Cut to C.J., Toby, Josh and Donna heading into a meeting room to meet with the religious folks: the Reverend, Mary Marsh, and What's-his-name Van Dyke. Toby starts off with a conciliatory introduction, but gets cut off by the Reverend, whose pants are in a knot about the "hostility and contempt" the government has shown them. Mary Marsh sits there like she has a pickle in her butt, at which I could go off on a tirade about relative fairness/unfairness of typecasting, but whatever. Josh gives Mary a seemingly heartfelt apology, to which Mary replies, "Good, then...now what do we get?" What she means is, what will the government concede to support: Getting condoms out of schools, coming down on pornography, or reinstating prayer in schools. Suddenly the air is thick with left- and right-wing dogma, which I won't bother to transcribe because we've heard it all before, and then Mary makes a comment about "New York sense[s] of humour," which is immediately interpreted as being an anti-Semitic slur that I don't quite get, but that may be because I'm not from New York. Toby, who's been pretty reasonable up to this point, gets really pissed, ostensibly because he's Jewish, and starts debating the commandments with the right-wingers, who seem not to have a clear bead on which commandment is which, causing one of them to yell, "Well, what IS the First Commandment, then?"

And then, with possibly the best first line in the entire history of the world, the President (played by Martin Sheen, of course) finally makes his appearance, stating "I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me." Despite the rather creepy overtones of having the American president quote God in the first person, I have to say that I loved his entrance.

Anyway. The crap is cut through. One of the right-wingers asks the Prez if $5 is too high a price to pay for free speech. The Prez shuts him up by saying, "No, but it's a high price to pay for pornography," which is a pretty good line, too. And let me add, that I can totally see Martin Sheen's agent, manager, and personal scriptwriter all poring over the script and commandeering all the good lines for Martin.