Lincoln's vision for civic religion should give Christians pause. Even if the Supreme Court retains "under God," the justices will do so only if they determine the phrase bears no genuine religious meaning. In other words, either "under God" serves to perpetuate American civil religion, or the phrase will be removed.

Christians have no interest promoting civil religion. America-worship is but a shadow of citizenship in heaven. When government co-opts religion in this way, genuine religious belief is cheapened. But if civil religion demeans Christianity, does God have a place in democracy?

More important than defending a phrase, Christians can revive the true meaning of "under God." They can elect public officials who acknowledge and submit to God's standards of justice in their decision-making. And they can help renew America's commitment to "liberty for all," because only "under God" are all men created equal. In secular and religious ideologies that reward human effort, men are anything but equal. Human equality is only possible when God lays low human divisions and renders null our uneven attempts to earn our way to heaven on earth or above.

Parts of the opinion by U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton do suggest bias. But it is not one judge's hostility or philosophy that imperils the partial-birth ban as it heads toward the U.S. Supreme Court. It is the hostility and philosophy of the ban's own advocates, whose determination to moralize the language of the debate and to build a "culture of life" makes their legislation medically confusing and resistant to judicial line-drawing. They are an army of crusaders lost in a war of legal argument....

Abortion foes may be right that the Supreme Court will find Hamilton's language excessive. But the more salient likelihood is that the court will find the ban itself excessive. Perhaps the court will explain yet again how to narrow the ban to make it constitutional. Don't hold your breath waiting for pro-lifers to heed the advice. They can't help themselves.

What happens is that a baby who is in the process of being born, with part of his body outside his mother's body and part still inside, is deliberately killed. One of the methods of doing this is to have his brains sucked out of his head by a device.

Although this is called an abortion, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that it seemed too much like infanticide to him. What keeps it from being murder, as far as the law is concerned, is that part of the baby's body is still inside the mother, so that this procedure can be classified as an abortion.

The American Medical Association some years ago said that there is no medical necessity for such an unusual procedure. Its purpose is not medical but legal: to keep the doctor and the mother from being indicted for killing a newborn baby.

Forget the BSA's constitutional right to freely associate with whomever they please. No one dares to withhold approval of the homosexual lifestyle lest they invite the unquenchable wrath of homosexual activists who, ironically, insist their aim is to prevent hatred.

Have we turned our backs on traditional morality so completely in this country that we won't even stand up for one of the last remaining groups that has the unwavering integrity and fortitude to resist the onslaught against decency so rampant in our popular culture?

How many times have you heard people -- your own friends and acquaintances -- lament the demise of our moral fabric? Yet when that rare group fights to preserve traditional values, we mostly sit idly by as the culture unleashes its vengeance against it.

It occurs to me that all young people who graduate from elite American universities now want to go into communications. It's a whole generation that wants to communicate.

But what do they want to communicate? They don't seem to have a clue.... [I hope that I could be an exception...]

I have come to hate the banners [of smoking]....As I watched the NBC report, I actually thought to myself: I want to make sure I understand. If you smoke a cigarette on a beach in modern America you are harming the innocent. If you have a baby scraped from your womb, you are protecting your freedom. If you sell a pack of cigarettes to a 12-year-old boy you can be jailed, fined and sent to Guantanamo Bay with the other killers. If you sell a pack of contraceptives to a 12 year old boy in modern America you are socially responsible citizen....

It seems to me the question is not, "Will the architects of the new Europe bow to the reality of God and include him in the central founding document of their vast new union?" The question is, "Will a group of atheist and agnostic European bureaucrats be forced to mention a deity in whom they do not believe in order to appease lesser and ignorant people who unfortunately have a lot of votes?"

Gay marriage completes the separation of marriage and parenthood in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the presumption that children need fathers and mothers. As Elizabeth Marquhardt and Don Browning have written, marriage would instead be reduced 'primarily to an affectionate sexual relationship accompanied by a declaration of commitment.' It would hardly be the first reform to do so, but this is no consolation -- these reforms have tended to weaken, rather than strengthen, family ties. Affection is impermanent but it is all that is increasingly holding marriage together.

The religion gap is the leading edge of the "culture war" that has polarized American politics, reshaped the coalitions that make up the Democratic and Republican parties and influenced the appeals their presidential candidates are making. The debate over same-sex marriage is expected to make it wider than ever this year. Gay rights, partial-birth abortion, definitions of patriotism and other "values" issues are likely to exacerbate the divide between the most observant and others.

Great story! Good for young girls -- they need to cry out about the slinky swimsuits, too, that cover LESS than a normal bra and underwear...

There is no hoop that bench-sitting radicals such as Judge Hamilton cannot force lawmakers to jump through in the name of defending the Constitution. No clarity of language and nobility of purpose can protect a statute from being voided by these berobed radicals who willfully misconstrue the Constitution for their own un-American purposes. They claim to protect the Constitution even as their rulings regularly corrupt its very essence. Their threats to declare unconstitutional any law that fails to fit their worldview intimidates lawmakers, deranges the lawmaking process and defeats the will of the public.

Judges recklessly intent on suborning the popular will must be restrained by the powers granted to the chosen representatives of the people. Judge Hamilton's signature permitted the indoctrination of seventh graders. On Tuesday, it outlawed the outlawing of baby killing. No lawful means should be spared to stop Judge Hamilton and others like her.

U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins tossed out a lawsuit challenging the placement of the Ten Commandments monument in a Pleasant Grove, Utah, park, ruling the display was more historic than religious.

In other words, it's all right to display religious monuments and artifacts on government property as long as they have more historic value than religious, more secular than spiritual....

The important concept at stake in a case of this kind is not whether the Ten Commandments monument in a specific public location can stay or not. The important concept is whether this nation still recognizes there are powers greater than government -- whether we believe our human rights and civil rights descend from God.

The makers of "The Day After Tomorrow" revel in the prospect of our civilization being brought low, humiliated for its sins. In the film, desperate Americans flee illegally across the Mexican border to escape the weather cataclysm. Get the irony? After the disaster, the Dick Cheney-like vice president apologizes, essentially for the fact that his country has been running a modern economy lo these many years: "We were wrong. I was wrong." Even with America's economy destroyed, even with millions dead, there is a bright spot. At the end, an astronaut comments from far above our frozen continent: "The air has never been so clear." All the SUVs are buried under the tundra!

In her New England exurban world, where, I was told, oral sex is common by eighth or ninth grade, and where hookups may skip kissing altogether, Kate's predicament strikes her friends, and even herself, as bizarre. ''It's retarded,'' she says, burying her head in Caity's shoulder. ''Even my mom thinks it's weird.''

Just a few weeks ago, Caity and Kate met a cute boy at the mall. ''Me and Kate walked into this store,'' Caity says, ''and this boy saw the shirt Kate was wearing that says, 'Kiss Me, I'm an Amoeba.' So he was, like, 'That's an awesome shirt.' And she was, like, 'Want me to make you one?' So he went and got Sharpies, and she went and got T-shirts, we met back there and then he said to me, 'You want my screen name?' So he wrote it on my arm. He just got his license, so he came up, and we hooked up.''

I ask Caity if that's it, or if her hookup might lead to something more. ''We might date,'' she tells me. ''I don't know. It's just that guys can get so annoying when you start dating them.''

Adam, a 16-year-old sophomore at the end of the table, breaks in, adding that girls, too, can get really annoying when you start dating them. A soccer player with shaggy blond hair and a muscular body, he likes to lift his shirt at inappropriate times (like now, to the Hooters waitress) and scream, ''I've had sex!'' Adam has had the most hookups of the group -- about 10, he estimates.

The picture the writer paints is of sexuality shorn of the rituals and romance many of us recall from the days when we were growing toward young adulthood. Flirtation, infatuation, invitation, dating, becoming steadies, progressing, stage by stage, toward sexual intimacy -- all that, for many suburban teens, has been replaced by matter-of-fact liaisons that treat sex as though it was little more than a biological urge to be indulged, by appointment, at the mutual convenience of mere acquaintances.

Coming from the most notoriously activist and liberal federal court in the country, Tallman's solicitude for federalism and "the democratic debate about physician-assisted suicide" is a bit hard to take. After all, it was the same Ninth Circuit that in Compassion in Dying v. Washington created a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. If the Supreme Court had not reversed the ruling, physician-assisted suicide would have been the law regardless of "democratic debate."

The Circuit Court's supposed devotion to "democratic debate" was also conspicuously absent in its Newdow decision. In Newdow, the Ninth Circuit ruled that "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance was an unconstitutional establishment of religion. It didn't matter to the court that Americans have democratically debated the role of religion in public life since the founding of the republic. And within these debates they have found some balance between the rights of religious minorities and acknowledging the religious ideas that underlie our common life.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton's ruling came in one of three lawsuits challenging the legislation President George W. Bush signed last year.

She agreed with abortion rights activists that a woman's right to choose is paramount, and that it is therefore "irrelevant" whether a fetus suffers pain, as abortion foes contend.

"The act poses an undue burden on a woman's right to choose an abortion," she wrote.