Don’t you just squirm when people you otherwise love and respect forward you email on some pretty revolting stuff. You don’t buy into such hatred material and smears and you begin to question the sanity of your friends and relatives who feel compelled to forward it to you. And we know much of those that contain the gotcha stuff on politicians or political groups are often phony.

What kind of friends do our friends keep, anyway?

So it is with one e-mail message that is tracking through Cyberspace. It insists those who designed and built the dramatic World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., a few years ago deliberately left out “so help us God” in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor “Day of Infamy” speech.

A longtime friend on Wednesday, religious and well-meaning as I have known him to be for more than 15 years, sent me a “PASS THIS ON!!” E-mail. It was termed “a bit of disturbing information.” Further on it was titled, “Shall we hire a monument engraver to go to Arlington National Cemetery and Add the Missing Words?”

To where? They can’t even get the place right, for starters. I have been to the World War II Memorial in the middle of the mall in Washington, D.C., (part-way between the Washington Memorial and the Capitol) and I have been to Arlington Cemetery – both places last summer – and the writer of this much-circulated e-mail should get that correct to have some credibility. The WWII Memorial is not at Arlington!

The E-mail tells how a group gathered to read “on the Pacific side” the words of Roosevelt that begin, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.” It goes on to say that one lady spoke up that “so help us God” was omitted from the end of this line: “With confidence in our armed forces, with the abounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable.” The e-mail writer exhorts, “Who gave them the right to change the words of history.”

Several Internet sites that work at finding truth, debunking Web rumors and checking the facts, have found that this e-mail is wrong. The inscription engraved on the wall is succinct and it is not from that portion of Roosevelt’s 485-word that did, in fact, contain “so help us God.” The part used on the memorial itself, however, comes four sentences before the sentence by Roosevelt that ends “with so help us God.”

The only part of Roosevelt’s speech used on the wall is:

PEARL HARBOR

DECEMBER 7, 1941, A DATE

WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY…

NO MATTER HOW LONG IT

MAY TAKE US TO OVERCOME

THIS PREMEDITATED INVASION,

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, IN

THEIR RIGHTEOUS MIGHT,

WILL WIN THROUGH

TO ABSOLUTE VICTORY.

Critics could say the wrong part of Roosevelt’s speech was used – a quote that didn’t happen to bring up God.

Check it out at urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_war_memorial.htm

Chalk this up to another effort to prey on people who need any excuse to show anew that God is being marginalized and intentionally removed yet another way from “this great Christian nation.”

What poetry lingers with you from school days and comes to mind from time to time? One of mine was Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy,’ who was described as a “child of scorn” who “wept that he was ever born.” He lamented that he was born at the wrong time in history. “He missed the medieval grace of iron clothing,” for example. He so loved the days of old. The poem’s ending noted the sadsack was “born too late,” so he “scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed and called it fate and kept on drinking.”

I bring this up because as I get older, I recognize how much we so much reflect the forces of the era in which we grew up in and matured. My entire high school and undergraduate years of college stretched across most of the 1960s (actually 1960 to 1968). I have told my grown children often that they missed out by not living in that heady era. They missed out not coming to maturity amid the tumult, politics and change of the Sixties. The Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, a string of assassinations, protests and the counterculture may not seem to be high points. Yet through it all, we absorbed something about the need to fiercely speak out, question authority and work for a better world, as idealistic as that sounds. I am troubled that my kids, born in the 1970s and maturing in the 1990s, were deprived of some kind of a revolutionary spirit and the critical thinking of my generation. Not to mention the greatest rock music ever.

Today, I received a book publicist’s pitch on a new booklet, “Red Hot Revolution” by Ariel Gobert, who addresses women of the Baby Boomers generation. The Kentucky woman, who was the first woman hired for outside sales by General Mills and several other companies, calls for those gals of the 1960s to start a new revolution. Those who thrived in the ‘60s are now over 60, with 165 more American women joining the ranks each year. It’s estimated that more than 56 million women “lived through a time of participation in the Vietnam War, Watergate and women entering the workforce,” the writer said.

Gobert notes that the 60-plus women today “were once women in their 20s or 30s protesting the Vietnam War. Their parents never questioned the government, but they had the courage to.” She takes it further by saying the women enjoyed watching “Leave it to Beaver,” where June Cleaver personified the notion that “a woman’s place was only in the home.” Yet those images did not seemingly dissuade them from “the idea of equal pay for equal work.”

Gobert urges women in their 60s to take advantage of the “new and exciting phase just beginning.” The Red Hot Revolution writer declares, “It’s time to be electric, not eccentric. Sexuality, passion and love cannot be outgrown – they only grow stronger the longer we live.” She notes that 15 percent of women who could retire are continuing to work. She is gathering feedback from her peers at her Web site: www.redhotrevolution.com

She said she spent most of her working years in the “good ol’  boys” network, and now she is determined to get  the “good ol’  girls” network going.

Jews have been discovering the cost of kosher meat has been climbing, and some of it can be attributed to a massive federal immigration raid May 12 on the nation’s largest kosher meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. Jewish-owned AgriProcessors, with 800 workers, produces half of the country’s kosher beef and about 40 percent of the U.S.’s kosher chicken, according to news reports. Kosher products traditionally are more expensive.

The Associated Press said almost 400 arrests were made by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and they were followed by about 300 plea deals by the workers mostly charged with using false identifications. Most were taken en masse to Waterloo and processed and housed on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds, which the federal agents used as their staging area. The plant has reopened, but it’s expected that labor costs will run much higher because it has to pay more to documented workers. The raid, which was the largest ever of its kind, came after a six-month investigation. More than dozen federal agencies were involved, including the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the departments of labor and agriculture. There were also allegations of methamphetamines being produced at the plant.

At 1 p.m. in Postville on Sunday, a rally and march are planned by people of many faiths calling for “comprehensive immigration reform, justice for workers and family unification.” Participants will include the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dubuque, two rabbis, a Lutheran pastor, the executive director of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs in Chicago and a similar leader from St Paul, Minn. “A child and women affected by the raid” will be among speakers. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) was sheduled to be on hand this weekend, as well.

There have been issues for years regarding the treatment of plant workers and the animals slaughtered under strict rules that meet Torah standards for the $12.5 billion market that also serves Muslims and others preferring kosher foods. The Postville plant markets its products under the labels of Aaron’s Best and Rubashkin’s.

Three years ago, I read Stephen Bloom’s revealing book, “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America.” It was about the reactions on the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant town when 150 Lubavitcher Jews from Brooklyn took over the shut-down, aging meat plant in 1987 and transformed it into a kosher packing plant. Those Jews, with their long beards, peyos (long sideburns) and black clothing, moved into Postville creating a stark contrast to the conventional town folks. They displayed monumental standoffishness with the 2,000 people of Postville. Then when large numbers of Hispanic people came for the jobs, Postville had to demonstrate pluralism and accommodation anew.

When we learned Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor, was to give a talk on his book at Temple Solel in Paradise Valley in 2006, my wife and I bought tickets. We had previoiusly communicated by letter and e-mail after I read his book.   I occasionally had visited Postville 30 years or longer ago when I was the farm editor and assistant state editor for the Waterloo Courier. I also was best man for a wedding in Postville 40 years ago this summer.

In reviewing Bloom’s book, Publishers Weekly noted, “.. the Lubavitchers, who traditionally live and work within their own closely knit communities, were not interested in fitting into Postville, and many were dismissive of, or overtly hostile to, its original citizens. After the Luvavitchers started buying real estate and exerting greater influence on the town’s finances, longtime Postville residents began to feel marginalized, yet their reactions caused the Jews to become more isolationist.” Then there were complaints about what the new owners did with the slaughterhouse – pay below minimum wag, lack of insurance for workers, sexual harassment of women employee, 12-hour work days,  and fighting common among the immigrant workers.

A Newsday review of Bloom’s book noted that Postville people “by and large were tolerant” but they found their Hasidim neighbors “secretive, wealthy, ostentatious, deceitful, chauvinistic, unassimilable and disrespectful of local customs.” There were complaints that the Jews didn’t maintain their lawns or take part in street fairs, and that they weren’t paying debts with merchants.  Jewish himself, Bloom communicated his own frustrations of trying to break through the Hasidic shell during his visits to Postville during research for the book.

The Postville experience allows for  study in how a homogenious community copes with the abupt influx of several distinct ethnic groups.

A couple weeks ago, I sat down for most of an hour with the Rev. John Dorhauer, who recently took over the post of conference minister for the Southwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. He oversees the work of the 43 churches in the conference, which includes Arizona, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. The story on him ran in the Tribune on July 19.

Story length restrictions prevented me from mentioning what he shared with me about why he believes his denomination and others mainline church groups have experienced a steady decline in membership going back decades. American Protestantism hit its high-water mark in the post-World War II years of the 1950s with a burst of church construction, a relatively high church-going population and religion being held in high esteem. Fifteen years ago, in 1993, it reported 1,530,178 members. By 2007, it was 1.2 million.

“The single most contributing factor to the decline in mainline Protestant churches is – and this is a sociological phenomenon – that folks who tend to be higher educated tend to produce fewer children,” Dorhauer said. Even until a generation ago, in mainline churches, he said, “evangelism was done through procreation.” Big families ensured a growing church.

“We were a less mobile society, and our grandchildren ended up being baptized, confirmed and married in the same churches,” he said. That contrasts to today’s pattern of mobility where grandparents, less and less, see their grandchildren being baptized in the churches that grown-ups helped build. Dorhauer said “the sociological phenomenon of higher education meaning (couples having) fewer children has been the single greatest contributor to the decline of mainline Protestant churches in America.”

Dorhauer, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on “white privilege” phenomenon in the United Church of Christ, attributes the decline also to baby boomers’ having the tendency to back away from institutions in general. He cited Watergate, Vietnam and the civil rights movement – and even further back to the Holocaust, World War II and the dropping of the atomic bombs. Sociologically and psychologically, “what we discover is a generation – the baby boomer generation – that grew up with an inherent mistrust of institutions.”

“The generation that preceded them had a inherent loyalty to institutions as they knew them and believed that institutions to be the resources on which sometimes literally their lives have depended on.” So in the middle and late 1970s, “their spirituality was disconnected from institutions and institutional life.” He said Generation X’ers (1965-1980) seem to be reversing that trend and turning more to traditional religions.

Dorhauer said the rapid rise of megachurches, which feature high-energy worship and music and a smorgasbord of programs targeted to families, are “a by-product of the metaphysical reality of a culture so tied to television.” He cited Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” in which Postman argues that because “entertainment” has been treating and rendering issues for years, the public no longer has a sense that they are serious issues. Moreover with all TV constantly changing camera angles again and again, people have been raised with shorter attention spans, so they need constant stimuli to stay interested.

Thus, to put a young person into a pew for a 50-minute worship service and a 25-minute sermon is problematic. “After about three minutes, we know they have stopped processing information that their brain needs to go on ‘pause,’” he said.

“What the megachurch has learned is that, in fact, our children are experiencing the world very differently than we are,” he said. The churches that “continue to hold to  institutional and traditional means of worship may run the risk of losing the next generation of believers,” Dorhauer said.

The recklessness of right-wing hate radio became evident anew last week when Michael Savage chose to spew his poison on children with autism. Understandably, he has set off a fire storm that certainly will forever identify him as part of the troglodytes who capitalize on freedom of speech and find sponsors who will support their perverse brands of destructive rhetoric.

By now you have probably heard what he said. On his talk show, “Savage Nation,” generated at WOR Radio in New York City, Savage said children with autism need tougher parents. He called autism “a fraud, a racket…”

“In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream, and they’re silent?” he said.

“They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz.’”

That from a man with a doctorate for the University of California at Berkeley, but who long ago became a conservative, out-of-control radical hate host whose favorite targets are Democrats, Muslims, immigrants, Jews, nonwhites, liberals and intellectuals. That Savage supposedly is the third highest ranked talk radio host speaks volumes about this country’s judgment, how they are being misled and why we are a deeply polarized country. Each time that I turn his show on, it is a matter of how many seconds I will go before his toxic words force me to shut him off. I certainly hope those who are calling for a boycott of his sponsors will have success.

My wife has worked as a teacher’s assistant in public classrooms with children with autism for more than 20 years. She has worked with some of the same children year after year. She has patiently – I mean patiently – worked with each to teach them despite their neurological wiring that so affects their communication and interrelation skills. She knows them like her own children and agonizes that someway somehow these beautiful children cannot be rewired. Their attention spans, their reactions to sharp sounds, their compulsions aren’t easy to deal with. Their parents strive to cope, trying to accommodate them as part of their families, sacrificing so much because they cannot and won’t abandon them.

And a Michael Savage can call it a “fraud” and a “racket.” Of course, this hate personality has been backpedaling since he went too far last week. There was the predicable word that his remarks had been taken out of context by “far-left Stalinists” and that he was, instead, talking about children who had been misdiagnosed, yet he still insisted that most children call “autistic” have been misdiagnosed. He cannot admit he has deeply hurt a community of people.

News reports said that in June, Savage said parents were using autism as a racket to get disability payments dreamed up by “poorer families who have found a new way to be parasites on the government.”

The American landscape is rife with big names misbehaving and saying cruel, unacceptable things.. Reckless and hideous speech by radio host Don Imus or civil rights activist Jesse Jackson or former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm or Ann Coulter should cause us to soundly stigmatize them for setting things back in this country. Sadly, it is a “savage” nation, but we cannot let hate and ignorance gain any respect in the public discourse. We should shut off such destructive noise.

Religion and faith continue to get major play in this year’s presidential campaign.

Rather remarkable is Sunday’s announcement that Pastor Rick Warren of the 22,000-member Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., has successfully scheduled an Aug. 16 joint appearance of presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. Given the land mines on the religious landscape and how both candidates have been dogged by faith controversies, i.e. Revs. Jeremiah Wright and John Hagee, it comes as a bit of a surprise. But the terms of the debates may seem relatively safe for the two presidential candidate designates

Warren will moderate the Saturday night forum that comes nine days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. It will be the two men’s first joint appearance, which is certain to catch a lot of attention. The event has been titled, “The Saddleback Civil Forum on Leadership and Compassion.” Now that’s lofty.

Warren, best known for writing the wildly successful book, “A Purpose Driven Life,” is calling it “an unprecedented opportunity for America to hear both men back to back on the same platform” and a time when Americans “deserve to hear both candidates speak from the heart, without interruption, in a civil and thoughtful format absent the partisan ‘gotcha’ questions that typically produce heat instead of light.” Publicity said the two candidates both requested that Warren exclusively pose the questions in the non-debate format.

That promise creates high expectations. Will Warren toss out predictable questions that will elicit safe statements – even platitudes? If there aren’t gotcha questions, can there be provocative queries that will separate the candidates? Warren suggest they will include such “pressing issues” as poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate and human rights.” The non-debate format, open to all media, will come 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. M.S.T. and prime time back east. Each candidate will talk continuously for an hour with Warren. Their order in the conversation with Warren will be determined by a coin toss.

Warren notes that both McCain and Obama have separately endorsed his P.E.A.C.E. Plan, called a 50-year strategy to mobilize millions of local churches worldwide to address five global problems: spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, poverty, disease and illiteracy.

The timing – coming before the networks get their debates going – is opportune. Yet it comes 89 days before the election, perhaps too early for a large segment of the population to get serious yet about the campaign. And Saturday night is a time when a large segment of society is off having fun. Not to mention that the forum comes half-way through the Olympic Games in Beijing, and many would-viewers will,  instead, give their attention to those sports that also come every four years — the same as American presidential contests.

That one of America’s most respected and moderate theologians has pulled this off is a coup. It underscores anew the impact of religion in the campaign, even with the Constitution’s provision that ” …no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

On May 3, the Tribune’s Spiritual Life section featured a story on Deal Hudson and his book, “Onward Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States.”

In an interview, Hudson extolled his work as the Catholic adviser to President George W. Bush. “I helped make the president ‘Catholic-friendly,’” Hudson told me by phone just two weeks after Pope Benedict XVI had come to Washington, D.C., and was feted, in absentia (he had another engagement), on his 81st birthday on the White House lawn for 12,000 people.

The evangelical-turned-Catholic is now at work making Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Catholic-friendly, as well. But the group Catholics United said Wednesday that the Republican’s designate for president ought to “remove influential Republican strategist Deal Hudson from his position on the ‘Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee.’” Their press release underscores their continued outrage at McCain’s association with controversial Texas megachurch pastor and televangelist John Hagee.

It was Deal Hudson who arranged a meeting between Hagee and McCain, along with some Catholic leaders, to try to smooth over the firestorm that came with Hagee calling the Roman Catholic Church the “great whore” and a “false cult system” and “the apostate church.” The San Antonio preacher also linked German dictator Adolf Hitler to the Catholic Church, that Catholic leaders helped to shape Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsessions. Hagee had previously endorsed McCain for president. On May 22, McCain rejected that endorsement in wake of the San Antonio pastor’s Hitler comments and more.

“I am trying to help him (Hagee) not to be seen as anti-Catholic,” Hudson told me three weeks before the McCain-Magee break.

Now Catholics United wants McCain to break from Hudson, 58, former editor of the Catholic monthly, Crisis, and now editor of an online version. The organization points out that Hudson stepped down from the Bush re-election campaign in 2004 when the National Catholic Reporter published a story about a 1994 incident in which Hudson had a sexual encounter in his office with a drunken 18-year-old college freshman while teaching at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution in New York City. It allegedly happened after a night of heavy drinking. Those missteps were later laid out in a book by Newsweek columnist Dana Milbank, “Home Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes That Run Our Government.”

Catholics United argues the three-time married Hudson’s personal conduct goes along with a “longstanding history of misappropriating Catholic teaching to advance a partisan agenda.”

In 1990, Hudson caught the attention of former Bush operative Karl Rove, when Hudson published in Crisis “an influential study explaining how the Republican Party could achieve greater success at the ballot box by specific appeals to Catholic swing voters,” according to Wednesday’s press release. By 2002, Hudson had “established a White House Catholic Working Group” but it had left out the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops out in discussions on policy. “Last year, Hudson publicly ridiculed a Vatican climate initiative that didn’t’ fit his political worldview,” Catholics United said. At one point he was the chairman of  Catholic Outreach at the Republican National Commitee.”

“If John McCain wants to represent a new kind of politics, then he and his Catholic committee would be well-served by disassociating from divisive and controversial figures such as Deal Hudson,” said Chris Korzen, executive director of Catholics United, described as a non-partisan, non-profit organization that promotes justice and common good “found at the heart of the Catholic social tradition.”

We fling around the terms “churched” and “unchurched” as a way to delineate what folks darken the doors of the houses of worship and who stay away. Those demarcations would seem to offer insight into how those two groups function in the greater world and maybe whether society benefits more or less from such patterns. But Phoenix-based Ellison Research has found things are a lot more complicated.

Those identified as “churched” really vary in their habits: 63 attend once a week; 12 percent three times a month; 16 percent twice a month; and 9 percent once a month. And people labeled “unchurched” cannot be legitimately called folks who stay away. In the research of 1,007 people in all 50 states, there were 18 percent of the unchurched who attend worship services occasionally, though not regularly. Another 22 percent fall in the so-called “Christmas and Easter” crowd, which also could include Jews, Muslims and others who take in religious holidays only.

That leaves 60 percent of the unchurched truly forgoing formal religious life.

Ron Sellers, Ellison Research president, calls for better ways to talk about and define people’s religious habits. “There’s a whole industry seeking to help clergy reach the unchurched, with seminars, books, videos, training centers and consultants,” he said. “However, many people don’t really have a basic notion even of just what it means to be ‘unchurched.’” He said the prevailing notion is people either do or don’t attend church, temple or mosque. As a matter of fact, one in five of those non-goers go, at least “occasionally” to a house of worship. It is unclear what the reasons for attending may be. Perhaps they are somewhat “obligatory” events like weddings and funerals, family unity church-going on Christmas Eve and Easter or showing up to see grandchildren in a pageant.

Ellison evaluated current worship attendance “based on family history of attendance.” “If an adult attended worship services regularly at some point before the age of 18, there is a 55 percent chance that person is currently attending once a month or more.” But if the person did not attend before age 18, there is only a 21 percent chance the person is now attending on a regular basis. Having both parents attending services leads to a 62 percent chance an offspring is attending once monthly or more often. That drops to 50 percent if only one parent attends; and to 33 percent of once-of-month-church or better if no parent was a church-goer.

The researcher asks whether congregations are prepared for the occasional church-goer, who may comes as a potential member but is not properly engaged. “We estimate that up to 43 million adults who do not regularly attend worship services will visit a church or place of worship at some point during the year, to say nothing of children and teens who visit with the family on their own,” Ellison said. “Are those congregations and clergy members ready for them?”

He would scrap “churched” and “unchurched” for putting people in seven specific categories (accompanied by what portion of all people they represent):

• Attend more than once a week (11 percent).

• Attend once a week (22 percent).

• Attend two or three times a month (14 percent).

• Attend once a month (5 percent).

• Attend occasionally, but not on a regular basis (9 percent).

• Attend only on religious holidays (10 percent)

• Do not attend at all (29 percent).

Now I want to see research on how many so-called lay leaders and officers of congregations are really pretty lax attendees for weekend services. Their once- or twice-a-month appearances can put them out of touch on church matters and issues and can lead to disconnect and communication breakdowns.