6/22/00 3:45 p.m.
Sympathy for the Devil
Not what the Founding Fathers were worried about.

By NR's Ramesh Ponnuru & John J. Miller

t seems there's a controversy over a D.C. public school inviting a member of the Church of Satan to address tenth-graders as part of a religion class. No, it's not that the invitation was issued in the first place — but that the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School for Public Policy made parents sign a letter explicitly allowing their kids to hear Damon Morningstar discuss his views, which, as the letter noted, "fall outside the religious mainstream."

Students previously had visited Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist sites in the area, and nobody made their parents sign waivers then. "Everyone needs to be treated equally and the school can't particularly choose which religion to permit or not permit in that way," Judith Schaeffer of People for American Way told the Washington City Paper. "If they were in a Baptist community and they sent home slips when a Jewish rabbi spoke and not a Catholic preacher, you can see the problem."

No doubt this was just the sort of thing James Madison was worried about.

Spy Detector
Can a book blow a cover? The hottest-selling book in Los Alamos, N.M., is a novel by Lynette Baughman called A Spy Within, according to the city's purchase circle on Amazon.com. And #4 on the best-seller list is A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector, by David T. Lykken.