What’s the biggest secret in the United States today? It can’t be the number of nuclear warheads we hold. President Obama has already spilled the beans on that one. It’s 5,113. He told the world. And it’s not the identity of SEAL Team Six as the strike force that took down Osama bin Laden. Vice President Joe Biden blurted that one out just days after everyone agreed not to do so.

The biggest secret—if you believe the media—is President Obama’s real position on marriage. To the press it’s some really big mystery. Why so? For as long as Barack Obama has been in public life, going back to his days as an Illinois state senator, he has opposed every effort to defend marriage. He opposed the federal marriage amendment to the Constitution. He opposed the federal Defense of Marriage Act (and has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder not to defend it in court). He opposed California’s Proposition 8. He opposed Iowa’s vote to remove state Supreme Court justices who overturned marriage there. He opposed North Carolina’s Amendment One. He opposes a similar effort in Maryland.

Marriage has been under sustained assault for more than 20 years, and Barack Obama has never supported a single effort to protect it. So why the big mystery?

It’s because President Obama now realizes that black Americans and Hispanic Americans overwhelmingly do not agree that marriage should be ended. He knows that pro-marriage voters are the key to carrying such critical states as Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado this fall.

Why do I refer to the issue as “ending marriage”? Just consider what Biden told Meet the Press on Sunday:

“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.”

Given this rationale, how can Biden say no to three men marrying? Two men and a woman? If everyone can marry, then no one can marry, thus ending marriage as we know it.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been working to end marriage for years. He told an overflow crowd at the Newseum three years ago, “They say gay marriage will lead to polygamy. I’m for that!” The audience of liberal grad students, congressional staffers, court clerks, and journalists cheered wildly in response.

Turley has thought through the marriage issue better than Joe Biden has. That’s not surprising. Turley knows constitutional law; Biden knows Will and Grace. Perhaps next year, the veep will see reruns of HBO’s Big Love and decide he’s OK with polygamy, too.

Americans need to realize that marriage itself is at issue in this country. And Biden’s mental meanderings should not obscure the issue. His same-sex miasma doesn’t conceal this blazingly obvious fact: This is an anti-marriage administration. Every policy it has pursued is anti-marriage.

President Obama says his position is “evolving.” Whether he wins in November or loses, he will emerge on the day after Election Day as a full-blown advocate of abolishing marriage.

There has been a great deal of attention given to the controversy over the Department of Health and Human Services contraceptive insurance mandate for religious groups. Millions of Americans, including many Democrats and many Protestants and other non-Catholics recognize this as an assault on religious freedom.

But the HHS mandate is only one of a growing number of attacks on America’s First Freedom. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. This was a case in which a dismissed teacher in a Lutheran school sued, claiming discrimination. The parent church body—The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS)—has always commissioned its teachers as ministers.

The courts have for decades recognized a “ministerial exception.” That means if you dismiss your priest, pastor, or rabbi, the government is not going to get involved in the internal matters of a church or synagogue. It’s a vitally important principle to keep the state from becoming “excessively entangled” in church governance.

That didn’t sway the Obama administration, which went into court pressing the argument that a ministerial exception should only apply to those who perform exclusively religious functions.

Carl Anderson, the Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus, spoke out against the administration’s argument this week in an address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, noting that “Chief Justice John Roberts wondered aloud during oral arguments whether even the pope could meet the administration’s definition.”

Anderson then pointed out how even Jesus could not meet the Obama test of “exclusively religious” functions. After all, when He was feeding the 5,000, was that exclusively religious or was that a secular function the government would recognize as food service? And do we want Obama administration bureaucrats sitting on a mountainside judging what’s secular, what’s religious? Give ’em a fish!

The faith communities breathed a sigh of relief in January when the court ruled 9-0 that the LCMS had acted within its rights. Consider that majority. How often do we see a 9-0 decision in this day of sharply polarized philosophies and ideologies?

What does this mean? It means the Obama administration is governed by an ideology of church and state so far outside the mainstream that even the most liberal members of the Supreme Court—even two of Obama’s own appointees to that court—cannot endorse this view.

This should be a matter of the gravest concern to all of us. James Madison recognized the passage of Virginia’s Statute of Religious Freedom as adding to the “the lustre of our country.” Madison believed that securing religious freedom was the necessary condition for the maintenance of civil liberty. It was that inspired idea that he carried from Richmond in 1786 to Philadelphia in 1787.

Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 pledging a new foundation for the American republic. It sounded like high-toned political rhetoric then. But now, it should alarm us. Moving America away from its foundation on religious freedom endangers all our liberties. Allowing this administration to set up constitutional tests that not even Jesus could pass shows how extreme it is in its lust for power.

We should not be breathing a collective sigh of relief that the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of religious freedom in January. Instead, faithful Americans and those who hold no religious beliefs but who cherish liberty should not be complacent. Under our system, it is the president who names federal judges, including Supreme Court justices.

If President Obama can find lawyers radical enough to argue such a meritless case before the high court, he can in time find judges radical enough to give their consent. When religious liberty is endangered, all our liberties are threatened. Madison said it well: “The people are right to take alarm at the first advance on their liberties.”

President Obama seems to have weathered the storm of criticism that arose over his whispering to Dmitri Medvedev during the nuclear summit in Seoul. Mr. Obama promised the outgoing Russian head of state that he would be more “flexible” after the election. That is, after he no longer has to put up with the nuisance of having to answer to those pesky American citizens.

Many of us think this administration has been entirely too flexible already. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that was rushed through a lame duck Senate in December 2010 advantaged the Russians. We wouldn’t call that hurried effort so much flexible as it was supine.

Two men who could tell us a lot about what post-election “flexibility” might look like are Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. It was Lugar who did the heavy lifting for President Obama in the Senate in 2010 for START.

Both men are old Russian hands. They have had decades of dealing with first the Soviet Union and now Russia. As far back as 1979, Biden and Lugar were enjoying those famed “Moscow Nights” as they luxuriated in the capital of the Evil Empire. We need to know what they said there.

Journalist Claire Berlinski, in her City Journal article from two years ago, wrote about what we have learned from the files of the late, great USSR. She told us of the collective yawn that greeted truly shocking revelations. Liberal journalists just don’t care that much.

But we should. For example, Soviet archives show media icon Mikhail Gorbachev chumming with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad (the late, blood-stained father of the current blood-stained boss in Damascus). Gorbachev agreed with Assad that Zionism was just a form of racism, made worse by its presumptions of Messianism. The idea that the Jews may be a Chosen People who look for a Messiah is wholly offensive to good atheists like Gorbachev.

But what Berlinski related about Biden and Lugar should give us pause.

Vadim Zagladin was a Soviet foreign affairs specialist. He took copious notes on all meetings with visiting dignitaries—like Assad, like Biden and Lugar.

“Unofficially, Biden and Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that [Soviet] citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for ‘human rights.’ … In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.” [emphasis added]

This is the impression these two powerful senators made on their Soviet hosts. As a result of their “not caring,” thousands of Russians and other nationalities were thrown into the psychiatric hospitals of the KGB. And we did not get an arms control treaty that could even be submitted to a Democratic Senate.

By contrast, President Reagan, whenever he met Gorbachev or any Soviet official, would press and press for specific named dissidents. He wanted the Siberian Seven Pentecostals to be allowed to emigrate. He pressed Gorbachev about Nobel Prize winner Andrrei Sakharov, Jewish “refusenik” Natan Sharansky, and a host of others. Reagan publicly called upon the Soviet Union to abide by the human rights guarantees it had signed at Helsinki.

Reagan never relented. What about arms control, the subject that apparently interested Biden and Lugar most? In 1987, Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

Reagan’s policy of peace through strength yielded the most far-reaching arms reduction agreement in modern history. The previous flaccid policy of détente favored by office holders like Biden and Lugar had yielded little but Soviet advances and Western retreat.

It would not be fair to condemn Biden and Lugar for their actions during those long-ago Moscow Nights. Both men have been in office continuously since 1979. We should not rely on the records kept by Vadim Zagladin. After all, he was a Communist wholly committed to the destruction of liberty in the West.

But it is fair to respectfully request of both men that they provide their own accounts of what transpired in the Kremlin. What did they whisper into the KGB’s itching ears?

Reagan is not the only one to prove that strength is the best and perhaps the only way to deal with the Russians. During World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill went to Moscow in the middle of winter. He found Soviet dictator Josef Stalin rude, offensive, and impossible to deal with. “If you fought the Nazis more, you [British] wouldn’t be so afraid of them,” Stalin had brusquely told Churchill, the man who defied Hitler’s blitzkrieg at a time when Stalin was still supplying the Nazi ruler with wheat.

Back at the British Embassy in Moscow, Churchill exploded in rage. He railed against bloody Stalin. Shocked, the British ambassador to Moscow tried to shush him. “Prime Minister! You must realize that every word you say is being recorded by the secret police, even here.”

Instead of whispering—as Barack Obama and, presumably, Biden and Lugar did—Churchill even more loudly denounced Stalin. He raised his voice and said that if Stalin continued in this vein on the morrow, he, Churchill, and his subordinates would return to London and put the entire matter before the War Cabinet.

The next day, Stalin greeted Churchill warmly and proceeded to negotiate with him with all due respect. The wartime alliance against Hitler held.

Vice President Biden, Sen. Lugar: You owe us your own version of your Moscow Nights.

Bill Clinton made that phrase—“It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is”—famous, or infamous. That was during his impeachment. That phrase now comes back to haunt his wife, the secretary of state, and the president who defeated her for their party’s nomination in 2008. Is Israel now in mortal peril? It depends what your definition of “is” is.

President Obama and Secretary Clinton want Israel to hold off, take no precipitate action, and, above all, not stage a “preemptive” strike against Iran and the rapidly developing Iranian nuclear weapons program. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warns that Iran may be moving its nuclear program into “hardened” sites, deep underground, protected from even the most powerful of U.S. “bunker buster” bombs.

If Iran does that, Barak warns, Iran can enter “a zone of immunity” that will allow the ruling mullahs to proceed without interference from Israel or the United States. Then, whether it takes six months or six years really will not matter: There will be no way to stop the Iranian rulers from getting their bomb. Or bombs. Ahmadinejad, Iran’s so-called president—has called Israel a “two-bomb country.” Just two nuclear weapons set off in Tel Aviv and Haifa could destroy the vast majority of the Jewish state’s population. Jerusalem, under this scenario, would be spared, but only because it is to be occupied territory.

The New York Times reports that Americans are telling the Israelis “not so fast,” that we can afford to wait until the new tougher sanctions begin to bite, and that the Iranian mullahs will feel the pressure from their long-oppressed people and be forced to abandon their nuclear program—just wait.

Martin Indyk, who has served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and who now serves at the reliably liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, said that “no end of consultations can remove [the] asymmetry.” He means that for Israel, the threat from Iran is mortal. For the United States, it is more remote.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s view is hopelessly blinkered. They really think taking away the Iranian mullahs “stuff” will deter them. Senior administration spokespeople repeatedly say that sanctions will prove to the Iranians that developing a nuclear weapon is “not in their interest.”

Years ago, New York Magazine published an article about a Suburban Joe in New Jersey who had befriended the son of a Mafia don. Joe felt a thrill at the idea of entertaining this notorious mobster’s son in his beautiful home. One afternoon, over wine and cheese, the don’s son asked Joe, “What would you do if a man with a gun came into this living room right now?” Joe said, “I’d tell him to take whatever he wanted, but not to harm us.” “Suppose,” that mobster’s scion asked, “what he wanted was to harm you.”

The Iranian rulers invented suicide bombing. They have conducted a 30-year war around the world against Israel and the United States. They believe they have a mission from God—jihad—to eradicate “the Zionist entity.” They don’t care about “stuff.” They rule a police state with an iron fist. Their long-suffering people will suffer longer. That does not matter to the mullahs. What they want is to harm.

The asymmetry Indyk referred to is only half of the matter. There is a greater asymmetry between liberal policy makers whose worldview cannot imagine anyone seriously willing to die in order to kill and the hardened realism that Israelis have been forced by bitter experience to adopt.

Take for example the murdering of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Any group that would do such a heinous thing or would condone such a monstrous act would be despised forever. Wouldn’t they? The PLO planned and executed those atrocities. The PLO applauded the murderers, sheltered them, lionized them. And did the PLO bear forever the obloquy of the world community?

Within just a few years, PLO boss Yasser Arafat was being rapturously applauded at the UN. Within 20 years of those heinous murders, Yasser Arafat was received at the White House and emerged clutching a Nobel Peace Prize.

All histories of the Third Reich show that Hitler made destruction of the Jews his highest priority. He sacrificed all of his European conquests. He had built a Germany greater than even Bismarck’s. He added to the pyre all the vast wealth of an industrious people and a dozen captive nations. All of that he burned in order to achieve his fanatical goal of extermination.

Aristotle defines power as the ability to be and to make things be. Israel has power for only one reason: to assure that the Jewish people will be and continue to be. Israel Is. That is the only “is” that matters to them.

Or should.

Co-authored by Bob Morrison.

Last year, we saw a major push back from the election results of the previous year.

In Madison, Wis., public employees occupied the state capitol for weeks to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s not unreasonable requirement that they contribute more to their own pension funds. For his efforts to bring Wisconsin back from the brink (he’s required to balance his budget), Walker is facing a union-backed recall effort. In my home state of Ohio, Gov. John Kasich’s modest attempt to bring spending in line was rebuffed by voters in a referendum.

We can also see peril in Pennsylvania as a part of this concerted effort by liberals. But in the Keystone State the left attacked Gov. Tom Corbett through one of his aides: Robert Patterson was forced to resign from the Department of Public Welfare because, as the liberal press would have it, he edits a conservative journal called The Family in America.

Most offensive to the media was an article in the journal suggesting that there are benefits for married women to not use contraception. But the oddest thing in the liberal pack journalists’ attack on Patterson and his publication was that the article they denounced was based on the findings of evolutionary psychologists and was originally published in Scientific American. It’s apparently fine for Darwinian naturalists to research and publish in secular journals, but if conservatives dare to quote them, they’ll be hounded out of office.

To the left, it’s fine if Penn State University Press publishes the works on French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir. Pennsylvania taxpayers subsidize that university press, but they pay nothing for Patterson’s journal, a highly respected source of research and writing about important public policy issues.

Beauvoir is a major figure in feminism, but she famously came out against a woman’s right to choose. That is, women should not have the right to choose marriage and family because too many women would make that choice.

Beauvoir and her long-time companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, were leading lights of the French school of philosophy known as existentialism. In politics, both Beauvoir and Sartre were apologists for Josef Stalin.

So, let’s review. In Pennsylvania, you can be a Stalinist and have your works published by the state university press, underwritten by taxpayers, and that’s OK. But if you privately publish a journal that shows the benefits that many women receive from freely choosing marriage and family, you can be driven from your public position.

Note, I am not arguing that PSU Press should be prevented from publishing admiring analyses of Beauvoir’s work. And I am not arguing that tenured professors at Pennsylvania’s public universities should not be allowed to teach what they want to teach about Beauvoir’s philosophy.

I am showing the hypocrisy of the left. Liberals are forever claiming victim status whenever elected governors or legislators try to trim state budgets. But they are the first to attack conservatives in public positions and seek to drive them and their ideas out of the public square.

In this case, the publisher of a respected, scholarly journal was driven from office because liberals don’t like the idea of women freely choosing marriage and family, and childbirth over contraception. Liberals want to protect you and me from such a peril in Pennsylvania, and this suppression of ideas is not new in the Keystone State.

Six years ago, a photo in a brochure published by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court showed a famous Violet Oakley mural behind the justices in the courtroom. Oakley’s painting, titled The Decalogue, depicts Moses chiseling out the Ten Commandments with the text of the commandments inscribed below. But the politically correct crowd in Pennsylvania decided to deliberately blur the text in the brochure’s photo, wanting to obliterate any knowledge of the source of our laws and our ideas of justice.

Ironically, liberals were willing to censor the work of a famous female artist. Oakley’s murals in the Pennsylvania State House may be one of the first instances of a woman painter being so honored.

Bob Patterson is just the latest victim of political correctness.

Dan Quayle was on hand last January for the swearing-in ceremony of his son, newly elected Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.).

The senior Quayle, who once represented Indiana in the House and then in the Senate, said it was a “magical” moment, even better than when he was sworn in as President George H.W. Bush’s vice president. That is surely pardonable fatherly pride.

As Congress struggles to cope with the results of 40 years of misplaced priorities, it may be worthwhile to re-visit an important article by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. This careful social scientist bravely took to the pages of The Atlantic in April 1993, with a title sure to provoke the right-thinking (or, more accurately, the left-thinking) readers of that venerable journal: “Dan Quayle Was Right.”

Whitehead was referring, of course, to Dan Quayle’s speech on family values in which he criticized Hollywood TV character Murphy Brown. Taking on a popular sitcom figure was highly controversial, especially when the fictional Brown (played by Candice Bergen) decided to choose life, not abortion, for her child. But the show’s premise was not that this was an “unplanned” pregnancy. No, Murphy Brown most deliberately decided to have a child without the burden of marriage.

Vice President Quayle was a pro-life politician, but he recognized that children born out of wedlock are disadvantaged in many ways. We today bless young women when they choose life. And we thank God when they choose adoption instead of abortion for their newborns. But we cannot pretend that there is no harm when children suffer the burden of not having a father in the home.

Whitehead met the feminist arguments made in the 1960s and ’70s head-on, arguments that continue to do harm to America to this day:

“According to a highly regarded 1977 study by the Carnegie Council on Children, ‘The greater availability of jobs for women means that more middle-class children today survive their parents’ divorce without a catastrophic plunge into poverty.’

“Feminists, who had long argued that the path to greater equality for women lay in the world of work outside the home, endorsed this assumption. In fact, for many, economic independence was a stepping-stone toward freedom from both men and marriage. As women began to earn their own money, they were less dependent on men or marriage, and marriage diminished in importance. In Gloria Steinem’s memorable words, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’”

Fish? Bicycles? This is neither logical nor beneficial. It doesn’t pretend to be a serious argument, much less the basis for a nation’s social policy. Yet, as Whitehead’s article showed, many prestigious foundations—tax-exempt foundations—peddled such damaging wares to an unsuspecting American public.

Stephen Mosher, the highly respected president of the Population Research Institute makes a telling point about the difference between civil engineers and social engineers. Mosher, who first broke the story of forced abortions in China in the 1980s, points out that if a civil engineer’s designs for bridges or tunnels prove disastrous, causing thousands to lose their lives, that engineer’s professional license is revoked. But if a social engineer’s notions of how to de-construct society prove harmful to millions, that social engineer usually gets tenure at a major university—and probably some hefty foundation grants to go with it.

We know that poverty—especially poverty endured by children—is causally related to family structure. We know that fragile families have a harder time providing for the needs of children. We know that if any couple will simply graduate from high school and avoid bearing children out of wedlock, the chances they or their children will live in poverty is a mere 4 percent. Divorced and never-formed families deprive children of the security and stability they need—and so desperately want.

It is strange that so many on the left continue to claim the moral high ground, decades after they hollowed out the ground beneath America’s poor families. If liberals won’t apologize to Dan Quayle, can they at least apologize to the millions of children their policies have impoverished?

The Obama administration is lending support to Congress in an effort to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. The president, instead, is backing something called the “Respect Marriage Act.” The latter measure, quite simply, would abolish marriage. While calling for “respect” in the Orwellian sense, it would offer true marriage the same “respect” President Obama showed to the body of Osama bin Laden—a hasty burial at sea after summarily being put to death.

I don’t object to the president’s actions against a sworn enemy of our country, but I object most strenuously to his plan to finish off marriage. What the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) does is protect true marriage in federal law. This means that Social Security, the military, our diplomatic service, the Census, our federal work force, and myriad federal activities may consider as married only one man and one woman.

DOMA has also protected states from being forced to recognize the counterfeit marriages that have been legalized by a few liberal states. This is critical. Thirty-two states have voted to protect true marriage, which have included liberal and conservative states, swing states and moderate states. In these states, a new coalition has come together to defend marriage.

Starting in Hawaii, a true mosaic of races and cultures with a non-Christian majority, citizens voted to protect true marriage. What followed was an unbroken string of marriage victories. Only once, in Arizona, did confused voters fail to ratify new protections for marriage. But voters in that state quickly corrected their mistake in the next election cycle. In the coming year, Minnesota and North Carolina voters will get to vote on protecting marriage.

DOMA protects marriage. It also protects the integrity of the electoral process itself. The drive to abolish marriage is fundamentally anti-democratic. The people want true marriage; the elites want to do away with it.

How do we know this? In 2008, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a panel discussion on marriage featured liberal law professor Jonathan Turley. He responded to critics’ charges that allowing two men or two women to marry would lead to polygamy. Turley conceded the point that it would lead to polygamy: “And I am for that!” His audience was composed of journalists, law students, and Capitol Hill staffers. They applauded wildly the death of marriage.

That death will mean the impoverishment of more women and more children. We know that if a young couple will but finish high school, avoid bearing children out of wedlock, and marry, the chances they will live in poverty are only 4 percent. True marriage is the best anti-poverty program ever devised.

No one who is for the abolition of marriage can claim to be a friend of the poor. And it is not only poor women and children who will suffer, but also minorities and the marginal. We know this because they are the ones suffering now.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and the elite media try to put down DOMA as a wedge issue. GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt, a self-proclaimed Big Business Republican, similarly disparages marriage as a wedge issue.

True marriage is no wedge; it is a bridge. And that bridge brings together blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites into a powerful majority coalition. That is why the elites hate and fear the marriage issue. That is why they will not allow voters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New York state to vote to protect true marriage.

What a tragedy it will be for the country, and especially for black Americans, if President Obama succeeds in abolishing marriage. His own marriage has been a model for the nation. He says his views on marriage are “evolving.” We know what that means. Evolvers only go one way. He is readying the country for his change of stance.

I would appeal to the president to remember Tennessee in 1866. In that first year after the Civil War, thousand more marriages were recorded. Thousands of freedmen and freedwomen walked hundreds of miles to have their marriages legally sanctioned. Many of these former slaves were barefoot, but they wanted desperately to achieve what had been so long and so unjustly denied them: marriage as God had designed it. After slavery, after Jim Crow, the worst calamity ever to befall black Americans has been the loss of marriage in our culture.

President Obama! Remember Tennessee! Defend the Defense of Marriage Act!

There was an audible gasp in the audience when the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced its choice for 2009. President Barack Obama had been in office less than nine months when the world was stunned by the news that he had been chosen for this most prestigious honor. The president spurned advice that he should diplomatically decline the award. But with becoming modesty, he said he would work to merit inclusion with past Nobel laureates.

That was the season of Barack Obama’s Great Overture. He was going to engage in unprecedented “outreach” to what he and his advisers called “the Muslim world.” In addressing the Grand National Assembly in Turkey, Obama said:

“I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds the United States and Turkey has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. So let me say this as clearly as I can: The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.”

It’s interesting that the White House website referred to the president’s speech in Turkey as the “Crossroads.” Uh oh. Maybe the communications director at that time, that admirer of Chairman Mao, didn’t get the message: Crosses are definitely out in Turkey. In fact, when Pope Benedict XVI crossed the threshold of the Saint Sophia church. . . . Oops! Correction: When the pope entered the sanctuary of a latter-day mosque, formerly a Christian site, he was advised not to cross himself lest the pontiff provoke riots worldwide.

After all those apologies to the Turks that Obama offered in 2009, how are things going now? Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described his country’s once-warm relations with America’s leading Middle East ally, Israel, as tense. He called Israel’s effort to block a Turkish flotilla bound for Gaza “a cause for war.” He pledged Turkey’s continued support for Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza.

And Erdogan is now visiting Libya and Tunisia, centers of what the media hopefully refer to as the “Arab Spring.” In Libya, meanwhile, National Transitional Council Chairman Mustafa Mohammed Abdul-Jalil, a former justice minister under Muammar Qaddafi’s long-term dictatorship, celebrated his ex-boss’ ouster in a speech to thousands of cheering, weeping Libyans in Tripoli’s Martyrs’ Square. After thanking NATO and the Obama administration for helping to dislodge Qaddafi, Jalil said, “We strive for a state of the law, for a state of prosperity, for a state that will have Islamic Sharia law [as] the basis of legislation.” Erdogan will be able to help out with that, to be sure. And by the way, the new Libyan regime will not extradite Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber.

President Obama didn’t make it to Libya or Tunisia in his apology tour, but he did address an overflow crowd at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University. There, in June 2009, Obama referred to the Quran as “holy” and to Islam as having been “revealed” in the Middle East. It was surely an historic visit by an American president. None of the 42 men who occupied his office would have used those words before a Muslim audience, and surely not at Sunni Islam’s oldest seat of learning.

Once again, Obama sought to make amends. How has that worked out for the United States? Hosni Mubarak was then the 30-year ruler of Egypt. He had maintained a Cold Peace with Israel for those three decades. Annual visits—deliberately kept low-key—were exchanged between top Israeli and Egyptian officials.

Mubarak was ousted last February and is now facing a death sentence in a Cairo court.

Meanwhile, last weekend, the Israeli Embassy in Egypt was invaded by a Muslim mob bearing signs “I Hate Israel ” and calling for death to the Jews.

Jerusalem had to quickly extract its ambassador and embassy staff. A half-dozen Israeli security police were very nearly lynched. The Israelis called upon the United States to intervene with the transitional government in Cairo. Egyptian military stormed the embassy to snatch the Israeli security forces from the grip of the bloodthirsty mob. Egypt and Israel are now on the verge of war.

Does it seem likely that Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, or Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah will be inviting the president of the United States for a visit any time soon?

Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan broke ranks in 2008 to support Barack Obama for president. Now, with regret, she says his stewardship of the economy has failed. “He made it worse,” was her terse summation of his policies. And although it seems the TV news networks have had their “Middle East Turmoil” logos painted on our screens for decades, it is undeniable that, compared with the U.S. position in that troubled region in 2009, “He made it worse.”

This is what happens when you get the Nobel Peace Prize before you get the peace. This is what happens when you bow to desert despots and abase your own country before the world.

Bin Laden was right about only one thing: His fellow Muslims respect the Strong Horse.

Can anyone say the United States is viewed today as the Strong Horse in the Middle East?

I wanted to reach over and give Chris Matthews a wedgie. He kept referring to the 2004 Ohio marriage ballot initiative as a “wedge” issue. The host of Hardball on MSNBC seems to think that social issues are all wedge issues. I call them “bridge” issues.

Matthews and many other liberals take their cues from the Thomas Frank book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank thinks that wily conservatives use “wedge” issues like life and marriage to duped blue-collar workers so they won’t vote their true “class interest”—with the Democrats. Frank is a Kansan and a liberal and cannot quite stomach the appeals conservatives make to pro-life and pro-marriage voters.

Well, Chris, calling them wedge issues is a way to diminish their importance, suggesting that they are not worthy of serious people’s attention. But I disagree: These matters go to the heart of who we are as a nation. The right to life is “inalienable.” Tens of millions of Americans still believe this, even if our elites are confused about when unborn children are endowed with that inalienable right. A Harvard grad may think such questions are “above my pay grade,” but regular Americans are not so perplexed.

We see in state after state that black Americans, Hispanics, and whites are coming together on the issues of life and marriage. This is why social issues are bridge issues. Those who urge Republicans to avoid these questions are the same folks who so often talk about “reaching out” to minorities. Well, there’s no better example of successful bridging in politics than the 2004 vote in Ohio to sustain marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

A lot of the GOP establishment was nervous about putting that measure on the ballot. Gee, might it bring out a lot of minority voters? Might that make it harder to carry Ohio for George W. Bush?

The results clearly showed that putting marriage on the ballot is why George W. Bush carried the Buckeye State in 2004. And the comfortable margin for Bush was so convincing that even John Kerry quickly conceded the state and the election.

There were the predictable howls from liberals. They tried to make a case that I, as Ohio secretary of state, somehow colluded with inner city Democrats—many of them black—to suppress minority voting in those communities.

Duh? Do liberals ever realize how foolish they really look? Black voters were not likely to have been disenfranchised in the very precincts where they live and vote by their own friends and neighbors. This is why nobody but the Michael Moores was silly enough to place any credence in these complaints.

Just look at what the marriage issue did on the ballot. In Ohio in ’04, Bush won with 50.8 percent of the vote, but marriage scored a thumping 62 percent. Clearly, Bush was helped by the presence of marriage on the ballot. In fact, he would not have won without marriage on the ballot. His 16 percent of black voters in Ohio was his best percentage in this community in the nation.

Marriage on the ballot helped bring out almost 1 million more voters in Ohio in ’04 than had voted in the state in 2000: 5.62 million vs. 4.70 million. Voters care deeply about these issues.

In 2008, John McCain never endorsed the pro-marriage Proposition 8 in California. His family and his campaign staff were opposed to it. Probably nothing could have saved McCain in that state in that year.

But Prop. 8 garnered 52.24 percent approval. That’s in spite of the pro-marriage forces being outspent 10-to-1 by the faux marriage folks. McCain was going down to a 54 percent to 37 percent crushing defeat in the Golden State at the same time marriage was winning.

Black and Hispanic voters may have put Prop. 8 over the top in California, but it was important to all Californians that year. The presidential vote was 13.46 million, while the vote on Prop. 8 was 13.40 million.

These are truly stunning figures. I can tell you as a former secretary of state that it’s virtually unheard of for a ballot proposition to come that close to the presidential vote totals.

This proves how much Americans care. And it shows that social issues are bridge not wedge issues. If conservatives want to win support in minority communities, I say for them to stand strong for life and uphold marriage. That’s the real bridge to the 21st century.

President Obama’s May 19 speech on foreign policy concentrated on the Middle East. He spoke quite correctly of Osama bin Laden in his address, billed as another outreach to the Muslim world:

“Bin Laden was no martyr. He was a mass murderer who offered a message of hate—an insistence that Muslims had to take up arms against the West, and that violence against men, women, and children was the only path to change. He rejected democracy and individual rights for Muslims in favor of violent extremism; his agenda focused on what he could destroy—not what he could build.”

Substitute the name Yasser Arafat for bin Laden, and everything in the paragraph above would be equally true of Arafat’s outfit, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), aka Fatah. For decades, Arafat murdered Americans, Israelis, and anyone else who got in his way. This included West Bank Arab mayors who favored some kind of accommodation with Israel. He invented airline hijacking for terror purposes. Bin Laden doubtless got the idea for 9/11 watching his big brother in the terror business.

Arafat spent most of his years in power—nearly 40—not appealing to Muslims as Muslims. In those days, his sponsor was the officially atheist Soviet Union. So he mumbled something about Arab socialism. But all his most violent supporters were Muslims. At the same time, to cover his bases, Arafat was happy to shout “Jihad!” in his insatiable demand for all of what we regard as Israel. And today, in the midst of this so-called “Arab Spring,” his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, has just pulled off a deal with Hamas, the openly terrorist Islamist group that launches missiles against Israel from the Gaza Strip.

When bin Laden attacked us on 9/11, Palestinians fired their rifles in the air in Gaza and in West Bank towns like Nablus and Ramallah. They danced in the streets as the Twin Towers fell. They gave their children candy.

Still, for the past decade, the PLO has received billions in U.S. and European Union aid for supposedly humanitarian purposes: schools, hospitals, and building “infra-structure.” Except in those schools, the children put on plays dressed as suicide bombers and dance to tunes that call for death to the Jews. In the PLO areas, PTA stands for Palestinian Terrorist Association.

Osama bin Laden famously said that Muslims would always follow the “Strong Horse.”

President Obama has been advised—badly—to put his Strong Horse to work for a final resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The president’s prestige rose from the SEAL raid on bin Laden’s compound. But Obama took America from Strong Horse to Hobbled Horse in just 19 days.

Now he wants our horse to kick against our only ally in the Middle East: Israel. Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration’s new determination is to “put the screws” to Israel.

Israel has supported the United States throughout decades of war and terror in the Middle East. Israel supported us throughout that “long twilight struggle” that John F. Kennedy spoke of: the Cold War with the Soviets. So it would make sense to kick Israel, or so our State Department thinks.

After all, Turkey was once our strongest NATO partner in the Middle East. Turkey is fast becoming an Islamist state. Egypt had supported U.S. efforts in the region for 30 years. Egypt is today slipping under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood.

So why not kick Israel? What other ally in the Middle East does this administration have left to betray? And isn’t it ironic that the president wants American taxpayers to fork over—from our already exhausted Treasury—further billions to Arab regimes for these purposes, as the president outlined in his May 19 speech:

“Across the region, we intend to provide assistance to civil society, including those that may not be officially sanctioned, and who speak uncomfortable truths.”

Here in America, many organizations in our own civil society that seek grants from our government will be disqualified because they do not share this administration’s radical plans for marriage and for including abortion in healthcare. Talk about not being “officially sanctioned.” And this administration is pondering ways to force the donors to these groups to disclose to Obama’s agents all their political contributions. Thus they may lose not only their government contracts, but they can also be subjected to IRS audits. Such is the fate of those who speak “uncomfortable truths” here in this land of the free.

If we want to be the Strong Horse in the Middle East, perhaps we should ask ourselves what the Palestinian leaders have done to deserve another state. Palestinians already constitute a majority of Jordan. If the UN seats the PLO as a nation, how can we view the UN as a helper in the war on terror?

When Franklin D. Roosevelt fought World War II, he said our goal against the terrorist Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese militarists was nothing less than unconditional surrender. FDR took the whole nation to war and we fought that war to win. Perhaps that war on terror ended in victory much more quickly because we Americans were only funding one side in it.