Oh, the humanity:

Ask Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant for the iPhone, for ideas on where to eat dinner or whether you need an umbrella, and it will deliver helpful localized suggestions.

But try asking it to find a local abortion clinic, and the software turns up a puzzling blank — even in areas that clearly have such clinics. The response in Manhattan is: “Sorry, I couldn’t find any abortion clinics.”

This is, of course, not a question that most people are likely to be asking their phones. But the odd results began to attract attention around the Web on Tuesday, with some suspecting a conspiracy.

“I can’t help but feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” said one blogger at a site called The Abortioneers.

And there are still some people who deny that we live in a theocracy.

But seriously … The Abortioneers? Really? Gruesome. Anyway, I’m sure there’s no connection at all between this and with the history of Steve Jobs, who once said of himself: “My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.” No, I’m sure there cannot be a connection here. Ahem.

UPDATE: Come to think of it, is there a greater First World Problem than your Siri not being able to give you directions to the nearest abortion clinic?

Well, whaddaya know:

Newt Gingrich is adamant that he is not a lobbyist, but rather a visionary who traffics in ideas, not influence. But in the eight years since he started his health care consultancy, he has made millions of dollars while helping companies promote their services and gain access to state and federal officials.

In a variety of instances, documents and interviews show, Mr. Gingrich arranged meetings between executives and officials, and salted his presentations to lawmakers with pitches for his clients, who pay as much as $200,000 a year to belong to his Center for Health Transformation.

When the center sponsored a “health transformation summit” at the Florida State Capitol in March 2006, lawmakers who attended Mr. Gingrich’s keynote speech inside the House chamber received a booklet promoting not just ideas but also the specific services of two dozen of his clients. Executives from some of those companies sat on panels for discussions that lawmakers were encouraged to attend after Mr. Gingrich’s address.

More:

Mr. Gingrich and his aides have repeatedly emphasized that he is not a registered lobbyist, an important distinction in their effort to position him as an outsider who will transform the ways of Washington. They say that he has never taken a position for money and that corporations have signed on with him because of the strength of his ideas.

…Yet if Mr. Gingrich has managed to steer clear of legal tripwires, a review of his activities shows how he put his influence to work on behalf of clients with a considerable stake in government policy. Even if he does not appear to have been negotiating legislative language, he and his staff did many of the same things that registered lobbyists do.

But … but … he’s going to clean up Washington! Ah, well, at least Gussie Fink-Nottle still loves him:

“You got the name correctly? Fink-Nottle?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, it’s the most extraordinary thing. It must be five years since he was in London. He makes no secret of the fact that the place gives him the pip. Until now, he has always stayed glued to the country, completely surrounded by newts.”

“Sir?”

“Newts, Jeeves. Mr. Fink-Nottle has a strong newt complex. You must have heard of newts. Those little sort of lizard things that charge about in ponds.”

“Oh, yes, sir. The aquatic members of the family Salamandridae which constitute the genus Molge.”

I am going to start calling Gingrich “Fink-Nottle” on this blog. Since the old boy is going to blow hisself up sooner or later, I might as well have fun with this while it lasts. It’s not every day a US presidential candidate calls to mind a P.G. Wodehouse character.

The Senate voted overwhelmingly tonight against an attempt to strip the controversial detainee provision out of the defense bill. It wasn’t even close: 60-38. Sen. Rand Paul was a leader of the honorable defeated. Read this:

The measure, part of the massive National Defense Authorization Act, was also opposed by civil libertarians on the left and right. But 16 Democrats and an independent joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) that would have killed the provision, voting it down with 61 against, and 37 for it.

“I’m very, very, concerned about having U.S. citizens sent to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the Senate’s most conservative members.

Rand’s top complaint is that a terrorism suspect would get just one hearing where the military could assert that the person is a suspected terrorist — and then they could be locked up for life, without ever formally being charged. The only safety valve is a waiver from the secretary of defense.

“It’s not enough just to be alleged to be a terrorist,” Paul said, echoing the views of the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s part of what due process is — deciding, are you a terrorist? I think it’s important that we not allow U.S. citizens to be taken.”

Here are the 14 Democrats (plus Joe Lieberman) who joined every Republican, except for Paul and Mark Kirk of Illinois, in voting down the amendment:

Sens. Bob Casey (Pa.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Carl Levin (Mich.), Joe Manchin (W. Va.), Clair McCaskill (Mo.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Jack Reed (R.I.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.).

The president is threatening to veto this thing. There appear to be enough votes in the Senate to sustain a presidential veto — but Jack Goldsmith believes Obama will fold:

I doubt that the President will blow up the bill.  Too many liberal democrats, including Senate Arms Services Chair Carl Levin, support it, so the president cannot charge political extremism.  And as John McCain has said, “[t]here is too much in this bill that is important to this Nation’s defense.”  Is the president really going to expose himself, in an election cycle, to the charge (fair or not) that he jeopardized the nation’s defenses in order to vindicate the principle of presidential discretion to release terrorists from GTMO or to bring them to the United States to try them in civilian courts?  It is the right principle, but it is a generally unpopular one that the president has not to date fought for.  I doubt he will start fighting for it eleven months before the election.

Turns out that oil men have been crawling all over West Feliciana, my home parish back in Louisiana, leasing land. I’m not sure, but I think my own family has gotten in on the action. From the Baton Rouge Advocate:

John Hashagen, the parish manager and water superintendent in West Feliciana Parish, said he had no real concerns about the impact of fracking on groundwater.

The Tuscaloosa Shale deposit sits between 11,000 and 13,000 feet underground and is protected by two impervious limestone layers, Hashagen said.

I found this out by Googling “fracking” and “West Feliciana.” Why did I do that? Because of this piece in the current New Yorker. Excerpt:

Shale gas itself presents another potential problem. A recent study by researchers at Duke University showed that methane frequently leaks into drinking water near active fracking sites, which probably explains why some homeowners have been able to set their tap water on fire. Yet another possible source of contamination is so-called “flowback” water. Huge quantities of water are used in fracking, and as much as forty per cent of it can come back up out of the gas wells, bringing with it corrosive salts, volatile organic compounds, and radioactive elements, such as radium. Citing public-health concerns, Pennsylvania recently asked drillers to stop taking flowback water to municipal treatment plants.

To be sure, the Tuscaloosa Shale deposit is not natural gas, but oil. I suppose this might make a difference in the methane problem, but I don’t know that this makes much difference in terms of potential chemical contamination from fracking chemicals. Of far more concern is this long NYT Magazine piece about fracking in Pennsylvania. The shale gas industry is a very, very big deal here. It has been a huge economic boon to people in the west of the state. But it’s come at a high cost to some. You really need to read these excerpts:

When the natural-gas industry came to town, Haney saw an opportunity to pay off farm bills and make a profit from the land. Word had it that the companies were interested in signing up large parcels, so in the winter of 2008, Haney, who owned only eight acres, persuaded two of her neighbors to pool their land on a lease for which she was paid, in installments, $1,000 dollars per acre and 15 percent royalties.

The money would help to pay the taxes on their farms. The land man who came to the Haney home to sell the lease showed pictures of a farm and pasture with a well cap “the size of a garbage can,” Haney said, which she found reassuring. And it didn’t seem as if the drilling would affect their lives much. Range Resources was involved in the community in small ways too. For the past several years, it operated a booth at the Washington County Fair. In 2010, the company offered kids an extra $100 for the farm animals they auctioned. That was the year Stacey Haney’s son, Harley, took his breeding goat, Boots, all the way to grand champion.

At the fair, Haney ran into her next-door neighbor, Beth Voyles, 54, a horse trainer and dog breeder, who signed the lease with Haney in 2008. She told Haney that her 11 /2-year-old boxer, Cummins, had just died. Voyles thought that he was poisoned. She saw the dog drinking repeatedly from a puddle of road runoff, and she thought that the water the gas company used to wet down the roads probably had antifreeze in it. “We do not use ethylene glycol in the fracking process,” Matt Pitzarella of Range Resources told me. He also said that the dog’s veterinarian couldn’t confirm the dog had been poisoned and that another possible cause of death was cancer.

A month later, Haney’s dog, Hunter, also died suddenly. Soon after, Voyles called Haney to tell her that her barrel horse, Jody, was dead. Lab results revealed a high level of toxicity in her liver. Voyles sent her animals’ test results to Range Resources. In response, Range Resources wrote to Voyles to say that, as the veterinarian indicated, the horse died of toxicity of the liver, not antifreeze poisoning. The company did acknowledge that the vet suspected the horse died of poisoning by heavy metals. Subsequent tests of the Voyleses’ water supply by Range Resources revealed no heavy metals.

Voyles’s boxers began to abort litters of puppies; six were born with cleft palates. They died within hours. Others were born dead or without legs or hair. Unsure what to do, Voyles stored 15 of the puppies in her freezer. (Range Resources says it was never notified about the puppies.) By December, Boots, the grand-champion goat, aborted two babies. Haney had to put her down the day after Christmas.

What was going on with the animals? Where were the toxic chemicals in their blood coming from? Haney feared that the arrival of the gas industry and the drilling that had begun less than 1,000 feet from her home might have something to do with it.

And then things got worse for Stacey Haney:

About a year before Haney’s dog died, in the summer of 2009, she began to notice that sometimes her water was black and that it seemed to be eating away at her faucets, washing machine, hot-water heater and dishwasher. When she took a shower, the smell was terrible — like rotten eggs and diarrhea. Haney started buying bottled water for drinking and cooking, but she couldn’t afford to do the same for her animals.

Later that summer, her son, Harley, was stricken with mysterious stomach pains and periods of extreme fatigue, which sent him to the emergency room and to Pittsburgh’s Children’s Hospital a half-dozen times. “He couldn’t lift his head out of my lap,” Haney said. Early in November of the following year, after the animals died, Haney decided to have Harley tested for heavy metals and ethylene glycol. While she waited for the results, Haney called Range Resources and asked that it supply her with drinking water. The company tested her water and found nothing wrong with it. Haney’s father began to haul water to her barn.

A week later, on Haney’s 41st birthday, Harley’s test results came back. Harley had elevated levels of arsenic. Haney called Range Resources again. The company delivered a 5,100-gallon tank of drinking water, called a water buffalo, the next day. “Our policy is if you have a complaint or a concern, we’ll supply you with a water source within 24 hours,” Pitzarella of Range Resources said. He added that the company has “never seen any evidence that anyone in that household has arsenic issues.”

Although she was able to work 40 hours as a nurse and care for two kids and a small farm, Haney wasn’t feeling great, either. So a few months later, she had herself and Paige tested too. Their tests results showed they had small amounts of heavy metals like arsenic and industrial solvents like benzene and toluene in their blood. Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai said that the results show evidence of exposure, but that it was difficult to determine potential health effects at the levels found. But he added: “These people are exposed to arsenic and benzene, known human carcinogens. There’s considered to be no safe levels of these chemicals.” Pitzarella says that Range Resources was never shown these reports and that arsenic has nothing to do with fracking. Pitzarella cited a study by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania that found that 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s water wells had at least one pre-existing water-quality problem, and that there was no obvious influence on private water-well quality from fracking. In a previous study, 2 percent of the state’s wells had arsenic levels that exceeded health standards.

You know the rest. People who are making money off of fracking — and note well, this isn’t the “rich,” but ordinary small landowners who are hard-pressed by the economy — don’t want to hear people like Stacey Haney telling them by their own example that fracking is making some people extremely sick, and poisoning the water they drink. People whose bank accounts depend on not seeing things tend not to see them.

Anybody know the story about Louisiana? Is it really true that “two impervious layers of limestone” protect the groundwater from fracking chemicals? What about the disposal of frack water? Suddenly, the fracking issue has become real personal to me.

And: what is the fracking story out where you live?

Lots of drama now around the Defense Reauthorization Bill, a provision of which gives the US government the right to detail without charge anyone, including American citizens in this country, without charge, as long as they are suspected of being or aiding a terrorist. Some say no, the bill exempts US citizens. The ACLU contends that this is not true. From the ACLU’s blog:

Don’t be confused by anyone claiming that the indefinite detention legislation does not apply to American citizens. It does. There is an exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032 of the bill), but no exemption for American citizens from the authorization to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial (section 1031 of the bill). So, the result is that, under the bill, the military has the power to indefinitely imprison American citizens, but it does not have to use its power unless ordered to do so.

But you don’t have to believe us. Instead, read what one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Lindsey Graham said about it on the Senate floor: “1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

There you have it — indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial. And the Senate is likely to vote on it Monday or Tuesday.

Today in Washington, Sen. Rand Paul attacked this provision of the bill. John McCain more or less accused him of being soft on terrorism:

Paul argued the amendment, which is cosponsored by McCain, “puts every single American citizen at risk” and suggested that if the amendment passes, “the terrorists have won.”

“Should we err today and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism, well then the terrorists have won,” Paul argued, “[D]etaining American citizens without a court trial is not American.”

McCain, however, who has spent hours of floor time in the last weeks promoting his amendment, hurried to the floor to defend it against Paul’s onslaught.

“Facts are stubborn things,” McCain repeated from the floor several times. “If the senator from Kentucky wants to have a situation prevail where people who are released go back in to the fight to kill Americans, he is entitled to his opinion.”

This is killer:

But McCain ended the conversation by suggesting the junior senator from Kentucky did not understand the gravity of the danger the U.S. faces from terrorism.

“An individual, no matter who they are, if they pose a threat to the security of the United States of America, should not be allowed to continue that threat,” said McCain. ” We need to take every stop necessary to prevent that from happening, that’s for the safety and security of the men and women who are out there risking their lives … in our armed services.”

By any means necessary. Am I actually reading this correctly? Is there no liberty that John McCain would not take away from Americans for our own safety?

Maybe I’m overreacting on this. I don’t like being on the same side as the ACLU, and have a strong mistrust of their alarmism. But I trust Rand Paul far more on civil liberties questions than I trust John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Post clarifying information in the combox if you have it.

Two of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates, have been going at it over race and IQ. Links here, in chronological order:

AS: The Study of Intelligence, in which Sullivan says that science proves that there is a correlation between race and IQ, but we can’t talk about it because of “p.c. egalitarianism”. Excerpt:

The right response to unsettling data is to probe, experiment and attempt to disprove them – not to run away in racial panic. But the deeper problem is that the racial aspects of IQ have prevented non-racial research into intelligence, and how best to encourage, study and understand it.

TNC: The Race-IQ Blackout. A response to this. Excerpt:

Advocates of the “p.c. egalitarianism” theory, such as Andrew, evidently believe that the notion that black people are dumber than whites is a cutting edge theory, as opposed to a long-held tenet of slave-holders and white supremacists. They present themselves as bold-truth tellers who will not bow to “liberal creationists.” In fact they are espousing firmly established views that date back to the very founding of this country. These views did not emerge after decades of failure of social policy. Indeed they picked up right where their old advocates left off; within five years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Arthur Jensen was convinced that black people were intellectually addled.

Back to AS: The Study of Intelligence, Ctd. Excerpt:

The differential between Caucasians and Asians – or between Ashkenazi and Sephardim Jews – is also striking in the data. And notice that my sole interest in this is either to counter what would be an injustice (affirmative action) or pure curiosity. I don’t think any serious critic of my work could conjure up a defense of compulsory sterilization or slavery within it. And the notion that I have an “obsession” with this is bizarre. I thought it worth airing the discussion a decade and a half ago and I think it’s worth airing today.

Then TNC: “The Bell Curve Through the Veil”. Excerpt:

On the broad question — Should researchers be free to explore the nexus of race, IQ and intelligence? — Andrew and I are in harmony. Onward, indeed. Where we differ is the following: Andrew, like most conservatives who write about race, is more concerned with a vague p.c. egalitarianism than the forces that birthed such things. (Unlike “political correctness” those forces can actually be quantified, and their impact demonstrated.)

That his contention has long been linked to one of the ugliest strains of American thought, that it continues to be linked to actual white supremacists, is not particularly troublesome to Andrew. But that others might find it troublesome is deeply distressing. I don’t charge Andrew with defending slavery or sterilization. I charge him with bumbling through the ICU, tinkering with machinery, and wondering why everyone is so uptight and stuff.

Then AS: The Study of Intelligence, Ctd. Excerpt:

Well, yes, I do tend to get concerned when politics cramps research and when certain facts are suppressed. And the subtle but clear differences in IQ between broad racial groups are a reality – across country and continent and world. They do not only persist when controlling for economic class, on some measures, they increase. Now, this is only the first baby step in the discussion, but it strikes me as the most important one. And it is this finding – staring right out at us from vast amounts of data that no one disputes – that prompts the question: why? At least that’s what I can say for myself. I had no interest in this subject until I saw the data in Murray’s and Herrnstein’s book. I was, frankly, astounded by it. As a highly educated person, I had never been exposed to this data. And yet, it turned out it was undisputed. Merely the interpretation of it was open to real and important debate.

I hope I’ve got these in proper chronological order. It’s hard to do when Sullivan posts so many entries daily. But you get the gist of the debate.

I find that I’m divided, but tend to lean more toward TNC’s viewpoint. To be sure, you should read the commenter who e-mailed Andrew to say this:

Many of the scholars who open study IQ differences amongst races are racist and shoddy in their scholarship. But that’s because there’s a selection effect: only they have the motivation to continue this research. Respectable and normal scholars avoid it. Who wants to be rude? How many people noticed that James Watson endorsed Obama and is a conventional liberal otherwise? E. O. Wilson has the same views as Watson on IQ and race, but keeps quiet about it, and is greeted with acclaim in his dotage because he does keep quiet (his views are clear if you go to Google Books and look up “E. O. Wilson” and “Rushton”).

More broadly the silence of scholars due to social norms means that most educated people are totally ignorant of the 1 standard deviation IQ difference between blacks an whites, and that the average black American scores at the 15th percentile in relation to the average white American. Perhaps these facts should be suppressed, I don’t know. But they sure have been.

And yet, I am more sympathetic to TNC’s viewpoint because I can’t get around the uses to which the study of racial differences and intelligence was put in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the eugenics movement. The eugenicists weren’t all racists in the way we understand the term. Eugenics was thoroughly mainstream science, embraced by progressives (Teddy Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, et alia) who thought this science would help us improve humanity. Christine Rosen’s fascinating work on the relationship between religion and eugenics in that era shows that all the progressive religionists embraced eugenics as morally good, but the “backwards” fundamentalist Protestants and the Catholics opposed it. It was only when the Nazis showed what the focus on race and intelligence could lead to that the study of these things was discredited.

Sullivan understands that just because the Nazis made bad use of this stuff doesn’t make it untrue, or unimportant. I get that. But I keep coming back to a point that seems to be the one TNC is making: of what use is this field of study, anyway? Where do we propose to go with it? Andrew’s view is that it’s worth knowing for the reason all truth is worth knowing, and pursuing. In an abstract world, that makes sense. But we don’t live in a world of pure disinterestedness. If I were a geneticist, I doubt I would want to work in this field, only because the experience of the 20th century, especially the Holocaust, makes me deeply mistrustful of what human beings will do with the scientific knowledge that this race is intellectually inferior to that race, and we can prove it genetically.

The only possible good I can see coming out of it is to knock down affirmative action programs as unjust — but you don’t need genetics to do that. The possible evils coming out of it? Legion.

Then again, I believe there is a such thing as forbidden knowledge — that is, knowledge that ought to be suppressed, for the greater good of all. Read Roger Shattuck’s brilliant study of this topic for more.

So says Jennifer Rubin, and she’s right. After pointing out Newt’s many flip-flops — against the Libyan intervention and then for it, for Fannie and Freddie (his clients as a provider of access historian, etc. — she lays into him on his latest outrage:

But nothing quite tops his lecturing Herman Cain about adultery. Politico reports: “Newt Gingrich, who has been friendly with Herman Cain but who has suggested his opponent needs to deal with the drip-drip of allegations about his past, suggested the businessman needs to address the claims made by Ginger White. ‘It is something that Mr. Cain will have to settle with the country and talk to the country about,’ Gingrich told CNN’s John King, as relayed by Politico’s Juana Summers. ‘It is sad to see that level of pain brought out, but I think he’ll have to deal with it.’ ” Gag.

Verily, Newton Leroy Gingrich has no shame. Rubin:

Gingrich’s serial adultery and his current hypocrisy suggest not a immoral man, but an amoral one. Rules, shame, punishment, consistency and transparency are abstractions for him, tools to be wielded against political opponents while his own supposed brilliance and patriotism exempt him from the standards that mere pols must follow. Really, is this a person whose values and judgment you’d trust to manage a charity or hold a leadership position in your church, let alone occupy the Oval Office?

Character matters. There’s a pattern here.

A discussion in the comboxes on another thread reminded me of this great essay by Travis Kavulla in The New Atlantis, from the Spring 2009 issue. In it, Kavulla, who lived and worked in Africa, talks about why the Western model of “reality” (for lack of a better way to put it) works against actually saving Africans’ lives from AIDS. Kavulla says that Westerners assume that the metaphysical dream of the Africans is like our own, and try to impose our way of ordering reality on Africans. This has been a public health failure. Excerpt:

We can call these people ignorant or backward. But there is something larger afoot in African society; there is a reason why the conspiracy theories are so many, the leadership so seemingly inept. Africans are not blindly resisting Western public-health beliefs. Their world is not a blank chalkboard where AIDS lacks an explanation that must be filled in by outsiders. Rather, they have a system of beliefs that makes perfect sense, in its own way, of the AIDS calamity.

More:

It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an exasperated, unanswerablecri de coeur in the rational West—one of the steps of the grieving process, we are told, that we all just need to get through. But many Africans have their own kind of answer to that question.

African tribes are not a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority traditionally held in common a worldview of causation very different from our own. With reference to illness, it is called the personalistic theory of disease. Even today, most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational work of anthropology, put Africans’ cosmological outlook this way: One might understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the more important question is,Who sent the termites?

And, the key point:

Yet short of a vaccine, the practical value of a scientifically proven implement, like a condom or an anti-retroviral drug, depends not on science alone but on whether it can be socially and culturally embedded. It is here where the West has faltered. Too often, policymakers take a device’s or method’s apparent scientific worth as a prospective indicator of how it will be valued in human society.

Read the whole thing for Kavulla’s explanation for why the Western public-health technocratic gospel of condom distribution has not been effective in Africa. The reason, essentially, is because Westerners refuse to grasp that AIDS has an intensely social dimension in Africa that it simply does not have in the West, and which is therefore resistant to Western preventative prescriptions.

Terry Mattingly at Get Religion goes off on WaPo On Faith co-founder Sally Quinn’s approach to journalism and religion. It’s a great, substantive, take-no-prisoners rant. He starts by quoting from Quinn’s list of things she’s learned since founding the influential and always-interesting religion commentary site:

1. Nobody knows.

2. All religions are the same — and not.

3. Everything is about religion.

4. We are all looking for meaning.

5. Why there is suffering.

This causes TMatt’s beard to combust:

The key question, once again, is why Quinn is convinced that religion — as opposed to dozens of other complex and mysterious subjects covered by journalists — must exclusively be viewed through a lens of feelings, emotions, opinions and, thus, commentary. Is religion, in effect, too dangerous to cover as news? Trust me, I know that religious doctrines, traditions, beliefs and emotions, when combined, can be volatile and hard for journalists to handle in an accurate, balanced and professional manner. However, this is not a valid reason to flip a switch and assume that this journalistic task is impossible. Quite the opposite.

What does Quinn mean when she says that the first lesson she has learned through “On Faith” is that, “Nobody knows”? On one level, this is a simple truth about a wide variety of topics — politics, fine arts, economics and sports leap to mind — in which it is impossible to nail down many crucial variables in a laboratory.

… If “no one knows” is the guiding principle, then right-wing blowhards are telling the truth when they say that they think that President Barack Obama is actually a Muslim. It is a fact, of course, that he walked down an aisle in a liberal Christian congregation and made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. It is a fact that he has shared his Christian testimony in a wide variety of settings. But, hey, no one knows. Right?

Think this through. The first thing we know is that no one knows. The one fact we know is that facts do not matter. Thus, religion is a subject that is best addressed through opinion and commentary, not journalism.

Read the whole thing.