RECENT NEWSMAKING EVENTS SUGGEST PRAYER BREAKFAST SORELY NEEDED

Coming up this week is the annual Mayors Prayer Breakfast. Official duties in your state Capitol will prevent my being here.

Believe me, we need the prayers. Scanning the news, it is clear that unless resisted, the forces of societal dissolution advance on all fronts.

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A U.S. Appeals Court ruled this week that the American Civil Liberties Union is right that Ohio's state motto, "With God all things are possible," is unconstitutional. As The Wall Street Journal notes, now the ACLU "may go after Arizona's motto, God enriches.' This isn't what the Founders intended? But with so few prominent voices raised against the ACLU, it looks like this is what we're going to get." Count mine among those "raised against."

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The same week, arguments were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Nebraska's law banning the gruesome form of infanticide known as partial-birth abortion. Many of our lifetime-appointed judges on our highest court made clear their hostility to any limitation on a woman's right to kill her baby, even late-term, fully formed babies, even as the child is passing through the birth canal in the process of being born.

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The same week, the same Supreme Court heard arguments brought by gay youth leaders seeking to force the Boy Scouts of America to admit them to the ranks of Scoutmasters. If these arguments are adopted by our highest court, instead of rejected as most lower courts who have heard them have done, little will remain of our precious rights of freedom of association, long a hallmark of American liberty.

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The same week, a Democratic state senator from Kansas City known for her liberal views rises in the Senate chamber to pass a resolution designating a portion of Interstate 70 as "Derrick Thomas Highway." (A similar House bill had earlier passed that chamber by a vote of 140-12.) Thomas was the late Kansas City Chiefs linebacker known for fighting illiteracy and other laudable civic works. He also became known, posthumously, for having fathered seven illegitimate children by five different women. Thomas died a couple of weeks after being paralyzed in a wreck he caused by weaving in and out of traffic on Interstate 29 in an ice storm. A suburban Kansas City prosecutor of my acquaintance informed me that the speeding and reckless driving that ultimately killed Thomas and instantly killed his friend wasn't an aberration. This prosecutor once convicted Thomas of going 105 mph. But for his mortality, Thomas would very likely have faced some form of vehicular homicide/manslaughter charge.

Anyway, I didn't seek for this to be my issue. Seeing that we were about to go to a vote with no discussion of the five fatherless households Thomas had created, I inquired of my colleague. I began by noting Thomas' many good deeds before noting the devastating news of his children. This timid inquiry ignited a 20-minute exchange culminating first in a statewide, then national news story that has since played on ESPN, MSNBC and CNN Headline News, among others.

My colleague told an interviewer I'm "narrow-minded" and chided me, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." So withholding the state's memorial of a man who fathered seven illegitimate children, and who would have faced criminal charges had he not killed himself and his passenger, is to "cast the first stone." Pray hard.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.