every day, fresh tremors break out along this fault line over abortion, euthanasia, death panels, the definition of a marriage and the composition of the federal courts. last year the clash appeared in senator obama's claim that better rural americans cling to god and the guns. today, as i speak, it is front and center in the fight over federal funding of abortions in the senate health care bill. it is a struggle literally over the meaning of right and wrong, a battle for conservatives against what pope benedict has called the tyranny of relativism. early in 2008, it briefly became fashionable in the media to suggest that the culture wars were over as a salient feature of american life. but the predictable contingencies of history. it in the meteoric e sense of sarah palin to national prominence and in the storm of publicity that has enveloped her ever since, the smouldering culture wars in some ways also a class war, have reignited. for the foreseeable future, the perception of an irrepressible conflict between conservative people of faith and the secular left is likely to energize l

they talk about how we are going to pull the plug on grandma, how we are going to push euthanasia forward, how we are going to deny health care to deserving people because of this legislation. these recommendations that we are going into this morning our recommendations and nothing more. and to say anything different than that is either to transmit the grossest kind of carelessness, and i hope this is not the case, or to just plain it out right deceit. it is time for us to look at these recommendations as they are. the recommendation of the scientific panel created to make advise on what is the best medical and how we can see to it that we best protect our women with regard to things like pap smears and mammograms. now i will yield to no one on either subject because this committee and the oversight subcommittee, when i was chairman of each, were responsible for seeing to it that both mammograms and pap smears were made in the safest way for the benefit of patients i lost a mother to cervical cancer, and i have lots lots of friends to breast cancer and other things, and i am grossly offen

they talk about how we are going to pull the plug on grandma, how we are going to push euthanasia forward, how we are going to deny health care to deserving people because of this legislation. these recommendations that we are going into this morning our recommendations and nothing more. and to say anything different than that is either to transmit the grossest kind of carelessness, and i hope this is not the case, or to just plain it out right deceit. it is time for us to look at these recommendations as they are. the recommendation of the scientific panel created to make advise on what is the best medical and how we can see to it that we best protect our women with regard to things like pap smears and mammograms. now i will yield to no one on either subject because this committee and the oversight subcommittee, when i was chairman of each, were responsible for seeing to it that both mammograms and pap smears were made in the safest way for the benefit of patients i lost a mother to cervical cancer, and i have lots lots of friends to breast cancer and other things, and i am grossly offen