Does sexual attraction always serve to bring a couple together so that, as they come to know each other, they eventually "fall in love"? Lewis believes that more often they fall in love first and then find themselves sexually attracted. "There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and then gone on at a later stage to 'fall in love with her.' but I doubt if this is at all common," Lewis writes in his Four Loves. "Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved -- a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person." Lewis states that a man in love wants "not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give." Lewis sums up with: "Sexual desire...wants it, the thing in itself; Eros [being in love] wants the Beloved."

Lawmakers in Wisconsin and Kansas pushed ahead Friday on efforts to amend their states' constitutions to ban same-sex marriage, two days after Utah's Legislature agreed to put the question to voters.

To some Jews, indirect anti-Semitism is worse than deadly anti-Semitism. Because it's the former that ineffectual groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center can fight. It's rather like looking indoors for a quarter that was lost outdoors -- because the lighting is better.

If some Jews were upset over The Passion of the Christ even before seeing it, it's because we gave the exclusive contract on anti-Semitism to Muslims. But why rob Gibson of the benefit of the doubt we gave Arafat? True, the film depicts an imaginatively unflattering Jewish role in Christ's crucifixion -- beyond what the Gospels suggest. So yes, Mel Gibson is his father's son. But any Jew who supported the Oslo Peace Process -- and there were more of us than readily admit now -- should be keeping a low profile amid The Passion. Unless blowing up Jews is more forgivable than Mel's movie. It's certainly easier to point the finger at the Christian, if you want to keep that finger....

By going after The Passion of the Christ the media are using Jews to attack Christianity, the ultimate target of extermination by the Left and its Islamic friends. (Neatly enough, immediately following the Diane Sawyer interview with Mel Gibson, ABC announced a report that thousands more molestations took place within the Catholic Church than previously estimated.)

Muslims have their story: God's revelation to the final prophet. Jews have their story: the covenant between man and God at Sinai.

Christians have their story too: the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Why is this story different from other stories? Because it is not a family affair of coreligionists. If it were, few people outside the circle of believers would be concerned about it. This particular story involves other people. With the notable exception of a few Romans, these people are Jews. And in the story, they come off rather badly.

When the president spoke recently about the institution of marriage and the need for a constitutional amendment, the words "gay marriage" were never uttered. Not once in the little over seven-minute speech did the president refer to "gay marriage." Yet, read the headline of any story that deals with the constitutional amendment issue and all you read is how the president is attempting to ban "gay marriage."

So why is the coverage written the way it is? Because it's easier to try to inflame people's passion on the issue by saying that the president is attempting to "ban gay marriage" than it is to say that the amendment would protect the definition understood for millennia of the institution of marriage. To write every op-ed piece from the standpoint that the amendment bans homosexual marriage is unfair and dishonest. At the very least, it doesn't fully describe the entire picture.

Their party has now moved back to the liberal extremism of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis that characterized the 1980s -- with the same predictable result.

It is now up to President Bush to take advantage of this by implementing a three-part strategy in the coming campaign.

First, his paid media must attack Kerry’s voting record to define him as an ultraliberal. There are likely those in the White House who are urging Bush to run positive ads. That won’t work. Even if positive ads produce a small, short-term bounce for Bush, events soon will come to dominate, and the impact of those ads likely will evaporate.

The loony-left is testy with Gibson for spending so much time on Jesus' suffering and death while giving "short shrift to Jesus' ministry and ideas" – as another Times reviewer put it. According to liberals, the message of Jesus, which somehow Gibson missed, is something along the lines of "be nice to people" (which to them means "raise taxes on the productive").

You don't need a religion like Christianity, which is a rather large and complex endeavor, in order to flag that message. All you need is a moron driving around in a Volvo with a bumper sticker that says "be nice to people." Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed"). But to call it the "message" of Jesus requires...well, the brain of Maureen Dowd.

In fact, Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it. That is the reason He is called "Christ the Redeemer" rather than "Christ the Moron Driving Around in a Volvo With a 'Be Nice to People' Bumper Sticker on It."

Five of the seven sacraments (they won't give me holy orders, and I'm not ready for last rites), 10 years with the nuns, a church wedding, three baptized babies, endless fights as they grew over why they had to go to mass on Sunday and a fair amount of prayer, and it's all wiped out in a single assumption about the nexus between left-leaning politics and atheism. A widespread assumption, too, and one that has come to color, even poison, American political discourse. It was inevitable that the opposite of the religious right would become the irreligious left. It just doesn't happen to be accurate.

In our American liberty theme park, it's much easier to add than subtract -- and the PR problem for a Constitutional marriage amendment is that liberal journalists and pols are portraying it as an exercise in subtraction. Senator Ted Kennedy's line is classic, even though with mathematical illiteracy he does skip the first ten amendments: "We have amended the Constitution only 17 times.... [It] has often been amended to expand and protect people's rights, never to take away or restrict their rights."

[W]hat's really going on in New Mexico? The Democratic governor says he opposes gay marriage, yet also opposes either constitutional or statutory steps to prevent it. One suspects that Richardson and his fellow Democrats actually favor gay marriage, yet want the courts to create it, while they stand aloof. Because state law takes male/female marriage so for granted that it doesn't bother to specify it, in the absence of further legislation, the court could easily find an excuse to legalize gay marriage. Equal protection and substantive due process claims modeled on Goodridge could accomplish the same ends. In effect, the taken for granted nature of male/female marriage has left the institution vulnerable to judicial tampering. Because no one bothered to specify what everyone took for granted, the burden of proof, so to speak, has shifted to the status quo. Now it takes new law and/or a constitutional amendment, just to preserve what already exists.

Did we know that Terry McAuliffe was even more of a strict constructionist on the Constitution than Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork? Did I simply miss the DNC press release reporting that the Democratic party officially opposes all of the amendments since the Bill of Rights? Actually, if we are to read McAuliffe literally, I suppose he's against the Bill of Rights, too -- after all, the Constitution "wasn't a rough draft" and our forefathers "knew what they were doing...."

Here's my problem: Most of the liberals invoking the inviolability of the Constitution in the debate against the FMA are the same liberals who generally invoke the doctrine of a "living Constitution," which demands that we constantly "reinterpret" the document.

Complete sexual freedom. That was the dream promoted by feminists. The dream has cost America dearly. Several reports released last week -- by Advocates for Youth and the Alan Guttmacher Institute -- conclude that half of all young Americans will get a sexually transmitted disease by age 25....

This contraceptive-based sex education is the solution proposed by the secular left, which created the problem of sexual libertinism in the first place. James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, feels that "the stakes are simply too high to talk only about abstinence." But the question remains: Even if venereal disease and teen pregnancy are eradicated, will America's young people be able to recover from the loss of their innocence?

I do not know whether Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite or not. All I know is that The Passion of the Christ brings up many important religious and historic questions for individuals to consider.

Most importantly, I was shocked that Mel Gibson had Jews in a movie set in a period two thousand years ago. Why, for at least one hundred years, the Arabs and Moslems have been telling the world that the Jews don't come from Israel and have never lived there. They have been telling everyone who will listen that the so-called "Palestinians", or Arab inhabitants of the Land of Israel, are the genuine inhabitants of Israel and that the Jews are nothing more than foreign invaders, or as they like to call them, "colonialists."

Furthermore, the movie is completely bereft of any Arabs, who, after all, have been the real inhabitants of the Land of Israel since time immemorial.

The argument most often heard in favor same-sex "marriage" is that it is the "fair" thing to do.

This is an interesting position, because having jettisoned one standard for marriage, those pushing for the inclusion of same-sex "marriage" now appeal to the public on the basis of another standard. But if there are to be no standards, or only "standards" that shift with the changing winds of culture (which then don't count as standards at all), on what basis are advocates of same-sex "marriage" appealing to the majority of us who, according to opinion polls, want to keep marriage for heterosexuals only?

We must honestly face the fact that this post-Christian morality is deeply rooted in a subtle form of atheism. Though most Americans habitually claim a belief in God, and even some form of Christian identity, Americans order their lives as if God does not exist. Otherwise, we would be required to care what God thinks, obey what God commands, and submit to His authority -- or fear and face the consequences. It seems that millions of Americans claim to believe in a god they do not fear.

The two stories share the front pages lately, but that's about it. A philosophical debate over a political process, no matter how contentious, has nothing to do with the nuts and bolts (literally) of building a wall high enough, strong enough and smart enough to fend off terrorist killers.

Except for possibly one thing. Both stories, in their way, show societies engaged in fundamental struggles over their futures and resorting, respectively, to dire measures to preserve themselves culturally and physically. With a marriage amendment, the United States could go to the mat -- the Constitution -- to draw a new line in the sand against continuing cultural revolution. With the security fence, Israel is drawing a line -- and building it, too -- to safeguard the lives of its citizens.

First, same-sex marriage does not represent evolution of the human race. In fact, viewing homosexuality as an evolutionary advancement is inconsistent with the theory of evolution itself. According to Darwinists, evolution is the progression and diversification of the species. The mechanism is descent by modification characterized by natural selection and survival of the fittest, all of which require propagation of a species. In the absence of modern medicine, a factor not contemplated by Darwin, same-sex marriage would bring reproduction to a screeching halt, leading to the eventual extinction of the human race.