Most pro-life people believe that life begins at conception or fertilization; that is the foundation for being pro-life. Therefore, we believe that even embryonic life is something to be cherished and protected even though, as Ron Reagan noted, these lives have no arms or legs or discernible signs of what we recognize as humanity....

Our ethics on life cannot be offhandedly modified simply because an arm of science demands it or because the left calls us names. Once we begin to adapt our ethics because of political heat there is literally no telling where we could arrive in terms of completely manipulating innocent life.

The debate has now been settled: John Kerry definitely served in Vietnam.

That was a major point of the Democratic Convention and of Kerry's acceptance speech. This must be one of the great acts of chutzpah of all time: The party that made national politics safe for Vietnam draft avoiders in 1992 now considers Vietnam service arguably the foremost qualification for the presidency. But, hey, the Democrats are now the party of militaristic display and cultural conservatism.

The emphasis here on values, faith, and patriotism was shrewd politics. But there was also something defensive and pleading about it, as if to say: "We can have values too. Isn't that amazing? And we can even be religious, and incredibly enough, patriotic." The last is a response to a phantom: the nonexistent Republican effort to "question the patriotism" of Democrats.

The group already has a policy opposing discrimination against gays, and many members are concerned about political actions to stop gay marriages, she says.

Keeping gays from marrying "puts a particular stress on them just because of their sexual orientation. It's a health issue and a mental health issue," [APA president] Halpern says.

The greatest hope that John Kerry offered last night was not so much anything he said in policy. It was in spirit. He held out the possibility of a less arrogant America. "I don't wear my own faith on my sleeve," Kerry said. "But faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday. I don't want to claim that God is on our side.As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side."

That drew one of the loudest applauses of his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for president. He deserved it. It was about time the Democrats started fighting faith with faith.

In accepting the nomination of his party Thursday night, John Kerry could not quite bring himself to give both the president and the volunteer military who performed so well some credit for this great and significant advance for human liberty. The theme of liberty in the Muslim world belongs to George Bush. It was he who named liberty the only real alternative to terrorism.

"With a firm reliance on Divine Providence," to cite our forebears once again, Bush has publicly held that one cannot fight terrorism merely by killing terrorists. One must provide an alternative of liberty, prosperity, and opportunity -- one must labor to build free societies where they do not now exist. Liberty works. I think Bush will win because these are the truths Americans hold.

What people really mean when they say so-and-so is imposing his religious beliefs on me is that they don't happen to agree with those beliefs....

There is, however, a problem with the way some religious conservatives approach the political sphere. The problem is not dogmatism, but laziness. Someone who rests the argument for a certain position entirely on the fact that his religion told him to is not really attempting to persuade. Even if one is motivated by faith, one still has to convince others using secular, or at least broad-gauge, moral arguments. It is fine for someone to oppose gay marriage because Leviticus frowns on homosexuality. It's neither appropriate nor smart to say Leviticus calls homosexuality an abomination and so you should too. That is demanding that other people accept your religion. Some religious conservatives forget to persuade because they live in a political cloister, speaking mostly with others who agree with them, and for whom Leviticus is an effective shorthand. One of the reasons the Founding Fathers thought religion important to a functioning democracy is that it would tamp down passions and ensure that people would listen to each other. Religious conservatives need to understand that part of the Founding Fathers' wisdom, too.

Analysts have said that religious Americans are typically drawn to the GOP's agenda on social issues. In general, Republicans oppose gay marriage and abortion, positions many faiths also profess. On the other hand, Democrats are associated with pro-choice, pro-gay causes as well as interpreting the separation of church and state as keeping prayer out of public schools and religious iconography off of government property.

Religious Democrats at Wednesday's event said they can succeed from within the Democratic Party because, aside from moral issues hotly debated in the United States, Democrats care more than Republicans about issues of social justice.

Teaching safe sex should be a high priority to curb AIDS, Savicz said, noting that promoting abstinence is likely to get a cynical reaction from teenagers: "Yeah, yeah, like I'm going to do that."

A majority in the poll, 55 percent, said teaching safe sex should be the focus of efforts to prevent AIDS, rather than promoting abstinence, backed by 40 percent.

Melissa Pardue, an analyst with The Heritage Foundation, took issue with the poll.

"It spent a significant amount of time talking about the HIV crisis in this country and all the people that are contracting it from not using contraception, and then goes on to ask parents if they want their kids taught that," she said. "Of course any parent's going to say, 'Well, no, I want my child to use contraception.'"

Kelly sits nervously on a couch in a clinic in Washington.

She is doing one of the most controversial things a woman can do in the United States -- seeking an abortion.

She is grateful that the law allows her to choose when she can have a baby.

"I'm glad abortion's legal and available," she said.

"Especially if we don't have contraception that's 100% effective.

"I'm glad there's an alternative because some people aren't ready to be mothers."

But more than 30 years after the US Supreme Court made abortion legal, womens' groups are warning this right could be taken away if President Bush is re-elected.

A friend of mine who is a DIA anti-terrorism specialist just told me that Boston would not be attacked and New york probably would be. I asked him why and here is what he said.

Ron Reagan's speech Tuesday night at the Democratic convention was breathtakingly irresponsible. For example, despite the fact that no one knows whether embryonic stem cells will ever be effective in curing Parkinson's disease or any other grave affliction, Ron Reagan virtually promised Parkinson's sufferers that embryonic stem cells will provide a cure for them in ten years or so. "Sound like magic?," he said. Welcome to the future of medicine." But Ron Reagan has no idea -- no one does -- whether this is the future of medicine. He is engaged in a campaign of outrageous hype to persuade suffering people that a mere change of administrations in Washington will lead to cures for "a wide range of debilitating illnesses: Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, lymphoma, spinal cord injuries, and much more." Sound like snake oil? Welcome to the present of politics.

Killing embryos is not a problem, he said, because those embryos have no fingers or toes. So much for quadriplegics. It's not a problem because they feel no pain -- like the comatose, or people given lethal injections. It's not a problem because the future will approve. In which case, so much the worse for the future.

I think that America has been involved in an unjust war on the unborn for over thirty years.

I think that liberals are right when they say that a nation's greatness is measured by how it treats those who cannot fend for themselves.

I think that I am lucky to have parents who are pro-life.

I think that many people who are "pro choice" are glad that they were born before 1973. Otherwise, they might not be able to make choices.

I think about the night that my wife spent six hours with a woman who was having her second miscarriage....She may have been thinking about how she had been misled by Planned Parenthood and the Women's Resource Center....

I think that pro-life groups should make their own t-shirts saying "your mother didn't."

The Richmond-based court ruled that the town of Great Falls, S.C., violated the Constitution by allowing officials to invoke the name of Jesus Christ. The suit was filed by Darla Kaye Wynne, a Wiccan who asked that "a generic deity such as 'God' " be invoked, "so that all of my community could be welcomed there," the three-judge panel noted in its decision Friday.

The controversy arose in Fredericksburg last year when Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU in Virginia, complained on behalf of a city resident. He said yesterday that the 4th Circuit decision means that "Rev. Turner must deliver nonsectarian prayers in which he doesn't make reference to a specific religion."

The Marriage Protection Act would strip federal courts of their jurisdiction to rule on challenges to state bans on gay marriages under a provision of a 1996 federal law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Though American Christians participate in a democratic society and a pluralistic culture, they do not serve that society well by receding into the moral background. The answer cannot be found in an assumption of secular norms or in the shared conviction that no common moral convictions are possible. We cannot accept the reduction of morality to values, though we do understand that a true system of morality produces real values, and puts value on that which is right, righteous, and just.

Where is the church in the midst of this moral and spiritual confusion? Will the church lead the way back to the moral high ground, or will we leave a secular society groping for values without Christian moral witness? The most urgent moral issues we face are really spiritual issues--the refusal to accept God's definition of marriage, the refusal to defend the dignity of human life, the rejection of the Creator's right to define our own existence. The Church cannot hide from these battles. Christians must respond with a note of clear, uncompromised, and unambiguous moral conviction.

The word "sin" has been ruled out of bounds for civilized debate. Once God is removed from the cultural equation, sin no longer makes sense. Human beings may offend each other, or even assault each other--but sin only makes sense against the revealed background of God's perfect holiness. Christians cannot hesitate to identify the problems of our times as sin, but we must wonder how popular culture can live without the category.

Richards doesn't say how old her son is, but assuming this account is recent, I'm figuring he's either a newborn, or about a year old. As the sole caregiver for an almost-two-year-old (and her three older siblings), I'd love to think that she's already regretting her decision, but I know the opposite is true. Each night she is awakened by a cry, every interruption in her workday, every dollar drained from her checking account for diapers or formula, she is telling herself, "What if it had been three? I couldn't have done it. I did the right thing."

But she didn't, of course. She did the easy thing. And she can tell herself for the rest of her life, that it was the right decision for her...after all, abortion is all about choice, isn't it? And you know, it probably was the right decision...for her.

But 20 or 30 years from now, when her adult son comes to her and asks -- as he surely will one day -- why she aborted his siblings, I wish I could be a fly on the wall. Because it may have been her children, her "choice," but in making it, she aborted her son's brothers or sisters. And some day, he, too, may believe in "fetal reduction"; after all, children tend to assume the morality, or lack thereof, of their parents. But, it also could be that, given a choice, he would have preferred to have had a couple of brothers or a sister, than the smallest jar of mayonnaise on the block, purchased at D'Agostino. Even if his mother was stressed.

Neither the cultural problem nor its solution can be found in Washington. It lies in the decisions by millions of Americans (and, yes, out-of-control federal judges, who reflect our moral indifference) to construct their own moral authority. Sufficiently large numbers of Americans either do not believe, or do not practice, what the Scriptures teach and cannot be made to do so through a constitutional amendment or any other law. Neither side is going to persuade the other of the correctness of its position, so it becomes a political power game....

America may be living on borrowed time, but its "lease" will not be extended by new laws or constitutional amendments. America and Americans will renew their moral strength when they decide in sufficient numbers to live differently. No power on Earth can make them do that. But a Power not of this Earth can help.

Of the approximately 15 million evangelical Christians in America, about 3.5 million are single adults, 500,000 to 1 million of them never married, according to the Barna Group, a research group that analyzes Christian trends. But demographics alone are not responsible for literature devoted to these single men and women.

Beyond the proscription on sex outside marriage, evangelicals grapple with relationship issues many other young Americans do not, spiritual leaders and authors say. For example, many single people raised in conservative Christian denominations believe it is not necessary to actively pursue a partner.

"Reduction" seems to be a favorite linguistic shroud for abortion advocates -- one that has multiple meanings. In recently completed trials challenging the constitutionality of the federal partial-birth-abortion ban, doctors describing the partial-birth-abortion method described how they "reduced" the "fetal calvarium." By that clinical terminology, these doctors cloaked from public scrutiny the process by which they crushed a partially born child's skull in order to complete the delivery of the aborted child. But "selective reduction" reaches a new low in the distortion of the language. Heard in a vacuum, the term could speak to any number of innocuous human experiences -- perhaps it describes the process of clearing out deadwood in a forest to prevent forest fires or maybe it depicts a targeted weight-loss program. But spoken by a pro-abortion advocate, watch out. Seemingly harmless terms become lethal.

This descent into chaos prompts four observations.
- The PA has joined other parts of the Greater Middle East (Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan) in the general trend toward lawlessness.

- Mr. Arafat predicted in 1994 that "Either we build a Singapore in our country or fall into the trap of the tragic Somali model." He thus acknowledges that the PA's slide to Somali-like anarchy symbolizes his own failure.

- The Islamic proverb, "Better a thousand days of tyranny than one day of anarchy," has an element of truth, for life in the PA territories has truly become hellish.

-Although Mr. Arafat launched the Oslo war nearly four years ago with the intent to destroy Israel, he is, ironically, destroying not Israel but his own proto-government.

The question now facing Palestinians is whether they have learned the right lessons from their bitter experience. That for once they are not blaming Israel for their problems gives some reason forr optimism.

During its morning session the Library Board voted unanimously to keep the link to teenwire.com while also reviewing the state's Web site policy to determine what, if any, among the links on the site were inappropriate given state guidelines. In the afternoon, however, one of Gov. Rounds' aides returned to the Library Board and asked them to reconsider, telling them, according to the Rapid City Journal, that Gov. Rounds would remove the link even if the board did not vote to do so. The Library Board then voted 5-1 to remove the link for at least two months pending investigation of its contents. The sole holdout, Eric Abrahamson, was concerned that Gov. Rounds was trying to exert too much authority -- he told The Argus Leader, "Libraries exist to be clearinghouses of information. And the State Library has a unique role in providing access to information that is different from other branches of state government."...

Gov. Rounds also said that he objected to the material found on teenwire.org, and, according to The Argus Leader, compared its availability on the library Web site to being like, "a librarian choosing Playboy for children's story time." According to the same paper, he elaborated, "We're simply saying you can't use a Playboy article in children's story time. It's a public policy decision."

If he stumbles over his words, he is an embarrassing idiot. If he manages to cut taxes or wage a war against Saddam Hussein with bipartisan support, he is a manipulative genius.

If he hasn't been able to capture Osama bin Laden, he is endangering U.S. security. If he catches bin Laden, it is only a ploy to influence the elections.

If he ignores U.N. resolutions, he is a dangerous unilateralist. If he takes U.N. resolutions on Iraq seriously, he is a dangerous unilateralist. If he doesn't get France to agree to his Iraq policy, he is ignoring important international actors. If he supports multiparty talks on North Korea, he is not doing enough to ignore important international actors.

Yes, the fence causes some hardship to Palestinians. Some are separated from their fields, some schoolchildren have to walk much farther to class. This is unfortunate. On any scale of human decency, however, it is far more unfortunate that 1,000 Israelis are dead from Palestinian terrorism, and thousands more horribly maimed, including Israeli schoolchildren with nails and bolts and shrapnel lodged in their brains and spines who will never be walking to school again.

From the safe distance of 2,000 miles, the court declared itself "not convinced" that the barrier Israel is building is a security necessity. It based its ruling on the claim that the fence violates Palestinian "humanitarian" rights such as "the right to work, to health, to education and to an adequate standard of living as proclaimed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child."

The UN agencies have all expressed their doubts about abstinence and fidelity, pointing out that women in southern Africa often do not have the power to say no and that married women are more likely to be infected with HIV, via their unfaithful husbands, than unmarried women.

"There is an urgent need to rethink the ABC approach," said Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the UN's Population Fund, at the launch of a report which outlined the dire plight of women in southern Africa, who make up 57% of those now infected and unable to protect themselves.

People's views on gay marriage, as on earlier issues such as interracial marriage, evolve. The reasoning of court rulings, such as the one handed down last year in Massachusetts, will spur Americans to think about gay marriage in ways they hadn't -- as an issue of equality, as the desire to create a socially and legally sanctioned family, as a wish to be accepted as ordinary citizens taking on rights and responsibilities.

Thinking in those ways about gay marriage makes clear how convoluted are GOP arguments that a gay-marriage ban "supports marriage and the family."

Gay unions exist. Gay families exist. Granting them legal status would not destroy the institution of marriage, nor would it hurt existing socially sanctioned families.

There is no good scientific evidence that preaching abstinence protects people from HIV infection. And this administration’s ideological obsession with marriage could actually put young girls at even greater risk. Marriage is not protective for young women in Africa. Young women who get married are at higher risk than young women who stay single.

The gay rights movement has protected and expanded freedom for all by getting the government out of our bedrooms. A tempting solution to the gay marriage controversy would be to extend that triumph one more step and get the government out of our marriages. Let churches and other private institutions define marriage however they wish. Gay marriage and traditional marriage would have the same legal status, and yet there would be no official sanction or approval of gay marriage. Both sides would have what they say they want. And what principled conservative could object to this major retrenchment of government authority in our lives?

Unfortunately for this notion, the concept of marriage is enmeshed in the details of government -- in the tax code, in inheritance and child custody laws and so on. In practice, it cannot be extracted. And even in theory, what lawyers call a "bright line" -- speeding means more than 55 mph; you're either married or you're not -- is often needed to keep the rules from becoming impossibly complicated.

But the notion of "privatizing" marriage remains a good one. And the concept of civil union may be a promising approach. Right now, civil union is just an evasion for politicians trying to sidestep the gay marriage controversy. But it could be a model for a different official attitude toward marriage.

Considering the volume of work Congress has yet to do before members leave town, the Senate's insistence on considering a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is telling....Everyone knows that, in the Senate, the proposed amendment is well short of the votes needed to send it on to the states; even making it to a vote on the merits is highly unlikely. The reason the Senate is moving forward is politics of a particularly crass and ugly sort: Gay marriage has become a national electoral issue....Precisely because of the weight conservatives have put on this issue, today's vote, despite its preordained outcome, has become deeply important. It requires senators to take a public stand on a question of deep principle: Are they willing to warp the entire American constitutional structure to prevent people who love one another from marrying?

The combination of this proposal's radicalism and its consideration in the middle of an election year commands a strong rebuke from those members who retain enough shame to oppose a constitutional amendment whose express purpose is to deny equal treatment to U.S. citizens. Even opponents of gay marriage, about which people of conscience legitimately disagree, should balk at this measure, which would prevent a democratic majority in any state ever from recognizing it. A strong vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment would send a powerful message that amending the Constitution is not a solution for every non-problem that generates a bad cause.

Excuse me, but it is now routine -- even on Fox News Channel, I just heard -- to talk about "banning" homosexual marriages. Isn't language being misused here? Can you ban something that has never existed? The way marriage is currently, and has traditionally, been defined restricts legal marriage to one man and one woman, both of sound mind, not close blood relatives, neither currently married to someone else. I suppose you could say that that "bans" all sorts of unions: mine with my sister, yours with your town softball league, Jonah's with Cosmo, and so on. But is it really proper to speak of these restrictions as "bans"? Who ever thought like this until about a year ago?...

I suppose you might argue that the *intent* of the FMA is to "ban gay marriage," even thought that isn't its wording. Even that is questionable, though. What supporters of the FMA want is to *maintain* marriage in the form in which it is currently understood, and to shield it from assaults by homosexuals, polygamists, incestuous couples, and anyone else who might seek to change the institution.

Republicans think they have an advantage in the "mainstream" war on the issue of gay marriage. But they may have tossed it away this week. In proposing a constitutional amendment to define marriage only as "the union of a man and a woman," the GOP's goal was to put Democrats on the cultural defensive and to inspire religious conservatives who form the core of modern the party today. Instead, the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist have exposed divisions among Republicans and, through a well-meaning procedural mistake, allowed the Democratic ticket to wriggle free of the need to cast a potentially harmful vote on the matter.

The article begins with a married woman confiding to her circle of friends that she is having an affair. In between huffing gin vapors, she spills the details about "heavy petting" and "the kiss that would just launch a thousand kisses." The tone is consciously tantalizing, designed to make female readers lean forward conspiratorially, and male readers fantasize about swooping in and poaching the unfulfilled wife....

What's striking about the article is not that the rate of cheating by women is approaching that of men but that our so-called hard-news outlets are depicting the trend with so little depth or introspection.

The Newsweek article, for example, provides almost no counterbalance regarding personal or moral responsibility. Mostly, the article is just a second-hand retelling of stories about voluptuously contoured, middle-aged married women getting mounted in dimly lit locales. The article suggests issues about our bodily needs. But mostly it just invites the reader to peek over the windowsill and enjoy the vicarious gratification of other people's sexual stealth and subterfuge.

the fundamental definition of marriage is no mere policy issue. We're talking about the very integrity and meaning of one of the primary elements of civil society.

Nor is this a matter for state-by-state experimentation. Society isn't harmed when high-tax states live side by side with low-tax states. The market adjusts to the inconsistency. Not so with marriage. A highly integrated society such as ours -- with questions of property ownership, tax and economic liability, inheritance, and child custody crossing state lines -- requires a uniform definition of marriage.

In a free society, certain fundamental questions must be addressed and settled for the good of that society. States can't impair the obligation of contracts, or coin their own money, or experiment with forms of non-republican government. We learned the hard way that the nation could not endure half slave and half free.

If marriage is a fundamental social institution, then it's fundamental for all of society. As such, it is not only reasonable but obligatory that it be preferred and defended in the law and, if necessary, protected in the U. S. Constitution.

The road to infidelity is paved with unmet expectations about sex, love, and marriage. A woman who is 40 today grew up during the permissive 1970s and went to college when the dangers of AIDS were just beginning to dawn. She was sexually experienced before she was married and waited five years longer than her mother to settle down. She lives in a culture that constantly flaunst the possibility of great sex and fitness well after menopause.

Invading Iraq was the right thing to do, President Bush said Monday, because even though weapons of mass destruction remain unfound, allowing the country to possibly transfer weapons capability to terrorists was not a risk he was willing to take.

"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq," Bush said during a trip to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The trip was designed to showcase a victory in the Bush administration's campaign against weapons of mass destruction.

In 1996, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Defense of Marriage Act, and President Clinton signed it into law. That legislation defines marriage, for purposes of federal law, as a union between a man and a woman, and declares that no state is required to accept another state's definition of marriage. Yet an activist court that strikes down traditional marriage would have little problem striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. Overreaching judges could declare that all marriages recognized in Massachusetts or San Francisco be recognized as marriages everywhere else.

When judges insist on imposing their arbitrary will on the people, the only alternative left to the people is an amendment to the Constitution -- the only law a court cannot overturn. A constitutional amendment should never be undertaken lightly -- yet to defend marriage, our nation has no other choice.

When allowed to choose, legislatures protect marriage rather than dismantle it. Therefore, advocates of same-sex marriage resort to strategies involving the executive or judicial branches. In states such as California, Oregon, New York, and New Mexico, rogue local officials have simply defied their own state marriage laws and married thousands of same-sex couples. While saying that New York law does not allow same-marriages, state attorney general Eliot Spitzer has promised that he will nonetheless recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

But in most cases, advocates turn to the courts to impose their preferred policies on their fellow citizens, and their legal war against traditional marriage has at least five fronts....

For a simple and compelling reason, traditional marriage has been the norm in every political community for 5,000 years. Society has an interest in the future generations created by men and women. Decoupling procreation from marriage in order to make some people feel more accepted denies the very purpose of marriage itself. And such a radical transformation should not be imposed by judges upon people who would not choose it for themselves. Yet absent a constitutional amendment, that is precisely what we face.

In Edwards' home state, a reporter told President Bush on Wednesday that the new vice-presidential candidate is described as "charming, engaging, a nimble campaigner, a populist and even sexy." How does Edwards stack up against Vice President Cheney, the reporter asked.

"Dick Cheney can be president," Bush said tersely before soliciting another question with an abrupt "Next."

I take no pleasure in telling you that the vote on the constitutional amendment designed to protect the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman will fail next week in the U.S. Senate.

Thousands of regular folks have been awakened from their political slumber and are writing letters, making phone calls, sending e-mails and holding prayer meetings in an effort to have some basic common sense written into our Constitution.

However, for over three decades, while we were sleeping, homosexual activists were working nonstop to get the government's seal of approval on same-sex unions and to make the issue of the marriage designation for these couples one of basic civil rights.

A majority of members, 65.3 percent, agreed, while 34.7 percent opposed the proposal.

Current guidelines from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists state that the unborn child should receive a lethal injection to the heart before delivery to ensure the infant does not survive.

Approximately 1 percent of all abortions in the UK result in a baby born alive, according to Adedugbe. Even abortions performed before 24 weeks have resulted in some live births.

The truth is that a law banning the killing of unborn babies, just like a law banning the killing of 2-year-olds or 92-year-olds, is not based on denominational religion. It is based, rather, on applying an objective moral principle to an objective fact in the interest of protecting a basic human right. The moral principle: It is wrong to deliberately take an innocent human life. The fact: The unborn child (as Kerry himself "believes") is a human life, just as the 2-year-old or 92-year-old is a human life. The basic human right preserved is the right to life itself.

Yes, the objective moral principle here comes from God -- as does "Thou shalt not steal," which protects the basic right of private property -- but it does not belong to any religious denomination. It is universal and precedes them all. It applied when Cain killed Abel; it applies when each American president puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath of office.

Presidents may pursue policies that accord with this principle or violate it. They can act rightly or wrongly. But they cannot change the principle itself -- any more than they can change the facts of human biology.

When the Senate debates a constitutional amendment next week limiting marriage to a man and a woman, the outcome might not change the law of the land.

But it is likely to have a political effect in the next five months, as campaigns around the country deal with the ongoing fight over gay marriage and civil unions.

The modern world is in a headlong rush to bury the remnants of the Christian conscience. The post-Christian character of contemporary western culture is most clearly evident in the rejection of biblical ethics in favor of moral relativism. Most persons believe that morality is simply up for grabs.

We must honestly face the fact that this post-Christian morality is deeply rooted in a subtle form of atheism. Though most Americans habitually claim a belief in God, and even some form of Christian identity, Americans order their lives as if God does not exist. Otherwise, we would be required to care what God thinks, obey what God commands, and submit to His authority--or fear and face the consequences. It seems that millions of Americans claim to believe in a god they do not fear.

Kerry is the first prominent pro-abortion politician I can remember admitting that life begins at conception. In fact, I don't remember any pro-abortion person making that admission -- to himself, much less to the public.

People I've debated on the issue have generally taken the position t