What we are seeing, of course, is the logical consequences of the desire for personal autonomy in an era of moral relativism. People can say with a perfectly straight face and without a twinge of conscience, "Yeah, it is wrong. It is murder. But nobody is going to tell me I can't do it."

If this is really the position that the pro-abortion movement is taking, then we're in a heap of trouble. If my neighbor thinks to himself, "I know stealing is wrong, but I don't want anybody to tell me I can't do it," I'm going to start putting extra padlocks on my house and bars on my windows. If somebody says, "I know pedophilia is a bad thing, but I have the right to do what I want with my own body," I am going to start keeping my grandkids locked in the house when they come to visit.

The "don't tell me what to do" mentality will unravel the very fabric of our society. If people actually believe that their autonomy is so important that it gives them the right to kill the innocent, then none of us is safe. I wonder how many of those folks getting bused to Washington ever thought of that.

Here's where Newdow really is right: While faith is sometimes mocked, at this moment in this country it is non-believers who are the truly oppressed minority. (And when we complain about the shocking excesses of popular secular culture, I'm sorry, we have only ourselves to blame.) So much of all that's gone wrong with the radical, counter-cultural, and yes, wildly irrational way of life that is Christianity goes back to the sad day it became Rome's state religion. We were supposed to be in this world but not of it -- and certainly not bullying people who don't want to be "under God" into saying words they don't mean.

What is an abandoned world like? How do we recreate ourselves once we are back (at least materially) to the state of nature? Glorious Appearing handles these issues with biblical literalism. There are no allegories, no metaphors, no parables. There is nothing figurative or conceptual at all. Armageddon literally comprises lakes of fire, rivers of blood, men that melt in the face of Jesus, and other excruciating deaths that are part of the Divine Justice. The state of nature is the playground for the war between Jesus and Satan. Forget how you've lived your life; forget your questions, thoughts, opinions; forget reality. Accept Christ or die. I mean, really die....

There are only two ontological possibilities in this Evangelicalism. The simplicity of this book is impossible to exaggerate. Page after page of the novel (it is really just a lurid sermon) is cribbed from the Bible to instruct the people to praise Jesus, for he is the one and true God; for otherwise they must face his wrath; for to love Christ is to reap eternal reward; for, again, he is the one and true God -- and on and on and on, until what feels like the end of time.

Now that 40 million unborn children have died and abortion has become one of the most common surgical procedures in the United States, a growing voice is emerging. This is the voice of the woman who's had an abortion, who regrets it, and who feels she was never empowered with adequate information to make a real choice. Some of these women and their supporters countered the march with a silent, peaceful protest.

And the silence worked in at least a few cases. Janet Morana, co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign stood at Constitution and Seventh Streets with a group of about a hundred post-abortion women and their supporters. In the midst of their silence, a woman from D.C. named Shirley came up to two of them. She was holding a Planned Parenthood 'Stand Up For Choice' sign and she said, 'I can't hold this sign and march with them anymore.' She explained that she had lost a child to crib death and then she broke down sobbing. She saw the reality of the 'choice' for which she had been marching....

Susan Pine also saw the quiet effects of silent protest. "Some women," she said, "would see our signs, start to cry, drop everything, and leave."

Consider what's required to wear the label: "Pro-Palestinian."


To start, you have to appear non-judgmental about innocent Palestinian children being raised to become human bombs.

You must refer to those who send such children on suicide/mass murder missions as "political leaders" or, even better, as "spiritual leaders." Call them militants if you must, but never terrorists.

To be thought of as pro-Palestinian, you must cite the plight of the Palestinian refugees as a key motivation for violence, ignoring the fact that there would have been no refugees had Israel's Arab neighbors not launched a war to destroy the tiny Jewish state immediately upon its birth.

Indeed, Arabs who chose to stay in Israel are today Israeli citizens, as are their children, enjoying more freedoms than do the citizens of neighboring Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia or even Jordan. Disregard all this if you want to be seen as someone who cares about Palestinians.

Like the evangelical movement, the president's born-again faith was not as striking to outsiders in 1987, when he moved to Washington to work on his father's presidential campaign. At the time reporters mostly saw him as the Bush family bouncer, someone who kept an eye on disloyal staff members.

Nor were his born-again evangelical beliefs much more than a biographical footnote in Mr. Bush's gubernatorial campaigns. Even in his 2000 presidential race most journalists placed Mr. Bush's religious beliefs behind his family lineage, career and political ideology. His faith was mostly examined in the context of a midlife crisis: a black sheep's self-styled 12-step program that helped him stop drinking and focus on a political career in Texas.

Once the younger Mr. Bush's faith took hold, it spread to his political ambitions. "I believe that God wants me to be president," is what Richard Land, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, recalls hearing Mr. Bush say in a meeting with close associates on the day of his second inaugural as governor of Texas. Once elected president, Mr. Bush went to work. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," he says in a 2002 clip. "And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench."

The documentary revisits a 1993 interview Mr. Bush had with a reporter for The Houston Post, Ken Herman, on the day he announced his intention to run for governor. Mr. Herman recalls that Mr. Bush said he believed that a person had to accept Christ to go to heaven, a view that Mr. Herman published.

After September 11, the American people are valuing life more and I think those are the kind of policies the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really, the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network...don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.

After September 11 officials stepped up their scrutiny of people seeking to enter the United States bearing passports from Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. While civil libertarians and Muslim-American groups protested, al Qaeda adapted.

As Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center wrote in the New Republic, Osama bin Laden is replacing Muslim immigrants in his operations with Western converts to Islam. It's easy to see why: European nationals with European passports and faces" are less likely to arouse suspicions among American officials. What's more, most Western Europeans aren't required to obtain visas before traveling to the United States....Europe has seen the rise of what are called "protest converts" to Islam. As the French scholar Olivier Roy put it, these young people convert for the same reason that American kids get multiple tattoos and body piercings: "to stick it to their parents [or] to their principal." Just as Europeans in the 1970s "went to Bolivia or Vietnam," these kids convert. It's a way "of identifying with a Third World cause."

A flier being distributed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah puts a hefty price on the heads of top U.S military officials, according to a Local 6 News report.

The flier offers $15 million for the death of each American pictured, Local 6 News reported.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are pictured on the paper.

The August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing is becoming part of that story. The memo notes Osama bin Laden's continual threats against the United States, operations here and abroad and, most chilling of all, plans to hijack airliners. Many people reading the memo or listening to the commission's hearings might ask, "Wasn't it obvious what was coming a month later? How could Bush have missed the September 11 attacks?" Knowing what we know now, it's hard not to conclude Bush made a foolish mistake.

But that's unfair and misleading. On August 6, 2001, the president did not know that September 11 would happen. What he did know presumably can be found in the PDB for that day. As Condoleezza Rice said, the memo is mostly historical; what she did not say was that bin Laden's history of threats had not led to attacks in the United States. Why should Bush have concluded that there would be any deviation from that track record? (Stating simply that "9/11 happened" is not an answer.)...

We live life forward, not backwards -- in ignorance, not perfect knowledge -- which means we must address threats with nets, not scalpels. By ignoring these truths, the 9/11 Commission is pushing the United States toward entirely predictable and preventable future disasters.

The new seriousness at the Federal Communications Commission toward basic, unmissable profanity on broadcast television and radio is beginning to draw great protest from the proponents of profanity and indecency. They have unfurled the banner of the First Amendment and utter the usual buzzwords and mantras: free speech, censorship, chilling effect. Then there's a new one: "creative integrity."

This last one comes from NBC president Robert Wright, who wrote a passionate editorial in the Wall Street Journal claiming the TV elite are the titans of "creative integrity," and must not be protested. "Ultimately, we have much less to fear from obscene, indecent or profane content than we do from an overzealous government willing to limit First Amendment protections and censor creative free expression. That would be indecent," Wright insisted.

It's an argument Howard Stern would love: it's not smut that is indecent, it's protesting smut that's indecent! It's like saying cigarettes don't kill people, the anti-tobacco lobby does.

Wright and other activists are now condemning the FCC for defining NBC's airing of the F-word during the Golden Globe Awards as obscene. Apparently, the F-word is the very height of "creative integrity." I wonder if Robert Wright taught his own children that profanity is creative, and laced with integrity.

The Associated Press snapped a photo of Ashley, honored guest of the "March for Women's Lives," which has been widely disseminated on the Internet. Pro-abortion leaders must be ecstatic. In a sea of angry (Hillary Rodham Clinton), haggard (Cybill Shepherd) and ghoulish (Whoopi Goldberg) women shaking their fists and waving coat hangers, Ashley's pretty smile helped put a softer, gentler and more glamorous spin on the morbid march for "reproductive rights."

Ashley's message to millions of young American women and girls: Opposing the partial-birth abortion ban is fun! Morning-after pills are cool! Sex without consequences rules!

One wonders what Ashley's mom, beloved country singer Naomi Judd, must have thought of her daughter traipsing around with abortion rights' militants. Naomi has spoken eloquently for years about how she firmly rejected abortion as an unwed teen and repeatedly witnessed the miracle of life as a labor and delivery nurse. "I've seen ultrasounds...you know that those babies are real," she told TV talk-show host Sally Jesse Raphael in 1998.

John Kerry made a familiar statement about abortion last week. Bill Clinton said it before him. Many Democrats who wish to remain in the good graces as well as the political clutches of the abortion-rights lobby say it. Kerry said he wants to keep abortion "safe, legal and rare."

I understand "safe" (though it's never safe for the baby and often not the woman). I understand "legal" (though contemporary jurisprudence is shifting sand). I don't understand "rare." Unless the pre-born child is human and worthy of the law's protection, why care if abortion is rare or common? Is Kerry attempting to satisfy the tug of conscience deep within this professed Roman Catholic that the teachings of his church are true and that he needs a kind of moral cover -- genuflecting in the direction of truth but making no effort to slow or stop abortions should he gain the power to do so?...

When Kerry and other Catholic politicians say they accept church teaching but selectively deny it when it comes to abortion, they place the state above the church and man above God. They mortgage their consciences to convenience and principle to pragmatism. Should such a person lead this nation?

Despite the booming popularity of evangelical artists and authors, evangelicals themselves remain an enigma to many outside the tradition--a people often stereotyped, whose agendas and motives are viewed with suspicion. They are a people, too, who often seem ill at ease with their own success and insider status in an America that they often regard as hostile to their values.

Yet a new poll by U.S. News and PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly reveals that evangelicals--their distinctive faith aside--are acting more and more like the rest of us. They are both influencing and being influenced by the society around them. While they harbor deep concerns about the moral health of the nation, they are more tolerant than they're often given credit for, pay far more attention to family matters than to politics, and worry about jobs and the economy just about as much as everyone else. And while it comes as no surprise that white evangelicals are overwhelmingly Republican and back President Bush by a wide margin, nearly a quarter say they might vote for Democrat John Kerry. (The small portion of African-American evangelicals mostly support Kerry, but their views often diverge strongly from the white majority.) "This is a group that is integrated into the mainstream," says Anna Greenberg, vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, which conducted the survey in late March. "Evangelicals are just not that much different from the rest of America."

American culture is an enormously powerful force. It will change religion, just as religion will change culture. [Evangelicals] are far more shaped by the culture than they are capable of shaping it to their own needs. The priority is to get them in [to church], but to do that you downplay the Christian symbolism: You take the crosses off the church; you put a McDonald's franchise in the lobby. The faithful now are remarkably like everyone else.

The "pro-choice" movement is based on the lie that an unborn human being is not a human being. If pro-aborts had nothing to hide, would they use such misleadingly innocuous words as "choice," "reproductive rights" and "family planning" when they mean the act of terminating life?

If "choice" were so popular with the public, would the pro-aborts' presidential candidate of "choice," Senator Kerry, feel compelled to dissemble, saying he is personally against abortion but opposed to the government regulating it? That's like saying he's personally opposed to shoplifting but against the government interfering with the thief's choice. Actually, it's much worse than that.

As scientific and technological advances continue to shed light on the darkness of their position, pro-aborts will become increasingly desperate. The marchers treated us to just a little bitter foretaste of that Sunday.

The Bush administration is scrapping plans to sponsor a major global health and reproductive rights conference that features liberal advocacy groups, including several pro-choice organizations and MoveOn.org, which is spending millions of dollars on negative ads to defeat President Bush....

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which said it never formally agreed to help fund "Youth and Health: Generation on the Edge," denounced the conference organizers late Friday for including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) -- both divisions of HHS -- in a recent promotional brochure.

New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.

Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.

But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

One could call the Sunday march a festival of paganism, but that's probably not fair to ancient pagans. Worshippers of Baal would have regarded it as a little too depraved for their taste. If C-SPAN covered the event, it must have had to black and beep out much of it. It sounded like a sustained FCC violation and many of the placards were too baldly obscene (usually twisting the president and vice presidents' names in various vulgar concoctions) for any newspaper to report....

Upset at the growing perception that they are godless degenerates, marchers tried to wrap themselves in religion as much as possible. Planned Parenthood now has a chaplain. And march organizers cobbled together other phony religious fronts for abortion, such as "Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice." "You don't own religion," one speaker said to the "religious reich." A female rabbi appeared on the podium to say that she was "pro-God, pro-choice." The marchers know that God blesses the abortion of unborn children because God is a woman. "I asked God. She's pro-choice," was a popular sign. And they are now theological enough to place Satan on the same ticket as George Bush -- the "Bush/Satan" administration.