Perverts, Liars, Christians and Bush

An interesting collection of articles in the Times and Post today:

• The Times' Eichenwald explores the online world of pedophilia here--From Their Own Online World, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach. He documents the extent to which pedophiles construct their own world, in which children come on to them and pedophilia is a civil rights cause.
  
• The Times also carries this story about a painting of Jesus in a West Virginia school, raising church-state issues. (The painting is the version I remember from the 40's, a very handsome man with long hair with eyes uplifted. At that time, Jesus was the only long-haired person. I'm certainly no expert, but he doesn't look Jewish at all to me.) It includes a quote that the U.S. was a Christian country, founded on Christian principles.
• Turning to the Post, Shankar Vedantam in his science column reports on research showing how much people cheat, and the excuses they give themselves as justification.
• And finally, in the funniest article, the Bush administration has decided that the number of U.S. missiles in 1969 is classified.
  

Why link them together, other than to create a striking header? Because they all show instances of what I might call "housekeeping"--the very human and birdlike quality of straightening out one's environment to make it more to your liking. The pedophiles aren't any less human than the rest of us; they're just more obvious about it.