40s and 50s – almost one in four – now taking antidepressants, according to a major study by the CDC;

• Add to that the tens of millions of users of all other types of psychiatric drugs, including (just to pick one) the 6.4 million American children between 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar psycho-stimulants. Throw in the 28 percent of American adults with a drinking problem, that’s more than 60 million, plus the 22 million using illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens and inhalants, and pretty soon a picture emerges of a nation of drug-takers, with hundreds of millions dependent on one toxic substance or another – legal or illegal – to “help” them deal with the stresses and problems of life.

By the way, things are no better over the pond – and may be worse, according to one major study that concluded almost 40 percent of Europeans are plagued by mental illness.

Note: This report is is excerpted from the April 2013 issue of WND’s acclaimed Whistleblower magazine, “STRESSED AND DEPRESSED: The unreported health crisis of the Obama era.”

What on earth is going on? Why isn’t medical science – and for that matter all of our incredible scientific and technological innovations in every area of life – reducing our stress and lightening our load? Why doesn’t the almost-magical availability of the world’s accumulated knowledge, thanks to the Internet, make us more enlightened and happy? Why is it that, instead, more and more of us are so stressed out as to be on a collision course with illness, misery, tragedy and death?

Most important, what can we do to reverse course? Fortunately, amazingly effective help is available – but more on that later.

‘He wants people to snap’

“Life is difficult,” wrote psychiatrist M. Scott Peck at the outset of his international best-seller, “The Road Less Traveled.” Stress, difficulties, disappointments, accidents, disease, misfortune, cruelty, betrayal – they’re unavoidable in this life.

Yet, during eras when society and families are stable, unified and fundamentally decent and moral – as, say, America during the 1950s – the stress level for each person is minimized, or at least not compounded by a perverse society. Conversely, when – as is the case today – we have widespread family breakdown, a depraved culture that mocks traditional moral values, a chaotic economy and disintegrating monetary system and a power-mad government dominated by demagogues and sociopaths, the normal stresses of life are greatly multiplied.

Thus it has come to pass that America, long the hope of the world, has grown increasingly dispirited and angry, which in turn breeds anxiety, fear, confusion, hopelessness and depression.

After all, let’s face the hard facts: We just re-elected perhaps the worst president in history, someone manifestly obsessed with dismantling traditional, free-market capitalist America and transforming it into a socialist nanny state. That in itself is highly stressful – at least for the roughly half the population that still understands socialism always leads to a profound loss of freedom and prosperity.

Then there’s today’s relentless economic pressures: high unemployment (the actual rate is at least double that of the “official” government rate), foreclosures and bankruptcies, a stagnant growth rate, 11,000 new people signing up for food stamps every single day, rising taxes for the entire middle class whose net worth is simultaneously shrinking, ever-higher prices for food, gas and other essentials – and overshadowing it all, a galactic national debt burden, courtesy of a wildly out-of-control government unrestrained by either the Constitution or common sense.

That, too, is very stressful. Top it all off with an administration continually abusing the public for the sake of enlarging and consolidating its political power – for instance, by purposely making the “sequester” cuts hurt Americans, even our active-duty soldiers, as much as possible.

Make no mistake: This sort of stress on Americans is not only intentional on the part of Team Obama – it is strategic. Remember, these people are revolutionaries (that is, engaged in “bringing about a major or fundamental change,” as Merriam-Webster puts it) and utterly committed to replacing one societal structure – America’s constitutional, limited-government, free-enterprise system – with another – a socialist, wealth-redistributionist system run by an all-powerful government.

Such a radical change cannot be accomplished while Americans are calm, happy, content and grateful for their blessings. Citizens must be unhappy and stressed out. Indeed, widespread popular discontent has always been the required fuel for leftist transformation.

Just reading a few pages into Saul Alinsky’s notorious “Rules for Radicals,” one encounters repeated confirmation that the very key to radical “change” is keeping the populace angry, encouraging their grievances, stoking their resentments and making sure they are continually upset. That is the primary psychological dynamic of “community organizing” – and America today is led by community-organizer-in-chief Barack Obama, a long-time master practitioner and instructor in Alinsky’s neo-Marxist agitation methods.

Top radio talker Rush Limbaugh recently picked up on this normally unspoken aspect of Obama’s modus operandi: “I think he wants people to snap,” opined Rush. “I think Obama is challenging everybody’s sanity. Obama [is] literally pushing people to snap, attacking the very sanity of the country.”

Commenting on Obama’s sudden obsession with employing every means possible to deny law-abiding Americans their constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms, Limbaugh exclaimed: “All of this is so in our face. Everything that people hold dear is under assault. Deliberately making people upset! This is not what presidents do.”

It’s not what presidents do – unless they happen to be leftist revolutionaries, in which case “deliberately making people upset” is precisely what they do to accomplish their intended “fundamental transformation.”

We need to realize that Americans could not have twice elected a leader as transcendently unworthy of the presidency as Barack Obama without first having had their minds and hearts captured. Through constant leftist indoctrination, emotional manipulation, ruthless intimidation – and then being rewarded once they have “converted” – perhaps half of the American electorate has been programmed over the course of decades by a subversive school system and equally perverse “news” establishment. Truth be told, both institutions have become full-blown abominations, occupying as they do near-sacred stations of public trust in American civilization.

Of course, at the nuclear core of the myriad assaults on traditional America is the rejection (at least by society’s elites) of God and repudiation of the Judeo-Christian values that underpin Western civilization. This in turn has led to pervasive societal disintegration and a Pandora’s Box of almost unimaginable problems.

Unfortunately, despite our nation’s growing number of seriously troubled people, psychiatry provides little help. It has evolved in our secular, mechanistic culture to see virtually all mental, emotional and spiritual problems as genetic or physiological in origin. No longer is there any such thing as sin. Nothing is moral or spiritual. Good character, introspection, understanding, repentance and forgiveness, so vital to genuine healing, are now irrelevant. Just write a prescription.

Since the current research fad is to conclude (as the National Institute of Mental Health puts it) that “depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain,” psychiatry has come to rely heavily on altering our brain chemistry by (in the case of depression) tricking it into producing higher levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine. But this forces us to ask an obvious question: What are you talking about? Do you really believe that the 23 percent of American women ages 40 through 59 currently on antidepressants ALL have defective or diseased brains?

Or, is it just possible that, rather than tens of millions of inexplicably damaged brains, much of today’s epidemic of “depression” and other “disorders” has a lot more to do with the prevalence of stress, pressure, confusion, cruelty, anger, injustice, temptation and corruption all around us – and our inability to deal with it without being infected and hurt by it?

Finding the way out

There are, of course, proven commonsense steps each individual can take to minimize the effects of stress. Chuck Norris’ personal list of “12 ways to avoid depression” is as good as any available online, and encompasses everything from diet and exercise to meditation and gratitude to God.

But boiling the matter down to core essentials, there are really three time-tested elements required for staying healthy physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. They are:

1) A genuinely healthful diet: Newsflash – eating the wrong foods (or eating too much) causes huge problems. Obesity is not only stressful, but has myriad adverse health effects, including depression. Likewise, eating foods that are heavily processed, high-sugar, adulterated, chemicalized, processed, artificially flavored, colored, sweetened and preserved stresses both body and mind. As WND columnist and orthopedic surgeon Lee Hieb, M.D., puts it, “If my great-grandmother would not have recognized something as food … I don’t eat it.”

Mountains of research and dietary wisdom can be boiled down to this: Eat a variety of fresh, natural foods, especially vegetables and fruits and particularly lots of enzyme-rich raw foods. Fish and chicken are fine, so is red meat in moderation, same with dairy (eggs, milk and butter – not margarine), but buy natural/organic whenever possible.

2) Regular exercise: A good exercise regimen not only helps keep our heart (and the rest of us) healthy, it confers untold benefits, tangible and intangible – plus it is, all by itself, a major de-stressor! Again, WND columnist Chuck Norris, who as a six-time undefeated world karate champion (and reputedly the world’s toughest man) knows a little about exercise, says this: “Exercise is a cure for so many ills; depression is one of many. Exercise is so powerful on our mind that Men’s Health calls it the drug-free depression cure.” Enough said. Just do it.

3) Personal quiet time for prayer and reflection, allowing us the opportunity to seek the Creator’s will while letting go of accumulated anger, frustration and resentment toward others. (In other words, renewing our love for God and our neighbor.) Anger in all its forms has long been shown to be at the very root of many serious problems and illnesses, both physical and mental.

Pause button. One all-important point needs to be made here: It is not the stress itself that harms us, but rather, the way we overreact emotionally to it. And primarily, that reaction is one of resentment, either overt or subtle.

Grasping this often-overlooked fact leads directly to the bottom-line principle for successfully coping with stress, whether it’s related to money, work, health, relationships or trauma: Learn to calmly endure the stress (or as the Bible expresses it, “trials and tribulations”) with genuine patience and faith instead of anger and frustration, and an amazing thing happens: The stress, rather than making us sick and debilitated, actually serves to make us stronger, more at peace and more whole.

Help with this all-important facet of stress management comes, ironically, from the occupation Forbes calls the “most stressful job” in America – namely, the U.S. military.

Despite the tremendous ravages of war stress – 22 suicides per day among U.S. military veterans (on average) and an epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder and other war-trauma conditions streaming out of Iraq and Afghanistan – a quiet revolution in overcoming stress is nevertheless unfolding within the military.

Like the constantly inculcated attribute of “resilience,” the military has also found the practice of “mindfulness” to be extremely helpful in overcoming stress. And the gold standard in this growing field is “Be Still and Know,” a simple and time-tested awareness exercise that been used in all five armed service branches for many years.

Currently relied on by tens of thousands of soldiers and veterans, “Be Still and Know” is the key ingredient included in a compact disc titled “Coping Strategies.” In essence, the 30-minute exercise helps users discover genuine patience, mental clarity and (a word the Founding Fathers used a lot) equanimity. It has been highly endorsed by both the U.S. Army’s chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. Douglas L. Carter, who calls it a “great resource for our Soldiers,” and Col. John Bradley, M.D., long the chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

“Coping Strategies’” distributing organization, the nonprofit Patriot Outreach founded by U.S. Army Col. Antonio P. Monaco, offers the CD (or Internet download) free to all U.S. military personnel, veterans and family members upon request. It is also readily available to civilians as a CD or audio download, at a nominal charge to support the free grants to the military. Patriot Outreach’s program has been publicly praised by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad as well as former GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum.

Having written about “Coping Strategies” and the “Be Still and Know” exercise a couple of years ago, I recently checked in with a member of the Patriot Outreach team, Navy Vietnam veteran Lee Booton, for an update.

Booton, after experiencing a lot of combat, came home from Vietnam with a nice big fat case of post-traumatic stress disorder. (“In the middle of the night I was pounding on my wife, thinking I was still fighting the North Vietnamese,” he told me. “I felt horrible.”) Yet years later, when he was introduced to “Be Still and Know,” Booton knew it provided the answer he and other stressed-out soldiers were desperately seeking. Over the past five years, volunteering with Patriot Outreach, Booton has “met face to face with returning troops” and personally “handed out between 5,000 and 6,000″ of the “Coping Strategies” CDs to vets and encouraged others to download the exercises for free. (There are actually four exercises included in “Coping Strategies” – the main one, “Be Still and Know,” plus three others that focus specifically on “Overcoming Pain,” “Overcoming Fear” and “Overcoming Stress.”)

Does he ever hear back from the soldiers he helps? “Yes!” says Booton enthusiastically. “Sometimes they give me a big hug and say, ‘Boy, does that work,’ or ‘You helped save my life – this made it so much easier for me to deal day-to-day with all of my issues.’”

‘Cure stress’

“Be Still and Know” was developed by Roy Masters, who at 85 is the patriarch of stress experts, having taught this method since 1960 to millions, his fans including everyone from movie star John Wayne to Internet journalist Matt Drudge. He also hosts talk radio’s longest-running counseling show, “Advice Line,” on Talk Radio Network. The author of 18 books, Masters was featured on the Sean Hannity Show to discuss his newest book, “Hypnotic States of Americans.”

Recently, all four of the audio exercises on the “Coping Strategies” CD have been released in a new civilian version on a dedicated MP3 player called, “The Cure Stress Device.”

“In today’s high-tech, wireless world,” said Masters, “a little, self-contained audio device the size of a credit card seemed like the best delivery system possible.”

In a recent message he tweeted, Masters summed up more than 60 years of work in just 140 characters: “Learn to endure cruelty and injustice without resentment and after the stress has passed you will find the fulfillment you have been seeking.”

“Most stress,” explains Masters, “is simply cruelty, in one form or another, directed at us by other stressed-out human beings, who themselves have been victimized by cruelty and stress in their own pasts.

“Imagine, however, that someone said or did something cruel to you, but that you did not react in any way whatsoever – you did not become upset, resentful or even ruffled. You simply observed that this person was saying or doing something cruel, as though you were calmly observing the scene in a movie. You simply would not be stressed by what would appear to others to be a highly stressful encounter. Stress and cruelty affect us as profoundly as they do only because we react to them resentfully.”

The exercise works so well, he adds, because “it enables you to become objective, a little bit separate, detached and disentangled from all your troublesome thoughts, emotions, heartaches, fears and traumatic memories – and that, all by itself, is extremely helpful, and actually healing.”

‘You just be cool and calm’

“Stress” – our modern name for all the trials and tribulations the Good Lord in His wisdom deems necessary for us to grow in character and faith – is not the enemy. It is, however, the difficult but necessary part of life that tests us, proves us, and ultimately makes us better – or kills us.

Fortunately, in the loving sacrifice of his Son, not only did God make provision for the forgiveness of mankind’s sins, but He also gave us another priceless gift – the perfect example of how to deal with stress. Even while hanging on the cross in agony, Jesus did not resent his tormentors and even asked God to forgive them. That’s the essence of what we need to find.

In one sense, our task is simple: Since our past sins have been forgiven, and since the future is in God’s care alone, we just need to focus on discovering how to live right now, in this present moment, with faith, patient endurance and perfect integrity.

Now more than ever, it is essential that Americans get a handle on stress. The pressures of modern life are being greatly multiplied by the ever-present threat of terrorism and a socialist government that thrives on promoting everything dark, perverse and angry (and therefore stress-producing) in human nature. Remember, Winston Churchill called socialism “the gospel of envy.”

After Rush Limbaugh warned his listeners that Obama wants good Americans “to snap,” he added, good-naturedly: “You just be cool and calm. Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll tell you when it’s not.”

Indeed, to prevent Obama and company from completing their “fundamental transformation” of America, we are going to have to learn to stay cool, calm and collected – and not just on the surface, but deep down in our souls.

Know this: If you are upset at Obama and the maniacal left – if you’re angry, full of rage, feeling hopeless, frustrated, wanting to drop out, or wanting to lash out and act violently – believe me, that’s precisely what your adversary wants. Not only that, that’s how he wins, because when you’re upset and angry and overreacting – pardon me for putting it this way – you become stupid. That’s what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Its principles are magnificent (read the 2012 platform), but most of its leaders are intimidated by the ruthless Obama administration and the blatantly biased and abusive “mainstream media.” Thus, in their reactive, intimidated state of mind, they become ineffective, cowardly and contemptible (with a few notable exceptions, for which we are very grateful).

This is true not just of politicians, but all of us: No matter how smart, moral and right-thinking we might otherwise be, when we’re angry and upset we do not possess God’s grace, wisdom, courage and creative genius guiding our steps, and thus we are no match for the evil rising in America.

But if Americans would discover grace under pressure – hey, Ronald Reagan had it, why can’t we? – if enough of us found strength and resolve that were rooted, not in rage, but in righteousness and love of God and our neighbor, then nothing, and I do mean nothing, could stop us. Having regained our lost innocence, we would likewise see our beloved country restored to the noble land it once was.

“My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing,” James 1: 2-4 KJV.

The preceding is excerpted from the April 2013 issue of WND’s acclaimed Whistleblower magazine, “STRESSED AND DEPRESSED: The unreported health crisis of the Obama era.”

Personally, I honor the police the same way I honor our soldiers in the military, because their jobs are similar – both protect us from those who would commit evil acts and do us great harm.

But police today are being put in an almost impossible situation, as we’ll soon see.

As a child, I had an idealized and naïve idea of police work, thanks to “The Andy Griffith Show.” The good-hearted sheriff of the fictional town of Mayberry seemed to be able to solve all the locals’ problems with wisdom and kindly strength – and the “help” of his inept and goofy deputy, Barney Fife.

Around the same time, artist Norman Rockwell rendered his famous painting, “The Runaway,” depicting a state trooper seated at a lunch counter talking with a little boy at whose feet lies a knapsack – clear evidence he is intent on running away from home.

When the real-life policeman who posed for Rockwell’s painting – Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Richard J. Clemens Jr. – passed away a few months ago, the force’s superintendent, Col. Marian J. McGovern, reflected on the iconic image: “The painting of a trooper bending over in counsel to a young boy intent on leaving home captures – much more than any of the images of shootouts and car chases favored by popular culture – the highest ideal of police work: helping someone in need at a vulnerable moment.”

“Helping someone in need.” Yes, that’s what it’s supposed to be all about, which may be why, during the tumultuous 1960s, when both stoned-out hippies and angry leftists publicly reviled the police and called them “pigs,” my favorite bumper sticker was: “IF YOU THINK COPS ARE PIGS, NEXT TIME YOU’RE IN TROUBLE, CALL A HIPPIE.”

When the 1991 Rodney King scandal involving the Los Angeles Police Department led to a media feeding frenzy over supposedly widespread “police brutality” in America, I sided with the cops. In fact, my journalistic defense of law enforcement at the time, which explored the multitude of stresses, sacrifices and challenges police work entails, was widely published in newspapers, law enforcement publications and criminology textbooks.

‘Unraveling’

Alas, over the past few decades, powerful forces have transformed America – and Americans. Many vital institutions have been progressively changed – in fact, just about all of them: The elite news media are more wretched than ever. Hollywood glorifies extreme violence and sexual debauchery. Big labor unions provide funding and zombie ground troops for radical causes and candidates. Our educational system is off-the-charts secular-left, zealously indoctrinating the next generation about how unfair, racist and oppressive America is.

And while we’ve pretty much come to expect such treachery when it comes to academia and the news and entertainment media, unfortunately even our more reality-based institutions, those strongly rooted in traditional values, have not been unscathed. Take the military, for instance: Political correctness, open homosexuality, women in front-line combat, perverse rules of engagement – these and many other radical and reckless changes have been imposed on our armed forces by leaders who care more about utopian social engineering than defeating enemies, winning wars and protecting our troops.

Likewise, law enforcement – particularly in the disintegrating urban environment – is under enormous pressures to abandon the traditional “serve-protect-defend” model of yesteryear in favor of a more aggressive and authoritarian ethos. The post-9/11 era wherein everyone is regarded as a potential terrorist is one factor. Another is the militarization of local and state police with hard-core war-fighting equipment (including surveillance drones and machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carriers), courtesy of a federal government program. When you’ve got such equipment, there’s a tendency to want to use it.

Then there’s the power-mad Obama administration setting the law enforcement agenda from the top – which in its second term, has now expanded to include a major campaign to disarm law-abiding citizens while dramatically increasing the firepower of those who work for the government. Not just Homeland Security, mind you, but even non-police agencies like the Department of Education, National Park Service, Small Business Administration and Fish and Wildlife have their own police forces and SWAT teams.

With the Department of Homeland Security now purchasing billions of rounds of small-arms ammunition, including lots of hollow-point ammo, many Americans are asking: Who exactly is the enemy our government is preparing to fight on our own soil? (The government claims all that ammo is for mandatory quarterly training exercises for government agents, but who uses hollow-point on the practice range?)

Top radio talker Mark Levin provided some context for the huge quantities of recent government ammo acquisitions: “Experts estimate that at the peak of the Iraq war, American troops were firing around 5.5 million rounds per month,” he said. “At that rate, the [Department of Homeland Security] is armed now for a 24-year Iraq war. A 24-year Iraq war!”

So, what crisis is DHS anticipating? “I’m going to tell you what I think is going on. I don’t think domestic insurrection. Law enforcement and national security agencies, they play out multiple scenarios. … I’ll tell you what I think they’re simulating: the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society and the potential for widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, because that’s what happens when an economy collapses.

“I suspect that just in case our fiscal situation, our monetary situation, collapses, and following it the civil society collapses, that is the rule of law, they want to be prepared,” Levin said. “I know why the government’s arming up: It’s not because there’s going to be an insurrection; it’s because our society is unraveling.”

And then there’s terrorism

Meanwhile, the threat of terrorism hovers over law enforcement at every level and feeds the growing surveillance beast. The federal Transportation Security Administration has made quite a name for itself with nude X-ray imaging and invasive pat-downs of ailing grandmothers and crying 3-year-old handicapped children in wheelchairs.

Unfortunately, while almost all of the thousands of terrorist acts perpetrated worldwide in the years since 9/11 have been committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, the Obama administration appears inexplicably obsessed with “potential terrorists” among the president’s critics. The Department of Homeland Security continually defames conservative individuals and groups, as it did in its April 7, 2009, report titled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” That law enforcement advisory characterizes as potential “right-wing extremists” – a term it uses at least 35 times in the 9-page document – constitutionalists, patriots and military veterans, as well as “groups or individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration” – thus conflating normal, traditionally minded Americans with neo-Nazis, skinheads, Klansmen and other potentially violent groups.

Just as the federal government increasingly oversteps its constitutional bounds, America’s police – perhaps following Washington, D.C.’s example – sometimes trample citizens’ rights. If you doubt that police in today’s America – in at least in certain areas and under certain extraordinary conditions – are fully capable of going door to door and forcibly confiscating legally owned firearms, consider what happened in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the New Orleans Police Department went from house to house taking away the guns of law-abiding citizens.

“Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,” announced New Orleans Police Superintendent P. Edwin Compass III in advance of a planned, forced evacuation. The city’s Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley told ABC News: “No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons.”

Really? “We are going to take all the weapons”? In America?

Incredibly, online videos are readily accessible documenting uniformed NOPD officers grabbing handguns out of the hands of terrified little old ladies, treating them like criminals, in some cases knocking them to the ground and injuring them.

And that was during the administration of President George W. Bush, who unlike Obama had no designs on widespread gun bans.

This, then, is the dilemma of living in a gradually escalating police state. The police themselves are not the problem, but they are being shaped by powerful political, cultural, legal and financial forces, and sometimes the results are downright ugly.

Good cop, bad cop

There is no shortage of horror stories of police excesses, especially in an era when security increasingly trumps liberty. As civil rights attorney John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute wrote in January:

If you want a recipe for disaster, take police officers hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge, throw in a few court rulings suggesting that security takes precedence over individual rights, set it against a backdrop of endless wars and militarized law enforcement, and then add to the mix a populace distracted by entertainment, out of touch with the workings of their government, and more inclined to let a few sorry souls suffer injustice than to challenge the status quo.

The resulting concoction, I can promise you, will be a messy, noxious stew unfit for consumption, miserable to digest and with after-effects that will leave you reeling and clutching your stomach in dismay. Such is the nature of life in the emerging police state that is America today, where roadside police stops have devolved into government-sanctioned exercises in humiliation and degradation with a complete disregard for privacy and human dignity.

Consider, for example, what happened to 38-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, who were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. First, the trooper berated the women for littering on the highway. Then, insisting that he smelled marijuana, he proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No marijuana was found.

Leila Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic during a routine traffic stop, while her two children – ages 1 and 4 – waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino’s body. No contraband or anything illegal was found.

Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers have been charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers is accused of conducting searches of men’s anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums. Half-way across the country, the city of Oakland, California, has agreed to pay $4.6 million to 39 men who had their pants pulled down by police on city streets between 2002 and 2009.

I’ll spare you any more gory details. Again, to be fair, these are horror stories and not the norm. Most police do an admirable job at a difficult, dangerous, thankless task.

Moreover, for every cop that fails to live up to professional standards, there are those who go way beyond the call of duty. We don’t hear about them very often; as a rule, things go public when they go wrong, not when they go right. One rare exception – when someone with a cell-phone camera happened to capture the event – was the encounter late last November between Larry DePrimo, a young NYPD cop patrolling Times Square, and a freezing, elderly homeless man with neither shoes nor socks. After talking to the man and ascertaining his shoe size, DePrimo went into a nearby shoe store and, with his own money, bought the stranger a nice expensive pair of boots and socks. When a passerby with a smartphone happened to photograph the scene of a young policeman kneeling down to help a homeless man put on the new boots he had just bought him, the image went viral and made every American’s Christmas a little brighter, and life in America a little more hopeful.

“I was just doing my job,” DePrimo later explained.

Larry DePrimo is not the only cop “doing his job” in this way. I have friends who are policemen and for whom I have nothing but appreciation and respect. I even cut the much-maligned TSA a little slack: I have been patted down dozens of times in U.S. airports since the most recent security protocols were introduced, and I personally have yet to encounter a single TSA agent who was not courteous and utterly professional.

Preserving the ‘thin blue line’

Crises – real or manufactured – do not void the Constitution. Even in real emergencies, as in post-Katrina New Orleans, we cannot descend into the official anarchy that ruled that city, with police blatantly violating the Constitution by confiscating the legal guns of law-abiding citizens. One sign of a powerful counterforce to this trend is the enormous number of county sheriffs – literally hundreds of them – who have recently stood up and defied the federal government over its threats of new infringements on the Second Amendment, even pledging their lives to defend the constitutional rights of the residents of their county, come hell or high water.

Likewise, partnership initiatives between law enforcement and citizens are more important than ever, from “Neighborhood Watch” programs to more ambitious projects like the one my friend radio talker Bob Just created – roving citizen patrols that drive through the community to provide extra “eyes and ears” for law enforcement, communicating problems to the police by CB or cell phone. Called Concerned Fathers Against Crime, the program has gained national notoriety for its successes.

There is one final factor, which may be the most consequential and intractable of all.

If you recall, on “The Andy Griffith Show,” Sheriff Andy Taylor didn’t carry a gun. (In a running gag, Deputy Fife had one bullet, which generally stayed in his shirt pocket – “in case of an emergency,” Andy always explained.) But then, the fictional Mayberry had virtually no crime. Contrast that with today’s America.

Detroit resembles a decimated war zone. Chicago experiences more murders of Americans than does Afghanistan. Los Angeles has over 100,000 gang members. Violent “flash mobs” appear “out of nowhere,” create havoc and destruction, and then disappear. There’s no question that today’s police – especially in America’s increasingly dangerous metropolitan areas, most of which are in stunning decline – face extraordinary challenges.

The more out-of-control and lost Americans become as a people, the more they will call into existence a police state. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, expressed this immutable law perfectly: “If men are not governed by God, they will be ruled by tyrants.” If police in our cities look like occupying armies sometimes, look at what they’re up against.

Police are sometimes torn between traditional community standards – preserving, protecting and defending their neighbors and communities – and being encouraged to violate Americans constitutional rights by an increasingly unreasonable and parasitical federal government. Today’s national leaders want, above all, power over the nation’s citizens, and they will use every lever of power they can get their hands on to accomplish that – including the police, which are, after all, government employees.

Let’s face reality: Our society is degrading and disintegrating economically, politically, socially, morally and spiritually. (Just about the only thing improving is technology, which creates the illusion of overall progress.) And as America degrades, we continue to expect our police to clean up our messes, to protect us and to apprehend the “bad guys” – from graffiti-scrawling gang wannabes and shoplifters, to robbers and rapists, to deranged, mass-murdering school-shooters and demon-possessed Islamic terrorists. For all their faults, the police continue to stand in the breech between civilization and chaos. So let’s be grateful for that “thin blue line.”

At the same time, let’s not act too surprised to learn that the police themselves are not immune to the ongoing degradation and disintegration of society, nor impervious to the growing pressures on them from the federal government, and thus inevitably become unwitting cogs in the “fundamental transformation of America.”

Reprinted from the March 2013 issue of Whistleblower magazine, “HOW AMERICA IS BECOMING A POLICE STATE.”

Last August, Pastor Kenneth Miller, of Stuarts Draft, Va., was convicted in a Vermont court on a charge of aiding in international parental kidnapping. He admitted that he helped Lisa Miller (no relation to the pastor) and her daughter, Isabella, leave the U.S. in 2009 at Lisa’s urging.

It is the latest twist in one of the most talked-about and consequential child custody cases of the modern era.

After childhood abuse led Lisa Miller into a dysfunctional life of addictions and homosexuality, she experienced a change of heart, converted to Christianity and left the homosexual lifestyle, in which she had lived as “spouse” to another lesbian woman, Janet Jenkins. During their same-sex “civil union,” Miller had given birth to a daughter, Isabella, conceived through artificial insemination.

As a new Christian, Lisa Miller’s all-consuming focus in life was to be a good mother to Isabella. However, after a Vermont judge demanded that Lisa allow her former lesbian partner, Janet Jenkins, to have unsupervised visits with little Isabella, Lisa’s nightmare – which continues to this day – got its start.

According to the testimony of experts and eyewitnesses, the court-ordered visits were severely traumatizing the child, and Isabella’s court-appointed advocate said Jenkins was “turn[ing] her world upside down.” A clinical therapist testified Isabella appeared “traumatized” by her visits with Jenkins, and that “unsupervised visits … could cause permanent damage to normal development.” A social worker testified the little girl “suffers from sleep disturbance and nightmares, having difficulty sleeping through the night,” adding that “Isabella also talks about death, and has expressed fear that if her mother Lisa dies she will be at risk. Without prompting, Isabella has said she is afraid that Janet Jenkins may take her away from Lisa.”

Lisa Miller and her daughter, Isabella (photo courtesy Barbara Curtis)

Worse, Lisa Miller told the court her child had referred to being forced to bathe naked with Jenkins, had begun to touch herself sexually and appeared disturbed and unhappy following visits, according a report by LifeSiteNews, which links to four court affidavits by social workers, therapists and others.

For example, clinical therapist Sylvia Haydash in her affidavit testified as to Isabella’s “extremely regressive behaviors” after visiting with Jenkins, noting that:

… Isabella appears to have been traumatized by the limited visitation thus far [with Jenkins], a serious consequence, taking Isabella in a negative direction as compared to Isabella’s condition before the recent visitations where she was a child that was well-adjusted, flourishing, above-the-curve developmentally, verbally gifted, and readily able to separate from Lisa and meet with other people.

And Lisa Miller told the LifeSiteNews interviewer: “Last year, Isabella put a comb up to her neck and said she wanted to kill herself after one of the visits. She took a comb and pressed it into her neck and said, ‘I want to kill myself.’ … It was immediately after a visit. Other people have seen huge changes. She also started openly masturbating which is not something that my child has done.”

Regarding Isabella, Miller added:

She is six now but this started when she was five – after visits. The very first time that Janet ever saw Isabella after the two and a half years, her very first overnight visit – the court ordered it and I allowed it because it was in Virginia and she was supposed to have been supervised by her parents, Isabella came home and said, “Mommy, will you please tell Janet that I don’t have to take a bath anymore at her house.”

I asked her what happened. She said, “Janet took a bath with me.” I asked her if she [Janet] had a bathing suit on. “No, Mommy.” She had no clothes on and it totally scared Isabella. She had never seen this woman except once in two and a half years and she takes a bath with her.

Miller refused to allow any more visits. As her attorney, Liberty Counsel chairman Matthew Staver told WND at the time, regarding Isabella’s visitations with Jenkins: “She began having nightmares, bed-wetting, fears of leaving Lisa and even tried to physically harm herself after just a couple of visitations. After having seen that, Lisa just simply said, ‘I cannot put my child in that situation anymore.’”

In response, in 2009 a Vermont judge decided Lisa Miller must give up her legal and biological daughter to her former lesbian partner, who had no biological or adoptive connection to the child.

Enter Pastor Kenneth Miller. To protect her daughter, Lisa Miller begged her Amish-Mennonite pastor to help mother and daughter leave the country – and he did.

Last August, a federal jury in Vermont convicted Pastor Miller of helping Lisa flee the country with Isabella, rather than hand her daughter over to her one-time homosexual partner.

The sympathetic pastor knew he was facing as much as three years behind bars, but said he was “willing to accept the consequences” of his actions.

Jenkins meanwhile filed a RICO lawsuit not just against this same pastor, but against Liberty University Law School, Thomas Road Baptist Church and others she alleges helped Lisa Miller “kidnap” her own daughter.

Liberty Counsel, a legal team affiliated with Liberty University and that advocates for Christian and religious rights, represented Lisa Miller until she vanished in 2009.

As WND reported, Jenkins is suing Liberty because a student worker allegedly sought donations to help Miller. Jenkins makes similar claims about a member of Thomas Road Baptist Church.

“Outrageously frivolous” is how Staver, who also serves as dean of the university’s law school, characterized Jenkins’ lawsuit.

“I don’t know how a church with a 5,000-seat sanctuary can be responsible for the act of one person,” Staver said, calling Jenkins’ lawsuit a “press release filed in federal court.”

According to Jenkins’ RICO lawsuit, “Lisa Miller’s attorneys Mathew Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen also routinely instructed their Law School students that the correct course of action for a person in Lisa Miller’s situation would be to engage in ‘civil disobedience’ and defy court orders.” (Lindevaldsen, also a law prof at Liberty, has published a book about Miller, titled “Only One Mommy: A Woman’s Battle for Her Life, Her Daughter, and Her Freedom: The Lisa Miller Story.”)

In response, Staver said that when Lisa Miller vanished in 2009, she did so without confiding in her legal team: “She never gave anyone indication of her plans. She was counseled to obey the court orders.”

Since then, Miller reportedly first traveled to Canada, then Nicaragua, and may still be living there today with her now-10-year-old daughter.

In a four-page letter to the federal court judge who sentenced him, Pastor Kenneth Miller wrote: “If it is true that my actions flow out of my faith in Jesus, and from my deeply held moral beliefs, and I sincerely think they do, then it must follow that whatever judgment is being brought against me by the United States of America, is judgment on my faith and conscience and deeply held moral beliefs. … I was faced with a woman in distress who needed help to protect her daughter from what seemed to be an inhumane court decree.”

Miller wrote the letter from the jail where he had been incarcerated for refusing to tell a grand jury who else might have helped Lisa Miller leave the country with her daughter. Now that he has been sentenced to 27 months, Pastor Miller is free on appeal.

“You could kill a whole lot of people with that gun.”

“Why not shoot her right now? That would shut her up!”

Those are the sorts of dark thoughts and impulses, too horrible to dwell upon or even acknowledge, that occur to many people at the mere sight of a firearm or a naked blade.

When they see the weapon, they sense the presence of evil – so naturally they assume the gun is its source, when actually the gun’s close proximity caused their own buried, angry, violent tendencies to surface for a moment.

Thus, many people who “dislike” or “are uncomfortable around” guns are actually afraid of what they might do if they had a loaded firearm in their hand. And I’m not talking about criminal types here. I’m talking about “nice” people – nice on the outside, and lots of buried and perhaps unrecognized rage inside. Again, the presence of the gun simply causes his or her own dark, angry propensities to “stir a little” deep down.

But the reality of all this is too heavy and “negative” for many of us to face, so we instantly and unconsciously project our own buried violence onto the gun, as though an inanimate hunk of metal – a tool – could somehow be intrinsically evil.

Obviously, a loaded gun has great potential for destruction and havoc – for evil. At the mere squeeze of a trigger there can be murder, suicide, terrorism. Even without being fired, the gun represents the magic ticket to armed robbery, forcible rape and every other form of coercion. For a person with lots of anger, albeit buried, a gun represents the shortest distance between two points – between the suppressed violent nature within him or her and the maximum expression of that nature. Therefore, the mere sight of a gun excites that dark part of us, causing it to beckon wordlessly, “Use me!”

Let’s examine this admittedly spooky phenomenon a little more closely.

Have you ever stood close to the edge of a cliff, or out on a balcony of a tall building? Did you notice that some “force” almost seemed to want to pull you over the edge? Most of us have experienced something like this – a momentary loss of balance, an unexplainable fear, some mysterious pull toward the edge. We have a moment of disorientation and fear, then we pull back to safety.

In this life, the malevolent intelligence we call “evil” is constantly scanning each of us for opportunities to tempt or even destroy us. The Bible has a famous verse: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). In critical moments of the sort I’m describing, evil seizes the opportunity to give us a mental “shove.” Unfortunately, for some people that “shove” is strong enough – especially after a lifetime of giving in to anger, doubt and despair – to pull them over the edge.

We’ll never know how many “suicides,” in which people tumbled off a cliff or a balcony, occurred this way – not because of a premeditated suicide plan, but because they were vulnerable to the opportunistic impulse of evil.

Similarly, how many head-on auto accidents occur because someone inexplicably crosses the center line to crash at high speed into an oncoming car, having succumbed to a wordless, instantaneous mental suggestion from hell? All in a timeless fraction of a second the message impresses itself on your mind: “Crash your car into that one coming your way. Life sucks. Go out with a major bang! Everyone will be shocked! You have the power! Just do it! Do it now!”

Does this scare you? If so – if this description resonates with you even a little bit – it’s only because you have the same problem to some degree. It’s OK; we’re all in the same boat, all subject in some measure to the “dark side of the force.” It’s called being “born in sin.” But some people honestly face what’s wrong with them and quietly call out to God for help, and His help comes. Others live in denial – until tragedy and death end it all.

In any event, this same phenomenon is at work with firearms, because of the potential they provide for immediate and ultimate destruction. Guns literally bring to the surface of the mind the suppressed potential for violence that exists inside every angry person. For that reason, they make a perfect scapegoat for people not ready to face their own darkness.

The preceding was adapted from “How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America” by David Kupelian.

In one respect, it doesn’t matter what BSA’s board members decide when they meet next week – to change their long-standing policy excluding avowed homosexuals, or not to change their policy. Either way, the Boy Scouts of America will not emerge unscathed. It will be bloodied. It will be hurt. The only question is: When the dust settles, which side will the 100-year-old organization be on?

Consider the two alternatives.

If those currently entrusted to lead the world’s greatest youth organization abandon their decades-old policy – the one that just six months ago they strongly and publicly proclaimed was “absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts” – and invite into the organization open homosexuals, not just as Scouts but as adult leaders and role models, all hell will break loose. Large numbers of Scouts, Scout families and potential Scouts will, with great disappointment and sadness, walk away from the Boy Scouts forever.

Moreover, most Boy Scout units – around 70 percent – are sponsored by churches and faith-based organization like the Southern Baptist Convention. Fred Luter, the SBC’s current president, put it this way to the Baptist Press:

“If that is what the leadership is doing, then I think it will be a sad day in the life of the Boy Scouts of America. … To now see this organization that I thought stood on biblical principles about to give in to the politically correct thing is very disappointing.”

The bottom line, says Luter, whose Baptist organization represents 16 million members and more than 45,000 churches, is that the Boy Scouts will “lose a whole lot of our support.” In fact, he says, Southern Baptist churches will have no choice but to cease supporting the Boy Scouts of America.

“A lot of them will just pull out,” he said starkly. “This is just something we don’t believe in. It’s unfortunate the Boy Scouts are making this decision.”

Interestingly, a “very disappointed” Frank S. Page, president of the SBC’s Executive Committee, told the paper what happened when he met with top Boy Scout execs recently: “[Boy Scouts Chief Scout Executive] Wayne Brock visited with me last week, signaling the possibility they would consider this proposal at their February board meeting. He specifically asked the Southern Baptist Convention not to oppose this move. Of course, I refused to make this concession.”

So, the Scouts clearly face an exodus of traditionally minded Americans who don’t want homosexuals taking their children camping (not to mention dozens of other vexing scenarios that will occur upon the abandonment of the Scouts’ policy).

But now consider what happens if the Boy Scouts maintain their homosexual-exclusion policy.

They will lose the support of corporate sponsors who have been intimidated and shaken down by gay activists. Many people in today’s morally confused America will be offended and turned off. The powerful and seemingly ubiquitous gay rights establishment will go into overdrive vilifying the Scouts as bigots and homophobes, as they have long done. And the mainstream media, in which (in case you didn’t know) gays are very heavily represented, will brutalize the Boy Scouts.

There’s no way out. The battle is now engaged. Next week at their board meeting, the Scout brass will either maintain their policy or abandon it.

Right now, multitudes of current and former Scouts, adult Scouters and their families and friends are contacting the Boy Scout executives and board members and telling them, in so many words, to man up. For over 100 years, BSA has taught boys how to be men. Now, those in top executive roles are being told this is their chance to exemplify genuine manhood. Not by demonstrating knot-tying or rappelling or first aid. But by being real men – who do the right thing on the battlefield of life, even if it costs them dearly.

Because the truth is, it is going to hurt – a lot – either way. But then, this is the fate of all noble people, organizations and causes in today’s America. We are at war, friends. Not a shooting war, but one of conflicting worldviews, which ultimately boils down to the battle between fidelity to God’s laws versus the prideful rebellion against His laws.

You Scout executives: When the battle is over and your wounds are being tended to, will you be able to hold your heads up high? Will you stand up for the oath tens of millions of Scouts have sworn over the last 100 years, to be “physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight”? Or will you side with activists who detest you, who couldn’t care less about whether the organization you head continues to exist or not, who have been suing you for years, and for whom conquering the Boy Scouts is just another notch in their belt?

Since you will lose support, you will lose funding and you will lose the love of many no matter what you do – why not do the right thing?

Remember, in the film “Braveheart,” the hero, Scottish patriot-warrior William Wallace didn’t want war. He wanted to get married, have a family, raise some crops, enjoy life and mind his own business. But evil has a way of not wanting to let us do that, and sometimes we get drawn into battle whether we want it or not.

Yet, it is in this very conflict that we are tested and proven. Without the battle, no courage or character are developed, no true manhood attained, no victory achieved. William Wallace fought the good fight, the fight he didn’t choose, but which chose him.

The Scouts didn’t choose this fight, but it is upon them. Look up, you executives and board members, you keepers of a century-old sacred trust. For you personally, and for the Boy Scouts of America, this could be your finest hour.

Here’s how to reach the Boy Scouts of America’s Board of Directors.

Read Kupelian’s previous column, “Why are Boy Scouts contemplating suicide?”

As NBC News first reported yesterday, BSA is talking about reversing, as early as next week, its decades-old policy of excluding homosexuals as adult leaders and scouts.

Considering that the United States Supreme Court has already sided with the Boy Scouts on this issue, and that a recent Gallup Poll shows most Americans side with the Scouts’ current policy, and that just six months ago BSA national spokesman Deron Smith affirmed the organization’s moral policy excluding homosexuals “is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts,” this current development illustrates – if nothing else – the brutal effectiveness of the relentless intimidation and economic pressure brought to bear on the Boy Scouts by gay rights activists and cultural extremists.

Indeed, yesterday Smith did a complete 180 in disclosing in a press statement that BSA is now discussing ending the organization’s decades-long moral standard and, instead, deferring to the local chartering organizations to decide what their own membership standards will be – “consistent with each organization’s mission, principles, or religious beliefs.”

“The policy change under discussion,” Smith explained, “would allow the religious, civic, or educational organizations that oversee and deliver scouting to determine how to address this issue.” In other words, the BSA would abandon its prohibition on homosexuals and every local Boy Scout troop or Cub Scout pack could do whatever it wanted.

As one might expect, traditionally minded Americans are alarmed. They warn this change would spell the end of the Boy Scouts as they have always known it – a quintessentially American, moral and God-based private organization, as exemplified in the Scout Oath “to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pinpointed the main reason for the BSA’s change of thinking – namely, the attacks on their funding sources by activist homosexuals. Said Perkins:

“The Boy Scouts of America board would be making a serious mistake to bow to the strong-arm tactics of LGBT activists and open the organization to homosexuality. What has changed in terms of the Boy Scouts’ concern for the well-being of the boys under their care? Or is this not about the well-being of the Scouts, but the funding for the organization?

“The Boy Scouts has for decades been a force for moral integrity and leadership in the United States. Sadly, their principled stances have marked them as a target for harassment by homosexual activists and corporations such as UPS which are working to pressure the Boy Scouts into abandoning their historic values.”

However, there is a second, largely unmentioned and potentially even more devastating reason that such a move on the part of the Boy Scouts’ national leadership would spell serious trouble for the organization, one that goes beyond the sad fact that many good people would walk away from the BSA for abandoning its principles.

Although under-reported in the press, the BSA, like the Catholic Church, has had a long struggle with predatory scout leaders embedding themselves in scout units and using the authority, familiarity and good will that goes with that position to sexually exploit boys and young men.

Two decades ago, journalist Patrick Boyle was the lead author of a comprehensive five-part Washington Times series on the large number of cases of predatory scout leaders. The series served as the basis for Boyle’s book, “Scout’s Honor: Sexual Abuse in America’s Most Trusted Institution.” Boyle wrote:

On an average of more than once a week for the past two decades, a Cub Scout, Boy Scout or Explorer has reported being sexually abused by a Scout leader.
An investigation by The Washington Times shows that at least 1,151 Scouts have reported being abused by their leaders over the past 19 years, making sex abuse more common in Scouting than accidental deaths and serious injuries combined.

In that time, at least 416 men have been arrested or banned from Scouting for molesting the boys in their care – and experts say the real number of abusers and victims is probably several times higher.

Those are among the findings of an investigation that turned up abuse by Scout leaders in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

“I was naive to think the Boy Scouts was such a safe place,” said the mother of a Maryland boy abused by his Scoutmaster. “I thought the Boy Scouts was a sanctuary.”

In fact, the examination of sex abuse in Scouting reveals a long-standing paradox for the nation’s most revered youth group: For 80 years the Boy Scouts of America have given boys some of the best experiences of their lives, but for 80 years some men have used the Boy Scouts of America to have sexual relations with those boys.

“That’s been an issue since the Boy Scouts began,” said James Tarr, the nation’s chief Scout executive from 1979 through 1984.

In his reporting, Boyle does not implicate homosexuals as such, but refers to all of the predatory adult scouters as pedophiles or molesters.

Hold that thought while we fast-forward to today:

In 2010, the London Guardian newspaper reported that “America’s Scouting movement is fighting to keep secret thousands of ‘perversion files’ on suspected child molesters after it was ordered to pay record damages over the sexual abuse of a former Scout.” Describing a “growing scandal threatening to rival the crisis hitting the Roman Catholic church,” the UK paper reported that BSA “has been accused of covering up decades of child abuse” to protect the organization’s reputation.

It reported that an Oregon jury heard the case of former scout Kerry Lewis, “who was repeatedly assaulted by a former assistant scoutmaster, Timur Dykes, in the 1980s.” Dykes, the paper reported, “had admitted to a superior in the Scouts that he had abused boys, but was allowed to remain in the organization and is alleged to have sexually assaulted several other children who are also taking legal action.”

Get the picture? Just as in some Catholic dioceses, someone in authority with the Boy Scouts made the unwise and unprincipled decision to protect the organization rather than rat out the perpetrator and protect children.

There’s more:

The judge in the case overruled the Scouts’ attempts to keep the jury from seeing about 1,200 files kept by the organization on suspected pedophiles. Kelly Clark, Lewis’s lawyer, told the jury that while the files were often used to remove child abusers from the Scouting movement, many were allowed to remain in the organization. He said that the Scouts rarely alerted the police and when they did, the movement asked the authorities to avoid publicity. Clark told the jury that the Scouting leadership had been “reckless and outrageous” in failing to warn parents and boys about the problem.

The jury agreed and awarded Lewis $18.5 million, the largest-ever award to a single plaintiff in a U.S. child-abuse case, according to the Telegraph.

The files shown to the jury “were not made public and are just a small part of what is believed to be a cache of as many as 6,000 held at the Scouts’ headquarters in Texas, dating back to the 1920s,” the report added.

“We said they had 75 years of secret files about pedophiles, and that’s the way the evidence came in. I think that fact in itself was just staggering to the jury,” said Clark, Lewis’s lawyer. “They had a regular practice of placing guys on probation and then they would allow them to continue to be active in Scouting, not unlike some of what you saw in the Catholic church.”

Now the big question in all this, of course, is the following: With these sex-abuse cases within the Boy Scouting organization, just as those within the Catholic Church, are we dealing with actual “pedophiles” or with predatory homosexuals?

Virtually all defenders of the gay agenda will angrily denounce the mere suggestion that homosexuals could be victimizers here, or that the two groups could even overlap.

Yet while the London Telegraph and many others note the striking similarity between “pedophiles” in the Boy Scouts and “pedophile priests” in the Catholic Church, there is a disturbing if little-known reality to all this:

Contrary to the media myth that the Catholic Church’s problems are primarily with “pedophile priests” – terminology which safely absolves homosexuals from suspicion – the major portion of the church’s sexual-abuse problem has been the infiltration of its seminaries by homosexuals. In fact, widespread cases of predatory homosexual priests created a full-blown crisis for the church.

“The real problem the Catholic Church faces,” explains Father Donald B. Cozzens, author of “The Changing Face of the Priesthood,” is the “disproportionate number of gay men that populate our seminaries.”

Or as former California Congressman Bob Dornan put it, “the Catholic Church in this country has been penetrated by an aggressive homosexual network.”

And National Review senior writer Rod Dreher put it even more bluntly: “This is chiefly a scandal about unchaste or criminal homosexuals in the Catholic priesthood. … The overwhelming majority of priests who have molested minors are not pedophiles – that is … among the rare adults sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. They are, rather, “ephebophiles” – adults who are sexually attracted to post-pubescent youths, generally aged 12 to 17. And their victims have been almost exclusively boys.”

“Pedophilia” is, by definition, sexual contact with a pre-pubescent child. Most of the boys molested by “pedophile priests” have been pubescent teens. Likewise, in the scout world, although we can comfortably indulge the fantasy that there is a wide gulf between the land of homosexuals and the land of same-sex pedophiles, this does not comport with the known facts. (If you want, you can read Scientific American’s explanation here – but bottom line, many of these sex-abuse cases, whether in Scouts or in church, do not involve actual pedophiles.)

The Washington Times – which for its in-depth investigation reviewed “internal Scout records and tens of thousands of pages of court records from around the country, including confessions of molesters and testimony from children,” and also interviewed “molesters, families of victims, Scout leaders, sex abuse experts and lawyers” and analyzed the cases on a computer database – discovered the following:

Each year from 1971 through 1989, an average of at least 21 male Scout leaders and camp workers were banned from Scouting or arrested for sexual misconduct with Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Explorers. The acts ranged from proposing sex acts and fondling boys in their sleep to performing oral sex and intercourse with the children.

Pause-button, please. Cub Scouting is for boys 7 to 10, the Boy Scouts is open to boys 11 to 18, and Explorers (which was replaced in 1998 by Venturing) is for 14-to-20-year-olds. The average age of puberty for males in the U.S. is 13.
Although it’s politically incorrect in the extreme, it has to be said: In the homosexual subculture, sexual attraction toward young teen boys is far more prevalent and prized than gay activists would like you to know.

Moreover, predators are known to go where the children are. And that means the Boy Scouts are arguably at even higher risk of sexual-abuse on a broad scale than the Catholic Church was and is. That is why BSA has instituted one of the best Youth Protection Training programs in the world, as a direct response to predators in their midst.

How ironic and unfortunate, then, that the Boy Scouts are now being so pressured that they are contemplating opening themselves up to lawsuits, to disgrace, and to huge jury awards and out-of-court settlements. After all, by changing their policy on homosexual leaders, the BSA would be adopting a more overt and inviting stance toward homosexual leaders than the Catholic Church ever did – essentially advertising for homosexual adult “scouters.”

If you do not think lawsuits, test cases, de facto recruitment and de facto affirmative action will not follow adoption of this policy, then you do not understand the political and moral left. If you think the vast gay rights lobby will finally leave the Scouts alone, once the policy reversal occurs (if it does), you do not understand the left.

Just as bed-and-breakfasts, photographers and many other business are routinely sued today by homosexual activists as a tactical means of advancing their position, the scouting organization will likewise fall prey to this long-term legal strategy if it betrays its own commitment to being “morally straight.”

America is in a time of great crisis on many fronts, and much that is good we are in danger of permanently losing. The Boy Scouts of America is one of the most important and loved and truly valuable organizations in American history. It is literally a sacred trust between one generation and the next. The Supreme Court is on their side. Public opinion is on their side. God is on their side.

Why on earth would they trade all this away by giving in to pressure from people who detest them and everything they stand for?

A little bit of America will die if the Boy Scouts organization gives in to the pressure and makes this decision. You might want to let them know how you feel. You can reach the Boy Scouts of America at 972-580-2000. Tell them how much you appreciate them – and tell them to stand strong.

The craze started when Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison, writing in the New Yorker in 1998, described Bill Clinton as the “first black president.”

Everybody got it: “White skin notwithstanding,” explained Morrison, “this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

Thus was born an enduring cultural idiom Atlantic Wire recently called the “first something president” – by which a president is labeled as part of a group with which, though not actually a member, he strongly identifies in terms of his experiences, loyalties and policies.

Once Barack Obama emerged onto the presidential scene – remember, he’s the guy who boasted in “The Audacity of Hope” that “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their views” – he became the “first everything president.”

• In 2008, Newsweek called Obama “The first woman president,”arguing that he “is pushing against conventional … wisdom in five important ways, with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities and values that women bring to organizational life … Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is taking a more traditional (and male?) authoritarian approach.”
• In 2009, Geraldo Rivera dubbed Obama “the first Hispanic president” for his support for “comprehensive immigration reform,” while an Agence France-Presse story cast Obama as “the first Asian-American president”for appointing three Asian-American Cabinet members.
• In 2010, the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker reprised Newsweek’s earlier title, with “Obama: Our first female president.”
• In 2011, the cover of New York magazine christened Obama “The first Jewish president.” Really.
• In May 2012, Newsweek pushed the edge of the envelope by crowning Obama with a rainbow-colored halo on its cover, over the headline, “The First Gay President,” to honor his election-year abandonment of his long-expressed opposition to homosexual marriage.
• Things have gone so rogue that New York magazine has lampooned the craze by depicting Obama on faux magazine covers, including: “The First Italian President,” “The First Eskimo President,” “The First Vulcan President,” “The First Chiropractor President,” The First Lumberjack President,” “The First Sleeping President” and “The First Horizontal President.”
• Finally, not to be left out, just a few weeks ago, in response to the White House Tribal Nations Conference with the Department of Interior, Brian Cladoosby of the Swinomish Nation declared: “The president loves basketball. He has an Indian name, he knows what it’s like to be poor and he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. And his theme song is ‘Hail to the Chief.’ I think he definitely qualifies as the first American Indian president.”

OK, so let’s take stock: Obama is black, he’s white, he’s both male and female, he’s straight and gay, he’s Hispanic, Asian-American and American Indian. He’s Christian. He’s Jewish.

What’s missing?

‘My Muslim President Obama’

For a president whose policies over the past four years, both at home and abroad, have been passionately and relentlessly pro-Muslim, one wonders how the elite media could somehow have missed the camel in the living room: Barack Obama is the “first Muslim president.”

This is not breaking news. As American Muslim writer Asma Gull Hasan wrote in a widely read Forbes article titled “My Muslim President Obama”: “I know President Obama is not Muslim, but I am tempted nevertheless to think that he is, as are most Muslims I know. In a very unscientific oral poll, ranging from family members to Muslim acquaintances, many of us feel … that we have our first American Muslim president in Barack Hussein Obama.”

“Since Election Day,” Hasan confesses, “I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, ‘I have to support my fellow Muslim brother,’ would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice.”

But another aspect of having elected our “first Muslim president” is much more consequential, as veteran CIA officer and intelligence expert Clare Lopez chronicles. Under Obama, she writes:

“America’s involvement in the global jihad against Western civilization – on the side of the jihadis – is accelerating. Instead of standing firm as leader of the free world and defender of inalienable human rights, U.S. policy is shifting demonstrably to the defense of those who systematically deny such rights to their own people and seek to suppress them everywhere.”

Noting that since 2009, “U.S. foreign policy has backed al-Qaida and Muslim Brotherhood power plays in Libya, Egypt and now Syria, too,” Lopez reports that our State Department “is working closely with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, whose top objective is the criminalization of the criticism of Islam.”

Meanwhile, adds Lopez, here in the U.S. “the White House cultivates relationships with CAIR/Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leadership figures and associates,” while “instructors, trainers and any curriculum that would describe accurately the link between Islamic doctrine, law and scripture and Islamic terrorism have been methodically purged from U.S. government, intelligence and law enforcement classrooms.”

So, according to the established cultural norm of what constitutes a “first something president,” Obama qualifies as “Muslim” at least as much as Bill Clinton qualifies as “black.”

But let’s go a little further: How much literal truth might there be to this honorary title no one in the establishment press sees fit to confer on Barack Obama?

Respected Islam expert Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, has exhaustively documented “Obama’s Muslim childhood.” Here are just a few of the dozens of non-disputable evidentiary facts cited by Pipes:

• “In Islam, the father passes his faith to the children; and when a Muslim male has children with a non-Muslim female, Islam considers the children Muslim. Obama’s grandfather and father having been Muslims – the extent of their piety matters not at all – means that, in Muslim eyes, Barack was born a Muslim.
• “Arabic forenames based on the H-S-N trilateral root … (Husayn or Hussein, Hasan, Hassân, Hassanein, Ahsan, and others) are exclusively bestowed on Muslim babies. … Obama’s middle name, Hussein, explicitly proclaims him a born Muslim.
• “Obama was registered at a Catholic school in Jakarta as ‘Barry Soetoro.’ A surviving document lists him as born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961; in addition, it lists him having Indonesian nationality and Muslim religion.
• “He was also registered as Muslim at SD Besuki: Although Besuki … is a public school, Obama curiously refers to it in ‘The Audacity of Hope’ (p. 154) as ‘the Muslim school’ he attended in Jakarta. Its records have not survived, but several journalists (Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, David Maraniss of the Washington Post) have all confirmed that there too, he was registered as a Muslim.
• “Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s younger half-sister, said her father (Barack’s stepfather) attended the mosque ‘for big communal events,’ and the Chicago Tribune’s foreign correspondent Kim Barker found that ‘Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.’
• “Muslim clothing: Zulfin Adi, among Obama’s closest childhood friends, recalls about Obama, ‘I remember him wearing a sarong.’ Likewise, [the Washington Post’s] Maraniss found not only that ‘His classmates recalled that Barry wore a sarong’ but had written exchanges indicating that he continued to wear this garment in the United States. This fact has religious implications because, in Indonesian culture, only Muslims wear sarongs.
• “Obama says that in Indonesia, he ‘didn’t practice [Islam],’ an assertion that inadvertently acknowledges his Muslim identity by implying he was a non-observant Muslim. But several of those who knew him contradict this recollection. Rony Amir describes Obama as ‘previously quite religious in Islam.’ A former teacher, Tine Hahiyary, quoted in the Kaltim Post, says the future president took part in advanced Islamic religious lessons: ‘I remember that he had studied mengaji.’ In the context of Southeast Asian Islam, mengaji Quran means to recite the Koran in Arabic, a difficult task denoting advanced study.”

“The record,” concludes Pipes, “points to Obama having been born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and having lived for four years in a fully Muslim milieu under the auspices of his Muslim Indonesian stepfather. For these reasons, those who knew Obama in Indonesia considered him a Muslim.”

All right, that was then. But what about today?

Even as president, observes Pipes:

“… when addressing Muslim audiences, Obama uses specifically Muslim phrases that recall his Muslim identity. He addressed audiences both in Cairo (in June 2009) and Jakarta (in November 2010) with ‘as-salaamu alaykum,’ a greeting that he, who went to Koran class, knows is reserved for one Muslim addressing another. In Cairo, he also deployed several other pious terms that signal to Muslims he is one of them:

• “The Holy Koran” (a term mentioned five times): an exact translation from the standard Arabic reference to the Islamic scripture, al-Qur’an al-Karim.
• “The right path”: a translation of the Arabic as-sirat al-mustaqim, which Muslims ask God to guide them along each time they pray.
• “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed”: Non-Muslims do not refer to Islam as “revealed.”
• “The story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed … joined in prayer”: This Koranic tale of a night journey establishes the leadership of Muhammad over all other holy figures, including Jesus.
• “Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be upon them”: a translation of the Arabic ‘alayhim as-salam, which pious Muslims say after mentioning the names of dead prophets other than Muhammad. (A different salutation, sall Allahu alayhi wa-sallam, “May God honor him and grant him peace,” properly follows Muhammad’s name, but this phrase is almost never said in English.)

Beyond all these things, what honest conclusion – other than that the president has a tremendous hidden attachment to Islam – could one possibly draw after reading Obama’s March 2007 interview with the New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristof, who wrote:

“Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.’”

’The grand jihad’

Ironically, none of Obama’s documented Islamic background may matter very much, since his demonstrated camaraderie with Islamists is typical of far-leftists and doesn’t require a personal Muslim upbringing such as Obama had.

In his bestselling book, “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,” former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy explains how and why hardcore leftists and radical Muslims – despite their obvious differences – work together.

“Like the neocommunist, the Islamist works to impose his version of ‘social justice.’ It is a very specific Islamic prescription, and elements of it diverge markedly from the neocommunist’s more amorphous utopia. But the essentials of their visions coalesce: They are totalitarian, collectivist, and antithetical to the core conceit of American constitutional democracy, individual liberty. Today’s left-leaning, Islamophilic Obamedia consciously ignores the convergence, but America’s 44th president and America’s enemies have a common dream.”

Thus, while there is no evidence Obama is today a practicing Muslim, what is far more important than his current religious affiliation is what his deep-down sympathies, affinities and loyalties truly are – and what sorts of policies those affinities lead him to pursue.

One final thought: Having lived through a tumultuous era in which the two biggest geopolitical challenges to America’s very existence as a free nation have been Marxism and Shariah Islam, it’s a testament to modern Americans’ advancing spiritual blindness that we have chosen – twice – a president in thrall to both.

There’s a perfect logic to the “grand jihad” uniting these two ungodly forces against the rare and exotic bloom of individual liberty. Both movements are based on rejection of Christianity, Judaism and the “Judeo-Christian values” that comprise the moral foundation of Western Civilization. Both are fixated to an ecstatic vision of a utopia that cannot exist in reality because it defies all the laws of God and man and human nature and common sense.

And, although superficially incompatible with each other, both are on the same side of the great war between good and evil, each intent on captivating as many free people as possible in the process of imposing a deluded paradise that never was, and never can be.

Excerpted from the January issue of WND’s acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, edited by David Kupelian. Learn more about Whistleblower or become a subscriber.

“Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.”

Obama may want to put a hold on that one, until he comes to grips with what happened the last time a U.S. president tried it.

During the late ’70s, President Jimmy Carter and his inner circle determined to push through comprehensive new federal gun-control legislation. They decided the best way to grease the congressional skids would be to have a massive scientific study conducted which, in the end, would proclaim that gun-control laws were effective in reducing crime.

So the Carter folks handed out a major gun-control research grant to University of Massachusetts sociology professor James D. Wright and his colleagues Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly. They spent four years and lots of tax dollars to produce what would be the most comprehensive, critical study of gun control ever undertaken. In 1981, they published the results of their research – an exhaustive, three-volume work titled “Under the Gun.”

There was only one problem.

Their findings, summarized starkly by co-author Wright, were that “Gun control laws do not reduce crime.”

“When Wright, Rossi and Daly produced their report for the National Institute of Justice, they delivered a document quite different from the one they had expected to write,” explained David Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute and co-author of the law school textbook, “Firearms Law and the Second Amendment.” “Carefully reviewing all existing research to date, the three scholars found no persuasive scholarly evidence that America’s 20,000 gun-control laws had reduced criminal violence.”

Among their many findings:

• The landmark federal Gun Control Act of 1968, banning most interstate gun sales, had no discernible impact on the criminal acquisition of guns from other states.
• Detroit’s law providing mandatory sentences for felonies committed with a gun was found to have no effect on gun-crime patterns.
• Washington, D.C.’s 1977 ban on the ownership of handguns (except those already registered in the District) was not linked to any reduction in gun crime in the nation’s capital.
• Polls claiming to show that a large majority of the population favored “more gun control” were debunked as being the product of biased questions, and of the fact that most people have no idea how strict gun laws already are.

“As the scholars frankly admitted, they had started out their research as gun-control advocates,” said Kopel, “and had been forced to change their minds by a careful review of the evidence.”

Get autographed copies of both of David Kupelian’s classics: “The Marketing of Evil” and “How Evil Works.”

Fast-forward to the late ’80s, when the women of Orlando, Fla., were terrified of being sexually attacked, since 33 women had already been raped in just one nine-month period. After people began flocking to gun stores to protect themselves, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel newspaper got together with the police to offer a firearms safety course.

It was all very well publicized. Everybody knew that in Orlando there were 6,000 women who had handguns and knew how to use them. The result was that in the following nine-month period, there were only three rapes. In addition, crime in general declined. The fact is, Orlando, Fla., was the only U.S. city with a population of over 100,000 that had a reduction in crime that year.

In fact, it is not only Orlando that experienced a dramatic decrease in crime. After the 1987 Florida right-to-carry legislation, homicide, firearm homicide and handgun homicide rates all decreased. Eight of Florida’s 10 largest cities experienced drastic decreases in homicide rates from 1987 through 1995: Jacksonville, down 46 percent; Miami, down 13 percent; Tampa Bay, down 24 percent; Orlando, down 41 percent; Fort Lauderdale, down 53 percent; Hollywood, down 30 percent; Clearwater, down 21 percent; and Miami Beach down an incredible 93 percent.

Opponents of Florida’s right-to-carry legislation claimed their state would become known as the “Gunshine State.” But the last quarter century’s actual experience (as of mid-2011, Florida has issued a total of 2,031,106 concealed-carry permits under the 1987 law) proves Florida’s trailblazing program to fight crime has been a tremendous success. As U.S. Sen. Orin Hatch, R- Utah, put it: “The effect of that legislation on state crime rates has been astonishing. The predictions of the gun-control advocates were wrong, flat wrong.”

But no matter. Politicians and others intent on restricting or eliminating firearms ownership ignore mountains of evidence, virtually all of which points to the same conclusion – that guns in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens always, in all places and times, result in a safer, more secure and more civilized society.

Therefore, if the Centers for Disease Control, at Obama’s direction, actually conducts honest research – and that’s a magnum-caliber “if” – it will arrive at the same conclusion as Jimmy Carter’s research team: Their basic premise is wrong.

As John Lott, former chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission, crime-statistic researcher and author of the widely cited book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” reiterated today:“Gun control just does not work. Indeed, it makes things worse.

THE FULL STORY ON OBAMA’S MASSIVE GUN GRAB:

Poll: Seeds of tyranny present in America

Obama plan: ‘Assault-weapon’ ban, universal background checks

47 states revolt against Obama gun control

Rush Limbaugh: Obama ‘wants people to snap’

‘Obama has dramatically overshot’

Oops! Gun-map hate mail goes to wrong paper

Constitution ‘no impediment’ to Obama

Chicago murders top Afghanistan death toll

Virginia’s solution to guns in school

See WND’s latest columns on gun control:

How Obama’s gun ‘order’ will backfire by David Kupelian

Gun grab: It’s about freedom’s end by Joseph Farah

School shooters and pharmaceuticals by Bradlee Deab

Sandy Hook: Obama’s latest exploitation by David Limbaugh

The peerless malevolence of redcoat Piers Morgan by Ilana Mercer

Obama’s disgusting use of kids as pawns by Diana West

Obama’s dictates will cost lives by Jeff Knox

Obama’s gun plan doesn’t go far enough by Bill Press

Guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do by Ann Coulter

What happened to Lanza’s 4 handguns? by Jack Cashill

The consequences of volatile speech by Phil Elmore

It’s all about safety by Craige McMillan

Guns and government by Andrew Napolitano

‘Gun Culture’ – what about the ‘Fatherless Culture’? by Larry Elder

Indeed, President Obama has vowed to impose strong new gun-control measures on the nation – very soon, with or without Congress.

Other possible factors – from violent video games to the “failure of our mental-health system” to the unintended consequences of making schools “gun-free zones” – have taken a back seat to guns. Within hours of the gruesome mega-crime, the media had provided extensive, round-the-clock coverage of precisely which firearms, manufacturers and calibers the perpetrator had used, how he had obtained them from his mother, where they were originally purchased, and so on.

But where, I’d like to ask my colleagues in the media, is the reporting about the psychiatric medications the perpetrator – who had been under treatment for mental-health problems – may have been taking? After all, Mark and Louise Tambascio, family friends of the shooter and his mother, were interviewed on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” during which Louise Tambascio told correspondent Scott Pelley: “I know he was on medication and everything, but she homeschooled him at home cause he couldn’t deal with the school classes sometimes, so she just homeschooled Adam at home. And that was her life.” And here, Tambascio tells ABC News, “I knew he was on medication, but that’s all I know.”

It has been more than three weeks since the shooting. We know all about the guns he used, but what “medication” may he have used? (One brief mini-hoax emerged when the New York Daily News published a story claiming the shooter, according to his uncle, had been on the controversial antipsychotic drug Fanapt. That story was quickly withdrawn after the “uncle” turned out to be a fraudster with no relation to the murderer.)

So, what is the truth? Where is the journalistic curiosity? Where is the follow-up? Where is the police report, the medical examiner’s report, the interviews with his doctor and others?

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But let me back up. Perhaps you’re wondering why this issue of psychiatric medications should be so important.

As I documented in “How Evil Works,” it is simply indisputable that most perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications:

• Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999 during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves.Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox – that’s 1 in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.
• Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban “semiautomatic assault weapons” in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.
• Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.
• In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill., killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania.
• In Paducah, Ky., in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school’s lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.
• In 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac.
• In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Ky., killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.
• Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danysh’s description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder is chilling: “I didn’t realize I did it until after it was done,” Danysh said. “This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun.”
• John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty.
• Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartrending crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.” And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well-publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.

  And what exactly does “rare” mean in the phrase “rare adverse events”? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug.

  Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues.

• One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them.”I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger,” he recalled. “Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it.” Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders.

  Paxil’s known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others.The preceding examples are only a few of the best-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes – there are many others.

  Whether we like to admit it or not, it is undeniable that when certain people living on the edge of sanity take psychiatric medications, those drugs can – and occasionally do – push them over the edge into violent madness. Remember, every single SSRI antidepressant sold in the United States of America today, no matter what brand or manufacturer, bears a “black box” FDA warning label – the government’s most serious drug warning – of “increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24.” Common sense tells us that where there are suicidal thoughts – especially in a very, very angry person – homicidal thoughts may not be far behind. Indeed, the mass shooters we are describing often take their own lives when the police show up, having planned their suicide ahead of time.

  So, what ‘medication’ was Lanza on?

  The Sandy Hook school massacre, we are constantly reminded, was the “second-worst school shooting in U.S. history.” Let’s briefly revisit the worst, Virginia Tech, because it provides an important lesson for us. One would think, in light of the stunning correlation between psych meds and mass murders, that it would be considered critical to establish definitively whether the Virginia Tech murderer of 32 people, student Cho Seung-Hui, had been taking psychiatric drugs.

  Yet, more than five years later, the answer to that question remains a mystery.

  Even though initially the New York Times reported, “officials said prescription medications related to the treatment of psychological problems had been found among Mr. Cho’s effects,” and the killer’s roommate, Joseph Aust, had told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that Cho’s routine each morning had included taking prescription drugs, the state’s toxicology report released two months later said “no prescription drugs or toxic substances were found in Cho Seung-Hui.”

  Perhaps so, but one of the most notoriously unstable and unpredictable times for users of SSRI antidepressants is the period shortly after they’ve stopped taking them, during which time the substance may not be detectable in the body.

  What kind of meds might Cho have been taking – or recently have stopped taking? Curiously, despite an exhaustive investigation by the Commonwealth of Virginia which disclosed that Cho had taken Paxil for a year in 1999, specifics on what meds he was taking prior to the Virginia Tech massacre have remained elusive. The final 20,000-word report manages to omit any conclusive information about the all-important issue of Cho’s medications during the period of the mass shooting.

  To add to the drama, it wasn’t until two years after the state’s in-depth report was issued that, as disclosed in an Aug. 19, 2009, ABC News report, some of Cho’s long-missing mental health records were located:

  The records released today were discovered to be missing during a Virginia panel’s August 2007 investigation four-and-a-half months after the massacre.

  The notes were recovered last month from the home of Dr. Robert Miller, the former director of the counseling center, who says he inadvertently packed Cho’s file into boxes of personal belongings when he left the center in February 2006. Until the July 2009 discovery of the documents, Miller said he had no idea he had the records.

  Miller has since been let go from the university.

  Although Cho’s newly discovered mental-health files reportedly revealed nothing further about his medications, the issues raised by the initial accounts – including the “officials” cited by the New York Times and the Richmond paper’s eyewitness account of daily meds-taking – remain unaddressed to this day.

  Some critics suggest these official omissions are motivated by a desire to protect the drug companies from ruinous product liability claims. Indeed, pharmaceutical manufacturers are nervous about lawsuits over the “rare adverse effects” of their mood-altering medications. To avoid costly settlements and public relations catastrophes – such as when GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to pay $6.4 million to the family of 60-year-old Donald Schnell who murdered his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a fit of rage shortly after starting on Paxil – drug companies’ legal teams have quietly and skillfully settled hundreds of cases out-of-court, shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to plaintiffs. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly fought scores of legal claims against Prozac in this way, settling for cash before the complaint could go to court while stipulating that the settlement remain secret – and then claiming it had never lost a Prozac lawsuit.

  All of which is, once again, to respectfully but urgently ask the question: When on earth are we going to find out if the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook school massacre, like so many other mass shooters, had been taking psychiatric drugs?

  In the end, it may well turn out that knowing what kinds of guns he used isn’t nearly as important as what kind of drugs he used.

  That is, assuming we ever find out.
  

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