Two Brief Items. Item 1: Good Riddance to Christopher Reeve. "Do not speak ill of the dead" is a very old proverb, dating to the "Seven Sages" of around 600 B.C. That does not make it good advice. Christopher Reeve is another of those "heroes" who started as victims and only after they suffered a tragedy of their own did they become public-spirited. Until his horseback-riding injury, Christopher Reeve was just another Hollywood slimeball.
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Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen observed today that:

Reeve's insistence that he would someday walk again is proved sadly false — as some always said it would be. He was criticized by knowledgeable people for what they characterized as his ignorant or opportunistic optimism — he appeared in a TV ad promoting spinal cord research — and giving false hope to others in his condition. What these people needed above all, Reeve's critics said, was the determination to face reality — not the bogus dream that the past could somehow become the future.

Reeve doubtless did some good in the nine years he lived after his injury, in giving spinal-cord injuries a higher profile and more priority than they otherwise might have had. But he also turned into an advocate of childslaughter. Babies, he suggested, should be created for the express purpose of chopping them up for parts! Reeve advocated embryonic stem-cell research, research that might NOT produce hoped-for advances but would DEFINITELY kill children.
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But, then, Christopher Reeve's attitudes toward children were not the best to begin with. He was a bastardizer: he had a son out of wedlock, and only later married the mother. Why? Why not marry before the child was born and save him from even the slightest stigma?
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Reeve also was involved in some minor way in pro-Communist activities in the Vietnam era and participated in filmic sado-masochistic violence, especially in the odious Superman IV.
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He lived a privileged life (private school, Ivy League college), partly here in New Jersey, and died from an injury sustained in a sport of the rich, "eventing" (a combination of "the precision of dressage with the excitement of cross-country and show jumping"). All the rehabilitation (including six months at the Kessler Institute in NJ) and the finest medical care in the world couldn't save him. But at least his idle life of wealth and privilege ended with that accident, and he finally, at age 42, did something useful. Better late than never.
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Item 2: Ten Commandments Revisited. AP reports today that the Supreme Court has agreed to take a case about governmental displays of the Ten Commandments. Hopefully it is not to undo its 1980 prohibition of such displays, but simply to make plain that divergent rulings from various courts are unacceptable and all governments must stop trying to push Judaism upon the unwilling. Yes, I said Judaism, because the Ten Commandments are Jewish, NOT Christian. Jesus gave Christians three commandments, not ten (see this blog's entry of May 12, 2004). The most important of those three is the Golden Rule. If you heed that one rule, you don't need to list ten, twenty, or a hundred specific prohibitions.
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But I would oppose even the display of the Golden Rule in government facilities, because it is not for government to tell us what religion or religious precepts to follow. The First Amendment was inserted into the Constitution to protect minorities, including that smallest of minorities, the individual, from impositions by the majority. We can respect each other's rights to believe other than as we do, or we can have religious war. Religious freedom, sí! Ten Commandments, no!
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* I reject the arrogant Jewish term "B.C.E."; there are about 2.015 billion Christians on Earth, 33% of the entire world's population, as against some 18 million Jews, 0.2% of the world's population. There is absolutely no reason for 2 billion Christians to accommodate 18 million Jews with "B.C.E.", any more than there would be to adopt the Jewish calendar.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:54 PM