Saudi Arabia is the kind of country in which an 8th-grade textbook teaches that Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs, and in which 9th graders learn that on the day of judgment, "a Jew will hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will call upon the Muslim: 'O Muslim, O slave of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!' "

It is the kind of country in which a guest worker from India can be arrested for leading Bible studies in his home. Brian Savio O'Connor was beaten and threatened with death unless he agreed to renounce his faith, Christian news services have reported. "My legs were chained and I was hung upside down," he told friends who visited him in prison. "My captors alternately kicked and beat me in the chest and ribs."

And it is the kind of country, let's not forget, in which Muslims, too, can be hideously victimized -- as when the state morality police, the "mutawwa'in," forced a group of teen-age girls to stay inside a burning school building because they were not wearing the head scarves and black cloaks that female Saudis must wear in public. Fifteen of the girls died; 52 were injured.

Saudi oil fuels the world, but the enemy we are fighting is fueled by the feverish religious bigotry that is Saudi Arabia's other leading export. Unless we squarely face that bigotry, and cast a cold eye on the regime that sustains it, the war on terror is one we will not win.

Saeb Erekat is something of a rarity in the Palestinian Authority (PA): by his own account, he has "never had a gun in his hand" and has never been to jail. While he may not personally perpetrate violence, his polished prose advances its cause--deviously.

Whereas most spokesmen cleverly contort the truth without fracturing it, Erakat lies like he breathes. At a one-hour session with nine American journalists, Arafat's mouthpiece wasted no time in doing what he does best.

Asked upfront whether Arafat's machine, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, recognizes the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, he emphatically states that it does. Except it doesn't.

Never mind that this year the Supreme Court overturned the one major lower-court opinion that had struck down the pledge and that there is no reason to think the court is having second thoughts. As far as House proponents are concerned, judges should never again even be able to consider whether the words "under God" are constitutional in the pledge.

How much power Congress has to block judicial consideration of the constitutionality of its laws remains, somewhat surprisingly, an open question -- because Congress wisely has chosen not to test the question. It has, rather, accepted judicial review -- the idea that the courts can strike down legislative enactments that offend the Constitution -- as integral to the system of checks and balances. So while legislators have sometimes been tempted to yank controversial matters from the court's jurisdiction, cooler heads have prevailed. They should prevail now too. Whether the pledge violates the First Amendment's separation of church from state is a legal question. Congress has no business obstructing the courts from answering it.

Christina Aguilera is a role model for young girls, just the wrong kind of role model. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt if she's changing her public ways -- but her outward appearance leaves nothing to be desired, figuratively of course, with immodest clothing and all. I'm scared about this documentary -- but the subject needs to get out there to the MTV audience. Hopefully it's a good one!

What makes being known as a "good Jew" such a liability while the designation of "good Christian" so facilely gains one entry to credibility and trust? After all, to denigrate Jewish values is to deny Jesus' most profound teachings -- The Golden Rule, The Lord's Prayer, The Beatitudes. Whenever I see a "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelet, I say to myself, "Jesus would act like a good Jew." Period....

Jews believe that good Jews go to heaven -- maybe a different heaven -- and that heaven is an inclusive, not an exclusive, place. We believe that God is friendly and has lots of room for good people. Good Christians are welcome there, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, maybe even some good atheists. We will let God figure that out. Define "good"? It probably has something to do with The Golden Rule. At least that is what Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Jesus taught.

If I earn my way into Jewish heaven, I am totally psyched on the idea of spending eternity learning at the feet of Mother Teresa, Dr. King, Baha'u'llah, the Dali Lama, Moses Maimonides and oodles of people who are condemned to hell by "good Christians." On the other hand, I get a little queasy every time I contemplate spending eternity in the company of televangelists, Bible-thumpers and politicos who promise that I will be with them if only I see things their way.

Whenever I hear a candidate being marketed as a "good Christian," my blood does not boil. It runs a little cold. Then I stop and wonder whether folks who are simply "good people" could ever pass the us-versus-them loyalty test that would gain them entry into civic leadership, if not heaven.

Pro-pledge demonstrators who gathered outside the Supreme Court carrying signs declaring "Keep USA 1 Nation Under God" clearly did not regard "under God" as a historical footnote. Their emotion and energy -- and the seriousness with which they are taken in Congress -- are the best refutation of the idea that this controversy was not about religion.

It was about religion -- but it was also about patriotism and what the First Amendment scholar Rodney A. Smolla calls the Aristotelian strain in American thinking about the law: the notion that "law exists to make men good, by binding men together in a cohesive and just community."

There is another theme in the American political tradition. It was celebrated in Justice Robert Jackson's opinion in the 1943 Supreme Court decision upholding the right of children not to pledge allegiance to the flag. "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation," Jackson wrote, "it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

Those who would strip the federal courts of the right to defend that freedom should have the courage of their convictions and admit that they prize orthodoxy -- religious orthodoxy and political orthodoxy -- above the individualism celebrated by Justice Jackson.

We need to acknowledge that everyone, liberal, conservative, libertarian, or whatever else, draws moral distinctions, including ones that look like exceptions from general rules. Liberals may distinguish some race discrimination against whites, which they call affirmative action, from race discrimination against nonwhites. I think this is the wrong distinction, but it's not "moral relativism": Moral rules are sometimes more complex than simple three-word phrases such as "race discrimination bad."

Conservatives, for instance, generally believe that killing humans is wrong -- except when done in self-defense, or when executing a just death penalty, or in war, or in some other situations. There's nothing "morally relativist" about that. It's just an acknowledgment that moral questions are complex, and require distinctions within the category of killing. In fact, some of the people who would have the most absolutist anti-killing rule are generally on the left: pacifists who oppose all capital punishment, all war, and even all individual self-defense. This failure to recognize moral exceptions to moral rules makes the pacifists wrong, not right.

Likewise, liberals aren't inherently wrongheaded moral relativists simply because they distinguish some race discrimination from other race discrimination, or some lies under oath (e.g., about sex) from other lies. I may disagree with them about the particular moral rules they apply. But there's nothing inherently mistaken about their underlying moral method, which is what the charge of "moral relativism" suggests.

What do the Presbyterian Church and the Syrian Baathist dictatorship have in common? They have both pledged themselves to cutting off ties with American firms doing business with Israel....

Recently, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted to divest from American companies that do business with Israel. The action, taken at the church's 216th General Assembly meeting in Richmond, is the first of its kind taken by an American denomination. Indeed, even colleges and universities, where anti-Israel campaigning is rampant, have rejected calls for divestment. As with Syria, Caterpillar is a particular object of Presbyterian ire.

To the Left, legality matters most, while to the Right, legality matters far less than morality. To the Right and to the religious, the law, when it is doing its job, is only a vehicle to morality, never a moral end in itself. Even the Left has to acknowledge this. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, she violated the law. Therefore, anyone who thinks she did the right thing is acknowledging that law must be subservient to morality. Why, then, must the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein be subject to international law as determined by Communist China, neo-KGB Russia, amoral France and the thugs who rule Syria?

The answer is to be found in the Left's substitution of legal for moral.

And why is the Left so enamored of law?

First, the Left, which is largely secular, regards morality not as absolute, but as relative. This inevitably leads to moral confusion, and no one likes to be morally confused. So instead of moral absolutes, the Left holds legal absolutes. "Legal" for the Left is what "moral" is for the Right. The religious have a belief in God-based moral law, and the Left believes in man-made law as the moral law.