Two good Americans need your help. Both are Christians, both believe in the self evident truths of the Declaration, and both are under attack for professing that religious and civic faith.

J. Leon Holmes, of Arkansas, has been appointed by President Bush to a Federal District Court vacancy. He is a past president of Arkansas Right to Life and a distinguished attorney and scholar. Three Democratic Senators, Durbin of Illinois, Feinstein of California, and Schumer of New York, have denounced Dr. Holmes in public and led a vile campaign of public vituperation against him. His sin? He has defended, in an article for a religious journal, co-authored with his wife, Susan, the teaching of marriage in Ephesians 5. He has also defended the all male priesthood of the Catholic Church, and the moral wrongness of sodomy. The trio of leftist senators also find fault with his approving Booker T. Washington's Christian sentiment that Divine Providence had a purpose for the American people in allowing the evil of black slavery to exist here. That purpose, incidentally, was to teach whites, by way of the humility and Christian witness of good black men and women, something about their own pride and other sins. That the wise ends of Providence in allowing evil must be reverenced was a key thought in Lincoln's Second Inaugural, too.

Finally, the sycophants of political correctness in Schumer's staff dug up a letter that the young Dr. Holmes wrote over 20 years ago, in which he noted, in hyperbolic language ... that's a figure of speech, Senator Schumer, in case you didn't know ... the simple fact that conception as a result of rape is very rare.

For breaking the taboos of the left, for loving and defending life, marriage, and the teaching of his church, Dr. Holmes is deemed, by three powerful senators, ineligible for public office in the Federal Government. This is to apply a religious test against a believer, in this case a Catholic, for Federal office. The Constitution, the Senators might recall, forbids such tests.

The Grand Inquisitors of the sodomite and feminist left are also demanding that another Catholic, Senator Rick Santorum, resign his leadership position in the United States Senate because he sided with the state of Texas and numerous public officials in defending a Texas statute forbidding the "crime against nature." Santorum made the point, often explained in detail by Ambassador Keyes, that the principle involved in legitimizing sodomy, a principle of general licence for sexual appetites, would undermine the family and leave public policy impotent in such related matters as polygamy and adultery.

The Declaration proclaims a respect for "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Jefferson, who wrote it, showed plainly enough that he found no natural grounds for the conduct of sodomites. His model legislation for the State of Virginia includes the following: "Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with a man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in diameter at the least." Peterson, Merrill D. "Crimes and Punishments" Thomas Jefferson: Writings Public Papers (Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1984) pp. 355, 356.

Santorum is proposing nothing so harsh as this statute. But he makes, in accordance with American and Christian tradition, and the authoritative teaching of his Faith, a stand against conflating unnatural sexual acts with marital relations within the bond of matrimony. There is nothing exteme about such a position, and to condemn a man for it is to misunderstand the American Republic and its longstanding history of policy favoring and protecting marriage and the resulting family.

I have been posting on this site articles about both men, and the attacks on them. I urge you to learn the details of their stories, and use your natural and constitutional rights to contact your reperesentatives to see that their honor, and the common good of the Republic, are upheld.

For America,