Used to, if you asked someone what church he goes to, you would get one answer. I just encountered someone who is a Catholic but who also sometimes attends a non-denominational church and also a Baptist church.

I had heard of this phenomenon but hadn’t met it up close. An increasing number of Christians don’t belong to any one congregation, but instead regularly attend lots of them. They might go to one church for its Bible studies, another for its music, and yet another when a particular minister preaches.

After all, I don’t just go to one grocery store. Church is becoming something similar. Not a community that shares a common confession, but a place to go to meet our consumer religious needs.

From Last-minute Bush abortion ruling causes furor :

A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job-discrimination laws.

The proposed rule would prohibit recipients of federal money from discriminating against doctors, nurses and other health care workers who refuse to perform or to assist in the performance of abortions or sterilization procedures because of their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

It would also prevent hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices and drugstores from requiring employees with religious or moral objections to “assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity” financed by the Department of Health and Human Services. . . .

The protest from the [Equal Employment Opportunity] commission [which says their current rules are sufficient] comes on the heels of other objections to the rule by doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, state attorneys general and political leaders, including President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama has said the proposal will raise new hurdles to women seeking reproductive health services, like abortion and some contraceptives.

Some of you have said that a president’s views on abortion do not matter. We’ll see.

George F. Will says that what with all of our government subsidies, earmarks, social welfare programs, and other policies–including those supported by Republicans–we are already pretty much a socialist country. In his column, he makes some trenchant observations about where we are heading:

The distribution of a trillion dollars by a political institution — the federal government — will be nonpolitical? How could it be? Either markets allocate resources, or government — meaning politics — allocates them. Now that distrust of markets is high, Americans are supposed to believe that the institution they trust least — Congress — will pony up $1 trillion and then passively recede, never putting its 10 thumbs, like a manic Jack Horner, into the pie? Surely Congress will direct the executive branch to show compassion for this, that and the other industry. And it will mandate “socially responsible” spending — an infinitely elastic term — by the favored companies. . . .

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government. But if conservatives call all such spreading by government “socialism,” that becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost everything, including the refundable tax credit on which McCain’s health-care plan depended.

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker’s intelligence. And falsely shouting “socialism!” in a crowded theater such as Washington causes an epidemic of yawning. This is the only major industrial society that has never had a large socialist party ideologically, meaning candidly, committed to redistribution of wealth. This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an envious, people. It is also because the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of the strong, e.g., sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.

In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do rent-seeking — bending government for the benefit of private factions. The difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become.

OK, he concedes, we are not actually socialist. Just “rent-seeking.” That’s a useful term. But another name for it is corruption.

Pirates are plundering the sea lanes practically at will, and world governments are saying they can’t do anything about it:

Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade.

Admiral Michael Mullen, the US military chief, pronounced himself stunned by the pirates’ reach after their capture of the supertanker Sirius Star and its $100 million (£70 million) cargo. Commanders from the US Fifth Fleet and from Nato warships in the area said that they would not intervene to retake the vessel. . . .

Operations undertaken by the coalition fleet are fraught with legal difficulties, ranging from restrictive rules of engagement to rights of habeas corpus, as the British Navy discovered when it detained eight pirates after a shootout last week. Yesterday the detainees were passed on to Kenya, where efforts to prosecute them will be closely watched for precedent.

Have the old laws of the sea been repealed? In the past, pirates, being combatants under the authority of no nation, had no legal protection. It would be inconceivable that a naval vessel would have any qualms about pursuing and destroying pirates.

UPDATE: India’s navy is responding in the old school manner.