There was a reason I left Cairo beyond my choice of university to study architecture, and after Mohammad Atta, an Egyptian Arab-Muslim, slammed a jet into the world trade towers, I decided to fully explore this reason. I could no longer ignore the memories I had buried so long ago and what I had witnessed as a young boy growing up as a minority Copt subject to Islamic rule.

Such is the place we find ourselves in America's dialog on race relations, which has become a political contest won by one political party. Democrats have garnered 88%-to 93% of the African-American vote in the past three presidential elections, an astounding record among any ethnic or demographic group in American politics. The Democrat political advantage on race has been established and growing for decades, but it has now become the "strange fact" of American politics.

The death of that once-promising dialogue would have been unimaginable 40 years ago. Then, in the aftermath of Vatican II, it seemed possible that Canterbury and Rome might be reconciled, with full ecclesiastical communion restored. That great hope began to run aground in the mid-1980s, when the Church of England faced the question of whether it could call women to holy orders (a practice already under way in other member communities of the worldwide Anglican Communion).

This new morality is a form of libertarianism (people have a right to do as they please) whose fundamental principle is a simplistic idea of fairness (if you can do it, so can I). I learned about libertarian fairness many years ago as a father of small children, whose ultimate argument upon being denied something they wanted invariably was, "It isn't fair."