I think President Bush's proposed funding increase for the NEA is symbolic, as the NEA itself is symbolic. 20-million can't be anything but symbolic in an overall federal budget that runs around a trillion. Question is, What is it symbolic of? I suggest it's meant to show that Mr. Bush is indeed as advertised, a centrist coming from the right. Bush is not a revolutionary and has never portrayed himself as one. He is, in fact, a war fighter, and any triangulation he's working in this and other areas is as much for the sake of the successful prosecution of a long-term conflict as for his reelection. Frankly, unity for the sake of national survival trumps all other considerations. That's the political component of the proposal.

Assuming some of the increase gets through the opposition, largely from further right than Mr. Bush (the remnants of the old Gingrich defund-the-NEA Congress), its effect will be to enhance programs that, like the NEA Shakespeare road show alighting in locales far from Tinseltown and Broadway, are meant to bring the arts -- and artists -- to the taxpayer.

The Christian pollster George Barna put together a list of biblical teachings that presumably Christians of every denomination or theological tradition could affirm: There is absolute moral truth based on the Bible; biblical teaching is accurate; Jesus was without sin; Satan literally exists; God is omnipotent and omniscient; salvation is by grace alone; Christians have a personal responsibility to evangelize.

This is a bare-bones list. It says nothing about the Trinity or the Deity of Christ or other important teachings that are essential for salvation. The list has to do not so much with theology as with the assumptions that are behind one's theology; that is, with worldview. Any minister of whatever denomination, especially a Protestant one, should be able to agree on these basics. But only 51 percent do.

Ted Kennedy and Levin began their "questions" with the equivalent of courtroom indictments of the Bush administration. They charged that it deliberately misled the country into falsely believing Iraq posed an imminent threat.

Kay answered by saying he spoke to many analysts who prepared the intelligence and "not in a single case was the explanation that I was pressured to this."

Instead, Kay stressed the danger posed by Saddam and said that Iraqi documents, physical evidence and interviews with Iraqi scientists revealed that Iraq was engaged in weapons programs prohibited by U.N. resolutions.

Why so few young voters? Part of it, of course, is that younger adults tend not to show up at the polls. But part of it as well, as we noted last week, is that they tend not to exist. That's right, Dean once again has fallen victim to the Roe effect. Not that Dean would have won the election had more young voters shown up at the polls, but Kerry would not have dealt him such a trouncing.

It is not hard to see how we got to this point, amazing as the point would have seemed four or five decades ago. Marriage, which logically and generally precedes family, is the central human institution. It nourishes belief; it forms and shapes behavior. On marriage all social undertakings rest. Does marriage concern or interest government? If it doesn't, nothing does.

It becomes hard to resist the idea of gay marriage when marriage, the institution, becomes just a convenient arrangement for two people who enjoy each other enough to share bed and board for a time. The churches themselves have helped society define marriage that way with their growing laxness about divorce and premarital relations.

Would we be talking now about a federal marriage amendment -- a public policy response to a perceived crisis in public policy -- if the relevant private institutions hadn't so frequently gone AWOL when challenged to show why marriage was rightly a sacred proposition?

I believe that pro-choice feminists became fans of abortion for just the reason that they felt that abortion (in general and also in many particular cases) was in fact an indispensable guarantor of an adult female life capable of reaching either an acceptable level of satisfaction and fulfillment or, at a minimum, equality with men.

In the sexual confusion of postmodern America, teenage girls are now looking for alternative ideas of sexual expression. Some are trying on sexual lifestyles like the latest fashions, with obvious disregard for traditional sexual morality. Indeed, some may be experimenting because they are frustrated with teenage boys....

Oddly enough, the hard-line gay rights activists aren't pleased with this development at all. Old-school lesbians see this new idea of "heteroflexibility" as far too soft for their liking. Homosexual men are not sure what to do with this trend either. This phenomenon of girls kissing girls on high school campuses is not matched by a similar proportion of boys kissing boys. This is a lesbian phenomenon, very different from what we have seen before.

A United Kingdom government adviser on genetics says he doesn't see any distinction between aborting a fully grown unborn baby and killing a child after it is born.

I agree.

And that's precisely why it is wrong to abort babies.

Bush said he had no misgivings about going to war against Iraq but he refrained from saying -- as he once did -- that weapons of mass destruction would be discovered. "There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein (search) was a gathering threat to America and others. That's what we know."

Of course there have been also counterfeits of marriage for centuries, chiefly cohabitation and polygamy. But no successful political movement has ever proposed elevating heterosexual cohabitation to marriage (Why bother, really?) and Americans rejected polygamy, firmly and even violently, in the late 19th century.

Friends of traditional marriage had hoped the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, would provide sufficient protection for traditional marriage. It has not. Courts still hammer at the boundaries of DOMA, and some apparently won't stop short of a demolition.

Back before he had to worry about competing with one Howard Brush Dean, Kerry was positively delighted by the Patriot Act. "It reflects," he said on the Senate floor, "an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work." While supportive of "sunset" provisions in the bill, Kerry pronounced himself "pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation." These are not the words of a man about to help inaugurate an era of brown-shirt law enforcement.