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.