So why do most men avoid church? Here's the veneer stripped-away answer: going to church for the majority of men is an exercise in unwanted effeminacy. Church, for most men, has not only become irrelevant; it has also become effeminate. Hanging out in church for most extra-Y chromosomes seems unmanly and most men more than anything want to be masculine!

The current lack of strong men within the Church, both in the numeric and leadership sense, has crippled our cathedrals and has helped devastate our nation ethically. The masculine spirit being absent from the pulpit, the pew and subsequently the public square has not only slowed down the forward progress of the Church, it has also weakened our nation's morality, increased our country's secularity, and has assisted [owing to our absence] the lascivious Left's re-definition of life, sex, marriage and law.

In defiance of Lutheran doctrine, active homosexuals have been appointed pastors at three congregations, including one in Minneapolis...

The move defies the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's rule against active homosexuals in ordained ministry.

As the nation's fifth-largest Protestant denomination, with 10,700 churches and five million members, the Evangelical Lutheran Church ordains gays but requires them to be celibate.

Since the days of John F. Kennedy, modern politicians have tried to have it both ways on matters of religion --espousing personal religious beliefs that at times are at odds with their public policy pronouncements.

Democrat John Kerry is the latest candidate to navigate this terrain, offering himself as a practicing and believing Roman Catholic who nonetheless holds positions contrary to the teachings of his church. Kerry supports abortion rights, stem cell research, the death penalty for terrorists and civil unions for gay couples -- all opposed by the church hierarchy.

What happened in September 11 and March 11 is your own merchandise coming back to you. We hereby advise you...that your definition of us and of our actions as terrorism is nothing but a definition of yourselves by yourselves, since our reaction is of the same kind as your act. Our actions are a reaction to yours, which are destruction and killing of our people as is happening in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine....

The peace treaty will be in force upon the exit of the last soldier of any given [European] country from our land.

The door of peace will remain open for three months from the broadcast of this statement. Whoever rejects the peace and wants war should know that we are the men [of war], and whoever wants a peace treaty and signs it, we hereby allow this peace treaty with him.

Stop shedding our blood in order to protect your own blood. The solution to this easy-difficult equation is in your own hands. You should know that the longer you delay, the worse the situation will become, and when that happens, do not blame us, blame yourselves.

We see what is happening today as an isolated case of terrorists taking a misguided reading of the Qur'an. I wish it were that simple. The truth is there's an element in Islam -- some estimate as high as 20 percent -- who see this battle as a resumption of the thousand years of war. In fact, Osama bin Laden was a student of Mohammed Qutab whose brother, Saeb Qutab, a radical Egyptian Islamist, argued for a resumption of this conflict with the West. Saeb Qutab was thoroughly anti-Semitic, had a burning hatred of the West, and saw its destruction as the world’s only hope. And that's what filled the mind of Osama bin Laden.

We're kidding ourselves if we think that containing a few terrorists will allow America to live in peace and safety. We're kidding ourselves if we think we can bring troops home from Iraq and that's the end of the war. This war is going to be with us for generations. Millions of followers of Osama bin Laden and those like him believe that it is their manifest destiny as Muslims to bring about the utter destruction of Jews, Christians, and Western civilization.

Why should this president apologize for toppling a murderous dictator responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 1 million people and the rape and torture of unknown thousands of others? Why should Bush admit mistakes when he didn't start the war? That dubious honor goes to the likes of Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden and terror-spawning groups named Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Why should Bush take responsibility for an intelligence apparatus that was dysfunctional when he inherited it less than seven months earlier and, by law, was designed to continue misfunctioning until disaster struck?

Running out of time and options, Gov. Mitt Romney said Thursday he will seek emergency legislation aimed at forestalling gay marriages, which are scheduled to become legal in Massachusetts on May 17.

The legislation would allow Romney to appoint a special counsel who would ask the state's highest court to delay its ruling on gay marriage. The governor said it would allow him "to protect the integrity of the constitutional process."

The Bush administration threw down the gauntlet at Yasser Arafat's feet yesterday during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In fact, before the press conference even began, Arafat was already all over the airwaves, denouncing it to all who would listen.

Two weeks ago, Arafat began making overtures to Israel's deadliest enemies, Islamic Jihad and Hamas....Arafat offered both organizations a power-sharing plan in Gaza following an Israeli pullout. The first onramp to the Roadmap for peace was supposed to be a "cessation of all violence" by the Palestinians, followed by the dismantling and destruction of all Palestinian terrorist organizations. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are among the most prolific terrorist groups in the Middle East. In complete contradiction to these requirements, Arafat is now proposing a partnership with them.

He reiterated that his mission is dictated from above: "Freedom is the almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world."

Given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops, and given that our marines are surrounding a cleric in the holy city of Najaf, we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war. That would only further inflame the Arab world and endanger our overstretched military, so let's hope that Mr. Bush's reference to the almighty was to Dick Cheney.

President Bush on Wednesday praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans to withdraw Israeli forces and settlements from the Gaza Strip and from parts of the West Bank.

"These are historic and courageous actions. If all parties choose to embrace this moment, they...can put an end to one of the world's longest running conflicts," Bush said in a joint news conference with Sharon from the White House.

Organized religion and professed piety, neither of which has any essential relation to true spirituality, make news every day by setting unswerving ideas on collision courses. The resulting censure, scandal or shooting supplies contemplative columnist and rabid reporter alike, and never do the multitudes want.

Faith is a personal journey to be taken with utmost seriousness -- even by the confirmed atheist. But religion as a social phenomenon is a trip through the looking glass. Nothing seems to exist without its contradiction. This, unlike revealed unimpeachable truth, makes for high drama, generously leavened with comic relief.

Religious faith compels some people to feed the hungry and house the homeless. It drives others to try to stop people they'll never meet from getting married.

Religion is used to decry poverty amid plenty and to justify disproportionate wealth.

In the name of God, humans will climb into deathtrap DC9s to deliver food to famine victims, fly jumbo jets into office buildings and send Stealth bombers to destroy cities.

There is nothing in sight, given the decision of the Massachusetts court, and the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court last June overturning the Texas sodomy law, to curb the evolution of "marriage" to signify simply an affectionate relationship between two or more people, with cross commitments of one kind or another. The rules for entering into such a union -- man-man, woman-woman, widowed sisters, father and son -- might differ here and there, so long as those differences were not held to violate the equal-protection clause of the Constitution, or other of its provisions. In the absence of an amendment, the fight is simply abandoned, and Darwinian mutations are, if not exactly encouraged, nevertheless indulged.

To argue that a constitutional amendment is radical, while acquiescence in the anarchy of the Massachusetts court is less than that, staggers the mind. It has become easier to amend the Sermon on the Mount than the Constitution, and it is strange and awful that passivity is urged in a republic of free people.

Looking at today's Islam, a growing number of Western long-chinned pundits have been suggesting that what Islam needs is reform -- much as Christianity and Judaism have reformed over the past 500 years. Christian reform, driven by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment, brought itself into comfortable compatibility with modernity. But what if, in the context of Islamic history, for today's Islam, Bin Ladenism is the reform?

The Times went on to offer some "conceivable" actions the president might have taken after receiving that notorious Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing, namely he should have flown back to D.C. and demanded that airlines start "screening passengers" to fit their "threat profiles."

Considering that it'd been reported in Time magazine in 1998 that government officials believed Osama bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States, I'm not sure the president should have raced back to Washington from his ranch in August 2001.

But I am 100 percent sure that the folks at The New York Times editorial board would have snapped their pencils in rage if the president had suggested increased "profiling" of passengers in August 2001, let alone proposed the Patriot Act -- which the Times detests -- and never mind doing everything "conceivable."

The Bush-bashers who have relentlessly accused the president and his War on Terror team of acting like jack-booted bigots are now imperiously attacking them for acting like light-footed fumblers. This self-serving display of liberal hypocrisy has provided more idiotic entertainment than "The Nick & Jessica Variety Hour."

In an editorial this week that embodies the Left's unmitigated gall, the New York Times castigated President Bush for not doing enough after receiving an Aug. 6, 2001, briefing memo warning vaguely of bin Laden-planned domestic terrorism....That's right. The same editorial board that has barbecued the Bush Justice Department after the Sept. 11 attacks for fingerprinting young male temporary visa holders traveling from terror-sponsoring and terror-friendly nations (editorial, June 6, 2002); temporarily detaining asylum seekers from high-risk countries for background screening (editorial, Dec. 28, 2002); and sending undercover agents to investigate mosques suspected of supporting terrorism (editorial, May 31, 2002) now expects us to believe it would have applauded Bush for his vigilance if he had swiftly ordered airport security officials to stop thousands of young Middle Eastern men at airports during the summer of 2001 on the basis of an ill-defined threat.

Nearly 40 years after Time magazine posed the question "Is God Dead?" signs of His resurrection are everywhere: Mel Gibson's "The Passion" is on its way to becoming the highest-grossing independent film of all time, while the apocalyptic "Left Behind" novels, based on the Book of Revelations, have sold 58 million copies, a publishing jackpot....

Is America experiencing a religious revival? Is all this ferment a result of post-Sept. 11 anxiety? Or has spirituality become just another commodity in a world where consumerism has become the ultimate value?

Why is rich Europe secular and rich America religious? And are there any clues in the answer to that riddle to the rise in religious fundamentalism, one of the most pernicious and hateful phenomena in human association, ranking with political fundamentalism of Right and Left in its destructive and poisonous influence.

Whether it is the perpetrators of the Madrid atrocity or Franklin Graham, evangelical son of evangelist Billy Graham, calling Islam a 'wicked religion', fervent fundamentalist religiosity breeds violence, intolerance and sexism. The sacred texts of Christianity and Islam may plead love, mutual respect and peace; their fundamentalist followers observe these doctrines in the breach.

What is needed is a rediscovery of politics and a belief that purpose is best attempted in a secular guise underpinned by universal values, and that religion is a moral code to live by, rather than a purpose in its own right that gives believers the right to deny rationality and humanity.

This is a tall order. It won't be helped this Easter by following Gibson's interpretation of the Passion. The values we need are inclusion and love, not exclusion and irrationality. There's too much of that around, enough, if we let it, to usher in a new Dark Age. Values, yes; religious fundamentalism, no.

It's altogether possible that the gay lobby could lose this particular battle and still win the war. The battle over marriage right now is iffy, and could go either way. But the war has other theaters; one is obvious, the other a little less so....

The less obvious third-level battle may yet prove to be the most devious. And while I have no late-breaking evidence that this conflict is imminent, only a fool would fail to get ready for what is almost certainly just ahead. I refer to the threat faced by thousands of churches, schools, and other charitable organizations that their tax-exempt status will sooner or later be placed in jeopardy unless they follow the "public interest" and extend full rights, of every conceivable kind, to homosexuals....

This, I say, is a more devious and a more consequential threat than is the issue of marriage. For as repugnant as the gay-marriage issue may be, there is a sense in which it affects society only from a distance. Only a tiny number of individuals are likely to be involved, and their impact on the rest of us will in one sense be minimal.

By expressing both a willingness and desire to partner with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a new organization that apparently would function parallel to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Arafat has removed any pesky gray area. It would take a creative explanation to differentiate this from the Taliban's partnership with al Qaeda.

Then again, Arafat's own history should leave little doubt. His three organizations -- Tanzim, Fatah, and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade -- have combined slaughtered more than 400 innocent Israelis. And that was after the Oslo accords of 1993, where he famously shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin.

Take away the campaign of almost nonstop murder and mayhem, and what's left is still a thoroughly corrupt and contemptible thug. Arafat held sham elections in 1996 and he has continually skimmed off the top of the hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid given to the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Yet Arafat is still recognized by the international community as the "chairman" of the PA. But he is preparing to partner with Hamas precisely so he can maintain that status.

Providing yet more evidence that Iran is actively supporting the Shiite guerrilla forces battling U.S.-led coalition, former Iranian President Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani said the American military forces are vulnerable, describing them as a "wounded monster," and suggesting defeat would provide a "valuable lesson" for the West.

Rafsanjani, chairman of the powerful Expediency Council in Iran, says America's vulnerability in Iraq makes Iran stronger.