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'A matter of taste'

"The bombshell that Gov. James McGreevey dropped recently was not about being gay. It may have been about being a sleazy, cheating husband, a terrible father, a dishonest public servant, a failed leader and an atrocious role model, but it wasn't about being gay -- because he's not. ...

"He's already shown he's capable of having sex with women. He may have developed a liking for homosexual sex, but that's just a matter of taste, not biology, since there's no evidence for a homosexual gene. The major homosexual-rights groups don't even provide any such evidence, because it doesn't exist.

"What he's done is what many, many others have done: acted on a desire for unorthodox sexual activity and decided he's going to keep on doing it, regardless of the impact on others, or on himself. ...

"The facts are that McGreevey could just as easily one day call a press conference to announce he's become 'straight' again."

--Linda Harvey, writing on "McGreevey is not 'gay,'" Thursday in WorldNetDaily at www.worldnetdaily.com

Table of brotherhood

"To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, some say that the Olympics can forge peace and brotherhood merely by attracting athletes from diverse cultures and political systems. Let them come to Athens.

"Let them meet Iran's Arash Miresmaeili, a two-time world judo champion. Miresmaeili refused to compete because his first-round opponent, Ehud Vaks, committed the unpardonable sin of being an Israeli.

"Miresmaeili's attitude should remind the world that totalitarian regimes use sports not to encourage peace and brotherhood but to further their own geopolitical agendas. Sadly, after almost 70 years, the world needs reminding.

"The romantic conventional wisdom about Jesse Owens disproving the myth of 'Aryan' racial superiority by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics ignores the fact that the lie nevertheless doomed millions to death within a decade."

--Joseph D'Hippolito, writing on "The political Olympics," in the Friday edition of the Jerusalem Post

Teaching by rhyme

"Long before kids start school, parents begin to teach them language with the primitive poetry of the nursery rhyme. Before a 2-year-old can understand the meaning of Little Jack Horner's plum or Little Miss Muffet's tuffet -- before he knows what it means to hop on pop or why the pobble has no toes -- he delights in the rhythm and rhyme of the verse; and by hearing the music of the verse often enough he comes gradually to understand first the sounds and eventually the words of which it is composed. ... Without knowing it, a child who has learned a scrap of verse has been drawn into the civilizing interplay of music and language, rhythm and sound, melody and words. ...

"From 'The Cat in the Hat' on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music.

"What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development."

--Michael Knox Beran, writing on "In Defense of Memorization," in the summer issue of City Journal