Praise ye the LORD. Praise, O ye servants of the LORD, praise the name of the LORD. Blessed be the name of the LORD from this time forth and for evermore. From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the LORD's name is to be praised. The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens. Who is like unto the LORD our God, who dwelleth on high, Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth!

I have said enough to put the character of Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the result ( and this should be constantly kept in mind) of two distinct elements, which in other places have been in frequent disagreement, but which the Americans have succeeded in incorporating to some extent one with the other and combining admirably. I allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty....

Religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the faculties of man and that the political world is a field prepared by the Creator for the efforts of mind. Free and powerful in its own sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it, religion never more surely establishes its empire than when it reigns in the hearts of men unsupported by aught beside its native strength.

Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. It considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.

Under the insane cultural conditioning of the left, Americans aren't supposed to blanch at the brutalizing of women soldiers in captivity. To do so is chauvinistic. Those public service announcements about "Violence Against Women" don't apply to war. Then enlightenment requires that society not care if women are exposed to a culture of violence. And if you do, you are a chauvinist who fails to see that violence against women in war is an acceptable consequence of equality.

Liberals rejoiced when Les Aspin, Bill Clinton's hapless defense secretary, eliminated the phrase "substantial risk of capture" as a consideration in determining where the military could place women on the battlefield. The debate over placing women on the battlefield actually turned in part on an issue Zarqawi evidently hopes to exploit: that exposing women to abuse and death could demoralize a nation and lead it to turn against war at a critical moment.

The left pooh-poohed this possibility. Liberals argued confidently that Americans would learn to accept with equanimity the sight of women in captivity and women returning from the battlefield in body bags or as amputees. Americans, they said, could be conditioned out of their chauvinism, just like male soldiers trained not to feel distressed when women are brutalized in captivity next to them.

From his partial answers to questions about the recent war, intelligence officials said they came to believe that Mr. Hussein was surprised when the United States began its invasion in March 2003.

One official said that Mr. Hussein had implied that ambiguity over whether his government possessed illegal weapons "would keep the neighbors at bay, while the U.S. would be hung up in interminable debate at the U.N."

What difference does it make if a candidate is viewed as a person of faith? I don't think the key is the purity or coherence of his religious practice. New York Times columnist David Brooks (who's still my favorite conservative) nailed it precisely when he said of his fellow countrymen, "Their President doesn't have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God."

This is true for three reasons, none of which have to do with God. First, if Kerry's uncomfortable with religion then he's uncomfortable with Americans. Media managers love having him photographed riding a motorcycle because it shows he can connect with regular folks, who apparently all ride motorcycles, too. If Kerry's really secular, he's abnormal.

Second, the fact that people view Bush as a man of faith is very much connected to their viewing him as decisive and steadfast, two of his strongest assets. A man of faith is a man of conviction, and vice versa. So, Kerry's unwillingness to talk about his faith feeds into one of his great weaknesses, his reputation as a waffler.

The greatest moral question hanging over America's increasingly secular culture is this: Can we be good without God? That vital question--though almost always unasked--is the backdrop for most of the issues aflame in the media, the schools, and the courts.

Secularization, the process by which a society severs its ties to a religious worldview, is now pressed to the limits by ideological secularists bent on removing all vestiges of the Judeo-Christian heritage from the nation's culture. They will not stop until every aspect of Christian morality is supplanted by the new morality of the postmodern philosophers--a morality with no absolutes, and without God.

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry. He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"

The American people may come to feel that George W. Bush did the job history sent him to do. He handled 9/11, turned the economy around, went into Afghanistan, captured and removed Saddam Hussein. And now let's hire someone who'll just by his presence function as an emollient. A big greasy one but an emollient nonetheless.

I just have a feeling this sort of thing may have some impact this year. "A return to normalcy," with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

The most basic question in this controversy comes down to this: Has God created human beings as male and female with a revealed intention for how we are to relate to each other? The secular world is now deeply committed to confusion on these matters. Denying the Creator, the secular worldview understands gender to be nothing more than the accidental byproduct of blind evolutionary process. Therefore, gender is reducible to nothing more than biology and, as the feminists famously argued, biology is not destiny.

This radical rebellion against a divinely-designed pattern of gender has now reached the outer limits of imagination. If gender is nothing more than a biological accident, and if human beings are therefore not morally bound to take gender as meaningful, then the radical gender theorists and homosexual rights advocates are correct after all. For, if gender is merely incidental to our basic humanity, then we must be free to make whatever adjustments, alterations, or transformations in gender relationships any generation might desire or demand.

The postmodern worldview embraces the notion of gender as a social construct. That is, postmodernists argue that our notions of what it means to be male and female are entirely due to what society has constructed as its theories of masculinity and femininity. Of course, the social construction of all truth is central to the postmodern mind, but when the issue is gender, the arguments become more volatile. The feminist argument is reducible to the claim that patriarchal forces in society have defined men and women so that all the differences ascribed to women represent efforts by men to protect their position of privilege.

Explain this to me: The Supreme Court of the United States says the First Amendment protects the right of hard-core pornographers to lure children into "adult" Web sites where they will be exposed to every manner of deviant sexual behavior? Yet that same court says the First Amendment restricts the right of groups critical of this decision from airing ads at election time that oppose presidential candidates who might appoint similarly disposed judges. As incomprehensible as it might seem, this is the state of First Amendment jurisprudence as the current term of the Supreme Court comes to a close.

On Tuesday, the court upheld a lower court decision involving the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed in 1998, to penalize commercial Web sites that do not try to block access to sexual material deemed harmful to minors. An appeals court found the law unconstitutional in 2000, and it has been up on review by the Supreme Court twice since. The majority of the court in this latest decision said that COPA probably violates free-speech rights of adults who want access to porn but sent the case back to the 3rd Circuit to see if new technologies might make it possible to restrict children's access while not making it too difficult for pornoholics to get their fix.

Churches must recover the centrality and urgency of biblical teaching and preaching, and refuse to sideline the teaching ministry of the preacher. Pastors and churches too busy--or too distracted--to make biblical knowledge a central aim of ministry will produce believers who simply do not know enough to be faithful disciples.

We will not believe more than we know, and we will not live higher than our beliefs. The many fronts of Christian compromise in this generation can be directly traced to biblical illiteracy in the pews and the absence of biblical preaching and teaching in our homes and churches.
This generation must get deadly serious about the problem of biblical illiteracy, or a frighteningly large number of Americans--Christians included--will go on thinking that Sodom and Gomorrah lived happily ever after.

Satire in wartime is an ancient art -- Aristophanes made a career of it. One can appreciate the humor in a well-made caricature regardless of one's view of the issues it makes light of. But listening to the banter amongst the Left-wing crowd in the theater, I concluded that this was not simply lampoonery. Moore accurately reflects the beliefs that most Democratic voters hold as true: President Bush was not elected legally; the United States is run by a wealthy white oligarchy (of which Democrats are somehow not a part, but sometimes facilitate); the military is comprised of an underclass that is sent to die in wars to keep the ruling oligarchy in power and make its members even wealthier; and invading Iraq was the idee fixe of the Bush administration from day one, for which the war on terrorism simply provided a convenient pretext.

As a film, Fahrenheit is uneven. A few parts are visually entertaining (e.g., the "Bonanza" parody) and some are very moving. But other segments wander to no particular point (such as a night patrol in Iraq, dimly filmed and inconclusive) or are simply confusing (are there really insufficient numbers of state troopers in Oregon, and if so, isn't that their problem?). Mostly I was interested in how Moore employed the various elements of his shtick, which he has been developing at least since he emerged on the scene with "Roger & Me" in 1989. All the tricks were in evidence.

Some would say...that the minimal interest among homosexuals in getting married is itself another good reason for legalizing gay marriage. After all, if few homosexual couples get married, there's little chance of a Trojan Horse scenario whereby gay married couples could somehow work to undermine heterosexual marriage from within. The positive version of this argument is made by Andrew Sullivan in his so-called conservative case for gay marriage. He claims that allowing gays to marry would not only not undermine marriage, it would also help strengthen an institution under threat of countercultural erosion. It would do so, he says, not just by boosting marriage statistics, but more important by presenting marriage as something to be desired, a special status worth fighting for.

If true, this would be an important argument in favor of legalizing gay marriage. Unfortunately for Sullivan (and the Netherlands), however, the Dutch experience has shown the exact opposite of what he predicts. The Trojan Horse scenario only existed in the minds of gay-marriage activists looking for a strawman to burn down. After all, no serious opponent of gay marriage has ever argued that the fact that my gay neighbor suddenly has the right to get married would make me, a heterosexual married man, want to file for divorce. But by lobbying so intensively for a change in the law, the gay-marriage campaign did contribute to a change in people's attitude toward marriage. And there is little doubt that it has been a change for the worse.

At this time last year, there were 20 suicide bombings killing 141, while 2002 saw 25 such attacks in which 147 Israelis were killed. So far this year, there have been only two bombings in Israel proper, killing 19.

Israel says its tactics are clearly working, and that life in the Jewish state may gradually be restored to the way it was before the violence started in 2000. The security fence completed in Gaza and the one being constructed in the West Bank are credited with keeping suicide bombers out, and raids in Palestinian areas and targeted killings of top terrorist commanders seem to be putting Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades on the run and unable to orchestrate attacks.

The question is whether the trend marks the end of the intifada, or is merely a lull while the terrorists, temporarily decapitated, regroup and rethink.