The statement on its surface reads like a PSA from the Disney Channel, a favorite of Mr. Obama’s daughters Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10: Follow your dreams, dream big, let nothing stand in the way of your dreams.  Yet underneath is the simmering stench of latex and death.

Babies get in the way of dreams.

Malia, says her father, dreams of getting her driver’s license and having her own car.  In a speech last summer to U.S. automakers, Obama joked that he hoped they were working on a model “that gets a top speed of 15 miles an hour.  [And one that would deploy an] ejector seat any time boys are in the car.”  As a father, he knows what’s on the minds of 16-year-old boys.

And what happens to a boy if he fumbles around in an automobile, with no particular place to go, and happens to unfasten his young female passenger’s safety belt?  Well, nothing, really.  He can go on and pursue his dreams of being an NBA star or a community organizer.

Were it not for Roe, however, the unlucky girl, somebody’s daughter, might face the nightmare of morning sickness, an episiotomy, or stretch marks, not to mention lining up to register at Target or AFDC.

Roe v. Wade helps to fulfill little girls’ dreams.

“When Negroes have been able to ascend economically, statistics reveal they plan their families with even greater care than whites.”  Thus wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1966, in a speech on the occasion of his acceptance of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award.  “Negroes of higher economic and educational status actually have fewer children than white families in the same circumstances.”

In his speech, Dr. King lamented the “Negro folkways” carried from large plantations and farms into the ghettos of America’s cities, which resulted in “many unwanted children.”  But the blame for their sad existence fell squarely on the shoulders of powerful whites, who, by thwarting Sanger’s efforts, withheld a “profoundly important ingredient in [the Negro man’s] quest for security and a decent life.”

Providing ready access to contraception to black families, King insisted, would help to free the Negro man, unlocking “the income potential he can command.”

One week before the recent Roe anniversary, Mr. Obama marked the national MLK Day by visiting a largely black Washington-area school.  “Today, we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he told the children.  “And we should honor that legacy by acting as drum majors for service and lifting up those less fortunate.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone less fortunate, statistically, than an African-American baby in the womb.  For, although blacks make up roughly 12.2 percent of the population of the United States, black women account for between 30 and 38 percent of all abortions.  (According to the Gutt­macher Institute, whites, at 63.7 percent of the population, have 36 percent of all abortions; Hispanics, at 16.3 percent, have 25 percent of the abortions.)

Sanger’s and King’s dream of the great leveling effect of free and easy contraception sank under the weight of the Sexual Revolution.  Ever since Roe, Planned Parenthood has tried to fulfill that dream by transforming itself into a killing factory.  And despite the civil-rights revolution of the 60’s, black ghettos still exist, providing a prime location for Planned Parenthood clinics, who prey on the poor of every ethnicity, but on blacks especially.

One part of Dr. King’s statistical analysis holds true: In the years to come, we won’t likely find the President’s daughters in the waiting room of an abortuary.  They are well educated, affluent, and live in an intact home.  But not every African-American family can afford a hybrid car with an ejector seat: 27.4 percent remain below the poverty level, imprisoned by a welfare state that offers them abortion as a medicine of hope.

“I understand teenage-hood is complicated,” the President told automakers.  But his daughters need not worry about randy young men with illicit dreams: “I should also point out that I have men with guns that surround them, often.”

Roe v. Wade, now entering ripe middle age, made sure that no protection would surround the very least and most vulnerable among us—black, Hispanic, or white—who dream away silently in their uterine cradles.  Whether the product of outdated folkways or of fumblings in fancy cars, they are, after all, a psychological and financial burden, an obstacle standing in the way of big dreams.  As such, they may be discriminated against at will.

Their dreams don’t matter.

[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.]

I don't care how sacred the football program is or what you expect in terms of a future job: If you see a boy being molested, you immediately stop the proceedings, using violence if/because necessary.  That there isn't more of a public outcry against McQueary speaks volumes about the death of masculinity in America.

*alleged

**current assistant football coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions

The very idea of "Middle Earth" came from a (likely) ninth-century poem called Christ or The Ascension, by a man named Cynewulf.  In honor of the creator of Lord of the Rings, here's the relevant passage:

Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended,
ond soðfæsta sunnan leoma,
torht ofer tunglas, þu tida gehwane
of sylfum þe symle inlihtes!
Swa þu, god of gode gearo acenned,
sunu soþan fæder, swegles in wuldre
butan anginne æfre wære,
swa þec nu for þearfum þin agen geweorc
bideð þurh byldo, þæt þu þa beorhtan us
sunnan onsende, ond þe sylf cyme
þæt ðu inleohte þa þe longe ær,
þrosme beþeahte ond in þeostrum her,
sæton sinneahtes; synnum bifealdne
deorc deaþes sceadu dreogan sceoldan.

Charles W. Kennedy has translated this to read:

Hail Day-Star!  Brightest angel sent to man *throughout the earth* [in Middle Earth], and Thou steadfast splendour of the sun, bright above stars!  Ever Thou dost illumine with Thy light the time of every season.  As Thou, begotten God of God, Son of the True Father, without beginning abodest ever in the splendour of heaven, so now for need Thy handiwork bessecheth boldly that Thou send the bright sun unto us; that Thou come and shed Thy light on those who long ere this, compassed about with mist and in the darkness, clothed in sin, sit here in the long night, and must needs endure the dark shadow of Death.

How boring is the world of Christopher Hitchens and his fellow science-worshipers!  Tolkien, like Cynewulf, knew that reality is far more interesting than the mere visible world.

We call it American exceptionalism—the belief that, from among the countries of the world, the United States of America has been uniquely called by God to be X. In this equation, X equals whatever you think America stands for.

The Shining City on a Hill, the New Jerusalem, Manifest Destiny, the Sacred Union, the Great Society, the protector of God’s chosen people—X has many incarnations, some of them draped with Geneva gowns or encased in sidewinder missiles.

Harsh realities have pulled Christians back from the brink of this idolatry—half a million dead here, a generation lost to a sexual or unitarian revolution there—causing believers to remember that Stone that smashed the idol of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, or that line from Kipling about being one with Nineveh and Tyre. Maybe we’re not so special after all. Or just as special as, say, those Iraqi Christians recently liberated from their homes and churches.

Like Rome, America has a religion that supports and guarantees her greatness, one that sacralizes her exceptionalism. Imagine, if you will, if this country had a sacred past, one that factored into the salvation narrative itself. You look at this vast continent, and your mind boggles—all of this land, and it was only occupied by loincloth-wearing animists for a thousand or more years? Was anyone else here before them? Where did the lost tribes of Israel go? What if they came here! And since transatlantic travel was pretty scarce during the first century a.d., and since Jesus Christ came first “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” wouldn’t it follow that He appeared, resurrected from the dead, right here in America? And lest the gates of Hell prevail, doesn’t it then follow that a record of this would be written down, on golden tablets that would endure centuries of weather, and buried for later discovery? And (skipping ahead) wouldn’t the discovery here of “another testament of Jesus Christ” firmly establish the uniqueness, the permanence of America? And (skipping further ahead) wouldn’t any threat to America therefore be an attack on God?

W. Cleon Skousen thought so. For him the threat was the Red Menace, and he fought it on behalf of Elohim as an FBI special agent, a speaker for the John Birch Society, and in his book The Naked Communist (1958), in which he prophetically listed the goals of communism—many of which were fulfilled during the Cold War.

Skousen, you may have guessed, was a committed Mormon. As such, he denied the key tenets of Christianity, while using biblical terminology. Thus, for example, he believed that the one we all know as god, the father of Jesus (and Lucifer), was once a mere creature, but this “Elohim” “acquired,” through virtue, the glory and power of a god, being recognized as such by the universe’s “vast numbers of intelligences.” Thus, Skousen wrote (in 1953),

since God “acquired” the honor and sustaining influence of “all things” it follows . . . that if He should do anything to violate the confidence or “sense of justice” of these intelligences, they would promptly withdraw their support, and the “power” of God would disintegrate.

You may ask yourself, why in the world would anyone become a Mormon? This perception isn’t lost on the Latter-Day Saints, who don’t advertise that you, too, could rule your own galaxy, any more than Tom Cruise speaks publicly of the fate of the Thetans. Instead, they make those heartwarming commercials about family time and other things that interest conservatives.

Like, say, the threat of communism. Or liberals. Or the “racist” Barack Obama. Or any other threat to the aforementioned American exceptionalism.

Glenn Beck, the weeping conservative firebrand, has been a Mormon for a little over ten years. And while he pays homage to the writings of such great conservatives as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—which writings he calls “our American scriptures”—Beck has made it no secret that his favorite author is Cleon Skou­sen. Not Cleon Skousen, apologist of Interplanetary Elohim, but Cleon Skousen, author of The 5,000 Year Leap (1981), a catalog of the “divine” teachings of America’s Founding Fathers, who, it turns out, were to a man advocates of Mormon-style American exceptionalism. Beck urges his audiences to purchase the book, for which he has written a new Foreword.

It was the unstated theme of Mormon-style American exceptionalism that undergirded every word of Glenn Beck’s keynote speech at his recent “ecumenical” Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C.

To be continued . . .

This article first appeared in the October 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Well, fasten your Malthusian belts, because they did. Now here’s where you’d expect a very special Dateline NBC exposé or an investigative report from Katie Couric to unmask this conspiratorial threat to women’s health. Instead, she called it “a tiny tablet that revolutionized women’s health,” before blasting the government for not giving it to every single woman for free.

And then the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Time, and all of the TV networks threw a party to celebrate its birthday.

In the mid-1950’s, when many American women were using Lysol to keep from having babies, Gideon Daniel (“G.D.”) Searle (formerly of Metamucil fame) struck gold. Frank Colton, a researcher at his pharmaceutical company in Sko­kie, Illinois, had created a synthetic progesterone compound (norethynodrel), with a mind to curing “female problems.” Dr. Gregory Pincus heard about it and asked for some of it to test his theories about the relationship between progesterone and the prevention of ovulation. (Lucky for him, he had money to burn, thanks to his friend Margaret Sanger and her rich pal, Cyrus McCormick’s daughter Katharine.)

Pincus assembled a team led by Dr. John Rock, a Roman Catholic fertility expert who publicly rejected Church teaching on contraception, and they began experimenting on women, inducing “false pregnancies.” Meanwhile, back in Skokie, Searle researchers developed their drug, reducing the amount of mestranol (estrogen) in their compound to prevent bleeding. They called it Enovid and shipped it off to Team Pincus for testing on women in Puerto Rico and Haiti.

According to Planned Parenthood, Puerto Rico was chosen because, unlike Dr. Rock’s native Massachusetts, the island “had no laws against contraception.” Bonus!

Many of the women were semi-literate or illiterate, which allowed the researchers to test whether or not the pill could also be used by women around the world, regardless of their educational accomplishments.

G.D. Searle & Co. applied for FDA approval of Enovid for the treatment of menstrual problems at the same time it was organizing a symposium with Team Pincus on marketing the drug as a combined oral contraceptive. The FDA approved it for the former use in 1957, and two years later, Searle applied for the government’s approval of the latter use. Enovid officially became The Pill on June 23, 1960. One year later, a million women had already used it. Four years later, Searle was up to $24 million in annual profits.

The Pill has had a side effect or two on American culture, not the least being the Sexual Revolution. In addition, writes Gardiner Harris in the New York Times, “in regulatory terms, the pill brought about a kind of reformation.”

Because Team Pincus’s tests on the Puerto Ricans had been “relatively brief,” the FDA had no good reason (other than social pressure) to approve the drug for long-term use. So they slapped an arbitrary two-year limit on prescription durations. But women were so wild for The Pill that they simply asked for it under a different brand, consequences be damned.

It turned out that Pincus had ignored the evidence presented by his team which indicated that 17 percent of the illiterate women had experienced a host of side effects from chemically altering their otherwise healthy bodies—vomiting, headaches, nausea. (Pincus dismissed the women as hypochondriacs.) Added to that in the early 60’s were increasing reports of pulmonary embolism, congestive heart failure, and pulmonary tuberculosis.

What to do? If the FDA pulled The Pill, women would be forced to return to sexual servitude. The answer was to order doctors to distribute literature to their prescribees containing long lists of fine print that they are free to ignore. In the name of sexual freedom, the U.S. government stood between a woman and her doctor.

To commemorate the liberation of women, Planned Parenthood sent out a press release declaring May 9 the 50th Anniversary of The Pill, and the American media joined the celebration in lockstep. Now technically, the FDA only announced that it had plans to approve The Pill on May 9, 1960. But shucks, this year, May 9 fell on a Sunday, and it was Mothers’ Day.

This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

So imagine my delight when I read in a back issue of a leading Christian magazine (call it Evangelicalism Now) that, come next April 15, I should just flip off Uncle Sam and cheat on my taxes.

I mean, sure, breaking the law bothers some people. EN mentions that: “The issue before us is not whether law should be obeyed in normal circumstances. We all agree on that.” I feel better already, and my editorial brain is already forming the next sentence before I read it, and it has something to do with ours being abnormal circumstances.

“The question is: Under what circumstances is it appropriate to disobey a law?” Close enough!

As it turns out, cheating on my taxes is biblical. You doubt? Well maybe you’ve forgotten that recognizing that “the law is not everything” is “a biblical principle.” You must have also forgotten that Daniel flouted the “laws of the Medes and Persians” to pray to the Lord. You must have accidentally not-remembered Rahab’s treason against the devil-worshiping pagans of Jericho. You must be having a senior moment when it comes to Jesus and the Jewish Sabbath laws. And you must have missed your ginko biloba dose this morning, because Peter very memorably said, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey [the Jews] rather than God.” Indeed, EN points out, “the law of the land is superseded by the law of love.”

I think I love my family so much that I will give it my tax dollars.

As if that isn’t enough to convince me, EN then puts down the NIV and picks up a miniature Old Glory and a sparkler. “[T]his nation itself was founded on overthrowing not just a law but an entire government.” Now, at first my editorial brain paused at this. I thought a nation (Lat. natio, “birth, a people” from the verb nascor, “to be begotten”) could be “founded” only by a father and not by an act of disobedience, but then I consulted my Honest Abe’s Dictionary of Olde Peculiar Terms. So, yes, it is both biblical and American for me to cheat on my taxes. I can almost picture my boys on a set of matching ATVs.

I’ve been facetiously misleading. That magazine isn’t really called Evangelicalism Now. And in the editorial “Blessed Is the Law—Up to a Point,” the masthead wasn’t attempting to justify cheating on one’s taxes. They were arguing that, given today’s circumstances, it is “legitimate (albeit regrettable) for an immigrant to enter this nation clandestinely to gain [certain] freedoms.”

The circumstances listed are these: “economic and political hardship” and U.S. immigration policies that “make it nearly impossible for some immigrants to enter this nation.” Given those circumstances, Americans should cut the lawbreakers some “slack.”

Actually, more than that. “While we do not admire lawbreaking, we cannot help but admire people who go through great privation to attain the dream of economic and political liberty.” So let us not only absolve them with amnesty but stand in awe of their sin.

Is it sin? Well, sic et non. “It is deeply regrettable that they have broken the laws of our land.” But why regret it at all when it is nothing short of “deny[ing] the witness of Scripture” to say that there is never a time when we should obey God rather than men?

Certainly we should, and the biblical accounts provided by EN are perfect examples. The law told Daniel not to pray. The law told Rahab not to assist God’s people. The law told Peter not to preach the Gospel. And Jesus is Himself the Sabbath.

Roman law told a convert named O­nes­i­mus that he was a slave—what some might call economic and political hardship. When Onesimus went on the lam, Saint Paul’s response (written from jail) was to send him back to his master, Philemon. Paul encouraged Philemon to receive Onesimus as “more than a slave, as a dear brother,” but he would remain a slave nonetheless. As a new Christian, Onesimus’ calling was to abide by the law and sacrifice his liberty.

The trouble with twisted-Scripture immigration propaganda is that it almost always contains some genuine biblical truth. EN is right: Christians must “extend hospitality to the stranger and succor to the suffering.” We have no right to be a jackass toward people of any station in life who cross our paths. Nor do we have a right to admire, if not absolve, otherwise law-abiding people for flouting just and reasonable laws because they only yearn to be free to mow our lawns.

In a completely unrelated matter, I wonder: Come next April 15, will the otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants and their employers cheat on their taxes?

This article first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

He then goes on to rely on Princeton's "WordNet" for a definition of Islamist, which, by his standards, is pretty innocuous—the term only refers to someone who is knowledgable about Islam and probably believes that stuff! (Ali Mir is an Islamist!)

This is disingenuous at best. Islamism and Islamist have a long history. Islamism used to be a synonym for Mohammedanism, before both gave way to Islam. Then the term resurfaced in connection with modern political movements that had a basis in Islam.

But more to the point, the mainstream media now uses such terms while falling all over itself in an effort to keep from identifying the followers of Muhammad (in word and deed) as vanilla "Muslims." So perhaps what Ali Mir wants is for the media to stop identifying killers who cry "Allahu Akbar!" with Islam in any way, shape, or form.

So the nut of the opinion is, in essence, what's done is done. To those who would insist that original intent (of the authors of the Bill of Rights, or the legislators who voted on it, or especially the states who ratified it) matters, Justice Alito offers what might be called the DeLorean Defense or the Flux Capacitor Exception:

There is nothing new in the argument that, in order to respect federalism and allow useful state experimentation, a federal constitutional right should not be fully binding on the States. This argument was made repeatedly and eloquently by Members of this Court who rejected the concept of incorporation and urged retention of the two- track approach to incorporation. . . . Time and again, however, those pleas failed. Unless we turn back the clock or adopt a special incorporation test applicable only to the Second Amendment, municipal respondents’ argument must be rejected. Under our precedents, if a Bill of Rights guarantee is fundamental from an American perspective, then, unless stare decisis counsels otherwise, that guarantee is fully binding on the States . . .

You and I may appreciate the practical outcomes of today's ruling, but the whole affair calls to mind something the late Mark Winchell wrote for Chronicles in November 2005 ("Reattacking Leviathan: Starving the Beast"):

Unfortunately, hoping for the appointment of “conservative” judges is not enough. By their very nature, judicial conservatives show an exaggerated deference for settled law (the principle of stare decisis). What is needed to restore the original federalist balance is the sort of counterrevolutionary judicial activism that we are not likely to see. At a more fundamental level, it is ludicrous for the states to allow their sovereignty to be defined by lifetime appointees of the central government.

In the large urban centers, the poor were getting poorer, while the rich were getting richer. The wealthy—even in the churches—were given to elaborate and expensive entertainments. Keeping pedigreed horses was a favorite hobby. Aristocrats gobbled up the land of poor farmers and created vast estates for their champion thoroughbreds. Houses were lavishly decorated with gilded ceilings and mosaic-covered walls. Personal chefs and confectioners were employed.

To make matters worse, a false version of Christianity was on the rise. Within living memory, the emperor himself had confessed that Jesus Christ is fully God, “being of one substance with the Father.” But now a new emperor, while claiming to be a Christian, was professing just the opposite. Soon, all of the old heretic pastors were out of the closet, and the emperor, in the interests of unity, was applying gentle persecution to bring the conservative pastors into line. In such an environment, any reasonable man would batten down the hatches, circle the wagons, and protect himself, his family, and his way of life.

Basil sold his vast inheritance and gave the money to the poor.

Now, Basil was no dummy. As his friend Gregory would write, Basil had mastered all of the classical arts—at Athens, no less—“with all the learning attainable by the nature of man.” However, his interest was not in making piles of cash but in eternal salvation, and when he read the Gospels, he realized that this required, among other things, a “refusal to allow the soul to be turned by any sympathy towards things of earth.”

Basil preferred to work out his salvation separated from the world in prayer and contemplation, but heresy and the needs of people intervened. So he found himself on a debate tour, arguing against Arianism and for the Nicene Creed. Before long he was ordained to the priesthood in his native Caesarea, Cappodocia, smack dab in the middle of Asia Minor. His powerful teaching captivated audiences—to the extent that he had to dial it back a bit, as the faithful preferred him to their bishop, Eusebius.

When Basil was not writing and preaching in defense of the deity of Christ, he was thundering against Christians who make an idol of their own possessions, loving wealth instead of others:

You who dress your walls, and let your fellow-creatures go bare, what will you answer to the Judge? You who harness your horses with splendor, and despise your brother if he is ill-dressed; who let your wheat rot, and will not feed the hungry; who hide your gold and despise the distressed?

“Consider now the violent struggle that takes place between the desperation arising from famine and a parent’s fundamental instincts,” he continues. “Starvation on the one side threatens a horrible death, while nature resists, convincing the parents rather to die with their children.”

Basil was no bleeding-heart liberal. He didn’t think everyone everywhere deserves everything. He didn’t blame the emperor for poverty or a lack of “adequate healthcare.” His problem was with Christians who claimed to love God but refused to love their neighbors in need.

And so, in a.d. 370, when he took Eusebius’ place as bishop, he built a hospital. Using alms from the diocese, Basil constructed a massive complex in suburban Caesarea for the care of the sick who couldn’t afford medical treatment. This Ptochoptopheion or “New Town” (also called the Basiliad) was a wonder to the people of Cappodocia. It not only offered medical care but provided lodging for the homeless, job training for the indigent, and food for the hungry. The heresy-warrior bishop donned an apron and served in the soup kitchen.

That’s a great story, but it’s just not practical to apply it to our situation. Our government would never allow such a thing.

The emperor Valens had threatened Basil with exile repeatedly for his refusal to knuckle under to Arianism. At one point, Valens’ prefect delivered the threat directly to Basil, who boldly defied him. The emissary marveled that no one ever used that tone with him. Basil replied, “Maybe you’ve never talked to a bishop before.” Valens retaliated by hacking up Basil’s diocese and installing an Arian as a rival bishop.

A few years later, a curious Valens came to hear St. Basil the Great on Theophany. He was so moved by the preaching that he donated the land for the Basiliad.

This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“Amoeba are essentially everywhere and have probably existed . . . long before the appearance of macroscopic animals,” says the science department at the University of Edinburgh. “Throughout our entire existence therefore, we have lived in intimate association with amoebae. It is consequently no surprise that some amoeba have adapted to take advantage of us.”

Twenty-four years ago, a pregnant lady encountered one of these pathogenic amoebae in the Philippines. This pesky single-celled creature, in the process of its attempt to take advantage of her, gave her an infection that put her into a coma. In an attempt to revive her, the Filipino doctors gave her medication that caused her placenta to separate from her uterus. So severe was this placental abruption that the awakened lady was given disturbing news: Your baby will likely be stillborn. Your best option is to have an abortion.

Now, if ever there was a case of a protect-the-life-and-health-of-the-mother abortion, this was it. She was married, yes, but she already had four children. Can’t we all just agree that in this, the rarest of circumstances, it is best to take some sort of decisive action?

Then again, she and her husband were no mere tourists: They were missionaries. As Christians, abortion was not an option. So they resigned themselves to fate or, as they would say, the “will of God.”

Who would win: mom or amoeba?

It turned out, the baby—a boy—was born healthy. He was so perfectly normal that, at age six, he took an interest in football. The family split time between their missions work and orphanage in the Philippines and their home in Jacksonville, Florida. As parents, they were the hands-on sort. Dad made the boy join his brothers and sisters in tending a half-acre garden. Mom homeschooled them.

The boy really, really liked football, and so it occurred to the parents: Why not see if the local public school would let him play on the team? As luck would have it, in 1996 the state of Florida had passed legislation allowing homeschoolers to play for a local high school of their choice in district. And it turned out the boy wasn’t half bad. As a high-school jun­ior and senior, he was named Player of the Year—of Florida. It helped that, as quarterback, he led his team to a state title in his senior year.

Despite being a maladjusted, evangelical, six-day-creationist homeschooler—did I mention that he pledged to maintain his virginity until marriage?—this 6'3" muscle-bound loser was coveted by several SEC football programs. As a freshman backup quarterback for the Florida Gators, he rushed for only 469 yards and eight touchdowns. At the end of that season (2006), in the BCS National Championship game, the Gators faced the no. 1 ranked Ohio State Buckeyes, led by Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith. The Gators routed the Buckeyes 41-14, and the boy threw and ran for a touchdown.

Next season, he became the starter and won the Heisman himself—the first underclassman ever to be so honored.

In 2008, his coach decided to split the load at QB since this wrecking ball of an abortion candidate didn’t know when to quit. Coach should have known that from the start: In high school, he’d finished a game on a broken leg. Still, the boy led the Gators to another BCS Championship that year.

And then, just as you’d expect from a home­schooling nerdstrom, he announced that he was staying in school to complete his senior year, instead of entering the NFL draft, wherein he would likely have signed a contract worth something in the neighborhood of $40 million.

During his senior year, despite a season marred by injury, he managed to break the SEC’s record for career touchdowns, formerly held by Herschel Walker, perhaps the greatest college running back ever to play. The Gators won the Sugar Bowl, and the boy produced a mere 533 yards of total offense—enough for a BCS record.

“A lot of times people have this ster­eotype of homeschoolers as not very athletic,” the statistically stillborn boy remarked, after it was noted in an interview that he was the first homeschooler ever to win the Heisman. “It’s like, go win a spelling bee or something . . . ”

And yet, there are plenty of sports and cultural commentators who wish Tim Tebow would just go away, spelling bee or no. He’s a painful reminder of all their blown stereotypes. Rest assured, if he ever slips up, they’ll be there with their cameras and knowing grins. Somehow, it will have to have been wrong for him to win, in football and in life, on his first birthday.

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.