Over the last few months, with underwhelming media attention, home “gender” tests appeared on the United States market that can determine the sex of an unborn baby as early as eight or ten weeks into pregnancy, according to its American design company.

So underwhelming was the product rollout that, apparently, even Drudge Report missed it. Yesterday the newsmaking Web site linked to a story  in the New Zealand Herald about a “controversial product” making its way from Australia to the shores of its southeastern neighbor.

Much more newsworthy for an American site like Drudge, would have been a link  to the American company, IntelliGender, that designed the product and that is already selling it in local Walgreen and CVS pharmacies in every big and little town in America.

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This week we have witnessed two apparently similar drive-by killings by enraged activists. Suspect Scott Roeder has been charged with killing late-term abortion provider George Tiller as he served as an usher in his church. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad is charged with shooting and killing an army recruitment officer (and wounding another) as the victim stood outside his office.  Both cowardly suspects fled the scene. Both men are now in police custody.  Both were motivated by what they considered their religious convictions.

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The Obama administration is giving the impression that they consider the threat of additional crazed anti-abortionists, ready to kill abortion providers, to be greater than the threat of additional radical Islamists ready to strike domestic targets.

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With the two events having so much in common on the surface, it would seem logical to suggest—-and some in the media are already doing this—that radical anti-abortionists like Scott Roeder offer a threat to our national security that is on par with radical Islamists like Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad.  Nobody says this outright, but much of the reporting I have seen assumes crazed individuals with warped religious ideology who act independently of any organized group are just that–crazed individuals — and that they’re basically all alike.

In my opinion, we make a grave mistake if we follow the media’s lead.

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On Sunday in South Bend, Team Obama had its way with the Fighting Irish.   While Notre Dame officials argued for months that the decision to invite President Obama to give the 2009 commencement speech and offer him an honorary law degree had nothing to do with his “unacceptable” stance on abortion and the killing of human embryos for research purposes, President Obama shrewdly and shamelessly proved that for him, the occasion had everything to do with these issues.

During much of his 25 minute speech, President Obama lectured Notre Dame about why some of the Church’s fundamental values don’t really matter that much and why graduates should burn these values at his altar of feigned dialogue.

And all the while, students and professors cheered.  And Fr. Jenkins took bows.  And Team Obama scored points, moving quickly toward its goal of winning another electoral victory in 2012.

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Newsweek magazine is at it again: making a killing off religion, while biting the hand that feeds it. This week’s cover story — “The End of Christian America” — is emblematic of the magazine’s penchant for reporting on things sacred with an unmasked bias against America’s traditional religious beliefs and in favor of a socially impotent “secular theology” in line with the convictions of its self-described Episcopalian editor, Jon Meacham.

It’s a penchant that forms a pattern, a narrative. Meacham — a talented writer and editor, but untrained in theology — pooh-poohed the film “The Passion of the Christ” as theologically inaccurate and unimportant (until it became a spectacular box office success, at which time, the magazine shifted its focus to the mysterious phenomenon of so many people being positively moved by what film critics and liberal theologians so despised).

Newsweek seems bent on redefining America as a nation of disbelief — or of secular belief (made in one’s own image and likeness) — while hoping earnestly America will retain its moral character.

He then disgraced the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and his own profession, by employing her most vicious critic, atheist Christopher Hitchens, to pen the magazine’s analysis of her life and spirituality. In December 2008, Meacham pushed further the envelope of creative theology with an article titled “The Biblical Case for Gay Marriage” that was so pathetically ideological, smart gay marriage proponents have ignored the unprofessional exegesis as unhelpful to their cause.

But none of these examples is as important for understanding Newsweek’s faith-based secular agenda as this week’s article about the “decline and fall of Christian America”. Editor Jon Meacham wrote the article himself, and timed it perfectly for the Christian celebration of Easter, even though the data the article presents from the American Religious Identification Survey was available many weeks earlier.

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For decades, Notre Dame has stood out as the cultural jewel of American Catholicism — public evidence the great American experiment is compatible with, and indeed enriched by, distinctly Catholic values.

That’s why hundreds of thousands of American Catholics, including high-ranking church officials, have expressed outrage over what they see as Notre Dame’s betrayal of these values for the sake of worldly prestige. On Friday, March 20th, Notre Dame University announced President Obama had accepted its invitation to be the 2009 commencement speaker and to receive an honorary law degree.

The cap and gown are not given to an “office.” They are recognitions of extraordinary personal accomplishment worthy of imitation. When a Catholic university gleefully grants an honorary law degree to someone who is using the law against the most vulnerable members of the human family–the unborn–vigorous and charitable critique is warranted, because silence would imply approval.

Now, while President Obama has achieved great things, his views and actions are in direct conflict with the Catholic Church’s teaching on the universal obligation to defend the dignity of human life at all stages. He is, by any rational account, the nation’s most public and powerful promoter of abortion rights.

The university has responded to boisterous and prolonged criticism of the invitation by saying it in no way signifies support of all of the president’s views and by reiterating its adherence to the Church’s teaching on respect for life. That’s a relief. But as university officials surely knew, this defense would be insufficient to calm the storm.

And for good reason! The Catholic Church teaches the defense of the unborn is not just one value among many others, but rather the irreplaceable cornerstone of human rights and social justice. Once you rationalize the killing of an entire class of human beings, all the jumping up and down about other rights should seem rather insincere.

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