CORRESPONDENCE

...HERBERT F.OSTRACH ORLANDO, FL STUDYING WAR NO MORE It is perplexing to see William Kristol and Robert Kagan again put themselves in lock step behind the patriotic gore of a presidential candidate and a senator for an all-out effort in Kosovo ("GOPeaceniks," May 10...

...Some of the students overheard their peers making hateful, threatening, and just plain crazy remarks, but they did not confront them...

...They need to be morally strong...

...As a former school teacher I can attest that the bigger the school, the more difficult it is to form lasting, nurturing relationships with students...

...It's just an example of good old-fashioned bombast, the kind all intellectually insecure academics generate...

...Yet in the 1996 Survey of American Political Culture, a majority of the adults surveyed strongly favored teaching traditional values in public schools...

...If parents, schools, and the rest of us nonjudgmental folks have no standards, then evil does not exist...

...Granted, Judith Butler's award-winning sentence has all the elegance of a tangled pile of last summer's volleyball nets, but is it bad (poor) writing for being ungrammatical...

...Many Republicans had the backbone to vote against this incursion, but William Kristol and Robert Kagan want us to believe that a vote against the bombing of Serbia is tantamount to treason...

...PETER BEARSE GLOUCESTER, MA Could we safely say that "children slaughtering children" will continue...

...TOM LOEBMANN FALLBROOK, CA John J. Dilulio is perfectly right to point to the loss of authority and non-judgmentalism as major factors in the rise of violence among suburban and small-town middle-class boys...

...Yes, there does seem to be a "party feeling in the attacks made on Philosophy and Literature's Bad Writing Contest," but no more so than in D.G...

...The rhetorical excesses of Butler's long sentences or those of Myers's short ones...

...We avoid trying to teach values in schools...

...Never mind the inordinate damage done to tens of thousands of lives in so short a period of time—damage that could have been averted had real diplomacy been given a chance...

...As individuals and as a nation we need to accept that authority and moral behavior come from understanding a divine standard...

...We have now come to the point at which the ban on religious tests for public office in Article VI of the Constitution has evolved into the precise opposite of the Framers' intentions...

...JAMES W. CEASER CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA...

...DWIGHT D. SUTHERLAND JR...

...Meanwhile, too much of what youngsters encounter, both inside and outside of school, is moral relativism, the "I'm all right, you're all right" attitude...

...There are no standards except for those relating to tests and credentials...

...There are good reasons to "cut and run," not the least being the historical facts of the case and the illegality of NATO's behavior...

...The Web site for a group called the Interfaith Alliance reveals that Meneilly is on its board of directors...

...But the danger did not begin at Littleton...

...AVI GREEN CAMBRIDGE, MA John J. Dilulio's article offered some good perspective on the Littleton tragedy, but it could have easily provided more ("Twilight of Authority," May 3...

...It includes a chapter on "How to Form a Mainstream Coalition in Your State," by Donnah Marx of the Colorado Democratic party...

...For once a significant number of Republicans, and not a few Democrats, got it right...

...But there is one point Barnes misses: the way in which overly large schools foster violence...

...The indefensible political agenda of the self-aware doyenne or the defensible one of her unselfconsciously self-righteous critic...

...Holding genuine religious views practically disqualifies one in the eyes of a growing number of Americans...

...WILLIAM D. EISENHOWER REDONDO BEACH, CA E-PARTISANS I want to congratulate Jack Cashill for doing an excellent job exposing the Rev...

...The mere profession of faith by individuals on the "wrong" side of political questions can get them branded as "religious zealots," as Ken Starr learned last year...

...Surprisingly, however, Dilulio neglected to note the unfortunate support his "villager" model received from the Littleton tragedy...

...American schools were not always so big...

...The Interfaith Alliance was started in 1994 with $25,000 in seed money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with the avowed purpose of countering the religious Right...

...To help protect our children in the future we'll need sane policies that encourage the good, including some gun control and more tools for parents to prevent their children from playing games that glorify violence...

...Values comprise the core of a good education...

...In view of the obvious role of the Mainstream Coalition as a stalking horse for the left wing of the Democratic party, any Republican office holder or candidate who accepts its embrace falls into the category of what Lenin called "useful idiots...

...They need to know how to speak up and be able to "teach morality" in private as well as in public...

...DAVID TAYLOR EASTON, MD William Kristol is right to accentuate the positive in the wake of the tragedy at Littleton, not only because some good may well come out of this in the form of renewed religious commitment and moral virtue, but because, as he said, the good is primary ("Good and Evil in Littleton," May 10...

...The vice president is right to argue that the solution to this seemingly endless, tragic violence is neither simply taking away the guns nor taking away the video games and violent television programs which permeate our culture...

...We are not sensitizing and educating young people to take their places in a moral community...

...KANSAS CITY, MO CORRECTION In my April 26 article "French Resistance," I mistakenly identified Jean-Frangois Kahn as an intellectual of the far right...

...But today things stand very differently...

...I assume that they would vote to march troops into Ottawa if President Clinton decided to bomb the Canadians for their treatment of Quebec...

...The language of the last clause of that article ("no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States") meant that one did not have to be a member of a church or sect—or even believe in a Supreme Being...

...Authority cannot exist without a standard...

...The obvious conclusion to be drawn from years of growing attacks on religious people is that they should not be trusted with public office...

...This awareness of the power of good puts things into perspective and will be indispensible for saving the nation from the increasing threats to people of faith...

...What's even more amazing than this high-tech hate group's ability to pass itself off as the local voice of tolerance and pluralism is its success in posturing as a moderate, broad-based, non-partisan coalition...

...And coming from Gore, moral talk is conceivable, even believable...

...This same Web site offers a manual called "How to Win: A Practical Guide for Defeating the Radical Right," authored by the "Radical Right Task Force" of the National Jewish Democratic Council...

...Despite our vaunted media omniscience—live satellite feeds, intrusive photography, worldwide Internet access—it's amazing how little is communicated about events such as these when they're reported...

...Worse, the bigger the school, the more the students don't know each other...

...Myers's defense of it ("Bad Writing," May 10...

...Remember the ridicule and slander heaped on religious opponents of evolution, the members of the Moral Majority, and the Christian Coalition...

...Dilulio should also have noted the concept of the sanctity of life as a fundamental issue, and this too, is not conveyed by our educational system...

...This is particularly amazing because they openly disclose their affiliations with groups which are auxiliaries of the Democratic party...

...No and no...

...So they form cliques and gangs and hard shells to protect their anonymity...

...Correspondence THE LESSONS OF LITTLETON The Weekly Standard handled the Littleton tragedy better than any other publication—Matt Labash's affecting profile of Cassie Bernall captured something vital about what happened and conveyed it in such a way that it lost none of its vitality in the retelling ("The Life and Death of Cassie Bernall," May 10...

...The connection between school size and student misbehavior is well known in the social science literature...

...HARRY WILLIAMS WASHINGTON, DC Bill Clinton has put America in the indefensible position of attacking a sovereign nation for trying to put down an insurrection...

...For the vast majority, of course, it is a big leap from condemning those with religious views to killing them, but it is a leap made more easily by the young and irrational...

...The answer is yes if, as John J. Dilulio indicates, authority continues to wane into the darkness...

...For decades, evidence of the secular minority's virulent hatred of God has abounded...

...ERIC IVERS CARROLLTON, IL WHO'S BAD...

...Yet something is missing, some truth which seems to escape us and has been absent from most discussions...

...But the loss of authority not only explains the outliers—the handful of children who will actually explode—it also explains the dominant cliques who drive the outliers to violence...

...Littleton demonstrates that both evil and good, in their purest forms, exist in our society...

...Speaking of which, Myers's polemical overkill, confused equations, and unexplained distinctions leave one wondering: Which is worse...

...Indeed, high school students can and should be viewed as "villagers"— young adult members of a moral community...

...Perhaps to help foster communities that care for their children we should move back to the smaller schools of days gone by...

...RICHARD H. REEB JR...

...I should have said center or center left, and I very much regret the error...

...Robert Meneilly and his militant left-wing church, the Mainstream Coalition ("Memo to GOP Moderates: Be Nice to the Right," May 3...

...BARSTOW, CA Bully for Al Gore's moral stand on Littleton as reported by Fred Barnes ("Born-Again Gore," May 10...

...Most importantly, we'll need community and parental responsibility to boot...

...Now we know: Believing in God in the United States can get you killed...

...Religious nonconformists may have been barred from holding public office by the opinions of their fellow citizens, but certainly not by the Constitution...

...Small schools of a few hundred students or so were the norm until the Baby Boom...

...Is it bad (immoral) writing for being hurtful...