Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

When I was 14 or 15, a camp counselor told me I was smart. I had never been very good in school, but he told me once that I was smart but my mind operated a little differently.

We live in an age where there is both more expression and more self-censorship than existed even a decade ago. Alas, laws have immunized internet carriers from many of the usual rules that govern public dialogue. Rights must always stay ahead of technology to assure that constitutional protections apply to all forms of communication.

We don't have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets.

To ask about the 'source' of rights or morals assumes an erreous conclusion. To ask about the source of morals is to assume that such a source exists. As if it existed outside of human constructed systems. The 'source' is the human ability to learn from experience and to entrench rights in our laws and in our consciousness. Our rights come from our long history of wrongs.

We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.

I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.