Peace groups don't get it: Plenty worth fighting for.(Orlando Sentinel)

During these times when there are serious subjects to be considered, I wonder whether writing about a misguided fringe political movement is worth my time or yours.

But to ignore such groups is to let their ideas go unchallenged. Wrong-headed thinking is more dangerous than those who promote it, for ideas all too often outlive their sponsors.

That's how I feel about the fledgling U.S. peace movement, which surely will grow as American forces sustain and inflict casualties. Peace-group members are neither necessarily bad people _ nor un-American. But, being charitable, I think that they are horribly misguided in their apparent belief that very little is worth fighting for.

A less-flattering interpretation of their motivation would be that they believe that the terrorists had some justification, that there is a moral equivalency between the effects of U.S. foreign policy and flying jetliners into crowded office buildings.

The small peace network at this point includes academics, clergy, Hollywood types and others who have never used the words "support" and "military" in the same sentence _ in other words, people for whom protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was the highlight of their political lives.

For example, at the University of Wisconsin, a hotbed of anti-war demonstrations a generation ago, the activists apparently haven't even bothered to come up with new rhetoric. The Associated Press reported the 400 students who took part in a protest of potential U.S. military action chanted, "1-2-3-4, we won't support your racist war," the same slogan their predecessors on that lefty campus shouted during the Vietnam War era.

The protesters are many of the same people who denounce the Boy Scouts for excluding gays, conservative Christians for letting religion dictate their political beliefs and praise feminists for challenging traditional sex roles. Yet, they are unwilling to endorse resisting the Taliban and its friends, a political/military movement that would execute gays, ban women from schools and the workplace, and install a theocracy in which Pat Robertson's views would make him an out-of-touch liberal.