At a time when more than 40 million worldwide are infected, nearly 50 percent of them women, the religious roots of this disease must be examined to determine how the theological thinking of some has caused widespread harm to many.

These theological taboos include not talking openly about sex, preventing people from understanding how to prevent the disease. Second, moralistic judgments toward infected persons and their families have added to society's stigmatization. Third, religious prejudice toward sex workers, injection-drug users, gay men and others has contributed to discrimination. Silence, stigma and discrimination keep people from getting tested and treated.

"The theology of a few" has unfortunately long influenced many religious responses to the world's worst health crisis. Patriarchal religious assumptions have made women especially vulnerable. Endless controversies over the efficacy of condoms have helped deny people the least expensive "weapon of mass protection" available. In many countries, married women and young girls are endangered because they lack education and control of their own sex lives.

For the Left, Mr. Bush is automatically under a cloud of suspicion; he is an unapologetic twanger who likes guns, barbeques, NASCAR, "the ranch," and pick-up trucks. It matters little that George Bush's record on classical civil-rights issues is impeccable, without a hint of the deplorable racism of a younger Senator Byrd, a Lyndon Johnson, or an Al Gore Sr. Every statement Bush drawls out about religion, affirmative action, or abortion is forever suspect -- sort of what would happen should a Germanic-sounding Arnold Schwarzenegger quite rightly lecture Californians about the need for greater order, efficiency, cohesiveness, and the willpower to regain pride and purpose. Necessary, yes -- but for some, given his accent, Wagnerian and spooky all the same.

Similarly, Bush's Christianity seems evangelical and literal. It comes across as disturbing to liberals of the country who see religion as a mere social formality at best, useful for weddings and funerals, perhaps comforting at Christmas and Easter of course, but otherwise a potential threat to the full expression of lifestyle "choices."

American politicos like their candidates to be Episcopalian, Unitarian, or Congregationalist, perhaps even mainstream but quiet Methodists or Presbyterians. Baptists of the southern flavor, or anything not found in a New England township, reflect a real belief in the literalness of the Bible -- primordial ideas that religion is not a social necessity but a fire-and-brimstone path to eternal salvation.

Jimmy Carter came closest to the edge with his talk of being born again. Yet his liberalism, his close friendship with Walter Mondale, and his talk of American pathology convinced the Left that he was just a southern version of a Daniel Berrigan or William Sloan Coffin -- a little weird, perhaps, but useful all the same in drawing the powers of Christianity into the liberal crusade. In contrast, if Bush evokes the name of God one one-thousandth as often as did Abraham Lincoln or Reverend Jackson, he is dismissed as an unhinged zealot eager to incite a Hundred Years' War with the Muslims.

[Lt. Gen. Moshe] Yaalon suggested that from a military point of view, Israel could afford to withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, a key Syrian demand.

"If you ask me, theoretically, if we can reach an agreement with Syria...my answer is that from a military standpoint it is possible to reach an agreement by giving up the Golan Heights," Yaalon told the daily Yediot Ahronot.

[O]rganizers of this month's Athens Games plan to distribute 130,000 condoms in the co-ed athletes' village -- a record for Olympic latex.

"It's all about safe sex...and there's tons of that going on," says Diane Jones Konihowski, the three-time Olympian pentathlete who was Canada's chef de mission in Sydney. "That's the fun of it, I suppose. You're not going to find a better hotbed of bods. I mean, athletes are very physical people by nature, and there are some really nice specimens walking around.

You can read Kerry's full Advocate piece here. One does wonder how a candidate who thinks gay marriage is the "essence of the American pursuit of happiness and the core of the struggle for equality" can really be against it. Organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates gay marriage, have certainly been content holding water for Kerry -- actively attacking the Bush administration in an election year....Gay-marriage advocates seem not to worry much about the fate of their agenda in a Kerry administration. Well, no wonder, considering what he's evidently willing to say when he thinks he's talking behind the closed covers of a gay magazine.

Chief Justice Ronald George noted that Thursday's ruling doesn't address "the substantive legal rights of same sex couples. In actuality, the legal issue before us implicates the interest of all individuals in ensuring that public officials execute their official duties in a manner that respects the limits of the authorities granted to them as officeholders."

For decades, America has embraced a baffling contradiction. The majority of its people are churchgoing Christians, many of them evangelical. Yet its mainstream pop culture, especially film, is secular at best, often raw and irreligious. In many movies, piety is for wimps, and the clergy are depicted as oafs and predators. It's hard to see those two vibrant strains of society ever coexisting, learning from each other.

Yet the two are not only meeting; they're also sitting down and breaking bread together. The unearthly success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ helped movie execs recognize that fervent Christians, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on religious books and music, are worth courting. Publicists hired by studios feed sermon ideas based on new movies to ministers. Meanwhile, Christians are increasingly borrowing from movies to drive home theological lessons. Clergy of all denominations have commandeered pulpits, publishing houses and especially websites to spread the gospel of cinevangelism....

Hollywood doesn't necessarily want to make Christian movies. It wants to make movies Christians think are Christian. Moviemakers are happy to be the money changers in the temple, even as preachers are thrilled that a discussion of -- what, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle? -- can guarantee a full house on Sunday.

The misnamed and misguided Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is as unconstitutional and unnecessary as it is mean-spirited and malicious. The authors of the bill mistakenly claim that Congress has the authority to allow one state to ignore a legally recognized marriage in another....

Unconstitutional. Unnecessary. Premature. Presumptuous. What is this debate really about? It seems no coincidence that every election year a few politicians gang together for some legislative gay bashing. This behavior panders to the basest instincts of the human condition--scapegoating and ostracizing.

But we are a better nation than that. Echoing the ignorance and bigotry that peppered the discussion of interracial marriage a generation ago, the proponents of DOMA call for a caste system for marriage. I will not be party to that. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained 30 years ago, "Races do not fall in love and get married. Individuals fall in love and get married." This is the essence of the American pursuit of happiness and the core of the struggle for equality.

Surely some of the "Benedict Arnold companies" Kerry attacked for moving abroad to evade American taxes would have used their offshore hideaways by now to produce these lucrative cures -- if President Bush had indeed imposed a "ban on stem-cell research" and if, as Kerry claims, the cures were "right at our fingertips."

But Bush didn't, and they aren't....

On July 13, Kerry joined Sens. Orrin Hatch, R.-Utah, and Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif., as co-sponsor of a bill that would do exactly what Bush is trying to stop: legalize the cloning of human beings while requiring those human beings to be killed.

While Mr. Bush was appearing in Virginia, his wife, Laura, was addressing the Pennsylvania Medical Society in Langhorne, Pa., where she urged a cautious, go-slow policy on stem-cell research and declared that such research has ethical and moral implications "that must not be treated lightly."...

Mrs. Bush, speaking on the third anniversary of her husband's decision to restrict research to those stem-cell lines already in existence, clashed directly with Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, and his running mate, Senator John Edwards. The Kerry-Edwards campaign called today for an end to curbs on stem-cell studies and a "return to scientific excellence in America."

In her Pennsylvania appearance, Mrs. Bush said, "I hope that stem-cell research will yield cures," according to The Associated Press. "But I know that embryonic stem-cell research is very preliminary right now, and the implication that cures for Alzheimer's are around the corner is just not right. And it's really not fair to people who are watching a loved one suffer with this disease."

The divide in the thinking on the question by contemporary Americans was adroitly formulated by a reflective campaign manager for gay marriage. Jeff Wunrow said he was busy digesting what had happened. "The only thing I think I've learned is to be careful about trusting your instincts. I learned that I don't think I inherently know much about average voters in Missouri. Every message I thought made sense didn't resonate. I guess what it says is that seven out of 10 people here think they know better how I should live my life than I do."

The voters of Missouri aren't saying that. They are seeking to reinforce two traditions, one social, one political. They are defending an institution that is incoherent if attempted -- in the same name -- by persons of the same sex. That, and the tradition that certain matters are decided not by courts but by political bodies. Leaving the question to the individual states to decide is a broad acknowledgment of political divisions of authority, and is not to be taken as "gay bashing."

Events such as those last week in Missouri and Washington are making it less and less likely that Kerry, and the Democrats who cheered him in Boston, will get their wish. Kerry has made it clear that he and Edwards are personally opposed to same-sex marriage, so the debate will not be about the merits of this impending social change. Kerry, remember, has "no problem" with the Missouri vote. Yet everyone knows that, if left to themselves, judges like the ones in Massachusetts and Washington state will override the preferences of the 70 percent or so of Americans who likewise oppose same-sex marriage.

When it comes up in the fall campaign, as it certainly will, the issue will be what to do about this collision between democratic decision-making and judicial ambition. President Bush will have a clear answer: He will fight to preserve marriage, and his opponent will not. How does Bush know this? Kerry opposes changing the Constitution to preserve traditional marriage. He was one of 14 senators to vote against legislation to let states preserve it. And he is committed to appointing the kind of federal judges who created the problem in the first place.

Many people who rightly support a world war on AIDS do so, not because of their concern for others, but because of concern for themselves. They see the existence of AIDS as a threat to their sexual freedom. And that is why they fight to preserve abortion. They see the non-existence of abortion as a threat to their sexual freedom. Their problem is not intellectual. It is a basic issue of self-control, which lies at the heart of many human tragedies.

And that is why, as great as he was, C.S. Lewis was incorrect when he said that "The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins." Our decisions about sexual morality can affect our decisions about much more important issues. These seemingly minor transgressions can produce a callous indifference to the plight of the unborn.

But what we need is more than a lecture on sexual morality. We need a unified effort to end the two greatest human rights tragedies of our time, which are unquestionably the twin epidemics of abortion and AIDS.