In these times when a homicidal maniac from Texas...has stolen the American throne and called for a "crusade" against the "evil doers" in nations that white people have been invading, terrorizing, raping and pillaging in for 5000 years with zero provocation, I think we could manage some cultural sensitivity in our popular culture which one must acknowledge has a powerful propaganda affect on the general population that participates in it.

Are you ever tempted to just give up on Christmas? I know I am. The season is exploited to ridiculous extremes in pretty much every arena of marketing. Retailers try to get shoppers in the Christmas mood sometime around, oh, February (to keep them open post-Valentine's Day, I guess). TV stations inundate viewers with all of the sappy holiday shows from Halloween on, it seems (coming up next..."The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," followed by "A Charlie Brown Christmas").

Oh that we could keep Christmas around a few weeks -- or months -- longer, some would say. It's a time of purity, innonence, and selflessness, right? Not anymore. In recent news has been Abercrombie & Fitch's decision to pull its holiday catalog, which featured perversions of all kinds by kids in Santa hats. And then there are groups like the ACLU, whose soul Christmas gift to the world seems to be ridding it of mangers and angels and donkeys and Marys and Josephs and ESPECIALLY incarnate deities.

Some innocence. Bah, humbug.

But I'm no Grinch. Underneath the boxes and bows of commercialism, and somewhere behind the church-state lawsuits, there still lies the glibly labeled "real meaning" of Christmas. We seem to forget that the "real meaning" of our winter holiday is also the real meaning of life itself: our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and His rescue mission to earth.

Christmas isn't just about the cliched blue-eyed baby tucked carefully in a perfectly lain straw pile. (Maybe the ACLU's right; maybe the typical Nativity scenes should go. We can do much better.) Christmas is about the most powerful being in the universe, tucked into a small, human body -- a voice that could calm a storm reduced to a child's whimper for food. The fate of the world placed in the tiniest of hands. Next time you see a manger scene, maybe the appropriate response is to echo John the Baptist, and say, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."

The Holiday-tree tradition is long-standing. It dates back to Germany in the 16th century, a dark age when the remote control had not been invented and the Holiday Bowl wasn't even played yet. The evergreens were meant to symbolize the Paradise Tree in the Garden of Eden, and it was a religious extremist named Martin Luther who first had the idea of decorating them with lights. In England, meanwhile, people began giving Holiday gifts to one another in remembrance of a story involving Three Wise Men.

All of this started a several-centuries-long period when Holiday was closely associated with the birth of an obscure Middle Eastern religious figure whose name now escapes me, although it would probably show up in a Google search.

The progeny of the Playboy philosophy -- which said men did not have to limit their sex drive to their wives but could plunder whatever woman would allow them -- is brokenness, depression, addiction and, in some cases, suicide. What Hefner thought would liberate has, in fact, enslaved. What he promoted as fun turned out to be its opposite for larger numbers of people.

They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?

The President is still speaking in the conditional mode about the amendment. "If necessary, I will support..." and "We may need..." Apparently, the President does not feel we are yet at the point where the amendment is necessary.

You can understand the President's motives for hedging: Presidents have no role in the constitutional amending process, so why should he speak up about a matter that, technically, is the business of Congress and the state legislatures? But if we are not at the decision point now, when will we arrive at it?

If the bill is signed by the governor, as is expected, it will be legal in New Jersey to implant cloned human embryos into wombs, allow the baby to grow for nine months, and then destroy the unborn child for research. The bill prohibits the use of human cloning for reproductive purposes, but allows cloning to create unborn children only to be killed -- either early after their creation for their stem cells or at any time before their birth.

In other words, anytime we see a leader aim for and achieve god-like status among his people, fear the worst. (Does North Korea suggest itself?) Ancient Jewish tradition identifies any epoch defined by one charismatic and powerful leader as an epoch headed for trouble.

Why boastest thou thyself in mischief, O mighty man? the goodness of God endureth continually. The tongue deviseth mischiefs; like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. Thou lovest evil more than good; and lying rather than to speak righteousness. Selah. Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful tongue. God shall likewise destroy thee for ever, he shall take thee away, and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place, and root thee out of the land of the living. Selah. The righteous also shall see, and fear, and shall laugh at him: Lo, this is the man that made not God his strength; but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and strengthened himself in his wickedness. But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever. I will praise thee for ever, because thou hast done it: and I will wait on thy name; for it is good before thy saints.

Whether one liked Saddam Hussein or not, he was the legitimate President of a great Arab nation, and his humiliation was the humiliation of all Arabs. He was not the first captured ruler in the world's bloody and long history. More than 800 years ago, the great West European Crusader princes were captured by a victorious Arab army. Then, however, the Arab commander, Saladin, treated the captives courteously. He did not parade them with an open, red-painted mouth in front of his troops. But Chivalry and Honour, so dear to an Arab heart, are not American virtues: the US dared to attack Iraq only after ten years of UN sanctions disarmed it.

They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?

Let's accept for a moment that Malvo probably picked up his knowledge of the jihadist ideology from Muhammad, who got it from who knows where. Did this obliterate Malvo's capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, or did it give him new lenses through which to view the distinction? Imagine Osama bin Laden on trial. Did he know right from wrong when he conspired to carry out the 9/11 attacks? He thinks he did.

The cause of the marriage crisis we now face is not merely a shift of values. Nor is it simply the work of '60s radicals. It is a broad, structural crisis visibly affecting every single developed nation in the world. As Allan Carlson has pointed out, the key to understanding this crisis is to recognize how many of the critical social functions marriage once performed have been taken over by government and the market.

For most of human history, the kin group was the primary unit of government, the locus of production and exchange, of care for the sick, the old, and the young. Marriage, as the key to kin-making, occupied a place of dominant importance. The family was for most people the primary work group, with husband, wife, and kids making much of what they needed on small farms. Disrupting a marriage meant endangering the livelihood of the entire family. To abandon the family was not only despicable, it was suicidal. If family bonds did not hold, who would care for you when you were sick, old, or otherwise unemployable?

One reason George W. Bush comes on a bit strong about ''evildoers'' and so forth is that the archbishop of Canterbury and any number of the Western world's great and good have rendered less primal language meaningless in this sphere: When [Archbishop Rowan] Williams condemns terrorism as ''vicious and senseless,'' that's just the mood music of the evening news. When he says ''these acts of violence achieve nothing,'' what he means is that his ''shock'' stops at the end of the sound bite; whether or not the terrorists ''achieve nothing,'' he intends to do so.

And yet, Christian exiles [in America] are not passive. We do not smirk at the misery or the merrymaking of immoral culture. We weep. Or we should. This is my main point: Being exiles does not mean being cynical. It does not mean being indifferent or uninvolved. The salt of the earth does not mock rotting meat. Where it can, it saves and seasons. And where it can't, it weeps. And the light of the world does not withdraw, saying "good riddance" to godless darkness. It labors to illuminate. But not dominate.

In the weeks since the Massachusetts supreme court decided to impose gay marriage on the state, social conservatives have been losing the political debate over the issue. Already the language is changing. Democratic presidential candidates have even started referring to "non-same-sex marriage," and columnists to "op-sex marriage" — by which they mean what we all used to describe, before November, simply as "marriage."

The irony here has surely not escaped the Planned Parenthood execs. Exploiting the commemoration of one very special birth to celebrate a flawed system that allows mothers to escape their maternal duties -- it would be comical if it were not so horrible. Why anyone would want to give his or her loved one a "Choice" card (other than as a joke) remains a mystery to me.

Ms. Marshall has as much right to proclaim a right to gay marriage from the Massachusetts Supreme Court as I do to proclaim it from my column. The Massachusetts legislature ought to ignore the court's frivolous ruling – and cut the justices' salaries if they try it again.

Planned Parenthood continues to dispense the abortion kill pills to pregnant teens -- and it continues to entice young people to its abortion clinics with a glitzy, MTV-like Web site offering "sexuality and relationship info you can trust." Called "Teenwire.com," the Planned Parenthood site is chock-full of colorful graphics, hip jargon, voluminous health advice, and lots of exclamation points.

For the purposes of the research, a biblical worldview was defined as believing that absolute moral truths exist; that such truth is defined by the Bible; and firm belief in six specific religious views. Those views were that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He still rules it today; salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned; Satan is real; a Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other people; and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.

It is like Jimmy Carter gathering a group of like-minded liberals, then going out and negotiating a cease-fire with al-Qaeda and then telling Bush the war's over -- go back to life as it was before 9/11. This is exactly comparable to what the Geneva Accords are.

I called Abercrombie's national headquarters in New Albany, Ohio to confirm this. CEO Mike Jeffries and his staff were not available, but an employee who gave his name as "Brennan" said the company had been, over the last two weeks, received 300 calls per hour from people announcing they were boycotting A&F stores until the clothier stopped selling the quarterly. The decision to yank the Christmas issue from stores was made at the beginning of Thanksgiving week, he added.

Who was behind the boycotts?

"Ever hear of Dr. Dobson?" Brennan asked.

Almost all modern liberal thought begins with the bedrock assumption that humans are basically good....The Left vilifies Bush because he insists on calling a spade a spade, and in so doing threatens to bring down their entire intellectual edifice. Even after the horrors of the 20th century, the Left has yet to recover from its Rousseau-induced hangover. Liberals still insist on seeing human nature as basically good. Nothing is more offensive to such a mentality, not Hussein's torture chambers, not al Qaeda's wanton killing of innocent life, than one who dares to speak so plainly of "evildoers."