Goodbye, Democrats. Hello, what?

It was sometime during the hearings into whether Judge Priscilla Owen was fit to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals that Father John F. Kavanaugh faced a hard question.

All 10 Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted against her and killed her recent nomination, even though the Texas Supreme Court Justice received the American Bar Association's highest ranking. The problem was that she favored restraints on abortion rights, including parental-notification laws.

"This was the first time in history that someone with her qualifications had been rejected in committee," said the nationally known Jesuit writer. "I couldn't believe it. ... That was when I had to ask: Why am I still a registered Democrat?"

Kavanaugh poured his feelings into a column in which he argued that it's time for Catholics to cut the political ties that bind and register as independent voters. While the priest stressed that he believes Catholic Republicans may also need to declare their freedom, he entitled his provocative piece "Goodbye, Democrats."

It helps to know that Kavanaugh is an old-school progressive, the author of books with titles such as "Following Christ in a Consumer Culture," "Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ" and "Who Counts as Persons? Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing." This is one Jesuit who would never "wrap a rosary" around a conservative agenda.

Kavanaugh said he remains firmly opposed GOP doctrine on tax cuts, labor laws, welfare reform, the death penalty and a host of other issues. In the past decade, he noted, Democrats have compromised on all of those issues. But there is one issue on which his old party has steadfastly refused any compromise.

"One thing the Democrats really stand for, however, is abortion – abortion on demand, abortion without restraint, abortion paid for by all of us, abortion for the poor of the earth," wrote Kavanaugh. "I am not a one-issue voter, but they have become a one-issue party. ... If traditional Democrats who are disillusioned with the selling out of the working poor and the unborn simply became registered Independent voters, would not more attention be paid?"

In recent national elections, researchers have been watching for any signs that America's 60 million Catholics are changing their voting habits.

For generations, Frost Belt Catholics have been a crucial part of all Democratic coalitions. Today, Catholic trends are crucial in an era when Hispanic voters are gaining clout in Sunbelt politics. Thus, it matters that nearly three-fifths of the Catholics who said they frequently went to Mass voted for George W. Bush in 2000.

The question is whether this change is part of a fundamental realignment in the role that faith plays in American politics, according to two political scientists at Baruch College in the City University of New York.

Once, Southern evangelicals and northern Catholics were loyal Democrats. Once, the mainline Protestant churches were the heart of the Republican Party. But everything has changed. Today, liberal Protestants have joined a rising tide of "secularists" and "anti-fundamentalists" as the most loyal members of the Democratic establishment.

"The importance of evangelicals to the ascendancy of the Republican Party since the 1980s has been pointed out ad nauseam," noted Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, in a paper presented to the Southern Political Science Association. "But if the GOP can be labeled the party of religious conservatives, the Democrats, with equal validity, can be called the secularist party."

And, they added, any list of nonnegotiable issues for secularists and leaders of the religious left would begin with abortion rights.

At some point, said Kavanaugh, Catholics must find a way to be active in politics without writing off the poor, the weak, the defenseless and the unborn. This is what their faith teaches. Right now, he believes that this means letting the political world see visible evidence that Catholics are no longer tied to one party.

"It's not just the unfettered worship of 'choice' that we see in the Democratic Party today, which some would even call a form of libertarianism," he said. "There has also been a capitulation to the power of money. ... It's painful to say this, but right now I see as much hard-heartedness in the Democrats as I do in the Republicans."

Topless culture wars in Idaho

Strange things happen when it gets hot in Moscow, Idaho.

In the summer of 1998, three women stayed cool by going topless on a major street. They were arrested, but a judge ruled that the local indecent exposure ordinance was too vague. The issue stayed on a low boil.

"That was a mini-tempest in a tea cup that just set the stage," said the Rev. Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, a conservative Presbyterian congregation in a town dominated by the University of Idaho. "What we're having right now is a lot bigger and more interesting than another debate about topless women."

The topless issue is back, but that's not the real story. While the Moscow City Council has attempted to map the topography of the female breast – imagine lawyers defining "cleavage" – many citizens are plunging into the philosophical issues at the heart of the topless culture wars.

Facing off in an Internet forum called Moscow Vision 2020, activists on both sides are letting it all hang out. This isn't just a debate about topless women, it's about burkas, bikinis, breastfeeding, marriage, rape, feminism, Nazis, the Vatican, slavery, hate crimes, Darwinism, property rights, postmodernism, birth control, media bias, free speech, sexual harassment, home schooling, gay rights, abortion, spirituality, heaven, hell, fundamentalism, Hollywood, parenting and, of course, the pledge of allegiance.

That's all.

The latest battle of the breasts began when 22-year-old Daisy Mace and her two roommates lost their jobs and fell behind on their June rent.

To the joy of newspaper headline writers everywhere, the young women decided to start a topless car wash, operating at different sites each day in neighborhoods and public parking lots. Soon, Moscovites were "steamed up" and their council was "in a lather" – resulting in an ordinance banning females from going topless in the city.

Liberals and libertarians started talking about the Taliban.

Obviously, if religious conservatives were strongly opposed to topless car washing, then the right to wash cars while topless must be a vital civil liberty. And what would the Religious Right do next? Take over the town?

As the leader of a growing evangelical flock, Wilson threw down a gauntlet in the Vision 2020 forum. The left can be as fundamentalist and judgmental as the right, he said. The ultimate question was whether it was possible to say that some behaviors are socially acceptable and some are not.

Both sides want to shape the laws. Were there no moral absolutes to guide them?

"By what standard do you judge anything? We have a standard and everyone knows what it is – Genesis through Revelation," argued Wilson. "You make quite as many value judgments as we do, even if it is only about us, but when pressed for details on when and how your Moses came down off your Sinai, everything goes blurry."

Everyone believes something is true, he said. Everyone has a worldview that guides his or her actions.

The implication was clear, responded Joan "Auntie Establishment" Opyr, in a chorus of outraged voices on the left. Wilson was claiming to speak for God, while the "rest of us have to make do with secular humanism, MTV and old bits of string and paperclips." But she noted that Christian denominations and sects often disagree over how to interpret their own scriptures.

So, wrote Opyr, "By what standard do we judge? By our own lights. ... No doubt you believe that you take your orders directly from on high. Oddly enough, that's where I get my orders, too, but I get them via The Tanakh, not the Christian bible. Others get theirs from the Koran, from the Tao Ti Ching, from the Upanishads, from the Rig Veda, or from time spent meditating in Joshua Tree State Park."

For Wilson and many others, it was simply impossible to say that all standards are equally valid. There would be no easy peace.

"When two contradictory claims of absolute truth collide, both can be wrong, but both cannot be right," he replied. "My complaint is that however much they complain about the threat of conservative Christianity, relativists are far more afraid of their own position than they are of ours. This is because if relativism is the case, then anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism."

After Sept. 11 – What good? What evil?

There was never any question whether the hellish events of Sept. 11 would be selected as the most important news story in the Religion Newswriters Association's annual poll.

The question was which Sept. 11 religion story would receive the most votes.

There were so many - from the prayers of the bombers to the prayers of those who fought them. In the end, five of the RNA poll's top 10 stories were linked to Sept. 11 in some way. The secular journalists who cover religion named Osama bin Laden as 2001's most significant religion newsmaker, with President Bush placing second.

"Osama bin Laden has demonstrated, not for the first time in history, how easily religion and religious fervor can be hijacked to serve political ends," noted one journalist.

Was this attack merely about politics? Armies of experts said it was part of an ancient clash between civilizations and religions. Some saw evidence of a pivotal struggle within Islam, a fight requiring sermons and fatwas as well as bullets and bombs. President Bush said this was a battle between good and evil - period.

But it's hard to discuss good and evil, and terrorists and heroes, in an age that says truth is a matter of opinion. Welcome back to America's culture wars.

"We're not fighting to eradicate 'terrorism,' " argued Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times. "Terrorism is just a tool. World War III is a battle against religious totalitarianism, a view of the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if others are negated."

In this column and others, the New York Times defined "religious totalitarianism" as any claim that a faith teaches absolute, exclusive truth.

"The future of the world may well be decided by how we fight this war," wrote Friedman. "Can Islam, Christianity and Judaism know that God speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays and Latin on Sundays? Many Jews and Christians have already argued that the answer to that question is yes, and some have gone back to their sacred texts to reinterpret their traditions to embrace modernity and pluralism."

David Zwiebel of Agudath Israel of America fiercely disagreed, insisting that this "vision of America where religious belief is welcome only if it abandons claims to exclusive truth is truly chilling - and truly intolerant."

Here are the top 10 stories in the RNA poll:

1. Americans rush to prayer vigils after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Clergy describe waves of worshippers asking, "Where was God?'' Worship attendance surges, but quickly returns to seasonal levels.

2. Fearing a backlash of hate, most American Muslims experience just the opposite. Many non-Muslims organize visits to mosques and clergy condemn negative stereotypes.

3. Bush repeatedly proclaims that America's war is not with Islam, but with those who blaspheme its teachings. But many Middle Eastern and Asian Muslims agree with bin Laden's proclamations that the U.S. is at war with their faith.

4. Months of debate over the morality of research on stem cells taken from human embryos lead to a presidential order limiting the use of federal research dollars to existing stem cell lines.

5. Assassinations and suicide bombings escalate in Israel, fueling animosity and mistrust in the Middle East and dimming the prospects of peace between Jews and Palestinians. Homes are bulldozed in Gaza and the West Bank.

6. The White House proceeds with its Faith-Based Initiative despite criticism from the religious left and many conservatives. A modified version wins passage in the U.S. House, but has yet to pass the Senate.

7. Books and courses on Islamic beliefs and culture surge in popularity as Americans seek to better understand Islamic fundamentalism and its place in the Muslim world.

8. Pope John Paul II visits to Greece, Syria and Malta, becoming the first pope to visit a mosque, the Great Mosque in Damascus. A papal visit to the Ukraine increases old tensions, as Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox leaders claim that he is stealing their sheep.

9. Books on prayer soar on bookstore charts, illustrated by sales of the ``Prayer of Jabez.'' The apocalyptic "Left Behind" series sets publishing records, even though only 24 percent of Americans and 42 percent of ``born again'' Christians say they have heard of the books.

10. Christian relief workers – accused by the Taliban of trying to convert Muslims – are freed after three months of captivity in Afghanistan.