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."