I'll be talking about some of this Sunday on "Radio Inside Scoop." That's the D.C. show hosted by Mark Levine, aide to Barney Frank. Mr. Levine has first-hand experience as a foe of the Faith-Based Initiative, and you can read his well-informed take on it -- he's an Congressional attorney -- here. Just to clarify what I said in my last post, I should acknowledge that (as he points out), funding religiously-infused missions is nothing new...so long as the hiring is fair, and the preaching is kept out of the taxpayer-financed soup kitchen. So in a spirit of Christian charity, one can hand out free soup. And in a spirit of Unificationist horror at the modern misuse of the "love organ," one can teach schoolchildren that unmarried sex is like drinking other people's spit. The lingering question is whether religious messages ("It's not just your body, it's your whole lineage forever") can help but percolate into classrooms where federally-funded reverends are called upon to further the cause of Chastity in public schools. The ACLU has its doubts. But Moon's missionaries say they're keeping it secular this time. Give them some credit: as far as we know, Free Teens USA isn't repeating the openly Reverend Moon-influenced public school experiment of the Pure Love Alliance, the roadshow that taught Chicago schoolchildren to pursue the Unificationist religious pinnacle of "absolute sex." The other question, of course, is whether "abstinence-only" vow programs in school are as valuable as free soup. Columnist Michelle Malkin wants to know, "What's so funny about abstinence?"

Ridiculing chaste young people and their abstinent role models as oddballs and prudes may score Franken a few points at Hollywood and Harvard cocktail parties. But if this intellectual poseur thinks he can improve democracy through nasty pranksterism and mockery, the only one he's kidding is himself.

--- For more on the Washington workings of all this, which I'll get into on Mark's show, read these 1999 minutes from a Unification Church meeting. David Caprara (Bush's pick to lead AmeriCorps VISTA) is said to have successfully worked towards an abstinence bill in Virginia's general assembly...thus sparking a worldwide "purity movement."

Now we need to develop curriculum material which can be shown in the school system. This is also going to affect other states, too. We could then take this a step farther with the idea of betrothal and engagement and marriage.

Also, check out this cameo by Grover Norquist in Robert Parry's Moon story.