The Bell Curve:

The 12th season of the Newport Beach Public Library’s Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series ended with a bang — certainly not with a whimper — last weekend.

A dynamo named Irshad Manji lived up to the title of her documentary for the Public Broadcasting System called “Faith Without Fear” in which she took on “the packagers of Islam” with a kind of joyous fervor that would have seemed reckless had she not backed up her words with a multitude of facts.

“I’m not here to be popular,” she told us, “just useful. I have more Muslims hating me than hated George Bush, but each of us has to stand up to our own. When I discovered that I would end up being indoctrinated instead of educated had I been stuck in religious schools, I chose to study Islam at a public library. We’re in trouble. We need to stretch our thinking. We have a right to ask our questions out loud.”

Manji was the capstone of a weekend in Newport-Mesa devoted to my cultural immersion in strong women in which Manji was preceded by an elderly Jewish mother with a secret weighing on her, a free-wheeling French intellectual of the 17th century Enlightenment matching wits with Voltaire, and a recent high school graduate struggling with some basic decisions regarding sex.

This pastiche added up to a weekend of verbal red meat that held its own for attention against the perfidy of Manny Ramirez and the temporary collapse of the Los Angeles Lakers.

The dowager in distress was the work of playwright Richard Greenberg, the eighth time he has used South Coast Repertory as a launching pad for one of his plays.

The last time I saw his work, it dealt with a gay major league baseball player coming out in his team’s locker room and included a half-dozen players taking showers onstage — which gives you an idea of his versatility.

Both the play and the marquise who dueled with Voltaire were named “Emilie,” and its production at South Coast Repertory was a world premiere from up-and-coming young playwright Lauren Gundeson.

Whether the dialogue was lifted from Voltaire or the playwright’s creativity — or both — it draws blood that merits a look from Broadway.

The last example packages a process still rather rare in Newport-Mesa, a new musical working its kinks out in small theaters as it plays its way hopefully toward New York. Called “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown,” it’s performed locally at the Samueli Theater.

At the core of this piece is a 17-year-old recent high school graduate who has taken to the road to plan the rest of her life. Still clearly a work in progress, it is uneven, the father figure is stick, and the music — loud and relentless — will limit its appeal to the Rodgers and Hammerstein aficionados like me. But some of its parts are quite good — especially a long scene in which the heroine deals with the mixed bag of sex.

If there is any generalization to be drawn from the above, I would suggest it to be that we are very lucky to have within easy reach a broad variety of performing art venues that are attracting an increasing number of quality performers. Oh, yes, and that an increasing amount of that quality work is coming from the women who write and play it.

Meanwhile, here’s what has been going on back at the ranch.

Our representatives in Congress, statesmen all, are playing predictably to the Orange County choir, especially Rep. John Campbell, who waxed poetic in comparing the president’s projected budget to a drinking binge when he told Pilot reporters: “If those Republican budgets were the spending-and-deficit equivalent of a couple of drinks when you get home at night, this budget is falling down, throwing up, passing out wasted on spending and deficits.”

Asked how he felt about inserting waterboarding into a conversation with suspected terrorists, Campbell said: “These techniques were performed on only three terrorists [and] probably saved thousands of American lives.”

He didn’t say how many terrorists subjected to torture might change his mind on this subject.

His fellow statesman Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was more terse. He found the question “irrelevant” and a “travesty” because those Americans using torture tactics were doing it “to protect us from another slaughter of our citizens.” Or, to put it even more tersely, the end always justifies the means.

In a split decision and on the advice of county lawyers, Orange County supervisors were bloody but still unbowed at having to back off suspending an eight-year contract to use tobacco settlement money to pay Planned Parenthood for providing health education for girls and young women.

Although only 3% of the funding was involved in a safe and legal way for women to choose to end a pregnancy, the supervisors left no doubt that they hadn’t softened their animosity toward an organization that performs abortions.

But they can now retreat behind that stand to a new policy of using the funding for direct health services like clinic care only rather than education, thus excluding Planned Parenthood.

Finally, in a week of conflicting news on the nature and presence of the swine flu, Los Angeles Times readers were greeted one recent morning with these two adjacent headlines: “Possibility of pandemic ‘very high’” and “Scientists see flu strain as relatively mild.”

Which illogically takes us back to Irshad Manji, whose closing advice to us was: “Above all, have the courage of your confusion.”

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.