How does a godly woman keep her way? She takes her feelings to Scripture to have them named. She finds there a framework for her experience: Some yearnings are blessed and others censured. She encounters the ancient phenomenon of Covenant, an insight as deep as the dawn of creation and in accord with reality. It takes into account a fact of human existence that fools ignore to their peril--that life is lived out in the matrix of time, in a succession of moments. And therefore, living is marked by inconstancy of feelings, feelings that would threaten to pull asunder by centrifugal force if not brought into submission to a higher rule. The woman now sees her impulses in the light of new possibilities: Not all feelings are friends.

In the same Scriptures she finds remedies. What do you do to rob the oxygen of an illicit ardor? You pray for the man (let's say it is a man) you are attracted to. You pray for his sanctification. You pray for his wife! (This, friends, is a real non-starter for romantic adventurism.) Rather than stoking ungodly feelings till they crescendo to a convincing claim of defining your essence, the tempted woman "sues for grace" (as the Puritans used to say), until the impulses threatening her very soul abate.

The only way to make the implementation of homosexual marriage un-radical is to persuade people that such a move isn't radical. And such persuasion is less dependent on reason than it is on time. Let's put it this way: Imagine that it's 1904 instead of 2004. Now, let's suppose that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Imagine the social and political upheaval that would ensue. Now, according to its advocates, gay marriage is a matter of justice, so presumably legalization in 1904 would have been as warranted as in 2004. But since virtually no one was asking for gay marriage in 1904, the move would have seemed needlessly or even insanely radical, and no amount of reasonable argument would change that perception.

[Jonathan] Rauch's version of Hayekianism says that change is necessary whenever the injustice is great. What if, instead, change is necessary when the injustice is obvious? For Rauch, of course, the injustice is already obvious. But obviousness for any individual is never the right criteria. The benefits of socialism or economic planning -- which Hayek dubbed "the fatal conceit" -- were obvious to a great mass of intellectuals and workers. No, the standard must be obviousness for the society generally.

Well, there's a difference between evangelical and being a part of the Religious Right. A significant proportion of the evangelical community is part of the Religious Right. My purpose in writing the book was to communicate loud and clear that I felt that evangelical Christianity had been hijacked.

When did it become anti-feminist? ["Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord."] When did evangelical Christianity become anti-gay? ["Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?...Neither fornicators...nor homosexuals."] When did it become supportive of capital punishment? Pro-war? [Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power?...for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.] When did it become so negative towards other religious groups? ["Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees."]...

In short, I think that evangelicals are so concerned with the unborn--as we should be--that we have failed to pay enough attention to the born--to those children who do live and who are being left behind by a system that has gone in favor of corporate interests and big money.

In a striking admission, George W. Bush said the other day: "We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be [called] the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."

This important concession follows growing criticism of the misleading term "war on terror" (how can one fight a tactic?) and replaces it with the more accurate "war on ideological extremists." With this change, the battle of ideas can begin.

But who exactly are those ideological extremists? The next step is for Mr. Bush to give them a name.

In fact, he on occasion since September 11 has spoken candidly about their identity. As early as September 2001, he referred to the enemy being "a fringe form of Islamic extremism" which seeks "to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children."

A British woman who had an abortion later discovered that the unborn child's head had been left inside her, a mistake that could have taken her life...."We just broke down and cried at what we were seeing. We couldn't believe it," said Chambers, sobbing.

It's not just a cliche: Sex and drugs often do go together, says a survey of U.S. teenagers.

Teens who say at least half their friends are having sex are more likely to report having tried marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes.

The annual survey, released Thursday, asked teens aged 12-17 about their use of illegal substances. Researchers then looked for other activities of daily life that were associated with such use.

It seems the seeds of divorce are sown long before a couple recites their wedding vows.

New research shows certain relationship skills -- or the lack of them -- can predict whether two people are headed for marital bliss or a painful breakup.

The skills that predicted success will come as no surprise to marriage therapists or happily married couples.

Fast on the heels of a recent Washington State court decision holding that homosexuals had a right to marry under Washington state law, a federal judge in the same state ruled this week that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage under federal law in light of the traditional opposite-sex definition of the term, is constitutional. The decision in In re Kandu was the first legal challenge to DOMA to be decided by a U.S. court. While it is only round one in a series of legal challenges to DOMA beginning to percolate around the country, the decision represents a significant victory for the majority of Americans who believe in the rule of law and the rule of representative democracy.

With Americans spending so much time on the job, some of them are finding ways to bring spirituality to the office, rather than relegating it to weekend religious services. This can mean simply trying to treat others well, saying a prayer to start the day or thinking about the sermon heard on Sunday.

This phenomenon is virtually impossible to quantify, but studies by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, as well as the Harris Poll and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, suggest that religion is increasingly important to Americans, both in private life and in public.

Hell House, the controversial morality play first staged at a suburban church for Halloween, is set to be spoofed in a new stage production in Los Angeles starting Aug. 28.

With Bill Maher playing Satan and Andy Richter as Jesus, the play will use the original play's script and special effects "to lampoon (Christian) fundamentalist beliefs about hell", producer Maggie Rowe said Monday.

"It will be a parody of itself. It will be very funny. We're having a hoot," said Rowe, who represents the Center for Inquiry-West, a group which says it promotes and defends reason and science.

Activists on both sides of the gay marriage debate "have begun to speak of the issue as 'the new abortion'," The Washington Post reports. But what ever happened to the old abortion? As it turns out, the past few months have seen extraordinary progress for the unborn, with abortion supporters looking more desperate than ever.

The reason Missouri was jostled to the forefront of the traditional-marriage battle had to do with Democratic politics being too clever by half. Amendment 2 was originally slated for the November ballot along with Amendment 1, which would open up the Branson area to casino gambling. But the governor and attorney general, both Democrats, overrode the Republican secretary of state to place both amendments on the primary ballot scheduled for Aug. 3.

The governor's official explanation was that the gravity of the issues made a swift vote imperative. Clearly, though, party politics weighed just as heavily on his mind. According to at least one Missouri family advocate, those most likely to vote in non-general elections are people associated with liberal advocacy groups. Facing a tough reelection battle this year, Gov. Bob Holden was beholden to many of those groups. Anticipating the usual low turnout of primary voters--less than one-third of a general election turnout--he challenged the secretary of state in court, and won placement on the primary ballot.

Kerry spins the stem cell issue by saying, "Here in America, we don't sacrifice science for ideology." This is a line he has been using for weeks. It delivers two messages, both false: (1) there is no legitimate moral issue here (though plenty of bioethicists and plenty of Kerry supporters think there is); and therefore (2) this is a one-sided issue, pitting enlightened people against backward ideological types....

But Bush did not impose ideology; he came out with a compromise that gave each side of the stem cell debate half a loaf, allowing federal funding and research, but not federal support for work on new stem cell lines. Politicians almost always seek compromises, and here Bush was trying to accommodate people who see no moral problem in working with microscopic embryos, and those (count me in) who don't want to pay scientists to create human beings so they can dismember them for research.

The gay-marriage debate is often conducted as if the whole issue were providing spousal health insurance and Social Security survivors' benefits for existing same-sex couples. All of that matters, but more important, and often overlooked, is the way in which alienation from marriage twists and damages gay souls. In my own case, I did not understand and acknowledge my homosexuality until well into adulthood, but I somehow understood even as a young boy that I would probably never marry. (Children understand marriage long before they understand sex or sexuality.) I coped by struggling for years to suppress every sexual and romantic urge. I convinced myself that I could never love anybody, until the strain of denial became too much to bear.

Others coped differently. Some threw themselves into rebellion against marriage and the bourgeois norms it seemed to represent. Some, to their credit, built firmly coupled gay lives without the social support and investment that marriage brings. And some, determined to lead "normal" lives (meaning, largely, married lives), married.

At what point Mr. McGreevey realized and acknowledged he was gay I don't know. I do know that many gay husbands begin by denying and end by deceiving. Perhaps that was so in his case.

Opponents of same-sex marriage sometimes insist that gays can marry. Marriage, they say, isn't all about sex. It can be about an abstinent, selfless love. Well, as Benjamin Franklin said, where there is marriage without love there will be love without marriage. I'm always startled when some of the same people who say that gays are too promiscuous and irresponsible to marry turn around and urge us into marriages that practically beg to end in adultery and recklessness.

The Democrats clearly think they hold a winning card in stem cell research because of its potential, eventually, to yield treatments for diabetes, heart disease, neurological ailments and a host of other illnesses. Although religious conservatives consider such research immoral because it requires the destruction of very early stage embryos in the laboratory, polls show that most Americans back the research for its medical potential....

The president's policy limits federal funding to research on some 20 stem cell lines that existed three years ago. That makes it harder for scientists to do research on dozens of other stem cell lines that have since been created with private funds, including new lines that reflect genetic diseases not present in the Bush-approved lines. The Bush policy also rules out research on stem cells that are genetically matched to a patient, the avenue that will now be explored by the British while American researchers' hands are tied.

Carl Kallsen of Fort Wayne, Indiana, has two granddaughters with Type I diabetes: Kendall, 6, and Kelsea, 13. After they were diagnosed, he got involved with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. In the campaign for expanded federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, few organizations have been more active in public than the JDRF. Earlier this year, Kallsen told the JDRF that he was taking his family to Washington, D.C....

[Congressman Mark] Souder was "very, very gracious," says Kallsen. But he said that he supported adult-stem-cell research, not research that killed human embryos. The fact that embryonic-stem-cell research involved destroying human embryos came as news to Kallsen and his family. "Basically, it was a learning experience for us. We were not well informed about all of the issues. We're all pro-life and...we had not done enough research on our own to understand that if we were promoting embryonic stem-cell research that's the opposite of pro-life. We were so interested in finding a cure that we weren't looking at how it's done." Kallsen also now believes that adult-stem-cell research is more promising than he had thought at the time of the meeting.