Aside from the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, few things are sure in life anymore. The Boston Celtics once won 11 National Basketball Association titles in 13 years, and baseball’s New York Yankees won 14 American League pennants in 16 seasons. Joe Louis held the world heavyweight boxing title nearly 12 consecutive years back when boxing still commanded a significant bit of America’s sporting attention.

But it’s hard to build dynasties these days, athletic or otherwise. Chicago’s Daleys and Alaska’s Murkowskis are the two most recent families to see their longtime political influence wane. It seems like the Kennedys of Massachusetts have run their course; hopefully the same is true of the Cheneys of Wyoming, not to mention the Bushes and Clintons of whichever state(s) they currently call home.

There are, though, some titles that still go unchallenged year after year. The Yankees continue to be an annual factor come World Series time. Miss America generally hails from a Sun Belt state. And America’s most reviled religious charlatan remains Fred Phelps, a one-time Kansas lawyer (now disbarred) and founder of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka.

Reverend Phelps’s small flock, consisting primarily of his family members, has gained notoriety by picketing funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They claim that dead soldiers are part of the punishment God is visiting upon America because of our nation’s “acceptance” of homosexuality. The group also pickets (with signs emblazoned with slogans such as “God Hates Fags”) funerals of people whose deaths were AIDS-related, as well as those of gay victims of murder.

And in case there are a few Americans not appalled by Phelps’s “church” (which has been disavowed and rejected by every mainstream Baptist organization), flag desecration is an integral part of their demonstrations as well.

But Phelps’s standing as the nation’s most fraudulent “Man of God” received a serious challenge recently from Terry Jones, the 58-year-old pastor of the Gainesville, Fla.-based Dove World Outreach Center. It was he who proposed last Saturday’s “International Burn a Koran” Day.

Thankfully, the event was ultimately postponed, but not before Reverend Jones got far more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame. For that he can thank “news” organizations (actually subsidiaries of the infotainment industry) that aid and abet the dumbing-down of America by continuing to aim programming at America’s still-descending lowest common denominator. Their breathless reporting of each of Jones’ moronic and incendiary pronouncements is only the most recent example.

Christians whose stomachs turn over at the deliberately offensive antics of Phelps, Jones and their acolytes now know how truly committed Muslims must feel when they read of the latest atrocities committed in the name of Allah by Osama bin Laden or one of his imitators.

Until finally backing down last Thursday, Jones, a classic fundamentalist wolf in Christian sheep’s clothing, planned on going ahead with his Sept. 11 public torching of Islam’s central religious text despite being urged not to do so by interfaith groups composed of Evangelical Christian, Roman Catholic, Jewish and Muslim leaders.

Also warning him about the potential consequences of his proposed insensitive and provocative actions: President Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, the commander of the U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. In an e-mail to the Associated Press, General Petraeus warned, “Images of burning a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan ”“ and around the world ”“ to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”

In other words, the grandstand play proposed by the gun-toting, proudly ignorant Jones and his fellow would-be Quran burners would likely have put both U.S. military personnel and American citizens traveling abroad in grave danger. Not only that, publicly incinerating copies of Islam’s Holy Book would have been just what the doctor ordered for Al Qaeda and similar organizations.

Why bother with risky and expensive weapons-smuggling operations to arm wild-eyed, unreliable fanatics when holy-rolling loose cannons like Jones will provide all the Uncle Sam-bashing material terrorists need to convince countless more homicidal maniacs to join their ranks?

If violent subversives around the world thought recruiting was a snap before, just think how much easier it would have gotten if the good pastor had been allowed to “spread Christianity” in his own unique way.

The behavior exhibited by Jones and his moronic followers prior to their calling off their proposed imbecilic demonstration last Thursday was equal parts selfish, senseless, spiteful, scandalous, shameful and stupid.

But complicit broadcast and cable news network TV cameras recorded each one of Jones’ idiotic pontifications and subsequently broadcast them around the nation and the planet. Their decision to do so gave the scripture-spouting phony far more fame, notoriety, and alas, influence than he’d have ever gotten otherwise.

— Andy Young teaches in Kennebunk and lives in Cumberland.