Christianity Today online has dusted off an interview with the recently-deceased William F. Buckley from 1995, featuring his advice to Christian activists. The interview shows his own Christian faith, as well as points like these:

What frightens people most about the Religious Right is the rhetoric that is sometimes used. There ought to be some thought given, for example, as to how you formulate your antihomosexual position: it should be more pastoral than vitriolic….

If, at the end of a broadcast by Pat Robertson, fewer people are disposed to Christianity than were before he came on (I’m not saying that is the case), then that would be awful if that were so….

Whatever you want to say about the anti-abortionists, you have got to at least say this: Theirs is the most disinterested act of humanitarian concern since the Emancipation Proclamation. They are not talking about protecting their own child, they are talking about protecting children….

Thomas Aquinas once was asked, “If the public view was that a famine was imminent, would you be justified in charging injurious prices for your grain, knowing that a relief wagon of grain was coming?” Thomas said yes, you would, but it would be wrong. A Christian would not do that.Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done.

The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today. That is about the gravest offense that a human being can commit, to throw away a wife.

You know how the mint is putting out quarters featuring all of the 50 states. Now the territories will also get a quarter, as will Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia turned in a proposed design that featured the slogan “No taxation without representation.”

See, the District of Columbia has no representatives in Congress, and yet its population has to pay taxes, which violates that old revolutionary principle. Many D.C. activists go so far as to demand statehood, so that the Milwaukee-sized city of 600,000 would have as many senators as California. (My solution is to shrink the district to just cover the federal buildings, so that all of the residential areas are in Maryland or Virginia. And if that is too radical, though I suspect eliminating Washington would make for a popular political cause, we could just make a provision allowing residents to register to vote in either of those states.) So resentful Washingtonians put that slogan on their license plates and want it on their quarters.

The mint, unfortunately, vetoed the slogan. Setting aside D.C.’s claims, wouldn’t it be cool to have a pocketful of quarters that say, “No taxation without representation”?

(On serious issues, my policy positions are based on my deeply-held convictions. On less important issues, I go by whatever position is funniest.)

England’s royal family may be returning to its chivalric roots. Prince Harry, the third in line to the throne, is a military officer who has been fighting in hot combat in Afghanistan. His unit has killed some 30 Taliban.

[Who can identify the allusion in the title of this post? How else is that allusion appropriate, considering Prince Harry’s earlier frivolous past?]

UPDATE: Because of the publicity, Prince Harry has been pulled from action and is back in England. Now al-Qaida is calling for his assassination.

Iran ‘number one world power’: Ahmadinejad:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday that Iran was the world’s “number one” power, as he launched a bitter new assault on domestic critics he accused of siding with the enemy.

“Everybody has understood that Iran is the number one power in the world,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech to families who lost loved ones in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

“Today the name of Iran means a firm punch in the teeth of the powerful and it puts them in their place,” he added in the address broadcast live on state television.

So what are you going to do with the extra day that you have been given this year?

I believe that February 29, which we only get once every four years, should be a holiday. And I’m not just talking about Little Orphan Annie’s birthday (which was how her creator explained how she was still a kid after decades in the funny papers). It should be a day on which we contemplate time as God’s gift, a truly extra, gratuitous day. It would be like a national snow day, in which people don’t have to go to work. (After all, if you have an annual salary, you are not being paid for today. Think about it.) But it shouldn’t be a time of going out for some big vacation, either (and the government should NOT tamper with the calendar by trying to move February 29 to Monday). Just stay at home and do nothing in particular.

Any other ideas for what we could do with this holiday? What we should call it or how we should celebrate it?

There is an old custom of women getting to propose to men during Leap Year. Women could do that or take other initiatives. I could see making it a holiday in honor of women, though we wouldn’t want the feminists to take it over. But how else should February 29, a day that only comes around once every four years, be celebrated?