And now number 4; but first, you just have to look at the photo on the front page of the Thursday Wall Street Journal. There are Sen. Reid, Sen. Spector and someone else, not sure I can remember who, and above them, flattened by the magic of photography, is a ceiling decoration in the Senate caucus room that looks exactly like a roulette wheel. Talk about perfect inadvertency.....

No. 4: Remove “red button” culture war moral issues from national politics.

The abortion issue and issues concerning marriage for homosexuals can never be settled in American national politics. These are issues that raise absolutist claims that, by their very natures, are resistant to compromise. The result is a source of permanent divisiveness that has driven our political parties into the hands of extremists on both sides. This is bad for everyone, and it is arguably getting worse.

Happily, there are such things in the United States as regional and local sensibilities and differences. That’s natural in a country as large and with social origins as diverse as ours. Following from the principle of subsidiarity, judgments about abortion and homosexual rights should be rendered at the state level, and perhaps, in some cases, at the municipal or local level.

My own view is that decisions on abortion and homosexual marriage are inherently religious decisions, and that these decisions should be made among interested family members and their respective clergy. Where decisions are matters of consent and no living person can be construed as a victim of any judgment, government should have as little a role as possible in them. That is what liberty is all about, after all.

But of course, not everyone has a religious tradition or community to turn to, and some communal standards are certainly necessary at the outer limits of potential human behavior. If, say, a group of cultists whose members stood for the public execution of adulterers moved into your town, the larger community would have a natural right to prevent that if, as one would hope, it so desired. But it is clear that local communities, at a maximum individual states, have a much better chance of reaching working compromises on sensitive moral issues than the country as a whole. And if minorities within a community or state disagree with the local consensus reached on issues like abortion and homosexual marriage, they can always go someplace where the consensus is more to their liking. It’s a free, and thankfully a diverse, country.

Therefore, the two main parties should agree not to use the Congress as a platform from which to wage culture war against each other. We need to stop beating ourselves up in a battle no one can ever win at the national level. The party leaderships should also agree that, at the level of the states, every effort should be made to cooperate to define standards acceptable to the majority. That’s the best we can do, and it’s the least we should do.