The penultimate part starts with an attack on Walter Lippmann, who dared to suggest that “the media should play a role as intermediary between politicians and a public too self-centered an uneducated to really grasp what was really going on.” I agree, Glenn, how dare those reporters suggest that a population 20% of which believes the Sun goes around the Earth, only 40% of which believe in evolution, and over 50% of which don’t know that the earth takes one year to revolve around the sun aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs in the box? Say it isn’t so! I mean, hell, if you tried explaining even the basics of nuclear physics to a random person (important to understand in the debate about nuclear energy), they’d probably have no clue what the hell you were talking about. And Beck can’t get out of this by blaming the socialist education system; these polls are of adults, which would probably include a good chunk of people who were in grade school during the Reagan era.

There’s one quote in particular that struck me as odd: Beck quotes Woodrow Wilson as saying, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life…[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.” It’s an interesting quote, and so I decided to try to find out what went in the ellipsis. The problem is, a Google search for the first half returns nothing giving the full quote; every single instance online is abridged in the exact same way. This site sources it as from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which I don’t have a copy of; I do plan on going to the library and checking it out to see where Goldberg got this from.
Anyway, then he goes on to list statistics about poor performance of inner-city public schools and expects the reader to make the logical leap that this is because of the education system and not, say, due to chronic underfunding or anything.

And then he brings up the real shocker: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. He even mentions that the US and Somalia are the only UN members that haven’t yet ratified it, and lists what rights the Convention requires countries to give children as “access to education and health care; programs that develop their personalities and talents; and the opportunity to grow and develop in an atomsphere of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality, and solidarity.” I guess we’re supposed to take these as bad things, since he never really says why they’re bad, other than that they’d force the US to be accountable to, gasp, an “international community”.

And now we turn to the final segment of the chapter: “Only a Moral and Religious People”. And with a name like that, you can tell it’s going to be good! He starts by declaiming the emphasis on money and material goods in today’s society, yet he curiously doesn’t place any of the blame for this on advertisements, which instill us with the message that “more money = better than.” What does he blame instead?
“It’s a sad contradiction, but our homes now seem to have plenty of room for everything—except God.”
All right then. Clearly religion is what we need more of if we want to be moral. Just look at these upstanding citizens:

• Ted Haggard, evangelical preacher: Hired a gay hooker and (allegedly) did meth.
• Kent Hovind, creationist: convicted of tax fraud.
• Fred Phelps, head of the Westboro Baptist Church: Disbarred after committing perjury.

Oh. Uh. Hm. But here’s the really funny part: look at what Our Holy Founding Fathers had to say about religion:

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
– Thomas Paine

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
– Benjamin Franklin

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.
– Benjamin Franklin

During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment known as Christianity has been on trial and what have been the fruits, more or less, in all places? These are the fruits: pride, indolence, ignorance and servility in the laity, and in both clergy and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
– James Madison

My point here is not that nobody who is religious can be moral, or that everybody who follows some religion is some kind of slavering God-zombie. I’m not PZ Myers. My point here is that Beck pulling the assertion that religion is necessary for a moral society completely out of his ass, with nothing to support it but some cherry-picked quotes; the only mention he gives to the fact that atheists can be moral people is when he notes: “Religion is not the cause of intolerance any more than the lack of it is the cause of mass murder.” So… atheists aren’t necessarily mass murderers. Thanks, Glenn! And I’d also like to note that if your religion tells you to hate gay people, then your religion kind of is the cause of your intolerance. Just saying.

Later this week, part 8. We’ll finish off the review with Beck’s (and my) closing thoughts.