The “flying imams” and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are declaring victory in their legal war against law-enforcement personnel and safety procedures at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Their “victory” — aided and abetted by a judge arrogantly dismissive of law-enforcement realities — is a major setback for transportation safety.

The case made news three years ago when the six imams were removed from a U.S. Airways jet after passengers and airline employees reported that the six were engaging in suspicious behavior, including changing seats into a so-called 9/11 pattern; cursing the United States and its conflict with Saddam Hussein; chanting “Allah, Allah” when boarding was called, and unnecessarily requesting seat-belt extenders that could be used as weapons.

The imams were questioned and released. Subsequently, they sued U.S. Airways, the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC), the officers involved and even passengers they suspected of reporting their behavior, until an outraged, bipartisan Congress passed a law giving the passengers immunity.

Last week, a settlement was announced in the case. Details remain confidential, and the judge must approve the agreement. But the parties have said publicly that — though there is no admission of guilt or fault — money will change hands. MAC’s insurance company exercised its right to take charge of the defense and chose to settle, according to MAC spokesman Patrick Hogan.

No wonder. In a ruling this summer, U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery pinned the law-enforcement officials involved to the wall — one from the FBI and six from MAC — second-guessing their conduct with the luxury of a Monday-morning quarterback.

When the officers were summoned to Flight 300 on Nov. 20, 2006, they believed that passengers might be in danger, and they had to make quick decisions based on limited information. Montgomery, in contrast, had the opportunity to review hundreds of pages of briefs, depositions and exhibits before concluding — in hindsight — that the officers had erred in detaining the imams. After hearing lawyers’ arguments, she deliberated for almost three months before penning a 47-page dissertation on what, in her view, the officers should or shouldn’t have done that day.

Most important, she — unlike the officers — knew with the benefit of hindsight that passengers had not been in danger.

On July 24, 2009, Montgomery issued her ruling. “No reasonably competent officer,” she wrote, could have believed he was acting legally by detaining and questioning the imams in a way that, in her view, amounted to an “arrest.” The fact that at least 15 officers involved in the incident — from the MAC, the Federal Air Marshal Service, the FBI and the Secret Service — had all apparently believed they were acting appropriately and responsibly did not appear to give her pause. The MAC officers, Montgomery ruled, were actually guilty of a “willful or malicious wrong.”

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, worries about the impact of a settlement reached under such circumstances.

“Terrorism operates on fear,” says Jasser. “Transportation authorities don’t know when, where or how terrorists will strike, so they must be vigilant.” After this settlement, he adds, the men and women charged with protecting the public will have to contend with a “competing fear” as they make tough decisions: “They may ask, ‘If I detain and question someone who is acting suspiciously, will I cost my employer thousands of dollars, or even lose my job?’”

This chilling effect may lead to risky changes in airport security policies and pilot training, Jasser warns. As a result, officials may miss “vital nuances” in behavior that put the rest of us in danger.

Despite a potential increase in safety risks at the airport, is the flying imams’ settlement at least a victory for Muslim civil rights, as CAIR has declared? On the contrary, says Jasser — a Muslim — it’s a victory for the legal strategy of “victimization,” which grievance groups have often employed to “shake down” defendants. CAIR and the imams dismiss national security concerns, he says, in order to portray airport security measures as motivated by ethnic and religious bigotry. In the process, they ignore the central role of suspicious behavior and cast themselves as victims of irrational bias.

This obsession with victimization leads CAIR and the imams to ignore Muslims’ real interests, Jasser adds.

“Muslims have responsibility for religious reform, aimed at removing the fuel that powers the growth of radical Islam. We will have succeeded when we no longer see arrests for terrorist-related activities — as we did recently in Denver, New Jersey and Boston,” he says.

“The real victory for Muslims will come when the cancer of political Islamist ideology, which feeds terrorism, disappears.”

“The progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary,” write researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in a much-discussed new study.

“The gender wage gap has partly closed,” they continue. “[Women’s] educational attainment has risen and is now surpassing that of men; women have gained an unprecedented level of control over fertility; technological change in the form of new domestic appliances has freed women from domestic drudgery; and women’s freedoms within both the family and market sphere have expanded.”

No news here, you may say. We all know that women’s opportunities have grown exponentially in the last 40 years, as stereotypes of every kind have been tossed in the cultural dumpster.

But wait. Read on:

“Yet … measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being … is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries.”

Pundits are scratching their heads over the new Wharton study, called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” Its message about women’s growing misery is especially startling because in the 1970s, the “happiness” gender gap ran the other way — with women consistently reporting being more satisfied with their lives than men, the authors say.

Why this flip-flop on happiness by the most fortunate generation of women in history? Why have progress and liberation on every front — educational, professional and sexual — left many women in a funk?

Old-guard feminists have a party-line explanation: the “second shift.” That’s the idea that women bear a double burden because as they moved into the paid workforce, they still had to do the lion’s share of the work at home.

Sorry, the data don’t bear this out, according to the Wharton study. Since 1965, it says, men and women have experienced relatively equal declines in total hours worked. Women are working more hours in the market but significantly fewer at home, while men are working fewer hours in the market and more at home.

What does seem certain is that the path to liberation and expanded opportunity has entailed some unsettling tradeoffs.

Take the sexual revolution. In 1970, women on my college campus began sporting T-shirts declaring that “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” In their eyes, marriage and family were a ball and chain — more likely to bring women bondage than fulfillment. To find happiness and an authentic identity, they insisted, women would have to cast off social convention and obligations to others and “explore” their sexuality without restraint.

But this philosophy had a catch: men began to embrace it too. Encouraged by women, many men began to back away from the responsibilities and burdens of marriage and fatherhood and to join enthusiastically in the sexual free-for-all. Increasingly, they came to view women as sex objects — the very thing feminists had claimed to want to avoid — rather than as long-term partners in the common enterprise of family.

We know what followed: Marriage and family began to unravel. The divorce rate doubled between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Today, no one of either sex can count on marriage or family for the social support we need to get through life’s inevitable challenges. But women and children — more vulnerable — have paid the biggest price.

Women’s quest for happiness in the work world also brought tradeoffs. In the 1970s and ’80s, many women, long shut out from high-powered careers, confidently sought freedom and fulfillment from a shiny briefcase and a VP nameplate on the office door. Success brought financial self-sufficiency and a fuller stage for the use of talents.

But the search for identity in the work world also brought disappointment. As women pinned their hopes for happiness on professional careers, they began to discover the mixed bag their male counterparts knew too well: the pressure to produce, the outright drudgery, the risk of failure, the boss from hell. For some, the process may have shed light on why men have traditionally died at a younger age.

Maybe we women got the whole happiness thing backwards. Years ago, we assured ourselves of a golden road ahead if we could throw off all that had tied us down and limited our options in the past. But perhaps there was something in those ties themselves — those “prisons” of family, marriage and other fundamental obligations — that had the power to bring us closer to our true goal.

Unless you’ve been stuck in the Gobi Desert, you’ve read the headlines about the scandal at ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Earlier this month, ACORN staffers in four states were caught giving not-so-sage advice to two journalists, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, on how to defraud the government, cheat on taxes and wangle a mortgage for a home-based brothel.

ACORN was once the darling of Democrats for its support of every item on the left-wing wish list. Suddenly, its employees can hardly find a Democrat who will answer their phone calls. When the U.S. Senate voted on Sept. 14 to cut off federal housing dollars for ACORN, the tally was a lopsided 83-7.

ACORN’s foibles may seem largely irrelevant here in Minnesota, where the organization has so far been able to keep its nose relatively clean.

But ACORN does have a special place in its heart for at least one prominent Minnesota politician. Last year, it showered praise on Al Franken, endorsing his run for the U.S. Senate. Franken returned the esteem: “I’m thrilled and honored to receive this endorsement,” he gushed in a press release. He added that he was “more motivated than ever to work with ACORN.”

I’m not suggesting that Franken had any association with the folks behind ACORN’s recent scandal. Indeed, when the Senate voted to defund ACORN, he got religion and joined the pack.

It’s worth recalling, however, that ACORN is best-known for its massive voter-registration campaigns, which focus relentlessly on getting Democrats elected in targeted states. Here its record is appalling — and goes to the heart of our democratic electoral system.

In October 2008, ACORN announced triumphantly that it had registered about 1.3 million new voters in 18 battleground states, among them Minnesota. A few weeks later, however, the director of Project Vote — an ACORN affiliate — acknowledged to the New York Times that election officials had rejected about 400,000 of those, for reasons including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and (in the Times’ words) “fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors.”

Nothing new here. ACORN’s registration drives “routinely produce fraudulent registrations,” according to a staff report released in July 2009 by the ranking Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The report describes ACORN as “a criminal conspiracy” and details violations ranging from unpaid taxes to a million-dollar embezzlement and cover-up. “To date,” the report says, “nearly 70 ACORN employees have been convicted in 12 states for voter-registration fraud.”

The latest such scandal broke a few weeks ago, when authorities in Florida accused 11 ACORN workers of falsifying information on 888 voter-registration forms.

In May 2009, Nevada’s attorney general charged ACORN and two employees with 39 felonies. Authorities raided ACORN offices after complaints about numerous forms with false addresses and names — including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. Forty-eight percent of forms turned in were “clearly fraudulent,” according to a Las Vegas election official. ACORN recruited felons living in transitional housing in Las Vegas to act as canvassers and promised illegal bonuses if they signed up more than 20 new voters a day.

ACORN’s practices can make fraud difficult to detect. For example, “at election offices around the country, ACORN workers are famous for waiting until registration deadline to dump thousands of new documents on overworked clerks — making it harder for them to fully vet the registration forms,” according to the New York Post.

As a result, fraud often only comes to light by chance. Fraud “has been discovered by cursory checks or by accident,” John Samples, an election expert at the Cato Institute, told the Post. “There’s a lot more out there to be discovered.”

Here in Minnesota, ACORN has boasted of playing a major role in the 2008 elections. It claims to have registered 43,000 new voters, which it describes as 75 percent of the state’s new registrations. Franken’s margin of victory in the Senate race was razor-thin: 312 votes out of about 3 million cast. And Minnesota’s laws on proof of voter eligibility are notoriously loose. Did ACORN folks pull some fast ones to help get their favorite son Franken elected — a win that handed Democrats the 60-vote, veto-proof majority that they needed to enact their liberal agenda?

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie assures us that Minnesota’s system of voter verification protects electoral integrity.

But here’s an uncomfortable fact: Ritchie himself was endorsed by the now-notorious ACORN and elected with its help.

High-school students: Did you stand last week with Homer on the walls of ancient Troy, watching awestruck as Achilles’ pride brought a vast army to the edge of disaster? Have you walked the mean streets of Victorian London with Oliver Twist? Before you graduate, will you and Mark Twain navigate the mighty Mississippi? Will you share Hester Prynne’s shame as she’s branded with a scarlet letter for her illicit love?

Today, too few teenagers embark on the literary quests for wisdom and adventure that timeless classics offer. Many American schools no longer teach these books. In the 1960s, the cry of “relevance” led some to trade Hamlet for the adolescent angst of Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye.” Later, obsessions with multiculturalism, racism and sexism made politically correct books like Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” de rigueur.

Now we’re taking another giant leap away from greatness toward mediocrity. The New York Times recently profiled an instructional approach called Reading Workshop — “part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools.” Reading Workshop can be implemented in various ways. Generally, however, it involves allowing students to choose the books they read — with few restrictions and minimal teacher guidance — instead of studying a serious work of literature as a class.

The movement has been around at least a decade. But it’s gaining steam in schools from New York City to Seattle, according to the Times.

The Times focused on Lorrie McNeill, a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher from suburban Atlanta who is taking the Reading Workshop approach to the max. She’s delegated all decisions about which books to read to her students, who discuss them individually with her or with classmates and write about them in journals.

McNeill no longer teaches books of substance, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” Instead, her students are reading chick-lit books, the Captain Underpants comic-book-style novels, or pop literature such as “Chaka! Through the Fire,” a memoir by R&B star Chaka Khan. Though some students have chosen more challenging books, all are contemporary titles.

A fundamental assumption behind Reading Workshop is that what kids read doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they do read.

“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” enthuses McNeill. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

Reading Workshop’s goal is to make students lifelong readers. But it’s hardly self-evident that reading about pop stars is a better use of kids’ — or anyone’s — time than playing video games or basketball.

In 2009, can we still argue persuasively that what young people read matters very much?

It’s clear, for starters, that kids who read books by masters of the literary craft are more likely to become skilled and thoughtful readers, writers and thinkers themselves.

But the reasons for reading good literature go well beyond this.

Young people — like human beings everywhere — face vital questions in life: What does it mean to be a true friend? What should I do when principle and self-interest conflict? How can I act in the face of fear?

In struggling to answer, however, they have limited resources to draw on. They see the world through the restrictive cultural prism of their own time and place. For many, teen actress Miley Cyrus or rapper Kanye West may be the ideal of greatness.

Good literature offers young people a way to transcend these limitations. Through classics that have spoken to readers for generations, they can come to see the myriad ways that people across the globe and through time have met the challenges of the human condition.

Am I convinced that the world is against me? Anne Frank’s story can show me how fortunate I am. Do I wonder what real courage looks like? I can learn by standing at the guillotine in the French Revolution with Dickens’ Sidney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities.”

By reading good books, young people can watch the consequences of characters’ choices and actions unfold. As they gain insight into why others’ lives have succeeded or failed, they become equipped to live more wisely and well themselves.

Unless our children’s classroom reading aspires to such goals, we may find it hard to explain why the television and the game controller won’t do just as well.

The mainstream media seem dumbfounded that any thinking person could object to President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren on Sept. 8. The president simply told kids to work hard and stay in school, right?

The controversy is just more proof, the media seem to have concluded, that Obama’s critics are kooks and yahoos — you know, the sort of foaming-at-the-mouth folks who show up for tea parties or town hall meetings, or seem compelled to lie reflexively about Obama’s health care reform proposals.

Why are the mainstream media so clueless about the anger and disillusionment growing among independents and conservatives?

The controversy over Obama’s education speech provides a clue. Contrary to most news reports, objections didn’t center on the speech itself. The fracas erupted over the accompanying lesson plans, or “menu of classroom activities,” assembled by the White House and the federal Department of Education.

One particularly blatant proposed activity did get some press — an assignment instructing kids to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” But the White House dropped that after a public outcry, so what’s the big deal?

Here’s the problem: The letter was only one of many examples of Obama-worship in the lesson plans, whose tone and focus came straight from the “Dear Leader” playbook. The plans included few references to citizenship and responsibility. Instead, suggested classroom activities revolved around Obama himself — his thoughts, his desires, his admonitions, the lessons we can all learn from this great man.

For example, the lesson plan for prekindergarten through grade six suggests that teachers prepare young children for Obama’s speech not by discussing personal responsibility, but by studying Obama himself. Teachers can “build background knowledge about the President … and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama.”

And for the higher grade levels? Teachers can prepare them for the “historic” speech by decorating classrooms with the great leader’s sayings: “Teachers may post in large print around the classroom notable quotes excerpted from President Obama’s speeches on education.”

Cringe-inducing Obama-centrism of this kind pervades the lesson plans. Questions and assignments take for granted that students will be inspired and moved by Obama’s words, and will want to do what he asks of them.

Students in the lower grade levels, for example, are to ponder questions such as these: “What is the president trying to tell me?” “What do you think the president wants us to do?” “Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? … Parents? The American people?”

Questions for the higher grade levels include these: “Why does President Obama want to speak with us today?” “How will he inspire us?” “How will he challenge us?” The plans suggest that students reflect reverentially on the Obama quotes hung around the classroom, asking: “What are our interpretations of these excerpts?” “Based on these excerpts, what can we infer that the president believes is important in order to be educationally successful?”

This reverential tone is reinforced by the lesson plans’ odd fixation on noting the president’s exact words.

Young students, for example, may “record important parts of the speech where the president is asking them to do something,” writing down “key … phrases.” Older students may try to “capture direct quotations.” “Teachers could focus students on quotations that either propose a specific challenge to them or that inspire them in some meaningful way.” Examples: “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech? … What are the three most important words in the speech?”

In 1991, the Washington Post went ballistic when President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren about working hard and staying in school. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post fumed. Democratic leaders expressed outrage and hauled administration officials before a hearing to probe the cost and legality of Bush’s action.

In 2009, however, the media cheered Obama’s school speech. Why? The chattering classes have fallen hard for Obama’s cult of personality. Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas may have spoken for many when he breathlessly said of Obama in an interview that “he’s the teacher” and “he’s sort of God.”

Today, average Americans are beginning to see something in Obama the mainstream media can’t. That’s a narcissism — a messianic quality — deeply at odds with the American spirit. Many members of the president’s own party seem to be sensing the same. They are backing away from Obama as the real content of the “hope” and “change” he promised becomes clear.