The phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is a placebo. The words provide a pleasant dose of sugary religion for the naive but mean nothing.

The phrase, added to the Pledge in 1954, sounded profound and appropriately religious but had no substance and offended no one. The gimmick worked for a half-century....

The phrase might suggest that there are one or more gods and could be offensive to atheists, who believe there is no god at all. However, the phrase simply does not promote a specific god or any religion that endorses one.

Nearly everyone says they believe in God, but it's an empty statement. Fewer people say what they believe about the God they say they believe in. What, for instance, has their god done to deserve the title God? Lacking such specifics, the word God, as found in the Pledge, is meaningless.

President Bush signed a bill yesterday making it a federal crime to kill or hurt a fetus while committing some other federal crime. The bill, which had been under consideration in Congress for several years and is similar to laws in 29 states, will turn harming a fetus into an offense distinct from harming the woman carrying that fetus. While the law exempts abortions, and its backers insist that it has nothing to do with the abortion debate, it provocatively defines an "unborn child" as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

This definition does not coexist easily with the notion that killing one's own fetus is a matter of constitutional right, which is one of the reasons the bill appeals to abortion opponents. Proponents of the law highlight the tragic cases in which pregnant women have been murdered and ask whether there is one victim or two -- which makes for undeniably powerful rhetoric. But what does it mean to have a legally defined category of person whose killing the law calls murder in some contexts and a matter of judicially enforceable maternal right in others? ...

This law does not impinge on abortion rights in any immediate sense. It is, however, part of a long-term pattern in which legal abortion is surrounded by criminal laws and other regulations that protect fetuses and define them in legal terms as separate individuals. This new law will aid criminal enforcement only marginally; it will be another unwarranted step toward making constitutionally protected abortion seem an anomaly in the context of law.

If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.

Perhaps the starkest contrast voters have in front of them this fall has nothing to do with taxes or health care or even strategy on the war on terror. It is something much more fundamental, rooted in values and worldview: the ability to recognize evil.

And looking around the Democratic Party, it may be a recurring issue for some time to come....

Yes, Kerry believes in waging some sort of war on terror, but he wants to do so in conjunction with the United Nations, a body which treats the likes of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya as morally equal to the United States and superior to the Middle East’s sole democracy, Israel.

And Kerry has yet to state unequivocally that the war on terror is, at core, about good versus evil.

Indeed, one has to admire it -- the most cynical and brilliantly delivered apology in recent memory: Richard Clarke using the nationally televised Sept. 11 commission hearings to address the families of the victims. ``Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you.''

Many were moved. I was not. For two reasons. First, the climactic confession "I failed you'' -- the one that packed the emotional punch -- was entirely disingenuous. Clarke did the mea culpa then spent the next 2 1/2 hours of testimony -- as he did on every talk show known to man and in the 300 pages of his book -- demonstrating how everyone else except Richard Clarke had failed. And they failed because the stubborn, ignorant, ideologically blinkered, poll-driven knaves and fools he had been heroically fighting against in government would not listen to him.

Message: They failed you.

Second, by blaming the government for the deaths of their loved ones, Clarke deftly endorsed the grotesque moral inversion by which those who died on Sept. 11 are victims of...George Bush. This is about as morally obscene as the implication (made by, among others, the irrepressible Howard Dean) that those who died in the Madrid bombings were also victims of George Bush.

This is false. They were all victims of al Qaeda and al Qaeda alone.

But in an ironic twist, it now turns out that the NCSE itself is using federal tax dollars to insert religion into biology classrooms. Earlier this year, the NCSE and the University of California Museum of Paleontology unveiled a website for teachers entitled "Understanding Evolution." Funded in part by a nearly half-million-dollar federal grant, the website encourages teachers to use religion to promote evolution. Apparently the NCSE thinks mixing science and religion is okay after all -- as long as religion is used to support evolution....

But the strangest part of the website, by far, is the section that encourages educators to use religion to endorse evolution. Teachers are told that nearly all religious people, theologians, and scientists who hold religious beliefs endorse modern evolutionary theory, and that indeed such a view "actually enriches their faith." In fact, teachers are directed to statements by a variety of religious groups giving their theological endorsement of evolution.

Any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice. If the crime is murder and the unborn child's life ends, justice demands a full accounting under the law.

Until today, the federal criminal code had been silent on the injury or death of a child in cases of violence against a pregnant woman. This omission in the law has led to clear injustices. The death of an innocent unborn child has too often been treated as a detail in one crime, but not a crime in itself. Police and prosecutors had been to crime scenes and have shared the grief of families, but have so often been unable to seek justice for the full offense. The American people, as well, have learned of these cases, and they urged action. The swift bipartisan passage of this bill through Congress this year indicates a strong consensus that the suffering of two victims can never equal only one offense.

The moral concern of humanity extends to those unborn children who are harmed or killed in crimes against their mothers. And now, the protection of federal law extends to those children, as well. With this action, we widen the circle of compassion and inclusion in our society, and we reaffirm that the United States of America is building a culture of life.

It is possible that the atrocity in Fallujah was spontaneous or not fully thought through, but it doesn't look like it. It seems likely to have been at least to some degree, and perhaps a high degree, well planned and calculated. The brutalizing of the bodies was done in a way that seemed imitative, as all have noted, of the incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, where in 1993 a frenzied mob dragged the dead body of a U.S. Army Ranger through the streets. The civilized world was horrified, and everyone knows what followed: a quick American retreat.

It is not a stretch to imagine the young murderers of Fallujah had this on their minds: Do it again to America, kill them and string up their corpses, because when you do this America leaves.

And so this time the response must be the opposite of the response in Mogadishu.

We know what the men and boys who did the atrocity of Fallujah look like; they posed for the cameras. We know exactly what they did--again, the cameras. We know they massed on a bridge and raised their guns triumphantly. It's all there on film. It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge.

Whatever the long-term impact of the charred bodies the short term response must be a message to Fallujah and to all the young men of Iraq: the violent and unlawful will be broken. Savagery is yesterday; it left with Saddam.

Looking for middle ground, a good number of Americans are apparently willing to settle the question in favor of civil unions, while attempting to preserve "marriage" for heterosexual couples.

In the end, both sides must know that this is an unsustainable posture. Once civil unions are recognized, they will effectively be considered equal to marriage and, though the word "marriage" may be reserved for heterosexual couples, the institution of marriage will have been displaced as the central organizing stackpole of human society.

At the same time, there is some real value in protecting the word, even as the social definition of marriage is radically revised. Moral conviction and prudential judgment are almost certain to collide as thoughtful legislators do the best they can to fight in defense of marriage.

Ardent supporters of homosexual marriage in Massachusetts are now virtually certain that they have won. They expect their Supreme Judicial Court to deflect any calls for a stay in its decision. Regardless of the proposed constitutional amendment, the Court demands full legal marriage -- not civil unions -- for same sex couples in the state. As one advocate explained, once that happens, there will be little chance of reversing the precedent.

Who says that "under God" must have precisely the same nametag for every American citizen? I recently participated in a local interfaith forum at which the Christian told the Muslim that Jehovah would not allow Muslims into heaven, and the Muslim told the Christian that Allah would not allow Christians into heaven, and the only thing on which the two could agree was that I, the Jew, would certainly not go to heaven. Meanwhile, I asserted to deaf ears that Yahweh, the omniscient, eternal God to whom Jews turn in worship, judges people by the content of their character, not the dogma to which they subscribe.

Why can we not at least concur on a "threshold" definition of "God"? "God," as I see Him/Her, should at minimum (emphasize, "at minimum") be understood as the sum of all the forces of creativity and moral good in the universe. Certainly, this is a definition to which every honorable person -- monotheist, polytheist, pantheist, deist, even atheist -- can subscribe. We each give that "God" different names. And, atheists may choose to use no name whatsoever, but they can certainly still affirm the virtues of creativity and moral rectitude.

Once enacted, the law will double the penalty for any boyfriend, husband, or thug who harms or kills a fetus in the course of beating or killing a pregnant woman. More broadly, it will enshrine in federal law the principle that killing a fetus is legally equivalent to killing a child. That's exactly the principle the Supreme Court rejected in Roe.

Advocates of UVVA say it won't affect abortion rights because it stipulates, "Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the prosecution...of any person for conduct relating to an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman, or a person authorized by law to act on her behalf, has been obtained." But the exemption is plainly illogical. Imagine a federal ban on gay marriage that stipulated, "Nothing in this section shall apply to a daughter of the Vice President of the United States." A gay marriage is a gay marriage. A child is a child. Once the embryo is defined as a child, and killing it is defined as killing a child, abortion at any stage of pregnancy becomes murder -- immediately in theory, and eventually in law.

What we have here is a generation that has learned to parrot ideas about abstinence without fully comprehending them. As the New York Times put it, several of the kids they talked to had a “grab bag of reasons” for waiting. But those reasons weren’t strong enough to keep Jasmine, for instance, from panicking and offering sex to get her boyfriend back after a fight. (Fortunately for both of them, he said no.) Jasmine hasn’t been taught to see a picture that’s bigger than her immediate circumstances. And she’s not alone: According to a recent government study, 88 percent of teenagers who take an abstinence pledge end up having sex before marriage.

Our approach needs to be even more “comprehensive” than that of the so-called “safer-sex” advocates. Having six children, I can tell you that we need to meet these kids where they are and teach them to focus on long-term goals, not stopgap solutions. We need to show them examples of strong marriages, so they can see there’s something worth waiting for. Most of all, we need to teach them about sex within the context of a clear and consistent worldview -- a worldview that emphasizes human dignity; the importance of stable families; and respect for their Creator, for themselves, and for others. This approach is exactly the opposite of the piecemeal messages that the kids are getting today from all kinds of sources, which means it might just be new and different enough to capture their attention.

"Activist courts" have properly come in for severe criticism by those in our circles who are alarmed by the attacks on traditional marriage. But we shouldn't kid ourselves. The dry rot in our foundations extends far beyond the courts. Michael and Tonya Hartsell were betrayed not just by their local elementary school, but by a whole national system of teacher education that for a generation has valued "diversity" more than it has valued the basic skills of a teacher. Virtually all of America's college and university systems-including way too many Christian institutions-are in on that treachery.

To the traitor courts and schools, you must also add the treason of corporate America. You can't blame a few wacko judges in Massachusetts or misled left-coast mayors for telling companies like PW and Amazon what they should approve and disapprove. The leaders of some of the big publishing, entertainment, and news conglomerates are just as much to blame....We didn't arrive where we are all of a sudden. The frog's been in the pot longer than we think. And the number of cooks who've been turning up the heat is a whole lot bigger than most of us have realized.

The only course for people who still care what God thinks is to follow the instructions of Paul the Apostle: "Come out from among them and be separate." John Wesley believed in absolutes that those who claim him as their spiritual ancestor have abandoned. He wrote: "But the Christian rule of right and wrong is the word of God, the writings of the Old and New Testament; all that the Prophets and 'holy men of old' wrote 'as they were moved by the Holy Ghost'; all that Scripture which was given by inspiration of God, and which is indeed profitable for doctrine, or teaching the whole will of God; for reproof of what is contrary thereto; for correction of error; and for instruction, or training us up, in righteousness" (a reference to 2 Timothy 3:16).

Dammann isn't the first lesbian ordained in the Methodist Church, but she should be the last tolerated by church members who are faithful to something higher than the shifting winds of cultural change. At the Methodist church trial, a majority of jurors failed their God and Methodism's founder. They have lost their authority to speak for God or to man on God's behalf. Methodists would be well advised to seek a denomination where God and not man is the supreme authority.

The United States of America is the only country in history to have defined itself as Judeo-Christian. While the Western world has consisted of many Christian countries and consists today of many secular countries, only America has called itself Judeo-Christian. America is also unique in that it has always combined secular government with a society based on religious values....

The battle over whether America remains Judeo-Christian or becomes secular like Europe is what this, the Second American Civil War, is about.

Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade -- to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office -- "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away...."

I don't know how good Clarke was at counter-terrorism, but as a media performer he is a total dummy. He seemed to think that he could claim the lucrative star role of Lead Bush Basher without anybody noticing the huge paper trail of statements he has left contradicting the argument in his book.