We remain optimistic that this year's divisive and unnecessary fight over granting same-sex couples the freedom to marry will inevitably be won in the courts and in the hearts of Americans....[W]ith measures banning same-sex marriage on the ballot in 11 states next Tuesday, those who favor giving gay partners the right to marry need to brace themselves for some painful setbacks....These sweeping bursts of bigotry could be read as outlawing family health insurance and other basic benefits for unmarried heterosexual couples as well as for gay couples....The most promising chance to defeat one of these mean-spirited measures is in Oregon....It's possible that people in these states may search their consciences in the voting booths and rebel at enshrining discrimination in their state constitutions.

I may have knee-jerk reactions to what seem like lame excuses for taking a human life, but I cannot deny the sincerity of this Planned Parenthood employee. I never imagined I'd leave an abortion clinic feeling good, but I did in a sad and hopeful sort of way. My heart was filled with pain over the children whose lives end in that place and their mothers who'll grieve silently forever, yet a prayer of thanks stirred in me because a bridge of humanity was built across the great divide of pro-life and pro-choice.

Abortion is the tragic ending of a precious life, but when I think of people who choose or perform this death act, rather than feeling hate or condescension, I get a lump of love in my throat, with a longing to hug them, and pray, "Father forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Technically, some of them know exactly what they're doing and may even flaunt it as their right. But remember those who cheered and jeered during the Lord's crucifixion. They were the very ones Jesus asked his Father to forgive.

On the day that Yasser Arafat left for urgent medical treatment in France, the press in the Palestinian territories and the wider Arab world hails his commitment to the Palestinian cause and prays for his speedy recovery.

One paper warns Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that without Mr Arafat he would be hard-pushed to find another partner for peace. But there is also criticism from a Lebanese paper of Mr Arafat's slowness to implement reforms.

Beheadings, suicide bombings, mass executions, and improvised explosive devices are not intended to destroy or even defeat the U.S. military. Rather, they are aimed at the taxpaying citizens back home who fuel it. In a globalized world of instant communications, a bin Laden or Zarqawi trusts that most of us would prefer to take out the garbage than watch a blood-curdling video clip of yet another Western hostage kneeling before a half-dozen psychopaths as they begin to saw off his vertebrae. They hope that we the sickened ask, "Why waste our billions and hundreds of lives on such primordial folk?" -- wrongly equating 26 million who wish freedom with a few thousand criminals and terrorists.

The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to harvest Westerners. They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees to alter the battlefield landscape. But what they can accomplish is to maim or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify the trauma and savagery of their attack -- and do so often enough to make 300 million of us become exhausted with the entire "mess." The message of Arabic television is that the Iraqis are supposed to blame us, not their brethren who are killing them, for the carnage. Not our power, but our will, is the target.

President Bush talks regularly about creating a "culture of life" in America and has a record to show he's not afraid to act, having signed into law more pro-life legislation than any other president since the passage of Roe v. Wade. About this conviction, he should not fret. Recent polls reveal that 61 percent of Americans favor strict limitations on the abortion license (36 percent thinking abortion should be permitted only in cases of rape, incest or to safeguard the life of the mother, with 25 percent favoring a complete ban). On the other hand, only 22 percent of Americans believe -- with Sen. John Kerry -- that the status quo should be maintained, that is, that abortion should be permitted at any time during the pregnancy, for any reason.

Despite what the mainstream media would have voters believe about abortion (disingenuously discussing Roe v. Wade as if it allowed only first-trimester abortions), Mr. Kerry is not in good company. Mr. Kerry has been a stalwart advocate of abortion rights during his tenure in the Senate, numbering himself among only a small minority of senators who voted against the widely popular ban on partial-birth abortion. Despite Mr. Kerry's attempt to have it both ways ("I believe life begins at conception but support a women's right to choose"), his ardently pro-abortion voting record reveals that Mr. Kerry views abortion as an untrammeled good -- one that ought to be funded by federal taxpayer dollars -- and a necessary, perhaps the necessary, precondition to women's well-being and equality.

After landing in Amman, Arafat was carried by doctors on a wheelchair to a waiting French presidential jet.

"God willing, I will come back," Arafat, who was laid on a stretcher inside the jet, told aides shortly before the plane departed for Paris.

Putting the issues succinctly into today's realities, it looks like this: If you are a "liberal," you favor abortion and you support homosexual marriage. You want to see prayer banned from public gatherings and you think all Scripture -- including the Ten Commandments, which form the basis of our system of law -- should be removed from the public square. You believe that condemning certain deviant behavior should be a crime.

If you are a "liberal," you think government can make better decisions and spend your money more wisely than you. You believe that legislation can dramatically improve the fortunes of all Americans. You think that taxpayers should foot the bill for many who either don't want to work or can't work as a result of their destructive lifestyles.

A "liberal" today takes comfort in the knowledge that even if America's citizens, legislators and Constitution get it wrong, somewhere there's an unelected judge that will make it right. Especially in the Supreme Court, which to the liberal exceeds the authority of the Constitution.

Research on adult and umbilical cord stem cells have led to cures in 300,000 cases. But that's not what proposition 71 is about.

This is Mel Gibson and I'm concerned that the people aren't fully informed about prop 71.

We have a lot of questions to ask, like why are we being misled into thinking prop 71 isn't about cloning, when it is?

Voters will have to judge for themselves whether Kerry's newly prominent religiosity is genuine or merely a facade adopted for political purposes. Those political purposes are certainly compelling -- according to an August poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 85 percent of Americans say religion is important in their lives and 72 percent say it is important to them that a president have strong religious beliefs.

But there is something wrong, it seems to me, with Kerry's glib equation of higher public spending and more lavish government programs with fulfilling one's religious obligations....

Each of us can do more to love our neighbor and to live up to the Judeo-Christian values that American history so strongly affirms. But promiscuous God-talk in presidential campaigns doesn't elevate our spiritual profile. It feeds the suspicion that religion is being invoked for cynical political reasons. Is Kerry right with his God? I certainly hope so. But for nearly 22 years he managed to keep that part of his life extremely private. I wish he would have kept it that way.

I have come to the sobering conclusion that we are in greater danger of a nuclear strike today than we were during the Cold War.

That being the case, can we really wait until an attack to go after the terrorists who perpetrate it? Or do we have to, instead, rethink the whole spirit of Just War arguments, accepting that preemption is the only humane and just solution in an age of terror to accomplish what the Just War doctrine proposes? Today we are dealing with an irrational enemy who knows it cannot conquer us, but will do everything in its power to destabilize us. Can we wait until the attacks--perhaps killing tens of thousands--or should we seek them out and destroy them before they have a chance to destroy us?

This is a huge debate which defies easy answers. The candidates this year are expressing radically different views. Some candidates believe in seeking out the terrorists wherever they hide, and others prefer treating terrorist acts like criminal acts that ought to be dealt with in a "law and order" kind of way.

For decades, plastic surgery for teenage girls meant one thing -- a nose job, frequently performed during the summer between high school and college. While rhinoplasty remains the most common cosmetic operation for teenagers, doctors are performing an increasing number of procedures such as breast implants, liposuction and tummy tucks on young women like Casto and even girls as young as 14.

The enormous popularity of reality TV shows such as "Extreme Makeover," "The Swan" and MTV's "I Want a Famous Face," as well as an explosion of Web sites that extol the virtues of cosmetic medicine, has fueled the desire of adolescent girls to alter their bodies permanently, and they are finding more surgeons willing to oblige them. Breast implants and liposuction are now bestowed by parents as graduation or birthday gifts. Some doctors say they have performed breast augmentations on baby-boomer mothers and their teenage daughters.

We did not go to war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but to prevent Saddam from retaining the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction and provide them to his terrorist allies: Abu Nidal, Abu Abas, Abu al-Zarqawi, Yasser Arafat. The joint congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq and passed by majorities in both political parties, Democrats as well as Republicans and John Kerry and John Edwards in particular, has 23 "whereas" clauses articulating the rationale for the use of force. Only one of the 23 focuses on weapons of mass destruction – that is on actual stockpiles of WMDs rather than the programs to develop them (once the UN inspectors were gone)....

We went to war against Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, because to withdraw the 200,000 troops without a war and without Saddam’s capitulation to the UN demands would be a catastrophic defeat for the forces of freedom and peace. It would mean with absolute certainty that Saddam would reactivate the weapons programs he had launched and spent more than 40 billion dollars to implement before the United States obstructed them. Saddam was in the process of negotiating an off-the-shelf purchase of nuclear weapons from North Korea, in fact, when the United States entered Iraq to remove him.

The final weeks of the presidential campaign are filled with talk of homosexuality, specifically the vice president's daughter. Beyond and behind this, of course, is the recent sight of homosexual couples lining up to receive marriage licenses. How did it ever come to this, while most of the country was hoping not to have to pay attention?

Not so many years have passed between the moment that New Yorkers were both bemused and amused to learn that their city would have an annual softball game between the cops and the homosexuals, and the day when those couples lined up to receive their licenses. Not so many years, that is, for a cultural journey as vast as the one that took American society from the decision not to persecute homosexuals to the point of the enthusiastic embrace of them. The time seems especially brief considering that in the years between these two phenomena we saw the spread of a new -- and hideous and fatal -- disease that resulted from the corresponding spread of a kind of blind and heedlessly driven homosexual promiscuity.