WHERE'S GOD IN THE LIBERAL MORAL EQUATION? NOWHERE TO BE FOUND ? AND WITH GOOD REASON. THE AMERICAN LEFT NOW STANDS FOR THE WHOLESALE DISPLACEMENT OF TRADITIONAL RELIGIOUS MORALITY AND THE UTTER REJECTION OF THE DIVINE. "We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion," atheistic commentator Christopher Hitchens writes in his new best-seller, "God Is Not Great." Hitchens, consciously or unconsciously, speaks for the liberal movement.

A recent Gallup poll showed overwhelming liberal support for homosexual activity (83 percent), premarital sex (89 percent), illegitimacy (83 percent), abortion (67 percent) and doctor-assisted suicide (73 percent). Liberals support polygamy, adultery and cloning humans at an exponentially higher rate than conservatives. The top moral issue on the liberal agenda seems to be global warming. ("It is a moral issue, it is an ethical issue," spouts Al Gore.) Liberals seem far less comfortable discussing the moral implications of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq.

This, then, is the "ethical life" proposed by the liberals who echo Hitchens: the unethical life of moral lassitude. It is a collective program of moral abdication on the international and domestic fronts. It is the substitution of libertinism for liberty, accompanied by the substitution of enforced fairness for individual freedom.

Liberalism's morality is philosophically bankrupt. Its atheism precludes the human capability for free will - without a soul, we are nothing but mechanistic products of genetics and environment - yet it simultaneously insists on an infinite capability for individual and societal perfection. It asserts the potentiality for a triumph of the will, while obliterating the basis for willpower. It champions the "natural," while maintaining that nature need not dictate social relations. IT WEDS DETERMINISTIC DARWINISM TO MARXIST UTOPIANISM.