Katha Pollitt has a fit of anti-religious mania (via Protein Wisdom):

Just think of the damage religious mania (combined, as it tends to be, with nationalism and patriarchy) has wrought around the globe this year, the first of the new millennium–the World Trade Center attack, the Taliban, suicide bombers in Israel versus yet more settlements on the West Bank. And that’s not even mentioning our own home-grown fanatics, like the recently apprehended fugitive Clayton Lee Waagner, who threatened to murder forty-two abortion clinic workers and who is the main suspect in some 550 anthrax-hoax letters to clinics, or the mainstreaming of conservative religious views, as in the explosion of abstinence-only sex education and theologically motivated restrictions on stem-cell research.

Hope you didn’t miss anything there, Katha! Well, let’s try a little experiment in substituting terms and see what you think…

Just think of the damage socialism (combined, as it tends to be, with state power and coercion) has wrought around the globe this century, the last of the old millennium – the gulag, the Great Leap Forward, the mass slaughter in Cambodia under Pol Pot. And that’s not even mentioning our home-grown adherents, like Alger Hiss and the Rosenburgs, who sold the secrets of their country to those dedicated to destroying it, or the spread of multiculturalism and postmodernism in our universities, and in the explosion of government regulation, clean-water laws, and politically-motivated restrictions on land-use.

I think I’d be deafened by the hysterical shrieks from Katha and company comparing me to a bad, bad man who used to be the junior senator from Wisconsin.